Castle Hangnail Read online

  DIAL BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  USA/Canada/UK/Ireland/Australia/New Zealand/India/South Africa/China

  PENGUIN.COM

  A Penguin Random House Company

  Copyright © 2015 by Ursula Vernon

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vernon, Ursula.

  Castle Hangnail / Ursula Vernon. pages cm

  Summary: When little, twelve-year-old Molly arrives at Castle Hangnail to fill the vacancy for a wicked witch, the minions who dwell there have no choice but to give her the job; at first it seems she will be able to keep the castle open, but Molly has quite a few secrets that could cause trouble.

  ISBN 978-0-698-15414-8

  [1. Witches—Fiction. 2. Magic—Fiction. 3. Haunted houses—Fiction. 4. Humorous stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.V5985Cc 2015 [Fic]—dc23 2014017106

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Kevin, my favorite minion

  Chapter 1

  It was a marvelously dark and dour twilight at the castle.

  Clouds the color of bruises lay across the hills. Rooks and ravens flapped into the battlements and were met by bats leaving for the evening.

  True, there were only three ravens, but there were plenty of bats, so the overall impression was of a small cloud of winged smoke hanging over the highest tower.

  The castle guardian was pleased.

  Sadly, Castle Hangnail was not surrounded by jagged mountains, which would have been ideal, but you couldn’t have everything. The grassy hills around the castle were doing their best impression of a blasted moor. The guardian tried not to notice the dandelions growing on the hillside. They were much too cheerful. He would go and have a word with the gardener tomorrow.

  It was a good Evil castle, he thought fiercely. Anyone would be proud to have it! Even with the dandelions and the aging ravens and the unreliable plumbing. Castle Hangnail had history. Dark and terrible deeds had been done there. Probably.

  He shuffled an empty teacup out of the way. Someone had left it on an end table near the door, and he hid it behind a stuffed crocodile.

  The ravens had assured him that the new Master or Mistress of the castle would arrive tonight.

  He hung about the main door, waiting. Would it be an Evil Wizard? A Dark Sorceress? A Loathsome Hag?

  He hoped it wasn’t the Hag. A certain degree of dust and cobwebs were expected in an Evil castle, but a really dedicated Loathsome Hag would have slime dripping off the walls and dead mice at the dinner table. It got to the point where you were embarrassed to have people over.

  But an Evil Wizard, now . . . well, there was a lot to be said for an Evil Wizard. Or a Witch. A Wicked Witch would be just fine. Perhaps she’d even have a cat.

  The guardian was fond of cats.

  Really, though, he wasn’t picky. Any proper Master would do. Necromancer. Cursed Beastlord. Even an ordinary Mad Scientist.

  “It’s been so long . . .” he said out loud. “I was afraid no one would answer the letters.”

  “You’re telling me,” said Edward, clanking.“And all those nasty letters from the Board! I was starting to worry that I’d have to go down to the crypt and see if I could find our old Master, the ancient Vampire Lord, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get back up again, with my joints.”

  “I’ll get you some oil for them tomorrow,” said the guardian absently.

  “Oil won’t help. I’ve rusted solid all through the knees.” The magical suit of armor sighed. “Well, it wouldn’t have mattered. We’d need blood to bring him back, and I don’t think you’ve got much in you.”

  “I’ve got plenty of blood,” said the guardian, peering out the peephole. “I keep it down in the cellar, where it’s nice and cool. We gave away at least a dozen bottles of O negative during the blood drive last Christmas.”

  A blood drive was not the sort of thing you could imagine an Evil Sorceress allowing, mind you, but you had to move with the times. That was one of the problems with raising the old Vampire Lord. He was very old-fashioned. He’d have been flitting around the town, biting people’s necks, before you could say “stake.” It was easier just to leave him quietly dead.

  “Did the ravens say anything?” asked Edward.

  The guardian shrugged. “They’re ravens. They mostly see the tops of people’s heads. They said the Master-or-Mistress was walking.”

  “Hmm.” Edward thought about that.

  There was nothing inherently wrong with walking to your new castle, of course. The last Witch had walked. The Evil Sorceress before her had ridden in on the back of a Dark Phoenix, though, and the Wizards all had dragons. There was nothing like a dragon to really make an entrance.

  “Perhaps the new Master just wants to take in the scenery,” said the guardian.

  “That’s probably it.”

  He hoped the scenery would be satisfactory. By darkness it should be all right. By daylight, the land around Castle Hangnail insisted on being picturesque, and Miss Handlebram down the road had a white picket fence, but perhaps the new Master wouldn’t notice.

  And the castle had crypts! Proper crypts, not just a wine cellar with a coffin shoved in the back. Plus a moat. Well, a mini-moat. Surely that would make up for the picket fence.

  The guardian looked through the peephole again.

 
“Getting on full dark soon,” said Edward as he leaned back.

  “Perhaps they’ll come at moonrise,” said the guardian. “Moonrise is perfectly respectable.”

  It was actually a few minutes before moonrise when the someone lifted the door knocker and banged it down, hard.

  The guardian wanted to throw the door open. He wanted to cheer and throw confetti. The Master—or Mistress—had arrived!

  But he had been a castle guardian for centuries, and he knew what was expected.

  He waited for five long seconds, then allowed the door to creak open. The hinges squealed like a dying rabbit.

  He looked out.

  He looked up.

  He looked left.

  He looked right.

  Finally he looked down.

  Ravens mostly see the tops of people’s heads. It does not occur to them that some people are shorter than others, because when you fly, everyone is shorter than you are.

  A small, determined face looked up at him. It belonged to a girl wearing black clothes, a black coat, and a silver necklace with a vulture on it.

  She looked to be about twelve years old.

  “My name is Molly,” said the girl. “I’m here to be your Wicked Witch.”

  Chapter 2

  What the guardian saw was a plump girl with a round face, a stubborn chin, and frizzy brown hair. She was wearing black boots with metal caps on the end. They were very serious boots. Molly had laced them with purple shoelaces. They looked as if they could kick a hole in a stone wall and have fun doing it.

  What Molly saw was a very old man in layers of gray rags. Parts of him looked to have been dead for quite some time.

  He was not naturally a hunchback, but he was making up for it by walking bent over and keeping his shoulders drawn up around his ears. He had scars and sutures and one white, clouded eye.

  Because he was hunched over and she had on very tall boots, she only had to look up a little to see into his eyes.

  “You’re the Wicked Witch?” said the guardian.

  “Yes?” said Molly. She fingered her vulture necklace nervously.

  “Are . . . are you sure?”

  “Oh, quite sure.”

  The last Sorceress had been nearly six feet tall, with hair the color of bleached bone and eyes like chips of flint. Molly had brown eyes, and the only way she would ever be six feet tall would be if she stood on a stepladder.

  “A Wicked Witch?”

  “Extremely Wicked,” said Molly. “It would curl your hair, how Wicked I am.”

  (This was purely academic, as the guardian had not had much hair for at least a century.)

  “A Wicked Witch, though,” said the guardian.

  “Very Witchy.” Molly tilted her head. “I’ve got loads of silver jewelry. And I like snakes. And toads. I had a pet toad back home.”

  “A familiar?” asked the guardian hopefully.

  “. . . sure,” said Molly. “A familiar. Definitely.”

  “I don’t suppose he’s here now?”

  “Well, no,” said Molly. “He had a family and a nice pond in the backyard and I didn’t want to make him unhappy. Mom promised to feed him mealworms every other day, though.”

  “One moment,” said the guardian, shutting the door.

  The guardian had a problem, and not just Edward hissing, “Is it a Sorceress? I want to see!” behind him.

  He’d never seen a Mistress this young before. If she was the real Mistress, he was definitely wrong to keep her waiting, and he really shouldn’t shut the door in her face, but if she wasn’t the Mistress—if she was an imposter, say—then when the real Mistress arrived, there was going to be a very unpleasant scene. It would probably involve screaming and fireballs and some of the torture devices in the spare bedroom.

  On the other hand, there were the boots. The boots had to count for something.

  “It’s not a Loathsome Hag, is it?” whispered Edward, who had been hiding behind the door.

  “No, no . . .” The guardian waved him into silence. “It’s a Wicked Witch. I think.”

  “Yay, a Witch!”

  “Hush! There might be a problem!”

  The guardian poked his head out the door again. Molly was still standing there, gazing up at the tower with vague nearsighted interest.

  “You can do magic, right?” Magic was a requirement in a new Master, unless you were a Mad Scientist, and Molly didn’t look like the sort to hook lightning rods up to cadavers while wild theremins wailed in the background.

  “Absolutely,” said Molly. “I’ve got a book of potions. And I can turn invisible if I hold my breath.”

  The guardian rubbed the back of his neck.

  “You seem a little . . . young.”

  “I’m smart for my age. I can read at a tenth-grade level.”

  The guardian found his gaze drawn back down to the boots again. They were very Wicked boots, but were they Wicked enough?

  “Could you do something . . . I don’t know, unpleasant?”

  Molly shifted her backpack from one shoulder to the other. “If you don’t let me in and show me to the bathroom, I’ll do something very unpleasant right here on the doorstep.”

  The guardian shuddered and opened the door all the way. The candles streamed in the sudden breeze.

  She stomped past him. She was probably merely walking, but the boots turned it into a stomp by the time they reached the floor. The guardian pointed her in the direction of the bathroom, which was off the main foyer and down a short hallway.

  They heard the door shut, and the rattle and gurgle of ancient pipes.

  “Seems a bit . . . young,” said Edward.

  “Yes,” said the guardian. He had been a member of the Minion’s Guild in good standing for many years—had even won “Minion of the Year” six times—but he could not remember a Master as young as Molly.

  “Good boots, though.”

  “Oh, very.”

  “Do you think the Board . . . ?”

  “We don’t have to tell them how old she is,” said the guardian firmly. “It’s just a check box—Witch, Wicked, yes/no, in residence in castle, yes/no.”

  There was another gurgle as the Wicked Witch washed her hands and then the door opened again.

  “The black guest towels are a nice touch,” she said.

  “We can have them monogrammed,” said the guardian. “If you’re staying.”

  Molly shifted uncertainly inside her boots. “You need a Wicked Witch, right?”

  “Well . . . yes . . .”

  “I’ll be a good Wicked Witch. I mean a bad—well, I’ll be good at it. Being Wicked, I mean.”

  Edward and the guardian exchanged glances. This is difficult to do when one party has helmet slits instead of eyes, but the guardian had known him for a long time.

  “It’s just . . .” the guardian began.

  He stopped. He started again. “There was a letter, you understand, that was sent to potential Masters—”

  “I’ve got it right here,” said Molly, interrupting. She thrust a hand into her coat pocket and pulled out a black envelope with a bloodred seal.

  “Oh!” said the guardian, relaxing. Edward gave a relieved rattle. “Those are ours. We sent them out when the old Mistress . . . left. If you got one—well, if you got one, I suppose it must be fine. They’re magic. They wouldn’t have gone to you if you weren’t eligible.”

  He reached out a withered hand for the letter. Molly gave it over. Her hand went to her vulture necklace again.

  The guardian flipped it over. “It’s one of ours, yes . . . hmm. Says it’s addressed to Eudaimonia—”

  “That’s me,” said Molly hurriedly. “Only I go by Molly. It’s—err—a nickname.”

  “I expect you got tired of people not being able to sp
ell Eudaimonia,” said Edward.

  Molly took a step back in surprise. “You can talk!” she said.

  “Very much so.” Edward took his sword hilt in both hands and knelt, ponderously. The guardian winced, knowing how much the armor’s knees bothered him. Edward bowed his head. “I, Lord Edward von Hallenbrock, swear allegiance to you, Mistress of the castle! I shall be your blade in Wickedness and your shield in adversity.”

  The guardian knew that Molly was a Wicked Witch, but he did hope she would be kind to Edward. The suit of armor was very sensitive. One of the Sorceresses had laughed at him, and he had been depressed for months.

  But Molly bowed to Edward—a bow, not a curtsy—and said, “Thank you, Lord von Hallenbrock. I didn’t know that the castle would have such”—she sought a word—“such stalwart defenders. I’m pleased to meet you.”

  Stalwart had been a nice touch. Edward beamed.

  Both Molly and the guardian had to take an arm to get him upright again. “It’s my knees,” he said cheerfully. “Don’t mind me.”

  “And I didn’t catch your name,” said Molly, when Edward was up on his armor stand again.

  “Oh,” said the guardian. “I haven’t got one. Not as such.”

  “Well, I can’t just call you hey, you!”

  “The last Sorceress used to call me Lackey. And the Cursed Beastlord called me Wretch.”

  “. . . I don’t think I’d feel right about that,” said Molly.

  “Then you’ll have to give me a name,” said the guardian.

  Molly thought about this for a moment. “What exactly is it you do?”

  “Whatever my Mistress desires.”

  “He does everything,” said Edward helpfully. “He makes sure the cook has supplies and the maid puts up the right sort of cobwebs and that the pipes don’t freeze in winter. He’s in charge of the castle while the Master’s away.”

  “If it pleases you, of course,” put in the guardian hurriedly. “I wouldn’t want you to think that we minions were getting above ourselves.” (Getting above yourself is considered very rude among minions.)

  “I see.”

  “And he’s been here for ages,” said Edward. “Longer than I have. Back when the first Vampire Lord built the castle.”