Puddlebrain

COMING SOON: Norman the Spellcatcher

Coming soon will be Book Two of The Shadowmoss Chronicles!

Norman the Spellcatcher

Here's the opening. Enjoy!

It was still light when Norman woke up.

This wasn't unusual. In the dank cellars that he and his friends used for sleeping (and eating and, basically, everything else to do with living) very little light managed to seep its way through the heavy wooden doors. Admittedly, windows lined the walls high up near the beamed ceiling, but the glass in them was long smeared and stained with who-knew-what, and they could well have been made from brick for all the light they allowed through. The snakes usually slept during the day, only stirring at night for Spellcatching, so they were used to living in a permanent dusk. Norman, however, was more of a get-up-and-slither sort of snake, and hadn't yet lost his enthusiasm for his job as the others had. He regularly awoke before his friends, the excitement of the forthcoming nightly mission making his scales tingle.

Norman stretched, yawning widely, his tail sticking out, ramrod straight. He groaned as his tail cracked, the result of it being curled awkwardly under him while he slept. Looking around the cellar, he saw he was the first to wake, the others of his nest still quietly snoring (expect in the case of 'Arry, a huge boa who could snore in the County Snoring Championships, if there was such a thing).

He licked his lips, his forked tongue flicking over them lightly. He could still taste last night's meal, a mouldy concoction of left over bread and rat that had been thrown down to them by Janice's henchmen. It wasn't a pleasant taste. He needed a drink. A few feet away from his bed was a puddle, one of the many formed by the constant drips from the ceiling. Janice's cooks, in the kitchen above the cellar, were not too fussy about cleaning up spillages or even the odd flood and this meant the kitchen floor was usually sodden. Even though the witch's house was solidly built, the walls and floors being made from the solid trunks of oak trees, the kitchen quagmire easily managed to ooze through to the cellar below. Luckily for him and the rest of the snakes, the cellar floor was mostly mud and drained off the mix of stagnant water, grease and other, less-appetising fluids, without difficulty.

Norman slithered off his bed, a scramble of damp straw that he'd scavenged, like his friends, while out on Spellcatching missions, and brushed it together so it had a meagre sense of neatness and moved to the puddle. It smelled of old vegetables and rotting wood, with a fetid scent of cat thrown in for good measure. He dunked his whole head in the mixture, taking the opportunity to wash as well as drink. It had only been a few weeks since he had last shed his skin, and he still itched, so the snake doused the rest of his body in the puddle too. Once done, he slid across to the remnants of the stew. A half-chewed rat's foot stuck out from the gloop so he wrapped his tongue around it, pulled it into his mouth and swallowed it whole. He smacked his lips together satisfactorily and belched. The snakes closest to him mumbled in their sleep but didn't wake. Norman smiled to himself.

All in all, he thought, life couldn't be better!

Suddenly there was a crashing from beyond the door to the house. A stream of guttural curses followed, chased quickly by a heavy slap and some muffled whimpering. Norman knew what to expect next, and pitied the poor kitchen hand or dogsbody that had inadvertently incurred the wrath of Janice the Witch's right hand thug. The anticipated scream didn't come and Norman was left wondering how the poor whelp had escaped the anger of...

The door at the top of the cellar stairs, which led into the main body of Janice's house, crashed open. Though it wasn't quite as thick as the doors to the outside, which were carved whole out of some ancient tree that was even older than Janice herself, it was still more than substantial. A body flew through the opening and smashed into one of the high windows, shattering the filthy glass and letting in the early evening's light. The living missile then landed with a limp crunch by the decaying supper that Norman had just snacked on. A couple of snakes were caught beneath it and hissed angrily as they tried vainly to crawl out. One of them (called Sorry due to the fact that, if something was going to break or fall or smash, Sorry would probably be the snake who caused it) was injured and bleated lamely until he saw who stood at the ruined doorway. Big 'Arry, the boa, simply slept on, oblivious to the disturbance about him. Practically every snake was now awake, slithering and hissing noisily at whatever insolent idiot had dragged them from their sleep. When they saw who that idiot was, they, too, quickly went quiet.

The light from the house beyond masked the hulk at the top of the stairs in silhouette, but there was no mistaking him. The immense size, the rasping breath, the tangible aura of menace.

Blot.