Maskerade

someone had set out to be messy.
    Take the account books. They were full of tiny rows and columns, but someone hadn’t thought it worthwhile to invest in lined paper and had handwriting that wandered a bit. There were forty rows on the left-hand side but only thirty-six by the time they reached the other side of the page. It was hard to spot because of the way your eyes watered.
    “What are you doing?” said Agnes, tearing her gaze away from the corridor.
    “Amazin’,” said Granny. “Some things is entered twice! And I reckon there’s a page here where someone’s added the month and taken away the time of day!”
    “I thought you didn’t like books,” said Agnes.
    “I don’t,” said Granny, turning a page. “They can look you right in the face and still lie. How many fiddle players are there in the band?”
    “I think there are nine violinists in the orchestra.”
    The correction appeared to pass unnoticed.
    “Well, there’s a thing,” said Granny, without moving her head. “Seems that twelve of ’em are drawing wages, but three of ’em is over the page, so you mightn’t notice.” She looked up and rubbed her hands happily. “Unless you’ve got a good memory, that is.”
    She ran a skinny finger down another erratic column. “What’s a flying ratchet?”
    “I don’t know!”
    “Says here ‘Repairs to flying ratchet, new springs for rotation cog assembly, and making good. Hundred and sixty dollars and sixty-three pence.’ Hah!”
    She licked her finger and tried another page.
    “Even Nanny ain’t this bad at numbers,” she said. “To be this bad at numbers you’ve got to be good. Hah! No wonder this place never makes any money. You might as well try to fill a sieve.”
    Agnes darted into the room. “There’s someone coming!”
    Granny got up and blew out the lamp. “You get behind the curtains,” she commanded.
    “What’re you going to do?”
    “Oh…I’ll just have to make myself inconspicuous…”
    Agnes hurried across to the big window and turned to look at Granny, who was standing by the fireplace.
    The old witch faded. She didn’t disappear. She merely slid into the background.
    An arm gradually became part of the mantelpiece. A fold of her dress was a piece of shadow. An elbow became the top of the chair behind her. Her face became one with a vase of faded flowers.
    She was still there, like the old woman in the puzzle picture they sometimes printed in the Almanack, where you could see the old woman or the young girl but not both at once, because one was made of the shadows of the other. Granny Weatherwax was standing by the fireplace, but you could see her only if you knew she was there.
    Agnes blinked. And there were just the shadows, the chair and the fire.
    The door opened. She ducked behind the curtains, feeling as conspicuous as a strawberry in a stew, certain that the sound of her heart would give her away.
    The door shut, carefully, with barely a click. Footsteps crossed the floor. A wooden scraping noise might have been a chair being moved slightly.
    A scratch and a hiss were the sound of a match, striking. A clink was the glass of the lamp, being lifted…
    All noise ceased.
    Agnes crouched, every muscle suddenly screaming with the strain. The lamp hadn’t been lit—she’d have seen the light around the curtain.
    Someone out there was making no noise.
    Someone out there was suddenly suspicious.
    A floorboard squeaked verrrry slowwwly, as someone shifted their weight.
    She felt as if she was going to scream, or burst with the effort of silence. The handle of the window behind her, a mere point of pressure a moment ago, was trying seriously to become part of her life. Her mouth was so dry that she knew it’d creak like a hinge if she dared to swallow.
    It couldn’t be anyone who had a right to be here. People who had a right to be in places walked around noisily.
    The handle was getting really personal .
    Try to think of something else…
    The curtain moved. Someone was standing on the other side of it.
    If her throat weren’t so arid she might be able to scream.
    She could feel the presence through the cloth. Any moment now, someone was going to twitch the curtain aside.
    She leapt, or as close to a leap as was feasible—it was a kind of vertical lumber, billowing the curtain aside, colliding with a slim body behind it, and ending on the floor in a tangle of limbs and ripping velvet.
    She gulped air, and pressed down on the squirming bundle below