The Miss Fitz – Mortia, Necroma and Phantasma – were ancient, decrepit triplets, more than a century beyond their Best Before Date. Despite their great age, they still remembered rejoicing, as children, when Queen Victoria died – the earliest hint that they were not quite normal. In fact, they were not normal at all; they were witches!

As their powers grew, so did their unusual behaviour. Their oddest peculiarity first occurred on their sixteenth birthday – they ate their parents for party tea! In the years that followed, the Miss Fitz celebrated each birthday with a little stealthy cannibalism – the disappearance of an unmissed loner or, if nobody else could be found, a loitering waif or stray . . . or two . . . or three, if they were very small and tasty.

To their delight, this unusual diet not only refreshed their evil powers, but also flushed them with youthful energy, pushing back the advance of time. In spite of this, they still looked like a trio of scarecrows, cut from the same threadbare cloth.

They had gained their knowledge of witchcraft from ancient books they had found at a dusty old bookshop just down the road. They had a sagging shelf of leather-bound tomes, full of spells and curses. They had memorised most of them long ago. Necroma and Phantasma were flawless but Mortia was prone to getting things back-to-front, upside down and inside out. It was not that her memory had faded – she had always been scatty. But being so close, her sisters usually jumped in with the right formula, before things went too badly wrong.

The sisters thought that their strange behaviour was totally normal. In fact, they persuaded themselves that they were providing a communal service, by helping to reduce the number of homeless people in High Woodley. That there may be better ways of helping the homeless, was of little interest to them. They came to regard it as their duty to free High Woodley’s shop doorways of rough sleepers. 

They had done this for years, under cover of darkness, without attracting attention. As they approached extreme old age, the supply of drifters had been enough for them to have a feast far more frequently than annually – monthly or even weekly rather suited them. As their age advanced, their vile craving grew.

Over the years, they had become withdrawn, sleeping through the daylight hours, in their crumbling old building, where Wicca Alley ran out into High Street in High Woodley. The deep growl of their wolfhound in the cellar was enough to keep away all enquirers. 

When on the hunt, they would creep out in the dead of night, equipped with all the spells they had learned from their ancient books, searching for a suitably succulent candidate. Once found, the triplets would cast a fine web from their fingertips, which was so sticky, that the more the enfeebled victim struggled, the sooner they succumbed.

These victims were underfed and not difficult to haul back to the Fitzes’ cellar in Wicca Alley. The Fitzes simply pulled their prey to his or her feet and tipped them into an old barrow, harnessed to their enormous wolfhound. Then it was easy to trundle them to their cellar door, and tip them down the cold, stone steps.