Catweazle

tramp, and when four of them had turned up the next day, Mr
Bennet had told him that they were trying to run a farm not a soup kitchen and
that Carrot wasn’t to give food to anyone. Catweazle certainly looked very hungry,
though, and eventually Carrot said, ‘All right, but you mustn’t come to the
house. You stay here, and I’ll bring you something.’
    Catweazle nodded. He would take the food, find his way back to the
forest, wait for night and then go back to his cave. He ducked down again as Mr
Bennet came back. ‘Come on, Carrot,’ he said.
    ‘Coming Dad,’ Carrot called after his father. ‘Don’t go out of here!’ he
hissed at the barrel as he went to the door.
    Catweazle surfaced again. ‘Is this place known to the Normans?’ he asked
anxiously.
    ‘The Normans?’ said Carrot.
    ‘Ay, boy, the Norman invaders.’
    ‘What are you talking about? The Normans were hundreds of years ago.’
    Catweazle looked at the boy. What did he mean? He began to feel
something was very wrong.
    ‘Hundreds of years?’ his voice quavered.
    ‘Yes, of course. Round about nine hundred,’ said the boy, and ran out of
the barn after his father.
    For a long time Catweazle stood transfixed, staring at the barn doors,
then slowly he clutched his head.
    ‘Nine hundred years,’ he whispered to himself, and holding his fingers
in front of his face, he slowly counted to nine.
    ‘Nine hundred years since the Normans?’ he muttered. ‘Nine hundred years
since this morning?’ Then he had flown indeed I
     
    Hexwood farmhouse was old, square, and rather dilapidated. The Bennets
never had either time or money to restore it and since the death of his wife
the previous year, Mr Bennet had struggled through one crisis after another;
sinovitis had killed off large numbers of turkeys, and the bank was refusing to
lend him any more money. He did his best, but he found it difficult to give
much time to Carrot, preoccupied as he was with the farm.
    ‘I’m going up to the pub for a game of darts,’ he told Carrot later that
evening as the two of them cleared the supper things from the kitchen table.
Carrot was secretly pleased. It meant he would have no difficulty taking the
food to the old tramp in the barn.
    ‘No sawing on the kitchen table, right?’ said his father, putting on his
jacket and preparing to leave. ‘I’d like to come back to a reasonably tidy
place for once.’
    ‘Right, Dad,’ Carrot grinned. He waited until he heard the sound of the
truck going up the lane and then he went through into the scullery and began to
make some sandwiches. He made good chunky ones, with thick slices of cheese,
took some cold turkey from the fridge and some apples from the fruit bowl, and
put the whole lot in a carrier bag. He was just about to leave for the barn
when there was a knock on the door. It was Sam.
    ‘Starts in five minutes,’ said Sam, coming in and shutting the door
behind him.
    ‘What does?’ said Carrot.
    ‘ “They Diced with Death”! Haven’t forgotten have yer?’
    ‘Er ... no. Of course not,’ replied Carrot, putting the bag behind a chair
and taking Sam through the hall to the sitting-room.

    ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ he said, switching on the television.
‘Shan’t be long.’ Carrot ran back to the kitchen, and slipped quietly out of
the scullery door with the bag of food.
    The farmyard was dark and he tiptoed across it so that the turkeys
wouldn’t set up their gobbling and flapping. Creeping into the barn, he called
softly.
    ‘Are you still here?’
    The old man’s voice came out of the darkness, ‘Ay, boy.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Here!’
    Carrot switched on the powerful working light. With a cry of terror,
Catweazle reared up in the barrel, his hands warding off the sudden dazzling
brightness. The barrel crashed over, spilling him on to the floor.
    ‘Blinded! Blinded by witchcraft!’ he moaned as he tried to crawl back
into the barrel on all-fours.
    Carrot switched off the light and groped his way over to Catweazle.
    ‘What on earth’s the matter with you?’ he said, trying to pull the old
man out.
    ‘I see again,’ said Catweazle with relief. ‘Hast thou lifted the curse?’
    ‘No, I’ve turned off the light.’
    Catweazle slowly backed out of the barrel. ‘What magic didst thou use?’
he asked fearfully
    ‘What d’you mean, magic?’ said Carrot, finding his way back to the
switch. ‘It’s electricity,’ and he turned on the light again.
    With another yell,