Wintersmith

tucked away, she filled in the grave, and at this point a couple of men ran and helped her—right until there came, from under the soil:
    Clonk-clank. Clonk.
    The men froze. So did Tiffany, but her Third Thoughts cut in with: Don’t worry! Remember, she stopped it! A falling stone or something must have started it going again!
    She relaxed and said sweetly: “That was probably just her saying good-bye.”
    The rest of the soil got shoveled in really quickly.
    And now I’m part of the Boffo, Tiffany thought, as the people hurried back to their villages. But Miss Treason worked very hard for them. She deserves to be a myth, if that’s what she wants. And I’ll bet, I’ll bet that on dark nights they’ll hear her….
    But now there was nothing but the wind in the trees.
    She stared at the grave.
    Someone should say something. Well? She was the witch, after all.
    There wasn’t much religion on the Chalk or in the mountains. The Omnians came and had a prayer meeting about once a year, and sometimes a priest from the Nine Day Wonderers or the See of Little Faith or the Church of Small Gods would come by on a donkey. People went to listen, if a priest sounded interesting or went red and shouted, and they sang the songs if they had a good tune. And then they went home again.
    “We are small people,” her father had said. “It ain’t wise to come to the attention of the gods.”
    Tiffany remembered the words he had said over the grave of Granny Aching, what seemed like a lifetime ago. On the summer turf of the downlands, with the buzzards screaming in the sky, they had seemed to be all there was to say. So she said them now:
“If any ground is Consecrate, this ground is.
If any day is Holy, it is this day.”
    She saw a movement, and then Billy Bigchin, the gonnagle, scrambled onto the turned earth of the grave. He gave Tiffany a solemn look, then unslung his mousepipes and began to play.
    Humans could not hear the mousepipes very well because the notes were too high, but Tiffany could feel them in her head. A gonnagle could put many things into his music, and she felt sunsets, and autumns, and the mist on hills and the smell of roses so red they were nearly black….
    When he had finished, the gonnagle stood in silence for a moment, looked at Tiffany again, then vanished.
    Tiffany sat on a stump and cried a bit, because it needed to be done. Then she went and milked the goats, because someone had to do that, too.

CHAPTER SIX
    Feet and Sprouts
    I n the cottage, the beds were airing, the floors had been swept, and the log basket was full. On the kitchen table the inventory was laid out: so many spoons, so many pans, so many dishes, all lined up in the dingy light. Tiffany packed some of the cheeses, though. She’d made them, after all.
    The loom was silent in its room; it looked like the bones of some dead animal, but under the big chair was the package Miss Treason had mentioned, wrapped in black paper. Inside it was a cloak woven of brown wool so dark that it was almost black. It looked warm.
    That was it, then. Time to go. If she lay down and put her ear to a mousehole, she could hear widespread snoring coming from the cellar. The Feegles believed that after a really good funeral, everyone should be lying down. It wasn’t a good idea to wake them. They’d find her. They always did.
    Was that everything? Oh, no, not quite. She took down the Unexpurgated Dictionary and Chaffinch’s Mythology , with the “Dacne of the Sneasos” in it, and went to tuck them into a bag under the cheeses. As she did so, the pages flipped like cards and several things dropped out onto the stone floor. Some of them were faded old letters, which she tucked back inside for now.
    There was also the Boffo catalogue. The cover had a grinning clown on it, and the words:

    The Boffo Novelty & Joke Company!!!!!
Guffaws, Jokes, Chuckles, Japes Galore!!!
IF IT’S A LAUGH, IT’S A BOFFO!!!
Be the Life of the Party with our Novelty Gift Pack!!!
Special Offer This Month: Half Price off Red Noses!!!

    Yes, you could spend years trying to be a witch, or you could spend a lot of money with Mr. Boffo and be one as soon as the postman arrived.
    Fascinated, Tiffany turned the pages. There were skulls (Glow in the Dark, $8 Extra) and fake ears and pages of hilarious noses (Ghastly Dangling Booger free on noses over $5) and masks, as Boffo would say, Galore!!! Mask No. 19, for example, was: Wicked Witch De-Luxe, with Mad Greasy Hair, Rotting