Role in The Story
The Grand High Witch within this story is noted for being particularly intolerant and demanding. At a yearly meeting of her English minions in a hotel, she demands that all of England's children be exterminated by the next annual meeting. When one brave or foolish witch claims this is impossible, the Grand High Witch tauntingly versifies her minion's impertinence and uselessness and burns her to oblivion by directing lasers from her eyes; a punishment all witches fear, and one known in their community as "getting fried."
The Grand High Witch then explains that elimination of children will be easily accomplished if all the witches set up in trade as sweetshop owners and places a potion in their stock that will turn anyone who consumes it into a mouse. This, she says, will convince parents and schoolteachers to kill the children, mistaking them for genuine pests. The witches and the story's narrator, himself a child, then witness a young boy, Bruno Jenkins, who has previously been fed some potion-inserted chocolate, enter the room, whereupon he is changed into a mouse to demonstrate the potion's effect.
The witches, satisfied that they will meet their leader's demands to destroy all children in England, are about to leave when one of the witches then picks up the scent of the story's narrator. They chase and lose him but eventually find him with his grandmother who has fallen into a diabetic sleep. They abduct and bring back to the convention and force-feed him the potion, and attempt, when he becomes a mouse, to crush him; but he escapes and finds Bruno again. The two mice then find their way back to the room occupied by the narrator's grandmother. Later, the narrator steals the potion, infiltrates the hotel's kitchen, and slips the potion in the witches' soup. All the witches, including the Grand High Witch, are transformed into mice and instantly are chopped to pieces by the cooks. The narrator and his grandmother, realizing that, as with queen bees, when the leader dies there is always going to be another individual who will take over the role of leadership, thereafter plan to move into the Grand High Witch's castle and use it as a base to track down the other witches, so as to spike their food as well, turn them into mice and destroy them with cats.
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