Free Survivor by Colin Thompson

poured itself into the bowl. Six very confused chickens suddenly materialised on the draining board and laid six eggs, which cracked themselves into the bowl.
    ‘Not so fast, dinner,’ Mordonna blurted out as the chickens began to disappear.
    In a flash of an eye and far too quick to be painful, four of the chickens plucked themselves and jumped into the freezer as more ingredients decided they had spent too long on the shelves of the local supermarket.
    Hanging from the beam, Mrs Hulbert felt the blood rushing to her head. As she spun the wand round in the mixing bowl, the room began to spin too and she felt her feet losing their grip on the beam. Finally she could hold on no longer and went crashing down into huge mixing bowl. As she did, Mordonna did the special upside-down cake twist with her wand and Mrs Hulbert ended sittingthe right way up right in the middle of the cake mixture.
    ‘Perfect cake-flip,’ said Mordonna. ‘I’ve never seen a first-timer do it so well.’
    Mrs Hulbert sat with the cake mix oozing into all her nooks and crannies, not quite sure what to think. When she’d got up that morning, she’d been a bit apprehensive about visiting the Floods. She had thought they might be offered weird things to eat or be asked to wear pointy witch hats. One of the millions of things she hadn’t thought of was that she might end up sitting with her bottom in a huge bowl of cake mix. If someone had told her this was a possibility, she would have stayed at home and had to lie down in a dark room with a wet hankie on her forehead.
    But now, she was amazed to find that she had a huge grin on her face. She felt as if a door had opened and she had walked out of her grey home into a world full of bright colours where anything was possible.
    ‘What do we do now?’ she asked.
    ‘Well, you go upstairs and have a shower while I put the cake in the oven,’ said Mordonna. As Mrs Hulbert stepped down onto the floor, where Claude and Satanella were licking as much cake mixture off her legs as they could reach, Mordonna added, ‘How many socks were you wearing, one or two?’

    These are two typical witches’ knees
    ‘Two,’ said Mrs Hulbert.
    ‘Oh well, too late now,’ said Mordonna. ‘It can be like a lucky rat’s foot in a Christmas pudding. 32 Whoever finds it will get a prize.’
    After her shower Mrs Hulbert came downstairs in one of Mordonna’s dresses that was rather revealing, but she was in the sort of mood where she felt quite excited by it. No one apart from Mr Hulbert had ever seen her knees before, and Mr Hulbert had only seen them on special occasions like his birthday.
    ‘Don’t you have lovely knees,’ said Mordonna. ‘Mine are all bony. I wish they were like yours.’
    ‘But if you can do magic,’ said Mrs Hulbert, ‘can’t you change your knees to be exactly how you want them?’
    ‘I suppose I could, but Nerlin loves my knees as they are,’ Mordonna explained. ‘He says they remind him of the day we met. I fell down a hole,you know, and landed right on top of him. He had two bruises from my knees right in the middle of his back for weeks.’
    ‘Mum, do you think me and Ffiona should go and wake our dads up?’ said Betty.
    ‘No, it’s nice and peaceful,’ said Mordonna. ‘We’ll just let them sleep.’
    Which would have been fine except that the thing that had been sleeping in the other occupied coffin had just woken up. It was Winchflat’s latest invention, the thing that he had been secretly creating for the past fortnight.
    Winchflat Flood had developed a taste for old-fashioned movies and his favourite was Frankenstein . He particularly liked the scenes where the mad doctor created a living creature out of a pile of bits from dead people, including a crazy murderer.
    The trouble was, Winchflat didn’t realise the movie was a made-up story. He thought it was a documentary and that it had all really happened. Humans would realise it wasn’t true straight away, but