Episode 10: Sascha Martin's Pitchy Witch Part Six

Things have escalated badly, for the girl who’s doomed to go to an island she despises in a sea she doesn’t know.

All her previous adventures have been horrible, each one, but the last was just the pits!

They tried to shoot her with a gun!

Then they used her as a target for artillery and all, and we left her in the face of an approaching cannonball.

Will it miss our gallant hero?

Will it take her out instead?

Let us read the words that follow, to reveal what lies ahead.

Mary-Alice checked, but didn’t find a cannonball-sized hole, and the cat continued clawing, like a fierce, implanted stole.

So they were neither dead, nor parted from each other.

There was hope.

Maybe, one day, they’d arrive when there was internet and soap.

She was deep within the darkness, though, and should have hit the light, but she hadn’t, ‘cause her eyes were closed.

She’d shut them really tight to stop the cannonball.

She opened them, and gaped her mouth and squealed, at the tapestry of wonder down below that was revealed! There was Landfill, and the Wilderness, and Periwinkle Hall, and her mansion right beside it, still the fairest of them all.

But the broom descended past it, landing smartly at the door of a different house she’d left, it felt like, centuries before.

This was Sascha Martin’s house, and Mary-Alice stormed inside, leaving black and sooty footprints down the stairs with every stride.

She discovered Sascha sitting, still, with Luca and their mess.

God, they hadn’t even moved from where she’d left them, at a guess!

Inexplicably, the boys remained oblivious to her, when the drama of her entrance should have caused them such a stir.

So she threw the broom at both of them with, ‘Sascha, you’re a jerk! Oh, and by the way, your dumb Bifana keyword doesn’t work!’

Now the boys, so rudely brought to an awareness she was there, turned and stared, in dumb amazement, at the ruins of her hair, and her tattered rags of clothing and her general sooty tone, and the curious addition of a blackened traffic cone; plus the baleful yellow eyes of something black around her neck, baring fangs at them and hissing, like herself when not in check.

They divined that she was angry, and it wasn’t safe to speak, but their silence only drove her to another shriek of pique.

‘After everything I’ve been through, while you sat here being slack, is it too much to expect you might have noticed that I’m back?’

Well, they didn’t want to say they hadn’t noticed that she’d gone, as the need to speak with caution was apparent, whereupon, Luca probed with: ‘Something’s … happened?’ in a sympathetic way.

You could hear the girl’s affirmative from miles and miles away.

‘Oh my God! Has something happened?

‘The ordeal you put me through! And you even have to ask?

‘Well, I just can’t believe you two!’

As the cat gave voice to several observations of its own, Mary-Alice stormed up all the stairs, and left the boys alone.

They exchanged uncertain glances as she slammed the final door … Then they shrugged, and both resumed what they’d been working on before.

‘What’s bifana?’ Sascha said at last, like, apropos of nil.

‘It’s a meal they make in Portugal. They do it on the grill.’

‘Oh,’ said Sascha.

‘How’s the broom?’ said Luca.

Sascha made a face.

‘Um, okay, I think. The old one had a loop in time and space.’

‘Oh,’ said Luca.

And, though neither really listened to his friend, they were both inside their happy place.

And this is where we end.

The end.

Which leads us to another end, unended when, if you recall, the Gobbly Goo had gobbled all that Landfill was before the fall.

It was the Terror of the Teasers, One, Two and Three, and left our heroes and heroines lost, abandoned, cast away, unclothed, upon a snot mass of mouldering mucus in wastes uncharted.

We haven’t forgotten. And next week we return to that rotty, clotty island in the snotty yellow sea where Sascha, naked and alone, except for all the others, has just a single card to play.

And it’s not even a real card, because everything is still … just … snot.

Is it really what it is, or is it something else entirely?

What does the universe hold in store for Landfill?

Surely that jewel of Australia can’t be lost forever?

And what dark summons brings Mary-Alice face to face with her nemesis, and on such unequal terms?

Will she ever get her clothing back?

All will be revealed - some of it - in Sascha Martin’s Great Ungoo: The Return of the Nakey.

Or, as some prefer to call it, the Girl from the Machine.