The Ogre Downstairs
          Diana Wynne Jones
                 A 3S digital back-up edition 1.0
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                           Contents
               |1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14|15|

Also by Diana Wynne Jones
Archer’s Goon
Aunt Maria
Believing Is Seeing: Seven Stories
Castle in the Air
Dark Lord of Derkholm
Year of the Griffin
Dogsbody
Eight Days of Luke
Fire and Hemlock
Hexwood
Hidden Turnings:
A Collection of Stories Through Time and Space
The Homeward Bounders
Howl’s Moving Castle
The Ogre Downstairs
Power of Three
Stopping for a Spell
A Tale of Time City
The Time of the Ghost
Warlock at the Wheel and Other Stories
The Worlds of Chrestomanci
Book 1: Charmed Life
Book 2: The Lives of Christopher Chant
   Book 3: The Magicians of Caprona
   Book 4: Witch Week
   Mixed Magics (Stories)
   The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume I (Contains books I
and 2)
   The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume II (Contains books 3
and 4)
   The Dalemark Quartet
   Book 1: Cart and Cwidder
   Book 2: Drowned Ammet
   Book 3: The Spellcoats
   Book 4: The Crown of Dalemark
   JR Greenwillow Book
   HarperTrophy®
   An Imprint oj HarperCollinsPublishers
   Harper Trophy® is a registered trademark of HarperCollins
Publishers Inc.
   The Ogre Downstairs Copyright © 1974 by Diana Wynne Jones
   All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles
and reviews. Printed in the United States of America. For
information address HarperCollins Children’s Books, a division of
HarperCollins Publishers, 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York,
NY 10019.
   Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
   Jones, Diana Wynne.
   The ogre downstairs.
   p. cm.
   “Greenwillow Books.”
   Summary: When a disagreeable man with two boys marries a
widow with three children, family adjustments are complicated by
two magic chemistry sets which cause strange things to happen
around the house.
   ISBN 0-06-029883-9 —ISBN 0-06-447350-3 (pbk.)
   [1. Family life—Fiction. 2. Magic—Fiction.] I. Title.
   PZ7.J6840g 1990 89-11741
   Typography by Karin Paprocki
   First Harper Trophy edition, 2002
   Visit us on the World Wide Web!
   www.harperchildrens.com
                                   For Richard,
                          who thought of Indigo Rubber,
                    and Mickey, who helped with the chemicals


                            The Ogre Downstairs



                                  Chapter 1
                                                                         ^»
Caspar came into the hall one afternoon with a bag of books on one shoulder
and a bag of football clothes on the other and saw his brother carrying a large
square parcel. “What’s that?” he said.
  “It’s the Ogre,” Johnny said gloomily. “He’s trying to bribe me now.”
  “Bribe you to do what?” said Caspar.
  “Be a sweet little boy, I expect,” said Johnny with the utmost disgust. “Let’s
open it before Malcolm gets in, shall we?”
   Caspar, very intrigued, and also quite unreasonably annoyed that Johnny
should get a present and not he, led the way to the sitting room door and
prepared to sling his bag of books across the room into the red armchair. The
bag had almost left his hand, when he saw a large pair of feet sticking out from
beyond this chair. Above the chair back was an open newspaper and, below the
newspaper, Caspar could just see a section of grizzled black hair. The Ogre
himself was in possession. Caspar caught the bag at the top of its swing and
retreated on tiptoe.
  “He’s in there,” he mouthed to Johnny.
  “Blast!” said Johnny, none, too softly. “I thought he was in his study. Let’s go
upstairs.”
  They hurried up the stairs, Johnny hugging his parcel, Caspar lugging his two
bags. Since Caspar was so laden and Johnny, though smaller, a great deal more
hefty and very eager to open his parcel besides, their progress was noisy, and
shook the house a little. It was the kind of thing the Ogre could be trusted to
notice. His voice roared from beneath.
  “Will you boys be quiet!”
   They sighed. Johnny said something under his breath. They finished climbing
on tiptoe, at half-speed. Both knew, by instinct, that it would be unwise to
provoke the Ogre further. So far, he had not hit any of them, but they had a
feeling that it was only a matter of time before he did, and that it was an
experience to be put off as long as possible.
  “He’s allergic to noise,” said Johnny, as they reached their bedroom.
  “And boys,” Caspar said bitterly.
   The Ogre was their stepfather, and he had been married to their mother for a
month now. All three children had found it the most miserable month of their
lives. They alternated between wishing themselves dead and wishing the Ogre
was.
   “I don’t see why she had to marry him. We were quite all right as we were,”
Johnny said, as he had said several hundred times before. They halted,
according to custom, at the door of their room, for Caspar to hurl his bags one
after another onto his bed. Then they set out to wade through comics, books,
records, toffee-bars, and sixteen different construction kits, to the one clear
piece of floor.
    The two boys had disliked the Ogre on sight, despite their mother’s glowing
description of him. He was large and black-browed and not at all interested in
children. He was divorced. His first wife had left him years ago and gone to
live abroad—and Caspar’s opinion was that he did not blame her, considering
what the Ogre and his two sons were like. Their own mother was a widow.
Their father had been killed in an air-crash six years before. And, as Johnny
kept saying, they had all got on very nicely until the Ogre came along. Of
course, they had pretended to their mother—not to hurt her feelings—that they
did not think too badly of the Ogre. But, after his second visit—when they were
still thinking of him as Mr. McIntyre—their mother had said she was actually
going to marry him. Quite appalled, they had escaped to the kitchen as soon as
they could, to hold a council of war about him.
   “I think he’s frightful,” Caspar had said frankly. “And I bet he listens to
commercial pop. He’s bound to, with low eyebrows like that.” Since then, alas,
they had discovered that the Ogre listened to nothing but news, and required
absolute silence while he did so.
  “Stepfathers are always frightful,” Johnny had agreed, with the air of one
who had got through several hundred.
  “What do they do?” Gwinny asked nervously.
  “Everything. They’re perfect Ogres. They eat you as soon as look at you,”
Johnny had answered. Upon which Gwinny had looked tearful and said she
would run away if Mr. McIntyre was an Ogre. And he was. They all knew it
now.
   As Johnny put down his parcel in the clear patch and pushed aside a bank of
other things to make more room, Gwinny came in. “Mummy thought she heard
you,” she said. “Oh, what’s that?”
   “A present from the Ogre, for some reason,” Johnny said. “He gave it to me
in the hall just now and said it might keep me out of mischief”
   Gwinny had been looking offended, and a trifle puzzled. The Ogre could not
be said to be friendly with any of them, but, of all three, it was Johnny he liked
least. But this explanation relieved her mind. “Oh, that kind of present,” she
said, and even smiled.
   Caspar shot a sharp look at her. Gwinny, perhaps from being the youngest
and a girl, sometimes showed a regrettable tendency to like the Ogre. It was
Gwinny who had first met him, in fact. She had tried to go to the library by
herself and had got off the bus at quite the wrong stop. She had wandered for an
hour, miserable and lost, with tears trickling down her face, and people passing
right and left, taking no notice of her condition whatsoever. Then the Ogre had
stopped and asked her what was the matter. And Caspar conceded that Gwinny
had a right to be grateful. The Ogre had taken her to the library, then to a cafe
for ice cream, and finally brought her home in his car when Caspar and Johnny
were out looking for her and only their mother was at home. Caspar often
thought that, if only he or Johnny (preferably both) had been at home when the
Ogre and Gwinny arrived, the worst would never have happened. But that, as
they all knew, had been the sole act of kindness ever performed by the Ogre.
Therefore Caspar looked at Gwinny.
  “I’m not weakening!” she said indignantly. “I’ve learned the error of my
ways. So there. Oh, look, Caspar!”
   Caspar looked, to find that Johnny had taken the paper off the parcel to reveal
an enormous chemistry set, which he was contemplating with a mixture of
exasperation and grudging pleasure. “I’ve got one of these already,” he said.
  “But only half that size and almost used up,” Gwinny said consolingly.
    “Yes, just think of the smells you can make now,” Caspar added kindly. He
was not at all interested in chemistry himself. The mere sight of the rows of
little tubes and the filter-paper and the spirit-lamp made him want to yawn. And
when Johnny lifted out the whole lot in its white plastic container and
discovered a second layer of packed tubes and chemicals underneath, it was as
much as Caspar could do to show polite interest. “Just like chocolates,” he
said, and threw himself down on his bed. There, by sweeping aside a pile of
books and scattering Johnny’s colored crayons, he was able to reach the switch
that controlled his record player and turn it on. The LP left ready on the
turntable began to revolve. Caspar dropped the needle into the groove and lay
back to listen to his favorite group.
  Johnny, squatting over the ranks of chemicals, was now grinning happily. “I
say, there’s everything here,” he said. “I can do things we don’t even do at
school. What do you think this is?” He lifted out a tube labelled Vol. Pulv.
Gwinny had no idea. Caspar shook his head, and shouted above the mounting
wail of a synthesizer and a roll of drums, “I don’t know. Shut up for this
guitar-solo!”
   Johnny continued to lift out tubes and bottles full of substances he had never
seen before: Irid. Col, Animal Spirits, Misc. Pulv., Magn. Pulv., Noct. Vest.,
Dens Drac, and many more. There was a pipette, glass rods, a stand for
test-tubes, a china crucible. It really was a magnificent set. He was forced to
admit that the Ogre had done him proud— although Gwinny could not hear him
admit it, because Caspar’s record had reached its loudest track by then.
  At that moment, someone thumped on the door. They all looked at one
another. “Wait a minute!” said Caspar. Then he shouted, “Go away!” knowing it
would be useless.
   Sure enough, the door opened and Malcolm, the Ogre’s younger son, stood in
the entrance looking righteous. By that time, Johnny had whipped the brown
paper wrapping across the open chemistry set, and he and Gwinny had moved
in front of it.
  “My father says you’re to turn that damned thing off,” reported Malcolm. His
eyes wandered disapprovingly round the room as he said it. “At once.”
  “Oh, he does, bay jewve, does he?” said Caspar. Malcolm’s posh accent
always set his teeth on edge. “Suppose Ay dewn’t?”
  “Then you’ll catch it, won’t you?” Malcolm retorted coolly. He was quite
equal to anything Caspar could say or do, although he was a year younger. They
suspected that his dreadful pallid coolness came from having been at a posh
boarding school until this term. Now, alas, Malcolm went to the same school as
Caspar and Johnny.
  Unfortunately, as so often, Malcolm’s remark was true. Well aware that he
would catch it, Caspar grudgingly leaned over and turned the sound down, right
in the middle of the best song.
  “He said off,” Malcolm pointed out.
  As if to underline his correctness, the Ogre’s voice boomed out from
downstairs. “Right off, I said!”
  Caspar obeyed, with black hatred in his heart.
   Malcolm, meanwhile, looked coolly to where Johnny and Gwinny were
crouching in front of the chemistry set. “What are you sitting on there,
Melchior?” he said.
  Johnny ground his teeth. “None of your business.”
   Caspar’s rage grew. If anything, he hated Malcolm calling Johnny Melchior
even more than Johnny did, because he knew it was a dig at his own absurd
name. It was typical of Malcolm to find a convenient way of insulting them both
at once. He had called Gwinny Balthazar—only Gwinny had mistaken what he
said and had gone to her mother in tears because Malcolm said she was going
bald. After that, Malcolm stuck simply to Melchior, and maddening it was, too.
   Malcolm ran his eyes once more over the crowded room and turned to leave.
“I must say,” he said, “I kept this room—”
   But he had said this too often before. All three of them joined in. “—much
taidier when it was maine.”
  “Well, I did,” said Malcolm. “It’s a perfect pigsty now.”
   Caspar lost his temper and threw himself off his bed and across the room,
stumbling and crunching among the things on the floor. “Get out, you!” Malcolm
prudently dodged out onto the landing, sniggering slightly. The snigger was too
much for Caspar. He dived out after Malcolm, roaring insults, and the other two
followed hastily to see, as they hoped, justice done.
   From below, the Ogre roared once again for silence. No one attended. For,
out on the landing, Malcolm was standing defensively above a chemistry set
identical to the one the Ogre had given Johnny.
  “Look at that!” Gwinny said shrilly.
  “If you spoil it,” Malcolm said, shriller still, “I’ll tell my father.”
  “As if I wanted to touch it!” said Johnny. “I’ve got one the same. So there!”
  “So you’re not the little favorite you thought you were,” added Caspar.
  “It isn’t fair!” proclaimed Gwinny, voicing Caspar’s secret thoughts on the
subject too. “Why does he give you two a present and not us?”
  “Because you’re such little frights,” said Malcolm. “And Douglas hasn’t got
anything, either.”
   “That’s because he’s a big fright,” said Caspar. “Beside Douglas, even your
frightfulness pales.”
   At this, Malcolm put his head down and tried to charge Caspar in the
stomach. Caspar dodged. Malcolm ran on into the banister, so that the house
shook with the impact. Gwinny and Johnny cheered. The Ogre shouted for quiet.
Again no one attended. Caspar saw he now had Malcolm at his mercy and
caught his head under one arm. Malcolm yelled and kicked to get free, but
Caspar had a whole month of sneers and sniggers to revenge and not even the
Ogre would have made him let go just then. Gwinny shouted encouragements.
Johnny shrieked advice about where to hit Malcolm next.
   The door on the other side of the landing was torn open, and Douglas, like a
giant aroused, entered the fray. Douglas was almost as tall as the Ogre, and old
enough for his voice to have broken, so that the roar with which he charged
down on Caspar was shattering. “Leave him alone! He’s younger than you!”
He tore Caspar and Malcolm apart. The banister reverberated. Caspar
protested. Malcolm accused. Johnny and Gwinny yelled at Douglas. Below, the
roars of the Ogre became a continuous bull-like bellowing.
  “What is going on?”
   Caspar looked up under Douglas’s arm. His mother was standing at the head
of the stairs, looking hurt and harassed. Since she had married the Ogre, that
hurt and harassed look had scarcely ever left her face. It did not help to make
them feel kindly toward the Ogre.
   Nobody spoke. Douglas shoved Caspar away and backed to the other side of
the landing, beside Malcolm. Caspar backed similarly, between Johnny and
Gwinny, and both families stood glowering at one another, breathing heavily.
   Sally McIntyre looked from one side to the other, and sighed. “I wish you’d
all try to remember there are five of you now,” she said. “This was the most
awful din.”
  “Sorry, Sally,” said Malcolm and Douglas at once, in a well-behaved
chorus.
   “And Caspar,” said Sally, “Jack says you’re welcome to play records any
time he’s out.”
  “Big deal!” said Caspar, not at all well-behaved. “What am I supposed to do
when he’s always in?”
  “Do without,” said Douglas. “I could do without Indigo Rubber, too, for that
matter. They stink.”
  “So does your guitar-playing,” Johnny retorted, in Caspar’s defense.
  “Now, now, Johnny,” said his mother. “Will you three all come in here a
minute, please.”
  They herded moodily back into the boys’ room and looked mournfully at their
mother’s harrowed face.
    “Gracious, what a mess!” was the first thing she said. Then, “Listen, all of
you, how many times have I got to tell you to be considerate to poor Malcolm
and Douglas? It’s very hard on them, because they’ve had to give up having
separate rooms and change schools, too. They’re having a far more difficult
time than you are.” There was a heavy-breathing silence, in which Caspar
managed not to point out that Malcolm, in particular, made sure that they had a
difficult time, too. “It will be better,” said Sally, “when we can afford a larger
house. Just have patience. And, in the meantime, suppose we tidy this room a
little.” She stooped to pick up the brown paper at her feet and revealed the
chemistry set. “Wherever did you get this?”
  “The O—Jack gave it me just now,” said Johnny.
   Sally’s worn face broke into an enchanted smile. “Wasn’t that kind of him!”
she exclaimed. She picked up the lid of the box and examined it lovingly. They
watched her glumly. Quite the worst part of the whole business was the way the
Ogre seemed to have cast a spell on their mother, so that whatever he did she
thought he was right. “How lavish!” she said. “Nontoxic, guaranteed
nonexplosive— Oh, you must be pleased with this, Johnny!”
  “He gave one to Malcolm, too,” Johnny said.
  “That was thoughtful,” said Sally. “Then he won’t feel left out.”
  “But we do, Mummy,” said Gwinny. “He didn’t give anything to me and
Caspar. Or Douglas,” she added, not wishing the Ogre to outdo her in fairness.
   “Oh, I do wish you’d be reasonable, Guinevere,” said Sally unreasonably.
“You know we’re hard up just now. Come and set the table and stop
complaining. And this room is to be tidy before supper. I’ll ask Jack to make an
inspection.”
  This threat was enough to cause Johnny and Caspar a little energetic work.
By the time the Ogre’s heavy feet were heard on the stairs, Caspar had piled
books, papers, and records in a sort of heap by the wall, and Johnny had pushed
most of the loose construction kits under his bed and the cupboard, so that, apart
from the chemistry set, the floor was almost clear.
   The Ogre stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and his pipe in
his mouth and looked round the room with distaste. “You do like to live in
squalor, don’t you?” he said. “I suppose all those toffee-bars are an essential
part of your diet? OK, I’ll report a clear floor. How are you getting on with that
chemistry set?”
  “I like it,” Johnny said, with a polite smile. “But I’ve been too busy clearing
up to use it yet.”
    The Ogre’s heavy eyebrows went up, and he looked rather pointedly round
the room. “I’ll leave you to it, then,” he said. A thought struck him. “I suppose I
ought in fairness to make a surprise inspection over the way,” he said. They
watched him turn and walk across the landing. They saw him open the door to
Malcolm’s and Douglas’s room. They waited hopefully. It would be wonderful
if, for once, it was those two who got into trouble.
  Nothing happened, however, except for a surprisingly strong stench, which
swept across the landing and made Caspar cough. Malcolm’s voice followed it.
“This chemistry set is positively brilliant, Father! Look at this.”
  “Having fun, are you?” said the Ogre, and he shut the door rather hastily and
went downstairs.
  “Pooh!” said Caspar.
  “I just like that!” said Johnny. “If it had been us making a smell like that, we
wouldn’t half have got it! All right, then. Watch me after supper. I’ll make the
worst stink you ever smelled, and if he says anything, I’ll say, what about
Malcolm?”
   Johnny was as good as his word. After supper, he set to work in the middle
of the carpet, mixing all the strongest and likeliest-looking things from the
various tubes and vials and heating them with the spirit-lamp to see what
happened. When he found a good smell, he poured it carefully into a tooth-mug
and mixed another. The savor of the room went through rotten cabbage, elderly
egg, moldy melon, gasworks, and bad breath; blue smoke hung about in it.
Caspar, who was lying on his bed doing history homework, coughed
considerably, but he bore it in a good cause.
   When Gwinny came in instead of going to bed, she was exquisitely disgusted.
She sat beside Johnny in her pink nightdress, wriggling her bare toes and
pretending to smoke one of the Ogre’s pipes that she had stolen. “Eeugh!” she
said, and peered at Johnny’s flushed face through the gathering smoke. “We
look like a witches’ convent. Caspar looks like a devil looming through the
smoke.”
  “Coven,” said Caspar. “Devil yourself.”
    Giggling, Gwinny stuck her spiky hair out round her head and carefully
tapped some of the ash out of the pipe into the tooth-mug. The mixture fizzed a
little. “Do you think it’ll explode now?” she asked hopefully.
  “Shouldn’t think so,” said Johnny. “Move, or you’ll get burned.”
  “Is it smelly enough?” asked Gwinny.
  “I still haven’t found the one Malcolm got,” admitted Johnny.
  “Try a dead fish or so. That should do it,” Caspar suggested.
  Gwinny squealed with laughter.
   “Gwinny!” boomed the voice of the Ogre. “Are you in bed?” Gwinny
dropped the pipe, jumped up and fled. In her hurry, she knocked the tooth-mug
flying and Johnny was too late to save it. Half the mixture spilled on the carpet.
The rest splashed muddily on Gwinny’s legs and nightdress. Gwinny squealed
again as she raced for the door. “It’s cold!” But she dared not stop to apologize.
She continued racing, up the next stairs and into her little room on the top floor.
She left behind her the most appalling smell. It was worlds worse than the one
Malcolm had produced. It was so horrible that it awed them. They were staring
at one another in silence, when Gwinny began to scream.
  “Caspar! Johnny! Caspar! Oh, come quickly!”



                                  Chapter 2
                                                                      «^»
Caspar and Johnny pelted up to Gwinny’s room regardless of noise. Johnny
thought she was on fire, Caspar that she was being eaten away by acids. They
burst into the room and stood staring. Gwinny did not seem to be there. Her
lamp was lit, her bed empty, her window shut, and her dollhouse and all her
other things arranged around as usual, but they could not see Gwinny.
  “She’s gone,” said Caspar helplessly.
   “No, I haven’t,” said Gwinny, her voice quivering rather. “I’m up here.”
Both their heads turned upward. Gwinny appeared to be hanging from the
ceiling. Her shoulders were lodged in the corner where the roof stopped
sloping and turned into flat ceiling, her bony legs were dangling straight down
beneath her, and her hands were nervously clasped in front of her. She looked a
bit like a puppet. “And I can’t come down,” she added.
  “However did you get up?” demanded Johnny.
   “I sort of floated,” said Gwinny. “I went all light after that stuff splashed on
me, and while I was getting into bed I got so light that I just went straight up and
stayed here.”
   “Lordy!” said Johnny. “Suppose the window had been open!” It was a nasty
thought. Both boys had visions of a light, leaf-like Gwinny floating out into the
night and then up and up, unable to stop, like a hydrogen balloon.
  “Let’s get her down,” said Caspar. “Come on.”
   By standing on the bed, Caspar thought he could just reach Gwinny’s feet, if
he jumped as he reached. Johnny stood in front of the bed to help catch her.
Caspar got on the bed and jumped. His fingers brushed Gwinny’s feet, but he
could not get a grip. To his annoyance, the slight push he had given her was
enough to send Gwinny bobbing gently out into the middle of the room, quite out
of reach.
  “Oh dear!” said Gwinny. “Could you lasso me or something?”
   Johnny took the cord off Gwinny’s dressing-gown to try. But he remembered
he had never been able to make a lasso that worked. “I’ll throw it,” he said.
“You catch it. Both hands and carefully, mind.” He threw the cord
upward—quite a good shot. It hit Gwinny’s chest and slithered away down her
legs. But Gwinny had always been hopeless at catching things. She missed the
cord and went bobbing and twirling away toward the window with the
movement.
  “That’s no good,” said Caspar. “She’ll be all night before she gets hold of it.
Gwinny, can you work yourself along the ceiling, back over the bed, and I’ll
have another go at catching you.”
   “I’ll try,” Gwinny said doubtfully. She put up one hand and pushed at the
ceiling. The next moment, to the surprise of all three, she was swooping through
the air toward the bed. Caspar raced after her, but, by the time he reached the
bed, Gwinny had rebounded from the sloping roof and swooped out into the
middle of the ceiling again. “Ooh!” she said, with her spiky head bobbing
excitedly against the cord of the light. “That was ever such a nice feeling! I
think I’ll do it again.” And, to Caspar’s exasperation, Gwinny began pushing off
with a hand here, then there, swooping this way and that and laughing. Johnny
started to laugh, too, because Gwinny looked like a gawky pink chicken with
her nightdress and long bony legs.
   “We must make her stop being so silly,” Caspar said. “Gwinny,” he said to
the soles of Gwinny’s swooping feet, “we’ve got to get you down. Don’t you
understand? Suppose the Ogre finds you like that.”
  “He wouldn’t be able to catch me,” Gwinny said gaily, shooting from the
window to the space above the door.
  “Yes, he would,” said Caspar. “Think how tall he is.”
 “Yes, but, Caspar,” said Johnny, “what’ll we do if we do get her down?
Won’t she just shoot up again?”
  “We could tie her down,” Caspar suggested.
   “Oh no, you won’t!” Gwinny called. She pushed off from the wall with her
feet and floated on her back across the room, to the far corner. And there she
lay, with her stomach and toes gently brushing the ceiling and a complacent
smile on her face. “Try and catch me now,” she said.
  They saw it was no use expecting her to be sensible. “Do you think we could
get rid of the chemicals somehow, and get her down that way?” Caspar said.
  “It might wash off,” said Johnny.
  “Let’s try,” said Caspar.
  They raced down two floors to the bathroom. There, Johnny seized the big
mop that was used to wash the floor and Caspar seized the back-brush, and they
hurried upstairs again. As they passed the door of Malcolm’s and Douglas’s
room, they heard Douglas call out something about “herd of blinking elephants,”
but they were too fussed to bother.
   Gwinny was lying on her back near the middle of the ceiling now. Johnny
raised the dripping mop and aimed it for the part of Gwinny’s legs where he
thought the chemicals had splashed. But it was not easy to aim a long, top-heavy
mop. He hit Gwinny plumb on the backside. She shrieked, “Stop it! It’s cold!”
and went floundering and scrambling and bobbing out of reach, like an
upside-down pink crab, with a muddy splodge on the back of her nightdress.
Caspar got onto the bed and clawed at her legs with the back-brush as soon as
they came near.
  “Stop it, you beast!” said Gwinny, and scrambled back across the ceiling.
  Caspar jumped onto a chair on the other side of the room and tried to reach
her from there. Johnny lofted the mop and prodded at her as she passed. Gwinny
squealed with silly laughter and scrambled out of reach again. They pursued
her. Caspar went leaping from chair to bed and back again. Johnny charged this
way and that, prodding, and Gwinny scuttled and squealed all over the ceiling.
Then Johnny, not looking where he was going, kicked the dollhouse over with a
crash, scattering little tables and chairs and dollhouse people all over the room.
  Gwinny turned over and drummed her heels on the ceiling, pointing furiously.
“How dare you! Look what you’ve done! Pick them all up!”
  “You come and do it,” said Johnny cunningly.
  “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!” said Gwinny, drumming away for all she was
worth.
   There were footsteps, and the shattering voice of Douglas bawled from the
stairs, “Stop that din, can’t you! Some of us are trying to do homework.”
   Gwinny’s heels stopped. Caspar and Johnny exchanged alarmed looks.
Without a word, they got down and began collecting the chairs, tables, and
dolls. But the damage was done. Behind the feet of Douglas retreating, they
heard a much more distant door slam. They waited. Heavy footsteps started
upstairs. They galvanized Caspar. He leaped up, seized the mop, and pointed it
at Gwinny.
  “Quick! Catch hold of that, Gwinny, and don’t let go.”
   Gwinny was only too ready to do as he told her. She hung on to the wet end
while Caspar heaved on the stick. It was extraordinarily hard work. Gwinny
seemed a good deal heavier upwards, as it were, than she ever was on the
ground. Johnny flung the last table into the dollhouse and helped Caspar heave.
Slowly Gwinny was dragged down. Slowly and remorselessly the Ogre’s feet
climbed the stairs. Once she was within reach, Gwinny was so terrified of
rising again that she seized Johnny’s hair to hold herself down with.
  “What do we do now?” said Johnny, through a grin of agony.
  “Bed. The covers might hold her down,” gasped Caspar.
    They towed the floating Gwinny over to her bed and attempted to put her into
it. Gwinny did her best to help, but nothing seemed to stop her floating away
upward every time they tried to put her legs between the sheets.
  The Ogre’s feet crossed the landing and began on the last flight.
   Gwinny flung her arms round Johnny in terror. While she was anchored that
much, Caspar let go, picked up all the bedcovers, flung them over her floating
legs and flung himself after them. As the Ogre’s feet came up the last stairs,
Johnny jumped onto Gwinny too and sat on her stomach.
  When the Ogre tore open the door and stood glowering, he saw Gwinny in
bed, Caspar sitting on one end of it, Johnny in the middle, and all their faces
turned to him in not-quite-innocent alarm. The only thing out of place was the
wet mop Gwinny seemed to be nursing and a muddy splotch on the pillow.
  “What the dickens are you all doing here?” said the Ogre.
  “Telling her a bedtime story,” said Caspar breathlessly.
  “Why does it need two of you and all this din?” demanded the Ogre.
   Caspar and Johnny could not think. Gwinny said brightly, “They were doing
it with funny voices to make me laugh.”
  “Were they?” said the Ogre. “Well, they can just stop!”
  “Oh no,” said Johnny. “We were just near the end. Can’t we just finish?”
  “No, you just can’t,” said the Ogre. “Your mother and I are entitled to some
peace.”
  “Please!” they chorused desperately.
  “Oh, very well,” said the Ogre irritably. “Five minutes. And if I hear another
sound there’ll be trouble. What are you doing with that filthy mop?”
 Again neither Caspar nor Johnny could think. “It’s a broomstick,” said
Gwinny. “The story’s about a witch.”
   “Then you can either do without or change the story,” said the Ogre. “I’m
taking that back where it came from.” He strode over to the bed and tried to
wrench the mop out of Gwinny’s hands. Gwinny lost her presence of mind and
hung on to the mop with all her strength. The force with which the Ogre tore it
free raised her a full foot off the bed and Johnny with her. Luckily, Johnny’s
weight and Caspar’s were enough to bring her down again fairly quickly, and
the Ogre did not notice their sudden elevation because his foot chanced, at that
moment, to kick against the back-brush. He picked it up and looked at it
meditatively. “I can think of a very good use for this,” he said. “Don’t tempt me
too far.” Then he went away, taking the mop and the brush with him.
  They listened tensely to his retreating footsteps. When he had reached the
bathroom, Caspar said, “Now what shall we do? We can’t sit here all night.”
  “But I’ll be cold on the ceiling,” Gwinny whimpered.
  “You could take a blanket up with you,” Caspar suggested.
  “If you could hold her down,” said Johnny, “I think I can fix her.”
  “All right,” said Caspar. “But don’t be too long.”
  So Johnny departed downstairs with heavy-footed stealth and Caspar tried to
keep Gwinny in place. He found it next to impossible on his own. In a matter of
seconds, she was floating clear of the bed, bedclothes and all. “Oh, what shall
we do?” she wailed.
  “Shut up, for a start,” said Caspar.
   The bedclothes slid away and Caspar was hanging on to Gwinny’s
nightdress. There was a slow tearing sound. Gwinny whimpered and began to
rise again, gently but surely. Caspar was forced to let go of her nightdress and
catch hold of her ankles. There he hung on desperately. He found, in the end,
that if he leaned back, with his head nearly touching the floor and all his weight
swinging on Gwinny, he could keep her floating upright about three feet from
the floor. They had reached this point when Johnny came swiftly upstairs and
entered the room with a bucket of water, looking very businesslike.
   “Oh, good,” he said, when he saw the position Gwinny was in, and he threw
the water over the pair of them.
  He had not thought to bring warm water. Gwinny squealed. Caspar gasped
and nearly let go. He was about to say some very unkind things to Johnny, when
he realized that Gwinny was now much easier to hold down.
  “It’s working,” he said. “Go and get some more.”
  Johnny turned, beaming with relief, and went galloping away downstairs,
bucket clattering. Somewhat to Caspar’s annoyance, he did not stop at the
bathroom, but went on galloping, right downstairs to the kitchen, because the
water ran more quickly from the taps downstairs. Caspar shook his soaking hair
out of his eyes and hung on grimly. Gwinny’s teeth chattered.
  “I’m freezing,” she complained. “My nightie’s soaking.”
    “I know,” said Caspar. “It’s dripping all over me, and I’m sitting in a puddle,
if that’s any comfort.”
   After what seemed half an hour, they heard Johnny pounding upstairs again.
Caspar was too relieved to worry about the noise he was making. He just
listened to Johnny pounding closer and closer and prayed for him to hurry. As
Johnny’s feet crossed the landing below, a confused noise broke out on the
same level. Johnny had started on the last flight of stairs, when Douglas erupted
into another shattering roar.
   “What the blazes are you doing? There’s water pouring through our
ceiling!”
   Johnny did not answer. They heard his feet climbing faster. Then came the
feet of Douglas, pounding behind. Behind that again were other feet. Caspar and
Gwinny could only wait helplessly, until the door at last crashed open and
Johnny staggered in, red-faced and almost too breathless to move, with water
slopping over his shoes out of the bucket.
  “Throw it,” Caspar said urgently.
   Johnny croaked for breath, heaved up the bucket and poured the water over
Gwinny, drenching Caspar again in the process. It did the trick. Gwinny
dropped like a stone and landed on Caspar. There was a short time when
Caspar could not see much and was almost as breathless as Johnny. When he
recovered sufficiently to sit up, Douglas was standing behind Johnny, looking as
if he had frozen in the middle of shouting something, and behind him were the
Ogre and their mother.
  “Johnny!” said Sally. “Whatever possessed you?”
  “Take him downstairs, Douglas,” said the Ogre, “and make him clear it up.
These two can clear up here.”
   “Come on,” Douglas said coldly. Johnny departed without a word. There
really was nothing to say.
   An hour later, when Gwinny had been put to bed in a clean nightdress and
everywhere wet mopped dry, Caspar and Johnny went rather timidly into their
room, expecting to see the carpet, where the rest of the chemicals had gone,
floating against the ceiling—or at least ballooning up in the middle. But the only
sign of the spill was a large purple stain and a considerable remnant of bad
smell. Much relieved, Caspar opened the window.
  “It must only work on people,” Johnny said thoughtfully.
  “We’d better clear it up,” said Caspar.
   Johnny sighed, but he obediently trudged off to the bathroom for soap and
water. He returned still thoughtful and remained so all the time he was rubbing
the carpet with the Ogre’s towel. The stain came off fairly easily and dyed the
towel deep mauve.
  “Couldn’t you have used yours or mine?” said Caspar.
   “I did. Douglas made me use them on their room,” said Johnny. “Listen.
Gwinny got an awful lot of that stuff on her, didn’t she? Suppose you use less,
so you weren’t quite so light, wouldn’t you be like flying?”
   “Hey!” said Caspar, sitting up in bed. Since he had had to change all his
clothes, it had seemed the simplest place to be. “That’s an idea! What did you
put in it?”
  “I can’t remember,” said Johnny. “But I’m darned well going to find out.”
                                  Chapter 3
                                                                          «^»
In the days that followed, Johnny experimented. He made black mixtures, green
mixtures, and red ones. He made little smells, big smells, and smells grandiose
and appalling. These met the smells coming from Malcolm’s efforts and
mingled with them, until Sally said that their landing seemed like an affliction to
her. But whatever smell or color Johnny made, he was no nearer finding the
right mixture. He went on doggedly. He remembered that Gwinny had put
pipe-ash in the mixture, so he always made that one of the ingredients.
   “Who is it keeps taking my pipes?” demanded the Ogre, and received no
answer. And in spite of Johnny’s running this constant risk, his efforts were not
rewarded. Nevertheless, he persevered. It was his nature to be dogged, and
Caspar and Gwinny were thankful for it; for, as Gwinny said, the idea of being
really able to fly made it easier to bear the awfulness of everything else.
   Each day seemed to bring fresh trials. First there was the trouble over the
purple towel, and then the affair of the muddy sweater on the roof, mysteriously
found wrapped round the chimney. The Ogre, as a matter of course, blamed
Caspar, and, when Caspar protested his innocence, he blamed Johnny. And
twice Caspar forgot that the Ogre was at home and played Indigo Rubber—the
third time, the noise came from Douglas, but Douglas said nothing and let
Caspar take the blame. Then the weather turned cold. The house had very old
central heating, which seemed too weak to heat all four floors properly. The
bathroom, and the bedroom shared by Sally and the Ogre, were warm enough,
but upward from there it grew steadily colder. Gwinny’s room got so cold that
she took to sneaking down to her mother’s room and curling up on the big soft
bed to read. Unfortunately, she left a toffee-bar on the Ogre’s pillow one
evening, and the boys were blamed again. It took all Gwinny’s courage to own
up, and the Ogre was in no way impressed by her heroism. However, he did
find her an old electric heater, which he installed in her room with instructions
not to waste electricity.
  “We don’t need to be pampered,” Malcolm said odiously. “You should see
what it’s like at a boarding school before you complain here.”
  “Quait,” said Caspar. “Full of frosty little snobs like you. Why don’t you go
back there where you belong?”
  “I wish I could,” Malcolm retorted, with real feeling. “Anything would be
better than having to share this pigsty with you.”
   Nearly a week passed. One afternoon, Caspar was as usual hurrying home in
order not to have to walk back with Malcolm, when he discovered himself to be
in a silly kind of mood. He knew he was going to have to act up somehow. He
decided to do it in the Ogre’s study, if possible, because it was the warmest
room in the house and also possessed a nice, glossy parquet floor, ideal for
sliding on. As soon as he got home, he hurried to the study and cautiously
opened its door.
  The Ogre was not there, but Johnny was. He was rather gloomily turning ash
out of the Ogre’s pipes into a tin for further experiments.
    “How’s it going?” Caspar asked, slinging his bag into the Ogre’s chair and
sitting on the Ogre’s desk to take his shoes off.
   Johnny jumped. The Ogre’s inkwell fell over, and Johnny watched the ink
spreading with even deeper gloom. “He’ll know it’s me,” he said. “He always
thinks it’s me, anyway.”
    “Unless he thinks it’s me,” said Caspar, casting his shoes to the floor. “Wipe
it up, you fool. But is the Great Caspar daunted by the Ogre? Yes, he is rather.
And the ink is running off the desk into his shoes.”
   Johnny, knowing he would get no sense out of Caspar in this mood, picked up
the Ogre’s blotting-paper and put it in the pool of ink. The blotting-paper at
once became bright blue and sodden, but there seemed just as much ink as
before.
   Gwinny came in, hearing their voices. “There’s ink running off onto the
floor,” she said.
   “Tell me something I don’t know,” said Johnny, wondering how one small
inkwell always contained such floods of ink.
  “I’ll do the floor,” said Gwinny. “Can’t you help, Caspar?”
   “No,” said Caspar, gliding smoothly in his socks across the floor. He did not
see why he should be deprived of his pleasure because of Johnny’s clumsiness.
   “Well, we think you’re mean,” said Gwinny, fetching a newspaper from the
rack and laying it under the streams of ink.
  “The Great Caspar,” said Caspar, “is extremely generous.”
  “Take no notice,” said Johnny. “And pass me a newspaper.”
   Caspar continued to slide. “The Great Caspar,” he said kindly, “will slide
for your entertainment while you work, lady and gentleman. He has slid before
all the crowned heads of Europe, and will now perform, solely for your benefit,
the famous hexagonal turn. Not only has it taken him years to perfect, but—”
  “Oh, shut up!” said Johnny, desperately wiping.
   “—it is also very hazardous,” said Caspar. “Behold, the hazardous
hexagon!” Upon this, Caspar spun himself round and attempted to jump while he
did it. While he was in the air, he saw the Ogre in the doorway, lost his
balance, and ended sitting in a pool of ink. From this position, he looked up into
the dour face of the Ogre. His own face was vivid red, and he hoped most
earnestly that the Ogre had not heard his boastful fooling.
  The Ogre had heard. “The Great Caspar,” the Ogre said, “appears to have
some difficulty with the hexagonal turn. Get up! AND GET OUT!”
  To complete Caspar’s humiliation, Malcolm appeared in the doorway,
snorting with laughter. “What is a hexagonal turn?” he said.
   The Ogre’s roar had fetched Sally, too. “Oh, just look at this mess!” she
cried. “Those trousers are ruined, Caspar. Don’t any of you have the slightest
consideration? Ink all over poor Jack’s study!”
   It was the last straw, being blamed for falling in the ink. Caspar, with
difficulty, climbed to his feet. “Poor Jack!” he said, with his voice shaking with
rage, and fear at his own daring. “It’s always poor, flipping Jack! What about
poor us for a change?”
  The hurt, harrowed look on Sally’s face deepened. The Ogre’s face became
savage, and he moved toward Caspar with haste and purpose. Caspar did not
wait to discover what the purpose was. With all the speed his slippery socks
would allow, he dodged the Ogre, dived between Malcolm and Sally, and fled
upstairs.
    There he changed into jeans, muttering. His face was red, his eyes stung with
misery, and he could not stop himself making shamed, angry noises. “I wish I
was dead!” he said, and surged toward the window, wondering whether he
dared throw himself out. His progress scattered construction kits and hurled
paper about. He knocked against a corner of the chemistry box. It shunted into
its lid, which Johnny had left lying beside it, and a tube of some white chemical
lying on the lid rolled across it and spilled a little white powder on Caspar’s
sock as he passed.
   Caspar found himself reaching the window in two graceful, slow-motion
bounds, rather like a ballet dancer’s, except that his socks barely met the floor
as he passed. And when he was by the window, instead of stopping in the usual
way, his feet again left the floor in a long, slow, drifting bounce. Hardly had he
realized what was happening, than he was down again, quite in the usual way,
with a heavy bump, on top of what felt like a drawing-pin.
    He was so excited that he hardly noticed it. He simply pulled off his sock,
and the drawing-pin with it, and waded back with one bare foot to the chemistry
set. The little tube of chemical was trembling on the edge of the lid, and white
powder was filtering down from it onto the carpet. Caspar’s hands shook rather
as he picked it up. He planted its stopper firmly in, and then turned it over to
read the label. It read Vol. Pulv., which left Caspar none the wiser. But the
really annoying thing was that the little tube was barely half full. Either most of
it had gone the night Gwinny took to the ceiling, or Johnny had unwittingly used
it up since in other mixtures that destroyed its potency. Wondering just how
potent the powder was, Caspar carefully put his bare foot on the place where
the tube had spilled. When nothing happened, he trod harder and screwed his
foot around.
   He was rewarded with a delicious feeling of lightness. A moment later, his
feet left the ground, and he was hanging in the air about eighteen inches above
the littered floor. He was not very light. He gave a scrambling sort of jump to
see if he could go any higher, and all that happened was that he bounced
sluggishly over toward the window. It was such a splendid feeling that he
bounced himself again and went jogging slowly toward Johnny’s bed.
  “Yippee!” he said, and began to laugh.
  He invented a kind of dance then, by jumping with both feet together first to
one side and then to the other. Bounce and… Bounce and… His head swung, his
hair flew, and he brandished the tube in his hand. Bounce and… Bounce and…
“Yippee!”
   Johnny and Gwinny came soberly and mournfully into the room while he was
doing it. For a moment they could not believe their eyes. Then Johnny hastily
slammed the door shut.
   “I’ve found it!” said Caspar, bouncing away and waving the tube at them.
“I’ve found it! It’s called Vol. Pulv. and it works by itself. Yippee!” He
suddenly felt himself becoming heavy again and was just in time to bounce
himself over to his bed before the powder stopped working and he came down
with a flop that made the bedsprings jangle. He sat there laughing and waving
the tube at the others.
  “How marvelous!” said Gwinny. “You are clever, Caspar.”
  Johnny came slowly over to the bed. He took the tube and looked at it. “I was
going to try this one today,” he said.
   Caspar looked up at his gloomy face and understood that Johnny, not
unreasonably, was feeling how unfair it was that Caspar should discover the
secret, when Johnny had worked so hard over it and had just been in dire
trouble about the ink as well. “You still need to do a lot of work on it,” Caspar
said tactfully. “I used it dry, and it ought to be mixed with water. You’ll have to
work out the right proportions.”
   Johnny’s face brightened. “Yes,” he said. “And experiment to find out how
much you need, not to go soaring right out of the atmosphere. I’ll have to do
tests on myself, bit by bit.”
  “That’s right,” agreed Caspar. “But for goodness sake don’t use too much
while you do it. The tube’s less than half full already.”
  “I’ve got eyes,” Johnny said crossly. Then, feeling he was being rather
ungracious, he added, “I’m the Great Scientist. I think of everything.”
   He tried to make good this boast by fencing off a corner of the room, so that
no accident should happen while the experiments were in progress. For the rest
of the evening he sat in his pen, carefully putting the powder, grain by grain,
into a test-tube of water, and then bathing his big toe with the result.
  “What’s the matter with Johnny?” their mother wanted to know, when she
came in around bedtime.
   Johnny, by this time, was bobbing an inch or so from the floor. He took hold
of a chair that was part of his fence to hold himself down, and pretended not to
have heard.
  “I knocked over one of his experiments this afternoon,” Caspar explained
anxiously, “and he doesn’t want anybody to do it again. Be careful of him. He’s
very angry.”
  Sally gave Johnny a puzzled look. “All right, darling. I won’t interfere. It was
you I wanted to talk to anyway, Caspar.”
   “About what I said about Jack? I’m sorry,” Caspar said hurriedly, dreading a
scene. Scenes with his mother were always painful, not because she scolded,
but because she believed in absolute honesty.
    Sure enough, she said, “That’s not quite the point, darling. I could see you
were hurt and miserable, and it upset me. Can’t you bring yourself to like Jack a
little better? He really is very nice, you know;”
  “Why should I? He doesn’t like us,” Caspar retorted with equal honesty.
  “He tries,” Sally said earnestly. “I can think of at least a hundred occasions
when he’s been very forebearing indeed.”
  “There are about a thousand when he hasn’t,” Caspar said bitterly.
  “That’s partly because you’ve been so awful,” Sally said frankly. “Truly, I’m
ashamed of you most of the time—all of you, but particularly you as the eldest.”
   Caspar’s face was red and he wanted to mutter again. He looked over at
Johnny. Johnny looked sulkily at his big toe and gave it a slight waggle. He was
hating the scene as much as Caspar, and he was also mortally afraid that he was
going to rise from his pen any minute and float about. Caspar did his best to
send Sally away. “I’m sorry,” he said, sounding so sincere and nice that he
made himself feel ill. “I will try.” He was quite unable to keep up this level of
piety. He found himself adding, “I do try, only he keeps blaming me so.”
  “You must remember,” said Sally, “that he isn’t really used to children.
Malcolm and Douglas have been away at school most of the time, and he simply
had no idea what it could be like.”
  “He’s finding out, isn’t he?” said Caspar.
  Sally laughed. “You can say that again! All right. Good night, darlings. And
do try a bit harder in the future.”
  She went out and shut the door. Johnny gave a sigh of relief, let go of the
chair, and bobbed clear of the floor again.
   Before he went to bed, he had risen to three feet. Caspar was rather glad to
find that there was no horrible smell this time, as the mixture in the test-tube
grew stronger. It must have been due to all the other things Johnny had put in.
They were discussing it when Malcolm, in his usual manner, knocked and came
in despite being told to go away. Johnny was only just in time to pull himself
over to the cupboard and pretend to be sitting on top of it.
   “My father says you’re to put your light out,” Malcolm said. His eyes
wandered critically to Johnny. “What are you sitting up there with one shoe off
for?”
  “We’ve both got one shoe off,” said Caspar, stretching out his bare foot and
wriggling the toes at Malcolm’s face. “It’s the badge of our secret society. Now
go away.”
  “You don’t think I come in here for pleasure, do you?” Malcolm said, and
went away.
  Johnny looked anxiously at Caspar. “Do you think he suspected anything?”
   “He’s far too flipping dim for that,” said Caspar. “But you’d better be
careful. If he did find out, he’d tell the Ogre like a shot.”
   “I think I’ll stop now,” said Johnny. “For tonight.” So Caspar washed his big
toe for him, and Johnny climbed off the cupboard and went to bed.
   The next day, Johnny skipped games and pelted home from school to continue
his experiments. When Caspar came in, he found Johnny, again with one shoe
off, triumphantly floating just below the ceiling.
   “Look at this!” he said. “I could go higher if I put more on, only all the
powder’s in the water now and I don’t want to waste it. Can you take the
test-tube and prop it carefully on that stand down there?”
  Caspar stood on the cupboard and took the test-tube from Johnny’s reaching
hand. Then he climbed down and propped it upright in Johnny’s pen, while
Johnny looked on tensely from the ceiling.
  “What are you going to do now?” Caspar asked. “Come down?”
 “I think I ought to practice a bit,” said Johnny. “You hold the door in case
Malcolm comes in.”
   Caspar stood against the door and watched a little wistfully while Johnny
pushed off from the ceiling and swooped this way and that across the room, as
Gwinny had done. It looked like enormous fun. Johnny was laughing. And now
that he knew what a splendid feeling it was to be nearly as light as air, Caspar
could hardly wait to get up there and swoop about himself
  “Hadn’t I better shut the window?” he called up at Johnny’s whisking feet.
  “It’s all right,” Johnny said happily. “It’s quite easy to control where you go.
Like swimming, only not such hard work. Watch.”
  Caspar watched him doing a slow, swooping breaststroke through the air,
and yearned to see what a fast overarm would do. “When shall we all try?”
   Johnny turned over and trod water, or rather air. “What about going out
tonight, after dark, for a fly round town?”
  Caspar was about to say that this was the best idea Johnny had had in his life,
when there was a thump on the door behind him. He flung himself against it,
with his feet braced. “Go away. We’re busy.”
  “Buzz off!” Johnny shouted down from the ceiling.
   The doorknob began turning. Caspar grabbed it and held it hard. In spite of
this, the knob continued to turn and the door moved slightly. Caspar had not
thought Malcolm was so strong. “Go away!” he said.
 “I only want to borrow Indigo Rubber,” said a much deeper voice than
Malcolm’s. “What’s so special that I can’t come in?”
   Caspar looked up helplessly at Johnny’s alarmed face. “I thought you didn’t
like Indigo Rubber,” he shouted through the door.
  “I’ve come round to them,” Douglas called back. “And I’ve got some friends
coming tonight who want to hear it.”
  “You can’t have it,” called Caspar.
  “But I promised them,” said Douglas. “Be a sport.”
   “You’d no business to promise them my records!” Caspar said, with real
indignation. “You can’t have them. Go away.”
   “I knew you’d go and be mean about it,” said Douglas. “It’s typical. I only
want to borrow their second LP for an hour this evening. I won’t hurt it, and you
can come and listen, if you like. Father’s said we can have it in the dining
room.”
   “You should have asked me first,” said Caspar. But put like that, Douglas’s
request was reasonable, and he did not want to be thought mean.
   “Tell him to come back for it in five minutes,” Johnny whispered from the
ceiling. “Then get me some water.”
  Caspar drew his breath to shout, but Douglas had lost patience. “You are a
mean little squit, aren’t you?” he said. “It’s no good trying to be polite to you.
You lend me that record, or watch out!” The doorknob turned sharply under
Caspar’s hands, and the door began to open.
   “Come back in five minutes!” Caspar said desperately, his braced feet
sliding.
   “And give you time to hide it?” said Douglas. “What kind of a fool do you
think I am?” The door opened nearly a foot, and Douglas’s leg and shoulder
came through the gap. It was clear that the rest of him was following.
    Johnny did the only thing he could think of. With a strong thrust at the ceiling
and a desperate kick of his legs, he got himself to the open window and, as the
door crashed open and Douglas plunged into the room, he pushed himself out of
it. And, whether it was the draft from the door, or the different conditions
outside, Johnny promptly soared. The last Caspar saw of him was his bare foot
and his shoe vanishing upward, beyond the top of the window.
  Luckily, Douglas was looking malevolently at Caspar. “Got any more mean
excuses?” he said.
  “It’s not mean. You shouldn’t promise things that aren’t yours,” said Caspar.
But his heart was not in the argument. All he could think of was Johnny soaring
away into the heavens.
   “Well, I’d have asked you this morning, only you’d gone by the time I’d
persuaded Father to let me have the dining room,” Douglas said. “Are you going
to lend it to me, or not?”
  “You can have them all. They’re down there by my bed. And I’ve got their
new one, too,” Caspar said hastily.
   “Their new one!” Douglas said delightedly. “Really? ‘Brainpan,’ you
mean?” He waded over to Caspar’s bed and went on his knees by the window
to sort out the records. Instead of taking the records at once, he knelt there
looking disgusted. “I wonder you can hear these,” he said. “They’re coated with
dust. Hasn’t anyone ever told you to keep LP’s clean? You’re ruining them and
your stylus.”
  “I know, but I’ve lost my cleaner,” said Caspar, almost beside himself with
impatience to get to the window and see what had become of Johnny.
   “I’m not surprised,” said Douglas, looking round the crowded room. ‘You
can borrow mine, if you’re careful with it. I’ve got one of those attachments
now. Thanks, anyway. I’d better go and give these a clean.“ And to Caspar’s
relief, Douglas got up and waded to the door.
  Caspar sped to the window and craned out of it. Johnny was not far off. He
was clinging like a monkey to the corner of the house, about four feet above the
window. ‘You can come back now,“ Caspar told him. ”He’s gone.”
  “I can’t!” Johnny said tensely.
  “Why not?”
  “It’s worn off. I’m stuck. I can’t hold on much longer, either.”
   Caspar felt rather sick. He looked down and realized that the ground was a
very long distance away. Worse still, the Ogre’s car was now parked on the
gravel at the side of the garden. For two very good reasons, Johnny had better
not go down. He looked up. The roof and the gutter, which came lower at the
back of the house, were only three feet or so above Johnny’s head.
  “Can you climb up and grab the roof?” he said.
  “What do you think I’ve been trying to do?” snapped Johnny. “It’s all I can
do to stay in one place.”
    “Then hang on. I’ll go out of the trapdoor in the loft,” said Caspar, “and see
if I can pull you up. Hold on.”
  “What do you expect me to do? Let go?” said Johnny.
  Caspar sped to the door and up the stairs that led to Gwinny’s room. The loft
was behind a low door opposite Gwinny’s. Gwinny came out to see what was
going on as Caspar was frenziedly rattling at it.
  “You don’t pull, you push,” she said. “Is something the matter?”
  “Yes,” said Caspar. “Johnny’s stranded halfway up the house and I’ve got to
pull him up from here. Where’s the Ogre?”
  “In the study, I think. I’ll fetch my dressing-gown cord,” said Gwinny.
  Caspar crashed the door open inward and hurried forward into the loft.
There was no proper floor, and he had to jump from joist to joist, which was
not easy in the dim light. He was struggling to open the trapdoor to the roof,
when Gwinny came crawling after him with the dressing-gown cord in her
mouth so that she could use both hands for crawling.
  “Th’Ogre,” she said indistinctly.
  “Where?”
  “I don’t know,” Gwinny said, removing the cord. “But I could hear him
shouting at someone. He sounded awfully angry.”
  “I hope it’s Malcolm. And I hope it keeps them both busy,” said Caspar.
“Help me with this bolt.”
   It was no easy matter to open the trap. The bolts were rusty, and the Ogre had
packed putty round the door itself to keep the rain out after he had fetched the
muddy sweater in off the chimney. To Caspar’s frantic imagination, it took them
an hour to unpack it again. Rust, dust, putty, and cobwebs spattered down on
them, and Caspar, unwisely bracing his foot between two joists, managed to put
his knee through the plaster floor. But they got the door open in the end. Caspar
hastily raised it and stood up into a cold sunset to lower it onto the tiles of the
roof. Gwinny stood up beside him.
  “Shall I climb out? I’m the lightest,” she said.
  “No. You’re to stay there,” said Caspar. “It’s dangerous.”
   He had one leg out over the edge of the trap, when, to his amazement, Johnny,
looking white and shaken, appeared over the edge of the roof and started to
crawl up it toward him.
  “How did you climb up?” said Caspar. Johnny, for some reason, fiercely
shook his head at him. “You must have done,” said Caspar. “You—”
  The head and shoulders of the Ogre appeared behind Johnny. Even for the
Ogre, they looked grim. All Caspar could do was to make haste to get himself
back inside the loft again.



                                  Chapter 4
                                                                       «^»
It seemed that one of the neighbors had seen Johnny clinging to the side of the
house and telephoned the Ogre. Probably it was just as well. Johnny had been
precious near letting go by the time the Ogre had tied two ladders together and
climbed up them. But in every other way it was unfortunate.
    The Ogre made the obvious assumption that they had been playing on the roof
and that Johnny had slipped off. He sent Johnny to bed without supper. Then he
nailed up first the trapdoor, then the loft door, and forbade them all three, on
pain of death, to touch either. Douglas, who was ordered in to help with the
nailing, and who might have provided Caspar at least with an alibi, said nothing
at all, to Caspar’s bitter annoyance. He just listened to Caspar being blamed for
leading Johnny and Gwinny into danger. And Malcolm— who was supposed to
be opening the trapdoor to let the Ogre and Johnny through—arrived in time to
listen, too. And he laughed. This so infuriated Gwinny that she bit Malcolm. It
was all she could think of on the spur of the moment. So she was in trouble as
well. The Ogre called her a vicious little cat and sent her to bed without supper,
too.
  Caspar supposed he was lucky to be allowed supper himself
   But it was not a comfortable meal. The Ogre had gone downstairs and
expressed himself forcibly to Sally after nailing up the loft, and Caspar could
see his mother had been crying. He felt truly wretched. Douglas and Malcolm
were, as usual, well mannered, sober, and almost totally silent. Caspar sat quite
as silent, wishing the Ogre would not make such a horrible noise eating.
Finally, Sally tried to make conversation by asking Douglas when his friends
were coming.
   Douglas replied, quietly and politely, “About eight o’clock, if that’s all
right.”
  “Of course,” Sally said cordially. “I’m so glad you’ve managed to make
some friends already.”
  “Thank you,” Douglas said politely.
  “Because it is difficult, when you move to a new school, isn’t it?” Sally said.
  “It’s not so bad,” said Douglas. “Thank you.”
  Sally gave up. Nobody said anything else. Caspar missed Gwinny and Johnny
acutely, because, if they did nothing else, they could be counted on to talk.
  At the end of supper, Douglas and Malcolm politely offered to wash up, and
Douglas surprised Caspar by turning to him and asking, equally politely, if he
wanted to come to the dining room and listen to records, too.
  “Oh no, thank you,” Caspar said hastily. He had had about enough of Douglas
by then.
   “That’s rather a blessing,” Sally said to him in the kitchen, a little later,
“because I want you to go on a secret mission and take some supper up to
Johnny and Gwinny. I know Jack said they were to go without, but I can’t bear
to think of them going hungry. But you must do it with the utmost stealth.”
  “All right,” said Caspar, and looked meaningly at Malcolm, who was still
busily and correctly wiping plates. When Sally did not seem to see what he
meant, he tried to make her understand by waggling his eyebrows at her.
 “Do stop making faces,” said Sally. “Malcolm won’t tell, will you,
Malcolm?”
  “Of course not,” Malcolm said coldly.
   Caspar did not believe him for a moment, but he nevertheless crept upstairs
with loaded trays. His task was made easier by the fact that Gwinny had
sneaked down to join Johnny. They were both sitting in Johnny’s bed sharing a
toffee-bar, looking rosy and excited.
  “When are we going flying?” Johnny asked.
  Caspar had imagined that, after being stranded on the side of the house,
Johnny would have had enough of flying, and he was rather taken aback. “When
were you thinking of?” he said.
  “Not too late,” said Johnny.
  “I want to look down on all the lights in Market Street,” explained Gwinny.
“The Christmas lights are up already, did you know?”
  “And see the nightlife,” said Johnny. “If we’re lucky, we might see some vice
going on. I’ve never seen any.”
  “We’ve been thinking it out,” said Gwinny. “It’s awfully cold out, so we’ll
have to go in coats, with shoes on, and wear gloves.”
  “And put the flying-mixture on our legs,” said Johnny, “under our trousers.
Rub on a really good handful, because we don’t want it wearing off in the
middle of town.”
  “All right,” Caspar said weakly. “About half past ten?”
  “And put pillows in our beds,” Johnny called after him as he waded to the
door.
   Caspar went downstairs again to report his mission accomplished. He was
so excited at the thought of going flying that very night that he forgot to refuse
when Sally said, “And don’t go away upstairs again, Caspar. Come and join us
in the sitting room for a change.”
  “If you like,” Caspar said, without thinking, and then realized that he had
condemned himself to a whole evening with the Ogre.
   Douglas’s friends were arriving when he and Sally reached the hall. Caspar
took one look at them and was heartily glad that he had refused Douglas’s
invitation at least. They were all as tall as Douglas and, since none of them
were in school clothes, they appeared even more grown up than they were.
They carried bundles of records. Two of them had guitars. And they laughed
and made jokes that Caspar could not understand. Douglas, as he showed them
in, laughed too and made the same sort of jokes in reply. Caspar stared rather,
because he had hardly ever seen Douglas laugh before, and because Douglas
had changed his clothes and looked just as grown up as his friends.
  “Coffee and so on set out on the kitchen table, Douglas,” said Sally.
   “Thanks,” Douglas replied, obviously too busy showing his friends into the
dining room to hear what Sally had said.
   The Ogre was standing in the doorway of the sitting room with the grim look
that he usually reserved for Johnny or Caspar. “I’m beginning to regret this
already,” he said. “Where did Douglas get those awful clothes?”
  “I got them for him,” said Sally, a trifle guiltily. “He seemed to have grown
out of everything else.”
  “Are they fashionable or something?” asked the Ogre.
  “Very,” said Sally.
  “I feared as much,” said the Ogre, and went and turned the television on.
  Since the Ogre was clearly in his stormiest mood, Caspar dared not do
anything but sit quietly over a map of South America, trying to decide on a
geography project. The Ogre gave him several irritated looks, but he said
nothing. The television produced the Ogre’s favorite kind of program for
him—the kind in which Officials and Ministers explained that the country was
in a considerable state of crisis, but that they were doing this, that, and the other
thing to cure it. Caspar bit back several yawns of boredom and wondered how
his mother could stand it. She was calmly checking over some long lists that had
to do with her work tomorrow. If Caspar himself had not been in such a
pleasant flutter about going flying, he thought he would never have endured it at
all.
   Indigo Rubber made themselves heard, rather loudly, in the middle of their
best song. Caspar raised his head and almost regretted not being in the dining
room. Either Douglas’s equipment was ten times better than his, or the records
had needed cleaning more than he realized. Indigo Rubber sounded
superb—though Caspar did wish that one of Douglas’s friends had not chosen
to pick out the song haltingly on his guitar at the same time.
   “This is intolerable!” said the Ogre, and turned the sound on the television
right up. The result was a truly awful noise, with a Minister booming away
about trade, and Indigo Rubber gamely competing for all they were worth. “I
shall go mad!” said the Ogre, with his face twisted into a snarl.
  “No, you won’t,” said Sally, laughing. “Do turn the sound down. I want to
make a list of the people we’re having to this party.”
   The Ogre, typically, refused to turn the sound down. So he and Sally were
forced, for the next half hour or so, to bawl names at one another above the
noise. Caspar’s head began to ache. His mother began to look a little worn also.
Luckily, after that, Douglas and his friends took to playing Indigo Rubber songs
on their guitars, which, though penetrating, were not quite so loud.
  “Shall I send them home?” the Ogre asked several times, but Sally would not
hear of it.
  “I want to get these invitations out,” she said.
   “You must be made of iron,” said the Ogre eventually. Then he noticed
Caspar and told him to go to bed. Caspar was collecting his maps and papers,
only too ready to go, when there were voices in the hall, and Douglas burst
gaily into the sitting room.
  “I say—” he said.
  “I’m not going to have you and your noise in here as well,” said the Ogre.
   Douglas froze into crestfallen politeness. “Sorry, Father. I was only going to
ask— You see, my friends are going downtown to the discotheque. Is it all right
for me to go, too?”
  “No,” said the Ogre.
  Douglas swallowed, and then said, very patiently and politely, “I shouldn’t
be more than an hour or so. I promise I’ll be back before eleven.”
  “Which is a good hour past your bedtime,” said the Ogre. “No.”
  “Couldn’t he go?” said Sally.
  “I’ve already given you my opinion of your indulgence,” the Ogre said
unpleasantly. “That blasted place is the haunt of half the vice in town.”
  Caspar felt his stomach twisting and fluttering. It sounded as if Johnny might
be going to see some vice after all.
  “But all sorts of people go there,” Douglas said pleadingly “My friends often
do.”
  “Then I think the worse of your friends,” said the Ogre.
  “But they—” began Douglas.
  “Absolutely NO!” said the Ogre.
  Douglas went out and shut the door quietly behind him. When Caspar went
upstairs, he was showing his friends out.
   Gwinny and Johnny were asleep, packed into Johnny’s bed. Caspar, at the
sight, felt rather sleepy himself, but he sat down on his own bed to wait. He
heard Douglas come upstairs, and smelled a whiff of chemicals as Douglas
opened the door across the landing. After that was a long, long silence. Caspar
was all but asleep himself, when Johnny suddenly sat bolt upright.
  “What’s the time?”
  Caspar found the clock, which had got buried under a pile of comics.
“Ten-fifteen.”
   “Oh, good,” said Johnny “I banged my head ten times on the pillow.” And he
started shaking Gwinny. “Come on. Time to go.”
   They bustled quietly and excitedly about, getting into warm clothes and
putting pillows in their beds. Ten minutes later, they were standing beside the
open window, feeling very excited indeed and a little inclined to giggle. Johnny
carefully fetched out the almost full tube of chemical and solemnly passed it to
Gwinny. Gwinny rolled up the leg of Johnny’s old trousers, which she was
wearing for warmth, poured the liquid carefully onto her palm, and rubbed it
hard on her shin.
  “Ooh! It’s cold!” she said.
  Johnny was just in time to take the test-tube out of her hand as she floated up
past him. While he was rubbing the liquid on his leg, Gwinny drummed the
ceiling gently with her heels.
  “I’d forgotten what a lovely feeling it was,” she said.
   Caspar was looking up at her when Johnny soared away to join her. He
missed his chance of taking the tube and had to climb on the cupboard to take it
from Johnny’s hand. It all seemed so silly and exciting that they both began
laughing.
  “Are you boys in bed?” called Sally from below.
   “Yes. Just going to sleep,” they lied at the tops of their voices. Caspar, still
crouching on top of the cupboard, rolled up his trouser-leg. He was quaking so
with laughter that he poured far more of the liquid onto his palm than he
intended. He splashed the whole ice-cold handful on his leg and, when the
delicious lightness spread through him and he, too, floated up to the ceiling, he
found he was holding a nearly empty test-tube, with about a quarter of an inch of
liquid left in the bottom.
  “What shall I do with this?” he said.
  “Balance it on the lightshade,” suggested Gwinny.
  “We ought to put out the light, too,” said Johnny.
   Caspar, intoxicated with the splendid new feeling of being light as air, swam
himself over to the middle of the room and balanced the test-tube on the
lampshade. It was better than swimming. One kick took him yards, with no
effort at all. The difficulty came when he tried to reach the light switch. Like
Gwinny before, he seemed far heavier upwards than he ever was downwards.
He tried jumping off the ceiling in a sort of dive toward the switch, but, no
matter how hard he pushed off with his feet, his hand never came within a foot
of the switch.
  “Why not take the bulb out?” said Johnny, impatient to be off.
   So Caspar swam back, put his gloves on, and very carefully took the bulb out
without disturbing the test-tube. But as soon as the room went dark, he had no
idea where it was any more. He felt his glove brush the shade and the shade tip.
Then there was a bump and a slight bursting noise from the floor.
  “The tube’s fallen off,” he said.
  “Well, we’d used most of it anyway,” said Gwinny. “Do come on.”
  Caspar put the light bulb in his pocket and swam toward the window. The
dark shape of Gwinny first, then Johnny, blotted out the window and soared
away upward, as Johnny had done before. There was quite a brisk wind. When
Caspar swooped deliciously up past the wall, the gutter, and the glistening roof,
he found himself being carried over the roof of the next house toward the center
of town. Johnny was floating against the orange glare of the city lights about ten
yards ahead, and Gwinny ten yards beyond that and a few feet higher up
because she was lighter. The sight gave Caspar a strange, frosty, excited
feeling, as if splendid things were about to happen. Being a good swimmer, he
caught up with the other two easily.
   “How lovely to look down on roofs!” Gwinny said. And indeed it was. The
street lights and a good round moon made it all very easy to see. Roofs had all
sorts of queer shapes that they would not have expected from the ground. They
could look through skylights and see people moving about inside, and television
aerials looked surprisingly big when you were beside them.
   Another surprising thing was the way bent streets looked straight, and streets
they had thought were straight had unexpected little twiddles or long curves to
them. They swam themselves merrily over the neighborhood, above wires,
roads, gardens, houses, and a park, until they all found that they had no idea
where they were.
  “Why does it all look so different?” Johnny said crossly.
  “The wind’s blown us off course,” said Caspar. “We’d better find a road we
know and follow that, or we’ll get lost.”
   The brightest orange glare seemed now to be away to the right. They swam in
that direction, across the wind. It was much harder going. Before long, Gwinny
was complaining loudly of being tired.
    “Do shut up,” Caspar called up at her. “Suppose someone hears you and tells
the police.” He was fairly tired himself by this time. The feeling of frosty
excitement he had first had seemed entirely to have gone. He was hot and
worried. The only thing that stopped him suggesting that they go home was that
it seemed so tame. But the fact was that one empty, dark street is much like
another, and merely flying across them stops being fun after a while.
  “Let’s rest,” said Johnny.
    They anchored themselves to a convenient television aerial and floated,
panting. Beneath them, on a corner, was a pub with people noisily coming out of
it.
   “There’s some vice for you, Johnny,” said Caspar, as a very fat man rolled to
the edge of the pavement and stood there singing. Gwinny laughed, because he
was so fat she could not see his feet. Johnny watched him dubiously. The fat
man stopped singing and began to shout rude remarks at imaginary people
across the road.
  “That’s not vice,” said Johnny. “He’s drunk.”
   “Do you know,” said Gwinny, “this is the pub on the corner near where we
used to live! I know that fat man. He’s the greengrocer who gave me the wrong
change. We can’t be far off Market Street. Yes, look.” She pointed a glove
toward a big block of buildings towering against the orange glare. “That’s the
Ogre’s office. I met him quite near there, so I know if we go past it, Market
Street is only over some roofs.”
   “So it is!” said Johnny, and Caspar felt foolish at not having recognized it
long before.
    So they set off toward the building, across the wind again, using television
aerials to push off from. Each aerial bent and twanged as they used it, until the
streets behind them hummed. Then they pushed off in a long swoop across a
little dark space like a chasm and were able to pull themselves hand over hand
along the towering side of the office-block. All its lights were on. They handed
themselves across a window that could well have belonged to the Ogre’s
office. Inside were typewriters with covers on them, and not very
comfortable-looking desks and chairs.
  “It’s a bit like school,” said Gwinny. “I shan’t work in an office when I grow
up.”
  “I can’t think how the Ogre can bear to,” said Johnny. “I suppose it’s because
he’s not human.”
   They dived off from the office-block across some tall, steep roofs, which
were almost too high for them to get over, and there they were at last, at the end
of Market Street. And that was splendid from the air. Colored street signs
flashed on and off, people hurried, shops shone, and cars went in lines down the
middle, so close together that, as Johnny said, they looked from above like a
train someone had chopped into bits. A nice rowdy noise came up, and petrol
fumes made Caspar sneeze. The Christmas lights were the only disappointing
part. From the air, they seemed to be all scaffolding and wires, with a bit of a
glitter below, almost out of sight.
  “They’re made to be seen from the ground,” said Caspar.
   They worked their way down the street, almost in the teeth of the wind. It
was very slow going, even using parapets and dormer windows to push off
from, and Caspar could not help being a little nervous of all the electric wires
strung across the street. They passed the discotheque on the other side of the
road. Caspar recognized it from the big red, lighted disc outside and the sound
of muffled music.
   “Douglas wanted to go there with his friends tonight, but the Ogre wouldn’t
let him,” he told the others.
   They were not surprised. After that, they stopped and roosted on the arch
over the Town Hall, where a number of pigeons, frightened and offended,
flapped away from their floating feet. Here Johnny thought he saw some vice.
There was a group of youths just below, laughing and shouting and twanging
guitars.
  “No, those are only Douglas’s friends,” said Caspar. “I suppose they’re
going home from the discotheque.”
   “I almost think the Ogre was right for once,” Gwinny said severely. “Those
friends look loud and rough.”
  “They’re just old,” said Caspar.
  “And I bet the Ogre was just being his own mean, Ogrish self,” said Johnny.
“Wasn’t he, Caspar?”
   “Let’s go home,” said Caspar. He suddenly thought what the Ogre might say
and do to them, if he discovered they had been to Market Street, and the idea
made him notice that he was cold and very tired. Johnny and Gwinny felt much
the same. They set off again down Market Street.
   They had almost reached the roundabout at the end, when Gwinny squawked,
clapped her hand over her mouth, and pointed across the street. The boys
looked. And they were so astonished at what they saw that they stopped
swimming and stared, and the wind carried all three of them back up the street
again.
   On the other side of Market Street, about ten feet lower down than they were,
swam a sort of aerial frogman. He was whipping along, face downward, past
lighted windows and over people’s heads, with his hands by his sides and the
great black flippers on his feet wagging away steadily.
   “Oh-oh, they’ve landed!” said Johnny. It was the first thought in all their
minds. But, as the figure came abreast of a street light, they saw it was Douglas,
with the hood of his anorak up and wearing flippers. They all secretly thought
the flippers were a very good idea, and wished they had thought of them, too.
“They’ve found the flying-powder, too,” said Johnny.
  “And he’s using it to go to the discotheque,” said Caspar, rather awed at
Douglas’s daring. “He’s late. He’s missed the others.”
   “Let’s follow him,” said Gwinny. “Then we can drop dark hints about where
he went.”
  “And get him scared silly we’ll tell the Ogre,” said Johnny. “Aha! Little does
he know we have him in our power!”
   Chuckling at this extremely pleasant thought, they all set off up Market Street
again as hard as they could go. The wind behind them helped, but Douglas, also
with the wind behind him and the flippers in addition, drew steadily ahead. No
matter how hard they shunted themselves from windows and balconies, they
were nowhere near him when he reached the discotheque. But, to their great
surprise, Douglas shot straight past, over the big red disc and on up the street.
  “I suppose he’ll have to wait for it to wear off and land somewhere secret,”
Caspar suggested as a possible explanation.
   Even so, it was odd that the now distant figure of Douglas should then cross,
flippering steadily, over the traffic and continue up Market Street on the same
side as they were. They hastened after him, but by the time they reached the
Market Cross Hotel, they had lost him completely.
  “He’s probably down by now,” Johnny said crossly.
   Gwinny anchored herself to the scaffolding above the K of the big blue hotel
sign and refused to go on. “I’m tired,” she said, floating out from the bar as she
might in a swimming pool.
  “Don’t touch that!” said Caspar. “You’ll get an electric shock.”
  “And probably put out all the street lights, too,” said Johnny.
   “I don’t care,” said Gwinny. “I’m so tired I could die.” Johnny suddenly
clutched at the scaffolding, too, just above the E.
  “Johnny!” said Caspar.
  “I’m going heavy!” said Johnny.
  “Oh, so am I!” gasped Gwinny. “Caspar, what shall we do?”



                                  Chapter 5
                                                                         «^»
It was one of the most horrible moments Caspar had known. He was perfectly
sure that if either Johnny or Gwinny put their feet as well as their hands on the
scaffold and completed the circuit, they could get an electric shock strong
enough to kill them. But now they could not let go. He was not going heavy
himself. He thought, because of the way he had been laughing, he had put rather
more flying potion on than the others. But it was obviously only a matter of
minutes before that wore off, too.
   “Keep your feet off that thing!” he said to Johnny, and grabbed Gwinny round
the waist. Behind the scaffold and the lighted lettering was a narrow ledge,
which ran along the front of the hotel between two rows of windows. It looked
about wide enough to take their feet. Caspar swam upwind, crabwise, to it,
holding Gwinny clutched against him. She felt as heavy as lead. He managed to
turn her round and push her onto the ledge, with her back against the wall of the
hotel.
   “Now don’t dare move!” he said, and swam back for Johnny. Johnny was
lashing his feet frantically, trying to use the last of his lightness to keep them
clear of the scaffold. Caspar had to come at him sideways and grab him round
the neck. By the time they reached the ledge, Johnny was making throttled noises
and could only gasp and lean.
   Then Caspar felt himself going heavy. He only had just time to turn round and
back against the wall of the hotel before the potion left him, and he went down
on the ledge with a thump so heavy that he nearly overbalanced and fell off. It
would have been a real fall, too, all the way down to the street. The distance
they were above ground, which had been exciting such a short time ago, now
seemed appalling. Caspar shut his eyes and sweated.
  “What shall we do?” said Gwinny. “Shout for help?”
   There were still crowds of people passing below, but they dared not bend
their heads to look at them.
   “Don’t be a fool!” said Johnny. “We’ll get taken to a police station, and the
next thing we know, the Ogre will be interrogating us in person.” He tried
turning his head up to see how far they were away from the row of windows
above, and nearly overbalanced. On top of clinging to the wall, this was too
much for him. His knees shook, and he felt giddy.
  “Caspar, what shall we do?” said Gwinny.
  “I think we’d better wait and see if Douglas comes back,” said Caspar.
  “Oh no! Not him!” Johnny said faintly.
   “But you said he’d come down by now,” protested Gwinny. “And if he walks
past underneath us, we won’t see him. And if he goes on the other side of the
road, he won’t hear us. Besides, what good could he do?”
  “I don’t know,” said Caspar. “But it’s all I can think of”
  “I hate him,” objected Johnny.
  “He’s about the only person in the world who’ll understand what’s
happened,” said Caspar. “Except Malcolm, I suppose.”
  “I hate him worse,” said Johnny.
   Nevertheless, they settled down to wait. The gay street twinkled and roared
around them. The Christmas lights glittered. Street signs winked on and off.
People talked below, and laughed, and someone in the hotel played a piano
rather badly. And solitary and unseen and stiff as statues, the three children
stood on the ledge and waited, more hopelessly with every minute that passed.
  They were so tired and miserable that they nearly missed Douglas when he
came. He flashed flippering past, just below the ledge and the hotel sign. He
was in front of CROSS before they saw him, nearly too far away to hear their
urgent whispers.
  “Douglas!” they all hissed desperately.
  Douglas’s flippers faltered, and then began to move faster. Johnny risked
shouting.
  “DOUGLAS!”
   With a swirl of flippers, Douglas stopped himself by hanging onto the
scaffolding, just below the first T, and turned to see who was shouting. When he
saw it was them, he shrugged his shoulders and was obviously about to flipper
away again.
  “Please,” Gwinny called imploringly.
   Slowly and grudgingly, Douglas handed himself back along the letters, until
he was hanging on below the L, looking up at them. He did not look in the least
friendly. “All right,” he said. “So we’ve discovered the flying-powder, too. If
you wanted to keep it secret, you shouldn’t have made such a darned fuss getting
Gwinny off the ceiling.”
  “So you did see her?” said Caspar.
  “Yes. Do you want to make anything of it?” Douglas inquired unpleasantly.
  “No,” said Gwinny. “Douglas, we’ve all gone heavy.”
   There was a silence full of town noises, during which Douglas looked
thoroughly exasperated.
  “And we’re stuck here,” explained Johnny.
  “Just like you were on the side of the house. I know,” said Douglas. “What
do you expect me to do about it? How much powder have you left?”
   “None, I’m afraid,” said Caspar. “The last bit fell off the light as we were
leaving.”
   “Oh, trust you stupid little squits to get yourselves into a mess!” said
Douglas. “It’s just typical. All right, I’ll go and get you some of ours, but you’ll
have to wait. I’ve got to see to Malcolm first. He’s in even more of a mess than
you are.” So saying, Douglas, with a deft swirl of flippers, pushed off from the
L, and shot away among the other street signs.
  Now that they had some hope of rescue, waiting was easier. But nothing
could make standing perilously on that narrow ledge pleasant. Johnny’s feet
went numb, and he was forced to shift cautiously from foot to foot.
  “Keep still,” said Caspar. “You’ll knock us all off”
  “I can’t help it,” said Johnny.
  Gwinny suddenly broke into song. “Abide with me. Fast falls the something
sky.”
  “Eh?” said Johnny.
  “Shut up!” said Caspar.
  “I was singing to keep our spirits up,” explained Gwinny.
  “Well, stop,” said Caspar. “You’ll have the hotel manager up instead, and
he’ll get the fire brigade and we’ll end up in no end of trouble. And just think
how mad Douglas will be if he comes all the way back here for nothing.”
  This caused them all to stand silently for a while. Then Johnny said, “What
was Douglas doing then, if he wasn’t going to the discotheque?”
  “Something to do with the mess Malcolm’s in?” Gwinny suggested.
  Caspar said nothing. He was secretly rather disappointed that Douglas had
not defied the Ogre after all.
  “Yes, what mess is he in?” wondered Johnny. “If he’s gone heavy
somewhere peculiar, Douglas wouldn’t need to come here, would he?”
  “If they’ve discovered the powder, too, that explains the sweater on the
chimney,” said Gwinny. “It was them.”
  “Trust them to keep quiet and let us take the blame!” said Johnny.
   But even this topic wore out after a time. They stood in a stiff row, while the
street noises died away beneath. The piano in the hotel stopped, and the roar of
cars decreased until it was only occasional. Then there seemed to be no more
cars and just one or two heavy lorries. The pavement they could see across the
road was empty. A few solitary people walked in or out of the hotel below, but
that was all. The street signs went out, one by one, though the Christmas lights
still twinkled gaily on a level with their heads. And the hotel sign stayed alight,
coloring all their faces a ghastly blue. The color just expressed the way they
were feeling by then. They were cold, miserable, and tired, and each of them
suspected that Douglas had gone home and forgotten all about them.
   They must have waited a good hour before Douglas arrived. Market Street
was so quiet by then that they heard him panting before they saw him, and the
slapping, whistling noise the flippers made. Never had any noise been more
welcome. They craned forward. Douglas was coming, flippering vigorously,
under the hotel sign, some three feet lower than he had been. When he reached
the letter L, they saw that it took him a considerable effort to heave himself up
so that he could get a grip on the scaffold, and when he had hold of it he was
hanging more than floating.
  “Thank you awfully for coming,” Caspar said.
  Douglas, in reply, held up a test-tube with a cork in it. It was just over
half-full of liquid. “Here you are,” he said, rather breathlessly. “That’s our last
drop and you’re each to use a quarter of it. Then give it back to me, because I
need it to get home on.”
   Gwinny, with great difficulty, managed to bend her knees sufficiently to reach
the tube. “It is kind of you,” she said.
  “Oh, don’t madden me by being grateful,” said Douglas. “Get on and use it.
And hurry up. I go heavy awfully quickly.”
  Gwinny hastily uncorked the tube and poured a quarter— or perhaps less,
because she was so dismayed at what Douglas said—of the liquid into her
hand.
  “Rub it on anywhere,” said Douglas. “Your face’ll do. And make sure
Johnny’s got the tube first.”
   So Gwinny handed the test-tube to Johnny and splashed the icy handful of
liquid onto her cheeks. The feeling of lightness spread through her, and her feet
gently left the ledge. Douglas startled her by reaching up and grabbing hold of
her ankle.
  “Hang on to me,” he said. “You can help hold me up.”
  “While Johnny was measuring out his quarter and passing the tube to Caspar,
Gwinny struggled her way down Douglas’s outstretched arm and twisted her
fingers into his anorak. His weight brought her down a little, and they both
floated just below the big blue L. Then Johnny bobbed clear of the ledge.
   “Catch hold of Gwinny,” said Douglas. “And you,” he said to Caspar, “keep
that tube and pass it down the line to me.”
   Caspar, though he was a little annoyed at being ordered about and organized
like this, did as he was told. As soon as he was floating, he caught hold of
Johnny. The tube traveled slowly and perilously down to Gwinny, who poured
the last small quantity down into Douglas’s cupped hand. Douglas gave a sigh
of relief and splashed it on his face.
  “Right,” he said. “Keep hanging on and all kick like mad. And let’s hope
we’ve got enough to get us home. If we haven’t, there’ll be hell to pay. Father
was prowling round the house really suspiciously when I left.”
   With these encouraging words, he let go the letter L and at once sank about
three feet lower. They floated in an irregular ballooning line, with Johnny
highest, clutching Gwinny’s scarf. Douglas’s flippers beat, and they felt
themselves tugged down Market Street. They all kicked too, Gwinny like a frog,
the boys in imitation of Douglas. They gathered momentum as they kicked, and
shortly they were going very well indeed— almost ten miles an hour, Johnny
reckoned breathlessly. They flashed down Market Street, drove across the
roundabout and, panting hard, kicked their way through the zigzag of streets
toward home. They were halfway up their own street when Gwinny felt
Douglas dropping.
  “Oh dear!” she said.
   “Faster,” said Douglas. “Kick like mad, all of you.” They kicked frantically,
dropping lower and lower, until Caspar’s feet were almost pointing upward.
Douglas was trailing down, brushing people’s hedges. About two houses off
their own, he went finally and completely heavy. All four dropped downward,
trailing like a kite’s tail, and Douglas, with all his weight dangling from
Gwinny’s fingers, was dragged across the pavement on the ends of his flippers.
“Oh!” squeaked Gwinny. “I can’t! I can’t hold on!”
   “You’ve got to,” said Caspar. “Kick, Johnny.” By kicking violently, they
trailed Douglas ten yards. Gwinny was squeaking all the time that she could not
hold on, and with every kick they all sank lower and lower.
   “This is no good,” said Douglas. “You’ll have to let go.” He braced his
flippers and stood still, with them hanging upward from him, so that Caspar’s
heels were level with the nearest street light. “Let go,” said Douglas. “I’ll have
to climb in through the kitchen window.”
  “That’s not fair,” said Gwinny. “Suppose you get caught?”
   “I won’t, with luck,” said Douglas. “Go on, let go, before you go heavy, too.
If we all have to climb in, we’re bound to be caught. Let go, and get up to our
window—I left it open.”
   “I’ll come down and open the kitchen window for you, shall I?” Caspar
offered.
  “And get me caught? I know you,” said Douglas. “Just get in and get to bed
and don’t make any blasted noise for once. Go on.”
   Since he really seemed to mean it, and sounded rather like the Ogre as he
said it, Gwinny untwisted her fingers from his anorak and let go. The three of
them floated upward, past the level of the street light, and almost as high as the
curtained slit of light at the front of their house where Douglas’s open window
was.
  “Good luck,” Gwinny said.
  Douglas looked up at them rather contemptuously, as Caspar took the lead
and began to trail them toward the window. “Get a move on,” he said.
   It was as well they went when they did. Gwinny went heavy as Caspar put
out his hand and grasped the windowsill. With a muffled, whispering struggle,
he and Johnny hauled her up and thrust her through the window between the
curtains. Johnny went heavy on the windowsill, and Caspar as he reached the
table just below the window. They all crouched breathlessly on this table,
blinking in the light and looking round a room they had scarcely ever seen
before.
   The room was much the same size as Johnny’s and Caspar’s, though it was a
different shape. But it seemed far bigger, because it was scrupulously tidy.
Books were in the bookcase and Douglas’s guitar tidily against the wall. Other
things were neatly arranged in a glass-fronted cupboard. Douglas’s bed was
unwrinkled. The bed in which Malcolm was asleep was equally free of
wrinkles. The only things out of place were the chemistry set open in the middle
of the floor, and a great deal of dust everywhere.
  “What’s the matter?” Malcolm demanded pettishly. “Where’s Douglas?”
   They stared round the room and then at one another. The sleeping shape in
Malcolm’s bed had not moved, and yet Malcolm’s voice had come from the
region of Douglas’s bed, on the opposite side of the room.
  “He went heavy in the road,” Gwinny said to the sleeping hump, wondering
if Malcolm was secretly a ventriloquist. “He told us to come in without him.”
  “Oh no!” said Malcolm, and again his voice came from the wrong place. “If
you’ve got him caught, I shan’t ever forgive you!”
   There was a shuffling noise from under Douglas’s bed, and Malcolm walked
out from underneath it. Their eyes popped. He was about a foot high. All of him
was small in proportion, except that perhaps his head was a little too big for his
body. He had no clothes on. Instead, he was wrapped in a shirt, which he was
clutching round him like a cloak, and which trailed behind and around him,
making a shiny path on the dusty floor. They could see Malcolm’s tiny hands
each grasping a shirt button, and they stared in amazement at his equally tiny
toes.
   Malcolm shivered. “At least shut the window, can’t you!” he said, with
dignity.
   Johnny, quite overawed, turned round and clapped the window shut. Gwinny
looked across at the hump in Malcolm’s bed, rather ashamed. She could see it
was only a pillow now.
  “However did you get like that?” said Caspar.
   “In the cause of science,” Malcolm said haughtily. “Didn’t Douglas tell you?
I was much smaller than this at bedtime. It took ages to climb out of my clothes,
and then I couldn’t get Douglas to hear me, let alone see me.”
  “But what did you do?” said Johnny. “What did it?”
   “It’s a tube called Parv. Pulv.,” said Malcolm, “and I advise you not to fool
about with it. It’s rather awful being that small. The grains of dust look as big as
footballs. And I kept being blown over in the draft under the door. All I did was
sniff it.”
  “Wow!” said Johnny, quite appalled to think that he might have been in the
same case any time that week.
  “But what made Douglas have to go into town?” asked Gwinny.
   “To find out the antidote, of course,” said Malcolm. “The sets came from a
toy shop near Father’s office, and we didn’t dare try anything else in case I
vanished completely. The old boy was watching telly, and Douglas said he was
furious at being disturbed.”
  “But he told you the antidote?” Caspar said.
  “Yes. It’s Magn. Pulv.” said Malcolm. “I thought that was magnesium. But it
works—though I seem to be growing awfully slowly,” he complained, looking
down at his pigmy body with distaste. “What’s Douglas doing?”
  “What will you do if you’re not the right size for school tomorrow?” Gwinny
asked, with interest.
  “I don’t know,” Malcolm said crossly. “You tell me.”
  “Perhaps you should have some more of the antidote?” Johnny suggested.
 Malcolm shuddered. “No! I had to eat a whole grain, and it tastes horrible.
What’s Douglas doing? How is he going to get in?”
  “But how much did the old man tell you to eat?” Johnny persisted.
  “He didn’t,” said Malcolm. “He just said it was Magn. Pulp. Where’s
Douglas?”
  “Then perhaps you should wash in it,” said Gwinny.
  “Climbing in through the kitchen window,” said Caspar.
    “Well!” said Malcolm. “I think the least you could do was go down and open
it for him.”
  “He wouldn’t let me,” said Caspar. “I offered. I’m not a complete brute,
whatever you think.”
   Malcolm gathered the shirt around him and trailed with dignity toward the
door. “Can I trouble you to turn the handle?” he said coldly. “I see I shall have
to go down and try to open the darn thing myself.”
   “How can you that size?” Johnny said, climbing off the table. “Don’t be a
fool. I’ll go. It had better be me,” he explained to the other two. “The Ogre
thinks I’m capable of any crime anyway, and I can always say I was stealing
biscuits.”
  Malcolm swung round from the door. “Who are you calling an ogre?”
  “Your flipping father,” said Caspar. “And you know he is, so don’t argue.”
  “I know no such thing,” Malcolm said uncertainly.
   “I’d better go down and see, anyway,” Johnny said. Since Malcolm was in
his way, he picked him up, moderately gently, and put him to one side of the
door. Malcolm stuttered with indignation, but he was helpless. Johnny opened
the door and crept heavily out onto the landing, into the remnant of old chemical
smells.
  Before he had reached the head of the stairs, the whole house echoed with a
shattering crash. Johnny froze. So did Malcolm in the doorway. Gwinny, who
was in the middle of the room with Caspar, covered her ears and held her
breath. Caspar, with horrible clarity, remembered the big jug of orange juice
which had been on the kitchen windowsill that evening.
   Light was snapped on below. Heavy footsteps hurried. Gwinny and Caspar
found themselves out on the landing with Johnny, and Malcolm came scuttling
between them.
  There was a long, awful silence. Then the Ogre’s voice was raised in a
perfect roar:
  “You disobedient little devil!”
   After that, the Ogre’s voice rumbled and roared, on and on, for what seemed
hours, accusing Douglas of going to the discotheque when he had been told not
to, and of other crimes besides. Caspar, Johnny and Gwinny all felt sick. They
did not need Malcolm to say, between chattering teeth, “Now look what you’ve
done!” to remind them that it was their fault Douglas was caught like this. And
to make matters worse, Douglas plainly could not think what to say. For a long
time, there was no sound from him at all. Then his voice was raised in a
faint-sounding denial.
  The Ogre shouted, “And don’t give me those lies!” There was the sound of a
heavy blow falling. And another. All four on the landing winced each time.
  A door opened downstairs. Sally’s voice said, “Jack! Really—!”
  “Will you kindly allow me to deal with this as I think best,” said the Ogre.
   There was no reply. The door shut again. After that, the Ogre roared on
again, and there were sounds that suggested Douglas was having to clear up the
jug and the orange juice that had been in it. Then there was still more shouting,
until they could hardly bear it, which at last died away to a rumble, followed by
silence. They sighed. Johnny looked toward Malcolm and found he had grown.
His head was now level with Gwinny’s shoulder.
   They all looked anxiously toward the stairs again. They could hear Douglas
coming up two at a time. The light came on at their landing, showing Malcolm
now nearly Gwinny’s size and looking a little indecent in just a shirt. Then
Douglas came galloping upwards with such an expression of fury and misery on
his face that Caspar braced himself to run and Gwinny and Johnny backed
away.
   Douglas halted on the top stair when he saw the four of them on the landing.
“Flaming pustules!” he said. “There’s no privacy in this blessed house!” He
turned round and went galloping downstairs again. They heard the bathroom
door slam and the bolt lock with a shriek.
  Then the Ogre’s heavy feet began marching up the stairs.
   “Quick!” whispered Caspar to Malcolm. “Don’t let him see you that size!”
He and Johnny took Malcolm and hurled him into his room, and Malcolm did
not protest. Gwinny raced upstairs to her room. Caspar and Johnny fled to
theirs, tore off their clothes, and dived into bed. When the Ogre arrived in their
doorway, they were both between surprisingly cold sheets, breathing as heavily
and slowly as they could. The Ogre clicked their light switch, muttered a little
when the light would not come on, and went across the landing to see what
Malcolm was doing. Whatever he saw there seemed to satisfy him, for he went
heavily away downstairs.
   Caspar waited until his bedroom door shut. Then he got up again and put on
his pajamas, closed the window, and dug the light bulb out of his coat pocket.
When he had succeeded in putting it back in its socket, he discovered,
considerably to his surprise, that Johnny was asleep. Caspar felt fairly sleepy
himself, but he knew he could not possibly go to sleep without a word at least
of apology and thanks to Douglas. So he went out and sat on the landing to wait
for him.
   He was nine-tenths asleep, with his forehead on his knees, when he heard his
mother’s voice on the landing below. “Douglas,” she was saying. “Douglas,
please won’t you come out?” Caspar could tell she was just outside the
bathroom door. After she had called again several times, he heard Douglas’s
voice. He could not hear what Douglas said, but it sounded like a gruff refusal.
“Oh, come on, Douglas,” Sally said. “How would it be if I made you some
cocoa?” There was a further mutter from Douglas. It sounded less gruff. Caspar
was glad. He knew that if it had been him in the bathroom, he would have
wanted cocoa, and comfort, too.
   But before Sally could speak again, Caspar heard the voice of the Ogre.
“Sally, for heaven’s sake come back to bed. I’ll deal with the stupid little fool.”
And then he heard the Ogre’s fist pound on the bathroom door. “Douglas,” said
the Ogre, “come on out of there and stop behaving like a spoiled baby. If you
don’t come out this instant, it’ll be the worse for you when you do.”
  “Look, Jack—” said Sally.
  “Shut up,” said the Ogre. “Did you hear me, Douglas?”
   “Yes, I heard you,” said the muffled, sulky voice of Douglas. The bolt
clicked. Caspar heard the door open.
  “Now get to bed,” said the Ogre savagely. “I’ve had about enough of you.”
  Douglas came swiftly upstairs. Caspar, rather nervously, stood up. Douglas
stopped when he saw him.
  “I wanted to say sorry,” Caspar whispered.
  But Douglas was in no mood for apologies. “You wait!” he said, in a furious
low rumble. “I owe you for this. You just wait!”



                                  Chapter 6
                                                                      «^»
Although Malcolm was his own size again the next morning, everyone, not
surprisingly, was torpid and tired. Johnny staggered from his bed and went to
school without really waking up. Both Caspar and Malcolm arrived late and
had to stand publicly at the back of assembly. Douglas left the house when the
Ogre and Sally did, which meant that he must have been late also, but since he
went to the senior school, no one knew what had happened. Gwinny fared best
because the Ogre, seeing she was going to be late, took her down to juniors in
his car.
   After school, Johnny as usual managed to get home first. He pelted up to their
room and there, in spite of a sudden overwhelming desire to roll on his bed and
go to sleep, he doggedly sorted through the crowded and disorderly chemistry
box until he had found the two tubes marked Parv. Pulv. and Magn. Pulv. His
idea was to tape them together and then stick a label on them saying DANGER.
But once he had them in his hand, it occurred to him to experiment. After all, he
had the antidote ready.
   Caspar also sped home, with an understandable desire to be out of sight
when Douglas arrived. He reached the door of their room to see Johnny holding
the tube to his nose and sniffing raucously. Johnny, hearing him, looked up
guiltily.
 “I’m only experimenting,” he said to Caspar’s accusing face. “And I think
Malcolm was lying. That was my third sniff.”
   Since the damage seemed to be done, Caspar could only wait. They waited
tensely, expecting Johnny to become a Johnny-shaped speck any moment. But
nothing happened. In five minutes, Johnny underwent no change at all—except
from guilt to annoyance.
  “You see!” he said disgustedly. “You can’t believe a word Malcolm says.”
  “What do you think he did do?” Caspar said.
   They heard Malcolm himself coming upstairs just then, trailing wearily from
step to step. They looked at one another and had the same idea at the same
moment. Without needing to exchange a word, they got up, crept to the open
door, and waited on either side of it out of sight. The moment Malcolm passed
the top stair and his shadow fell through the doorway, they darted out and
pounced. There was a squalling, indignant struggle, and they got him into their
room. Johnny shut the door and stood with his back to it. Caspar took hold of
Malcolm and pinned him by the upper arms against the wall.
  “What do you want?” said Malcolm. “Let go, can’t you!”
  “When you come clean,” said Caspar. “What did you really do with Parv.
Pulp.?”
  “I don’t know. I’m tired. Let go,” said Malcolm.
  “Not until you tell us,” said Johnny.
  “What makes you think I’m going to tell you?” countered Malcolm.
  “Because we won’t let you go until you do,” said Caspar.
   There was a short time of deadlock. Malcolm leaned defiantly against the
wall, and Caspar leaned on his arms to hold him there and wondered what he
could do to scare Malcolm into confessing. Then Malcolm said, with great
loftiness, “You wouldn’t understand if I did tell you. You’ve no idea of system,
or controlling your experiments, or even keeping your ideas in order. All you
do is muddle about and hope. It’s no wonder you haven’t made the discoveries
that I have. I bet you didn’t even realize that it’s always the things on the lower
layer that are odd. But I’ve come to that conclusion, because I’m systematic.”
   This exasperated Johnny and Caspar. They saw well enough that Malcolm
had no intention of telling them what he had done with Parv. Pulv. and was just
trying to distract their attention.
  “Stop waffling,” said Johnny, “and tell us.”
   “Can you see any reason,” said Malcolm, “why I should share my
discoveries with you, Melchior?”
  Johnny, to be quite honest, could see no reason at all. Which meant that
Caspar was forced to say, “Because we’re going to make you tell us. What have
you found out?”
  “Nothing I’m going to tell you,” said Malcolm.
    Caspar lifted Malcolm away from the wall and banged him back, so that his
irritatingly tidy head thumped against the plaster. “What other chemicals do
things?” he asked menacingly.
  At that moment, Douglas, outside on the landing, said, “Hey, Malcolm!”
  Caspar and Johnny both jumped, because they had not heard Douglas come
upstairs. Malcolm looked at Caspar, coolly and jeeringly, and Caspar looked
back, daring Malcolm to shout for help.
   “Malcolm?” said Douglas again. They waited tensely while Douglas went
into the room across the landing and came out again. Then Douglas said, “Oh
drat!” and went galloping away downstairs. As soon as he had gone, Caspar felt
suddenly tired to death of the whole matter. He wanted to yawn in Malcolm’s
face. Instead, he let go of him. Malcolm, with dignity, straightened his tie and
went toward the door.
   But Johnny at that moment thought of a very good reason why Malcolm
should share at least one discovery with them. “You tell us about Van. Pulv.”
he said. “You’d never have known anything could happen at all, if Douglas
hadn’t seen Gwinny flying.” And he did not move from in front of the door.
   Malcolm stopped. There was not so much difference between his size and
Johnny’s, and Johnny was burly. “I dare say we’d have worked it out,” he said
loftily.
  “Yes. We,” said Johnny. “Don’t pretend Douglas isn’t helping you.”
 “So what?” said Malcolm. “Don’t tell me you’re working entirely alone,
Melchior. And there are three of you.”
  “But Douglas is older,” said Johnny. “So it’s not fair.”
  “Your ages add up to more than ours,” said Malcolm.
  Caspar felt more tired than ever. “Oh, let him go, Johnny,” he said. “This is
boring.”
  Johnny moved reluctantly aside. Malcolm swiftly got his hand to the
doorknob. Then he said, “I don’t see I’ve any call to tell you anything. I bet you
only discovered the flying powder by mistake and spilled it on Gwinny by
accident.”
   The mortifying thing was that this was quite true. As Malcolm slipped round
the door, Johnny said angrily, “You wait. I’ll discover something you’ve never
dreamt of. You needn’t think you’re so clever.” Malcolm shut the door in his
face with a bang. Johnny turned round and ploughed feverishly through the
construction kits to the chemistry set. He threw himself down beside it and
began to scrabble among the comics and toffee-bars around it. “The
instructions,” he said. “Have you seen the instructions, Caspar?”
  “No. Why?” said Caspar, yawning.
  “I’ve got to find out which tubes were on the bottom layer,” Johnny said
desperately. “I’ve got them all mixed up.”
   Caspar saw reason in this. They searched fiercely. Johnny found the broken
test-tube that had held the flying mixture and cut his finger on it. Caspar found
nothing but toffee-bars and comics, until he thought to lift up the lid of the
chemistry set. The outside of it said Magicator Chemistry by Magicraft.
Guaranteed nontoxic, nonexplosive. The inside of the lid said the same, but
underneath that were instructions of a sort. Caspar read, 1. Try this experiment
with Marble Chips. “These are no good,” he said. “I did all these at school.”
  “No, you fool!” said Johnny, sucking his bleeding finger. “Under your knee.”
    Caspar seized the little pamphlet he was kneeling on. Magicator Chemistry,
it said. But it turned out to be a set of quite ordinary experiments, all of which
either he or Johnny had done at school. And nowhere did it give a list of the
substances in the set. “This is no good, either,” he said, smothering a yawn.
  “All right,” Johnny said grimly. “I’ll just have to go through and test each
one. I’m not going to be beaten by that stuck-up toff, so there!”
   By suppertime, he had sorted out the chemicals he knew, but by then he was
too tired to go on. He was only too glad to trudge downstairs and sit round the
table with four other people as tired as he was.
   “Good gracious!” said Sally, looking round at their white faces and reddened
eyes. She knew there was every reason why Douglas should be heavy-eyed and
morose, but she could not understand the rest of them. “I hope you’re not all
sickening with something.”
   “Only sickening in the other sense,” said the Ogre, with his usual uncanny
instinct for wrongdoing. “They were fooling about half the night, that was all.”
   “Oh no, Father, I think I really am coming down with something,” Malcolm
said coolly. “I have a heavy feeling in my head.”
  “Serves you right,” said the Ogre.
  “And I think there must be something wrong with me, too,” Gwinny said
hastily, “because I’m so quiet.”
  “Please don’t apologize,” said the Ogre politely. “It’s such a welcome
change.”
  The meal finished in silence both weary and nervous. Though the Ogre said
nothing more, Caspar could not help keeping an anxious eye on Douglas. He
was even more nervous of him than of the Ogre. When he found Douglas
morosely waiting in the hall after supper, it took him some courage not to run
away. But all Douglas did was to thrust the Indigo Rubber records at him.
   “They’re clean now,” he said. “Mind you keep them that way.” Then he went
away upstairs. Caspar, hardly able to believe his good fortune, stood clutching
the records and looking after him uncertainly. Douglas leaned down over the
banister. “I haven’t forgotten I owe you,” he said. “If I could keep my eyes open
I’d give it to you now.”
   It was surprising how ready everyone was for bed that night. By nine
o’clock, thick silence had fallen on the house. Caspar was just dropping off to
sleep, thinking that he was going to get an all-time low mark on tomorrow’s
French test, when Johnny said, irritably and drowsily, “Do you think Malcolm
was lying about the things in the bottom layer?”
  Caspar wanted to go to sleep so badly that he said, “I’ll get it out of him
tomorrow—if you shut up and don’t say another word.”
  It was a rash promise. Johnny held him to it the next morning. “I did my bit,”
he said. “I didn’t say a word—and I lay awake for nearly a quarter of an hour
worrying. Now you go and talk to Malcolm.” Then, seeing how reluctant
Caspar was, he added, “Or I won’t tell you a single thing I discover. Ever.”
  “Oh, all right!” Caspar said crossly. And, as they heard Douglas bounding
downstairs at that moment, he went across the landing there and then.
  The door was ajar. Caspar opened the hostilities by doing as Malcolm
always did—knocking and going in without waiting for an answer. Malcolm
was tying his tie in front of the mirror. Caspar, who rarely looked in a mirror if
he could help it, and especially not to tie his tie, felt very scornful.
  “What do you want?” said Malcolm.
   “Information,” said Caspar. “Were you lying about the things on the bottom
layer or not?”
  “No,” said Malcolm, and, as he tightened the knot of his tie, he whistled,
gently and mockingly, “We Three Kings of Orient Are.”
   Caspar of course perceived the insult. “Then, if you weren’t, prove it,” he
said.
  “Why?” said Malcolm, and pursed his lips to whistle again.
  “Whistle that again and I’ll knock your head off!” snarled Caspar.
  Malcolm smiled maliciously. “Why not, Capsule?”
  “And don’t call me that, either!”
   “It suits you. Everyone knows you’re a perfect pill,” said Malcolm. Then,
just before Caspar had time to explode, he went on patronizingly, “I’ve no
objection to proving it, since you’re obviously too stupid to work it out for
yourself”
  “Go on then,” said Caspar.
   Malcolm left the mirror and opened the glass cupboard, where the chemistry
set was neatly laid on a shelf. “See?” he said, lifting the lid. “These are all
things we’ve heard of. But underneath,” he said, lifting off the first layer and
revealing the second, “you’ve got things even Douglas has never heard of. And
most of them don’t react in ordinary tests. Do you follow me?”
  “Yes, teacher,” said Caspar. “What does that prove?”
  “Well, you don’t think I’m going to test one for you now, before breakfast, do
you?” demanded Malcolm.
  “Yes,“ said Caspar.
  “Well, I’m not,” said Malcolm.
  “So you were lying? I thought you were,” said Caspar.
  “I was not!” said Malcolm. “All right. Which one shall I test?”
  “This one,” said Caspar, pointing to a bottle labeled Animal Spirits.
    “That’s a boring one,” said Malcolm. “Nothing happens, even when you taste
it, except you feel rather lively for a bit. What about this one?” He picked up a
slender tube called, as far as Caspar could see, Misc. Pulv.
  “What about it?” Caspar said suspiciously.
  “I don’t know,” said Malcolm. “I’ve done everything I can think of with it,
and nothing’s happened. The only thing I haven’t done is taste it.”
  “Taste it!” said Caspar “Suppose it’s poison!”
  “It says nontoxic,” Malcolm said coolly. “I’m willing to taste it, if you’ll
agree to taste it, too.” He looked patronizingly at Caspar, as if he knew Caspar
would not dare.
  Caspar thought he saw his game. “If you think you’re going to get out of it that
way, you’re making a big mistake,” he said. “All right. Let’s both taste it.”
  It was clear Malcolm had hoped to get out of it. He uncorked the tube most
unwillingly and said, “It’s going to taste pretty nasty, I think.”
  “Hard luck,” said Caspar. “Hand some over.”
   Malcolm carefully picked up a little glass shovel and spooned a small
quantity of white powder out of the tube and onto Caspar’s palm. Caspar could
not help being impressed with the difference between this care and Johnny’s
slapdash methods. Then the smell of the powder met his nostrils.
  “Eeughk!” he said.
  “That’s why I didn’t taste it,” said Malcolm, shoveling the powder onto his
own palm. He carefully recorked the tube and put it and the little shovel down.
“So if neither of us wants any breakfast, it’ll be your fault. Ready?”
   “Ready,” said Caspar, daunted but determined. They both watched one
another like cats for any sign of weakness—and of course both would have died
rather than show any—as they each raised a stinking hand to his mouth, put out a
reluctant tongue, and licked up a mouthful of what was certainly the nastiest
taste Caspar had ever come across. The eyes of both watered. It was stronger
than onions and bitterer than gall. Both trying to conceal their shudders, they
swallowed.
   The result was the most curious whirling, dizzy, sick feeling. Caspar had to
shut his eyes. He felt as if he were being taken up by a small whirlwind and put
down facing the other way. Fighting not to be sick, he opened his eyes and
stared at the white face opposite him. Then he shut his eyes again, opened them,
and stared with unbelieving horror. Though he did not often look in mirrors, he
knew his own face when he saw it.
  The mouth in his face opened. His own voice said shakily, “Oh no!”
   “What’s happened?” Caspar said, hoping it was not as he feared. But that
hope was almost gone when he found himself speaking in Malcolm’s cool,
precise voice. He dived round and made for the mirror, and the false Caspar
opposite him did the same. They fought and jostled to get in front of it. Like that,
shoving and pushing with arms and legs rather shorter and weaker than he was
used to, Caspar managed to look into his own eyes. Sure enough, they were
Malcolm’s cool gray ones. Above them was Malcolm’s smooth hair; below,
Malcolm’s nose and precise mouth. And beside him, Malcolm was staring out
of Caspar’s brown eyes at Caspar’s shaggy black hair, with an expression of
acute horror on Caspar’s face.
  “What’s the antidote?” Caspar demanded in Malcolm’s voice.
  “I don’t know,” Malcolm said helplessly in Caspar’s.
  “Well, let’s find out!” Caspar said desperately.
  Sally’s voice bawled from downstairs. “Malcolm! Caspar! If you don’t come
down this minute, you’ll both be late for school!”
  “What shall we do?” said Malcolm.
   “We’ll have to go down,” said Caspar. “We only had a lick. It might wear
off.”
   “Hurry up!” boomed the Ogre’s voice. After that, neither of them dared
linger. Caspar dived across the landing for his schoolbag, Malcolm snatched up
his and, one behind the other, they pounded downstairs to the kitchen.
  Douglas was just getting up to leave. “You’ve got the wrong bag,” he said to
Caspar, thinking he was Malcolm.
  “So’s Caspar,” said Gwinny.
  “Are you two all right?” asked Sally. “You both look white as ghosts. You
haven’t time for cereal. Here’s your eggs.”
   The thought of eggs—or indeed anything else—after that powder made both
of them feel sick. “I don’t think I want an egg,” Malcolm said faintly.
  The Ogre took his head out of the newspaper and glared at him. “Your
mother’s cooked it, so you’ll eat it,” he said. “And take that look off your face,
boy.”
  Caspar looked at his own egg with loathing and silent resentment. The Ogre
always picked on him, not Malcolm. And, even if this time it was really
Malcolm he was picking on, it was still not fair. “I don’t want my egg, either,”
he said.
  “You heard what I said to Caspar,” said the Ogre, and hid his head in the
newspaper again.
  Reluctantly, they both opened their eggs and toyed with the contents. Caspar
wondered what had possessed the lunatic who first thought of eggs as food.
   “You’d better go, Johnny. And you, Gwinny,” said Sally. “There’s no need
for you to be late as well.”
  Johnny, as he got up to go, stopped behind Malcolm’s chair. Taking him for
Caspar, he whispered, “Was it true, or not?” Caspar saw an expression of
complete bewilderment spread over his own face. Its eyes glanced at him for
help. He gave it a very small nod.
  “True,” Malcolm said in a firm whisper. Johnny looked satisfied.
  “Get on with your breakfast, Caspar,” said Sally.
  Johnny and Gwinny left. The real Caspar and the false picked at their eggs
again. Each was hoping that the powder would wear off before they were
forced to go to school, for it was quite clear that they could not go as they were.
And each was determined never, ever to tell a soul what had happened. The
mere idea of the way Johnny would laugh made Caspar squirm. Probably
Douglas would laugh even louder—at any rate Caspar could tell that Malcolm
felt exactly as he did about it. His own face was extraordinarily easy to read.
Malcolm’s thoughts flitted over it almost as clearly as if he had spoken them. It
was the strangest part of the whole horrible experience. He had never been able
to tell what Malcolm was thinking before. He wondered if Malcolm found his
own face as easy to understand.
   Meanwhile they dillied. They dallied. Since the powder showed no sign of
wearing off, both clutched their heads and tried to look ill. Both left their eggs
half-eaten.
   “I’ve had enough of this,” said the Ogre. “My car is going to be at the front of
the house in one minute. If I have to fetch you out to it, neither of you is going to
enjoy sitting in it.”
   They saw there was no help for it and went to get their coats. Each naturally
took his own without thinking, and then had to change, because Malcolm’s coat
would not fit Caspar’s body. And they had to change schoolbags as well.
   “If we can’t get out of it,” Malcolm whispered, “we’ll have to change
classes, too, I suppose. Do you agree? I can’t tell a thing you’re thinking.”
   This surprised Caspar. He had to think about it for a moment. “You know,”
he said, “I think your face is bad at showing expressions. I’ve never been able
to tell what you’re thinking, either.”
  “Really?” said Malcolm, in considerable astonishment. “But I always know
what I—”
  Sally came out of the kitchen in her coat. “Are you two still here?” she
exclaimed. “Get out to the car at once.”
   By the time they came out of the front door, the Ogre’s thumb was on the horn
button and the Ogre’s face like thunder. “Sally and I,” he said, “are going to be
late for work. I’ve a good mind to take the day off and help your headmaster
cane you.”
   He drove them to the school and dropped them at the main gate. Since one of
the masters was just going in as they arrived, Caspar and Malcolm were
helpless. All they could do was pelt toward the lines of people going into
assembly and remember to join the class that matched their bodies.
                                  Chapter 7
                                                                         «^»
Long before the morning was over, Caspar had given up dreading that he was
going to turn suddenly into himself again in front of the whole class. Instead, he
gave himself up to despair, muddle, and boredom. He had simply no idea which
group Malcolm was in for any subject. By the time he discovered that it was
usually the most advanced, it was time for French, and Malcolm turned out to be
bad at French. Caspar arrived late and out of breath. Mr. Martin said, “Ah, the
Absent-Minded Professor is with us, I see.” This relieved Caspar’s mind a
little, because it looked as if Malcolm was always in a muddle—although he
did not like the way the rest of the group laughed. But it did not make up for
having the same lesson, word for word, that he had had himself exactly a year
before. Nor was it any comfort to know that the French test Malcolm was doing
in his place at that moment was certainly going to get zero out of ten—or worse,
if that was possible.
   The first thing he did at break was to hunt for his own body among all the
other people. He found himself extraordinarily hard to recognize at a distance.
Malcolm evidently had the same trouble. It was halfway through break before
they succeeded in meeting. Caspar found his own face looking quite haggard.
  “This is awful!” Malcolm said. “I can’t understand a word. You had a
French test and I got you zero, I’m afraid.”
   “I was going to, anyway,” said Caspar. “Don’t worry. It’s an emergency,
after all. Let’s say we’re ill and get sent home.”
  “But they take your temperature,” said Malcolm. “And I bet we’re both
normal.”
  “Normal!” said Caspar. “Let’s just go home, then.”
  “And someone finds out and tells Father?” said Malcolm. “You go, if you
want.”
  “I don’t want,” said Caspar.
   “I tell you what,” said Malcolm, “suppose we skip lunch and belt round to
that toy shop and ask him for the antidote. Because I don’t think we’re going to
change without one, do you?”
  “No,” agreed Caspar. “But I can’t bear missing lunch. After no breakfast I’m
starving already. What lunch are you?”
  “Second.”
  “And you go to first as me,” said Caspar. “That gives us half an hour. Meet
you outside the canteen. And tell me which group you’re in for math.”
  “Hunter’s,” said Malcolm. “And who are your friends?”
   Caspar was reciting the names of his friends, and Malcolm was nodding and
saying he was glad, he had worked most of them out right, then, when Johnny
came up and took hold of Malcolm by the elbow.
  “Oh, do come on, Caspar,” he said. “We’re waiting.”
   Malcolm, with an apologetic look at Caspar, went off with Johnny. Caspar,
before he remembered, had a moment of purest seething fury that they should
march off and leave him like that. Then he realized that this was exactly what he
and Johnny usually did do. For the rest of break, he wandered moodily and
dismally round by himself, working out the implications of this, and arguing
against his conscience that he was not mean to Malcolm. Oh no, Malcolm went
out of his way to insult them both, anyway. But, argue as he might, the fact
remained that Malcolm was supposed to be part of their family now, and neither
he nor Johnny had made the slightest attempt to look after him at school.
  “But think how he jeers,” Caspar told his conscience. And his conscience
smartly returned that one by reminding him that Malcolm’s face was not good at
showing feelings, and asking Caspar what he would do himself if he were too
proud to beg someone to be friends.
  At this point, it occurred to Caspar that no friends had come up to him at all,
during lessons or during break, and that he had been wandering round entirely
and gloomily alone— as he remembered seeing Malcolm doing. And he felt
more wretched than ever.
   Then came an appallingly boring math lesson. After that, Caspar discovered
that Malcolm’s situation was worse than he had realized. The last session
before lunch was craft. Everyone gathered at tables with paint, wood, paper,
and clay, and everything got much more free and easy. Malcolm was making a
boat. It was such a good boat, too, that Caspar was afraid to spoil it by doing
anything to it, so he had to pretend. While he was busy pretending, a group of
girls came up and tried to drip paint on the boat.
  Caspar snatched it away to safety. “You do that again and see what you get!”
 The girls burst out laughing and mimicked what he said. Caspar found
Malcolm’s cheeks hot. For Malcolm’s stiff face seemed incapable of talking in
anything but a precise, posh way, and Caspar was well aware that he had
mimicked Malcolm himself as often as he could.
   Realizing this made him unobservant for a moment. He did not see one of the
girls creeping round the other side of him until it was too late. He pounced
round, but she had already snatched the boat away. With screams of laughter,
the girls passed it to the boys, and the boys tossed it from one to another,
inviting Caspar to come and get it. It was a fragile as well as a beautiful boat.
Caspar was in agonies in case they broke it. He felt he had no option but to
defend Malcolm’s property, and he started after it.
  Immediately, his way was barred by a peculiarly unpleasant boy called Dale
Curtis, grinning nastily. “And where do you think you’re off to?” he said.
   Caspar, with his eye anxiously on Malcolm’s boat—which someone was
now balancing on a ruler—was forced to a standstill. He never had liked Dale
Curtis—in fact, now he came to think of it, 3H were an awful lot of kids
altogether, and it was hard on Malcolm having to be in with them—but Dale
Curtis, being a year younger, had never bothered him before. Now, half a head
shorter than he was used to, and with a feeling that his shorter arms were not
very strong ones, Caspar found Dale Curtis quite a different proposition.
    “You’re not supposed to run about in craft,” said Dale, who had been doing
nothing else himself since the lesson started. “Get back to your table like a good
little boy.”
  Caspar saw that he had no choice but to fight Malcolm’s battle for him. It
made it rather easier that it was his own for the moment. “Get out of my way,”
he said.
    Dale drew breath to mimic him, and gave Caspar his chance. He weighed in
with a trick that he and Johnny thought was probably judo. It was not so
effective as usual, because Malcolm’s arms were really so weak, but it served
to tip Dale off balance. And while he swayed, Caspar hit him as hard as he
could. The force of the punch almost broke Malcolm’s arm— but Caspar knew
it had to be hard to do any good. Dale fell over a chair, red-faced and swearing,
and Caspar was able to walk over to the boy balancing the boat on the ruler.
The boy handed him the boat without a word. Caspar took it, trying not to show
that his hand had been numbed by Dale’s teeth. Malcolm’s poker face helped
considerably there.
  Then, of course, Mrs. Tremlett noticed something was going on and hurried
over. “What’s the matter with Dale?”
  Half a dozen boys drew breath to say Malcolm McIntyre had hit him. Caspar
glared round them, forcing as much threat into Malcolm’s face as Malcolm’s
face would hold. It did the trick. Nobody spoke.
  “Dale?” said Mrs. Tremlett.
   “I fell over,” Dale said, glowering at Caspar in a way that suggested further
trouble coming.
   None, however, came just then, though one of the girls— the 3H girls seemed
to Caspar a really terrible lot—said, “I’m going to tell Mr. Hunter what you did
to Dale.”
  “Right. I’ll make sure I find you after that,” said Caspar.
   They left him alone then. He had a lonely kind of peace through the rest of
craft, and through lunch. Malcolm was waiting for him outside the canteen. They
set off at once to trot the distance into town.
  “I had to hit Dale Curtis,” Caspar panted after a while, “or they’d have
broken your boat.”
 Malcolm said nothing. But Caspar could tell from his own readable face that
Malcolm was ashamed Caspar had found out the way the class treated him.
  “I think they’re a horrible crowd,” Caspar said.
  “Yours are nicer,” Malcolm panted curtly.
  “Specially the girls,” puffed Caspar. Malcolm said nothing. “And Dale’s
going to be after you,” Caspar continued. “I’ll teach you some of our judo, if
you like.”
  “I can manage,” Malcolm panted.
   “Then hit him hard. Ever so hard,” Caspar advised. After that he was too
breathless to go on.
    They trotted hard, until, with heaving chests, they came into a little old
yard-place, almost beside the Ogre’s office-block and quite dwarfed underneath
it. Caspar had never seen the place before, but Malcolm evidently knew it, for
he made straight for a dark little shop there. The name over the window was
Magicraft Ltd. and in the window were a variety of toys, including a chemistry
set like the ones the Ogre had bought. It looked a good shop.
   Malcolm pushed open the door. An old-fashioned bell tinged, and their
laboring lungs drew in strange, spicy smells. An old man in
crescent-moon-shaped spectacles pottered out from the dark space behind a
scarred and aged counter, and pushed his glasses up to stare at them. They
stood, thoroughly out of breath and rather shy, staring back at him and at the
string bags full of footballs, the miniature golf clubs, the toolsets, and the dolls
that dangled above the counter and framed the old man.
  “Speak up, speak up,” said the old man. “Early closing today. I close in five
minutes.”
  “Well,” said Caspar, “you know those chemistry sets—”
   The old man nodded, and they saw he had a gold-embroidered skullcap on
his head. “I do indeed. Those are one of our best lines. But all our goods give
satisfaction or money back, you know. I hope you haven’t come to complain.”
  “No, not really,” said Malcolm. “It’s that powder called Misc. Pulv.—”
   “Failed to give results?” said the old man, with his eyebrows mounting
nearly to his skullcap. He looked with interest from one to the other
and—though, maybe, it was simply that his eyebrows being raised so high made
his face seem so droll— he appeared to be highly but secretly amused by what
he saw. “Now that surprises me,” he said.
   They were fairly sure the old man knew just what had happened. That, in a
way, was a relief, although it did not seem fair to them that he should laugh at
their troubles. Both opened their mouths to explain further, but, as they did so,
the bell tinged behind them. Someone else came into the shop. Caspar and
Malcolm looked at one another. It was going to be fairly embarrassing to
explain in front of another customer. Nevertheless, Malcolm said, “Yes, it gave
results. But—”
  The old man shifted his half-moon glasses and looked beyond him. “Good
day to you, my dear sir.”
  To their consternation, the Ogre’s voice replied, “Good day to you.”
Caspar’s brown eyes met Malcolm’s gray ones, and they both wondered
whether to turn and run. “Hello, you two,” said the Ogre genially. “Preparing to
be late this afternoon as well, are you?”
  “I think we’d better go now,” said Caspar, in Malcolm’s primmest manner.
  “I’ll drive you back,” said the Ogre. “Fascinating place, this, isn’t it? What’s
your latest line?” he asked the old man.
   “I’ve some very nice footballs,” said the old man, and he turned a
moon-spectacled eye on Caspar and Malcolm. He might have been calculating
whether footballs would please them, but they both thought the look was
distinctly malicious. “Just wait while I fetch them down, sir.”
  The two boys stood helpless while the old man brought a boathook and
hooked down a string bag of bright pink footballs, and the Ogre, hands in
pockets and pipe in mouth, admired them. The Ogre was the last person they
wanted to know about Misc. Pulv. Caspar and Malcolm were perfectly sure that
the old man knew it and that he was not going to tell them the antidote if he
could help it. He chattered to the Ogre about how good these footballs were and
how poor most footballs were these days, and the Ogre agreed that footballs
were not what they were in his young days, until Caspar and Malcolm grew
desperate. One after another, they bobbed forward and tried to whisper to the
old man.
  “Ah, you can see they’re keen,” said the old man gleefully to the Ogre. “Boys
always know a good football when they see one.”
  “I’ll take two,” said the Ogre.
  “What’s the antidote?” Caspar managed to whisper.
    “Eh?” said the old man. “That’ll be eighty pence, sir, and cheap at the price,
if I may say so. And can I trouble you to leave now, as I’m closing? My early
day, you know.”
  “Of course,” said the Ogre. “Come along, you two.”
  Caspar lingered. Malcolm hung back. “Just a moment,” Malcolm said.
  “Early closing,” said the old man firmly.
  “Come along,” said the Ogre, more firmly still.
   Despite all their efforts to loiter, in two seconds they were outside the door
of the shop, each clutching a pink football he did not want. A key clicked in the
door of the shop. A blind came down behind the glass, with the word CLOSED
painted on it. That was that. As the Ogre led the way to the car park, Malcolm
looked at Caspar despairingly.
  “Early closing means we’ve got to stay like this until lunchtime tomorrow,”
he said.
  “I know,” said Caspar. “What did you have to make me taste that stuff for?”
   “It was your fault. You called me a liar. Watch out,” said Malcolm. “Don’t
forget I’m bigger than you now.”
  “As if I cared!” said Caspar.
  The Ogre turned round, looking his most sinister. “Is something troubling
you?” he inquired. “Nothing I can’t settle by crashing your heads together, I
hope? And how about a word of thanks for the footballs?”
  “Oh—thank you,” they said, and miserably followed him to the car. When he
had dropped them at the school, they stood just inside the gate wondering what
on earth to do with the footballs. They were so very pink.
   “I suppose he meant to be kind,” Malcolm said drearily. “Would Gwinny
like them?”
   Caspar thought he had never hated the Ogre more. “No, she wouldn’t. She
hates pink. Let’s try leaving them in the cloakroom. Someone’s bound to steal
them. What are we going to do?”
  “Stay this way till tomorrow, I suppose,” Malcolm said, sighing heavily.
“There’s the bell. Come on.”
  They trudged off to endure the afternoon. Caspar had hoped that it would not
be too bad, since Malcolm’s year had football. But Malcolm played goal.
Caspar, who liked to be up front somewhere, had never kept goal in his life,
and he let in almost every shot.
   “I thought that was one thing you were good at!” someone said to him
disgustedly afterward.
   “Yes,” Caspar snapped, thoroughly weary and cross. “But I broke my arm on
Dale Curtis this morning.” And he marched away to the cloakroom, longing to
get home. To his annoyance, the boy followed him, apologizing. Caspar was
just about to get rid of him, when it came to him that Malcolm could do with a
friend—or he could, if he was going to have to be Malcolm for the rest of his
life. So they talked about how horrible Dale Curtis was all the way to the
cloakrooms. The two pink footballs were still there. Nobody had even wanted
to steal them. Malcolm was there too, looking at them morbidly.
  “What on earth are those?” said the boy.
  “Ogre’s eyeballs,” said Caspar. Malcolm gave a scream of insane laughter.
  “Not off his rocker, is he?” asked the boy.
  “No, but he’s not quite himself today,” said Caspar.
  He and Malcolm walked home together, nursing the footballs and mournfully
considering all the possible troubles and misunderstandings waiting for them at
home.
  “But don’t tell anyone,” Malcolm insisted.
  “Not a darned soul,” Caspar agreed.
  “Caspar’s become friends with Malcolm,” Johnny reported to Gwinny.
“Would you believe that? They’ve both got pink footballs to prove it.”
  “Why?” said Gwinny. “Can I borrow a toffee-bar?”
  “Only if you get out. I’ve got some experiments to do,” said Johnny. “If you
ask me, it’s sinister. Caspar was awfully strange at school, too.”
   Caspar was fairly sure Johnny was suspicious, but there was nothing he
could do about it. He did his best to behave like Malcolm. He went up to the
tidy room and put the pink football very neatly away in the glass cupboard,
which was a thing he was sure Malcolm would have done. But as soon as
Douglas came in, he realized how little he really knew about Malcolm’s habits,
and had to hurry away downstairs before Douglas started asking awkward
questions. There he found Malcolm had solved his share of the difficulties.
Caspar came into the kitchen, and there was Malcolm helping Sally get supper
and chattering away to her gaily. Sally, thinking he was Caspar, was talking
happily back.
   Caspar stood in the doorway, overwhelmed with jealous rage and suspicion.
He knew he was being unreasonable. He knew Sally was supposed to be
Malcolm’s mother too now. But he could not get over the feeling that this was a
really underhand trick. And the worst of it was that Malcolm looked so cheerful
that Caspar had a horrible notion that, if they were to find the antidote, Malcolm
was enjoying himself so much as Caspar that he might choose to stay that way.
Then what would become of him? As soon as he could, he caught Malcolm in
the dining room.
  “You mean sneak! What do you mean by sucking up to my mother like that?”
  “I wasn’t!” Malcolm said indignantly. “I was keeping out of Johnny’s way.
And it’s nice talking to Sally. I like her.”
   “But not when she thinks you’re me. Why don’t you talk to her that way when
you’re yourself, if you like her that much?” said Caspar, grinding Malcolm’s
teeth.
  “Because it’s not so easy. Because Douglas— Anyway, you don’t think I like
being you, do you?” said Malcolm.
  “No, but I do,” Caspar said, and stormed off to the Ogre’s study, feeling both
angry and relieved.
   But the real trouble came after supper, when the Ogre demanded peace and
quiet and everyone retreated upstairs. Then Caspar was forced to go into the
same room as Douglas and do his best to behave like Malcolm in front of the
person who probably knew Malcolm best of all. He was very nervous. Douglas
sat down at the table by the window and spread out a great many books. Caspar,
hoping this was the right thing to do, sat down opposite him and opened
Malcolm’s schoolbag. As Malcolm, he had been given French and math. He
began to do them, in Malcolm’s small neat writing, but with his own brain,
which found them easy and boring. He had plenty of space to think in, and he
could not help thinking that to work this way—instead of sprawling on an untidy
bed as he usually did—was very grown up and comfortable. He began to feel a
little smug, and to wonder if Malcolm was getting on so well.
  “Hey, Malcolm,” Douglas said suddenly. “Who was inside-right for
Sheffield Wednesday in 1948?”
   Caspar had never dreamed Malcolm knew this sort of thing. He had no idea.
He could no more tell Douglas than if Douglas had asked him the Chinese for
scrambled eggs. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve forgotten.”
  “Come off it,” said Douglas. “You knew yesterday.”
  “But since then I’ve had a—had a lapse of memory,” Caspar invented
desperately. “I think it may be a kind of stroke.”
   “Kids don’t have strokes,” Douglas said. He looked up and, for the first time,
surveyed the quaking Caspar narrowly. “Are you playing secretive again?” he
said. “I thought I’d cured you of that.”
    “No. Oh no,” said Caspar. “It’s ambrosia, or something. There’s a name for
it.”
  “Amnesia,” said Douglas. He looked at Caspar very hard. “What have you
been up to? Have you done something stupid with that chemistry set again?”
   “I— No—Well, only in a sort of way,” said Caspar. Douglas looking very
menacing, began to rise from his chair. Caspar pushed his own chair back and
braced his legs ready. “No, I didn’t. Nothing,” he said.
   “I told you not to do it when I wasn’t there!” Douglas roared. His chair fell
over behind him and he dived round the table at Caspar. Caspar knocked his
own chair over getting out of the way. And something in the way he dodged, or
looked, must have been wrong. Douglas stopped, put his eyebrows down, and
examined him again. “What’s going on here?” he said. “I’ll get it out of you if I
have to take you apart!” Then he dived for Caspar again.
   Caspar dodged him and fled him round the room. But when someone as large
as Douglas is determined to catch someone Malcolm’s size, he does it. Douglas
caught Caspar just by the door. He shook him with great vigor.
  “Come on, own up,” he said. “Which of them are you? What have you done
with Malcolm?”
   “I’m Caspar,” Caspar admitted, as clearly as his wildly nodding head would
let him. “He’s me. And it was his fault, too.”
  “You—!” Douglas started to roar.
  The door opened and Sally said, “Douglas! What on earth are you doing to
poor Malcolm?”
   Douglas, still keeping tight hold of Caspar’s arm, became very correct and
distant. “I’m not doing anything to Malcolm,” he said, truly enough.
   “Then why are you crashing and roaring and shaking him like that?” Sally
said. “You really must be careful. He’s a lot smaller than you are.”
  “I know that,” Douglas agreed politely. “I haven’t hurt him.”
  “Yet,” said Sally. “Come off it, Douglas. You looked ready to kill him when I
came in.”
  “But I haven’t,” said Douglas.
  “Malcolm,” Sally said to Caspar, “are you really all right?”
  Caspar would have loved to say No! Save me! But he did not dare, with
Douglas gripping his arm. “I’m all right,” he said, in Malcolm’s prim little
voice.
   Sally looked from one to the other. “Oh, why are you two so restrained and
uptight all the time?” she said despairingly. “I sometimes think it’s no good
trying to get to know you. You simply won’t make any advances, will you?”
   Caspar found this frankness of Sally’s embarrassing enough. Douglas,
knowing he had hold of Caspar, not Malcolm, plainly found it even worse. His
face went scarlet.
  “Perhaps it’s our Scottish ancestry,” he suggested uneasily.
  “I think it’s just my voice, with me,” Caspar claimed urgently, hoping his
mother would take the hint and see he needed help.
   Sally did not understand, though she grasped the urgency. “I’ve discovered
that, Malcolm,” she said kindly, and turned to go. Caspar despaired. But Sally
was plainly thinking the situation over. She halted at the door and turned back.
“Malcolm,” she said, “come downstairs and talk to me while I do the ironing. I
could do with some company.”
  Caspar looked up at Douglas. Most grudgingly, Douglas let go of his arm,
and gave him a grim look behind Sally’s back. Caspar could not resist smiling
with triumph as he followed Sally downstairs.
                                  Chapter 8
                                                                        «^»
Caspar spent the next hour or so sitting on the kitchen table attempting to fold
shirts and talking to Sally, while the radio softly played music behind him. It
was very comfortable. Caspar chattered away, and found that it made no
difference that he was supposed to be Malcolm. His mother talked to him in just
the same way. He thought he had better tell Malcolm.
  At length, when the last shirt was folded and the ironing board put away,
Sally said, “Well, I suppose you’d better get up to bed. I’ve enjoyed this talk.”
Caspar looked at her and found it must be true. She looked far less tired and
harrowed than usual. So he said good night and went softly upstairs.
   He had decided what to do. His plan was to creep up to Gwinny’s room and
explain to her. Since he had already confessed to Douglas, that seemed
fair—and Gwinny was not so likely to laugh as Johnny. The real difficulty was
getting past the landing below without Douglas hearing. Never had Caspar
moved so quietly. He stole across the landing like a thief, and was rather glad
that he had Malcolm’s lighter feet to do it on. There was no sound from
Douglas’s room, no sign that he had heard. Heartily relieved, Caspar reached
the next stairway and put on speed for Gwinny’s room and safety.
  Douglas was waiting on the turn of these stairs. He grabbed Caspar so hard
and unexpectedly that Caspar let out a high, mouse-like squeak. He struggled
madly, but Douglas was far too strong for him.
  “I thought this was what you’d do!” Douglas said triumphantly. “Come on
down. And don’t dare make a noise.”
   He dragged the helpless Caspar back downstairs to the landing. Then he
hauled him across, not to his own room, but to Caspar’s and Johnny’s, and
threw open its door without knocking. He revealed Malcolm, as Caspar,
standing by the opposite wall with a neat pile of comics in his arms, looking
exasperated; Johnny kneeling by the chemistry set surrounded by tubes and
bottles, looking indignant; and Gwinny sitting on Caspar’s bed, looking
distressed and puzzled.
   Their heads all whipped round as Douglas burst in dragging what appeared
to be Malcolm. An expression of alarm came into the real Malcolm’s face at the
sight of them. But he tried hard to look simply exasperated. “Did you knock?”
he said, in a very fair imitation of Caspar’s usual manner.
  “All right, Malcolm. Come on out of it,” said Douglas.
   Malcolm looked at Caspar, and Caspar, as far as Malcolm’s stiff face would
let him, tried to show that the game was up. Malcolm understood. He looked
more alarmed than ever, and backed against the wall. “You’ve gone mad,” he
said.
  “Stark, raving bonkers,” Johnny agreed loudly. “Don’t you know your own
brother when you see him?”
   “Yes,” said Douglas. “Even when he looks like Caspar. Come on, Malcolm.
I rumbled him an hour ago.”
   “I don’t understand,” said Malcolm firmly. Caspar knew it must be very hard
for him to admit what had happened in front of Johnny and Gwinny.
  “Nor do I understand,” Johnny said aggressively.
  “We changed places, you nit,” said Caspar. “It was a sort of accident. And it
was your fault really, sending me to talk to him.”
   Johnny stared from one to the other with his mouth open. To Caspar’s relief,
he showed no inclination to laugh—he was far too surprised. Gwinny bounced
up from Caspar’s bed. “Oh, you are Caspar!” she said. “I can tell it’s you
talking. I couldn’t think what had happened, especially when you started tidying
up.”
  “If you want any proof, that’s it,” said Douglas. “Did any of you ever see
Caspar tidy up? Come on, Malcolm.”
  “No,” said Malcolm.
   “Right,” said Douglas, and, towing Caspar, he plunged across the room,
ploughing through comics and scattering construction kits. Malcolm made a very
feeble effort to dodge, and Caspar saw that this was where he had gone wrong.
Malcolm must have learned long ago that when Douglas was determined to get
him, get him he would. He got him very easily this time, by the shirt collar.
“Right,” he said. “Now you’re coming back to our room to find the antidote.”
Pushing the two of them in front of him, as if they were the front part of a
bulldozer, he ploughed them back across the room.
   “Hey! Watch it!” Johnny cried indignantly, as the chemistry set leaped aside
under their six flying feet. The tubes and bottles rattled together and tipped.
Johnny threw himself forward and just saved a mass spill. But one of Douglas’s
large feet kicked against the bottle Johnny had put down in order to catch the
others, and sent it flying into the heap of plastic shapes Johnny was using to
support test-tubes. Johnny threw himself after it and picked it up all but empty.
“Now look what you’ve done!” he said. Caspar looked at the bottle anxiously.
It seemed to be the one called Animal Spirits that Malcolm said was dull. So
probably no harm was done.
  Douglas thought the same. “One more mess won’t be noticed in this pigsty,”
he called over his shoulder, propelling Caspar and Malcolm to the door.
  “It’s nearly empty!” said Johnny.
  “Too bad,” said Douglas.
  “Pig yourself!” said Johnny.
  “Can I come and watch?” Gwinny called after Douglas.
  “No. Go to bed,” said Douglas.
   Probably Gwinny would have protested. But the Ogre arrived on the landing
as Douglas was running Caspar and Malcolm across it.
  “Douglas, what is going on?” he said.
   Douglas stopped in his tracks, but he kept tight hold of the other two. Inside
Johnny’s and Caspar’s room, Gwinny struggled hurriedly under Caspar’s bed
and tried not to sneeze in the fluff there. Johnny leapt into his own bed with all
his clothes on, even his shoes, and pretended to be asleep.
  “Nothing,” Douglas said uneasily.
  “A—a game we’re playing,” Malcolm added guiltily.
  “Called troikas,” Caspar supplied inventively.
   “In which you harness three elephants to a sledge and gallop hard over the
frozen floorboards,” agreed the Ogre. “Stop!”
  “We will when we’ve got to our room,” said Douglas. “That’s our base.” He
put the other two in motion with a push and a tweak, and they all scurried to the
room opposite, where Malcolm humbly opened the door for them. The Ogre,
having watched them go in, went to the open door of the other room. Gwinny
and Johnny lay like ramrods.
   “What horrible squalor,” remarked the Ogre, and turned off the light and
went downstairs. Gwinny scrambled out from under the bed, seized the nearest
toffee-bar, and raced up to her room before she started sneezing. Johnny went to
sleep as he was.
  In the other room, Douglas said, “What was it? Something you ate?”
  “Yes,” said Caspar.
  “Misc. Pulv,,” admitted Malcolm.
  “You little twits!” said Douglas. “Right. Then we’ll take that out, and you’ll
both have to eat some of everything else in the box until we find the antidote.”
  Their stomachs heaved a little at the thought. “What if that doesn’t work?”
asked Malcolm.
  “Then you try each one again in combination with one of the others,” said
Douglas. “And then with two others, and so on. Even if it takes all night.”
   And that was just what he made them do. An hour later, they had gone all
through everything once and were halfway through taking them all again with
salt. Malcolm suggested they try salt first. “That’s what I put with Paw. Pulv. to
go small,” he explained.
  “Then we won’t use Paw. Pulp, this round,” said Douglas.
   Caspar supposed he should be thankful. It made one less chemical to eat. By
this time, he was feeling decidedly ill, and he could see Malcolm was too.
When they came to Animal Spirits, which had a sweet, fizzy taste, it was so
horrible with salt that they had to beg for a moment to recover.
  Douglas was grudging about it. “I think you deserve to feel ill,” he said.
  “If you knew what a horrible day we’ve had!” Malcolm cried out. “And
Father giving us pink footballs on top of it!”
   “Oh all right,” said Douglas. “You can have one minute, or. we’ll be here all
night.” There was half a minute of silence, except for the gulps of Malcolm and
the gasps of Caspar. Douglas unfeelingly watched the second hand of his watch,
until, quite suddenly, he forgot all about it and banged his forehead with his fist
instead. “What a nit I am! This is no good. You’re bound to have to take Misc.
Pulv. again, to mix yourselves up the other way!”
  “No!” said Caspar.
  “I couldn’t!” said Malcolm.
  “Yes, you can,” said Douglas. “If you did it once, you can do it again. I don’t
want to be stuck with Caspar as a roommate, whatever you want. Hold your
hands out.”
   Such was his ferocity that they both meekly did so. Douglas shoveled them
out each a generous spoonful of Misc. Pulv. The mere smell of it was almost
too much for them.
  “Eat it,” said Douglas. “Go on. I’ll count to ten. One— two—”
   On the count of eight they still thought they could not. On the count of nine,
they wondered. On the count often, their nerve broke. Each lifted the nasty
handful to his mouth, sucked some of the powder in, and did their best to
swallow.
  The whirling sensation that came after the appalling taste was the last straw:
Gagging, they each opened their watering eyes and stared at the pale face
opposite. They felt too ill even to be glad the stuff had worked.
  “Has it worked?” Douglas demanded. They nodded, too far gone to speak.
“Then don’t be sick in here,” said Douglas. “Get to the bathroom.”
  They bolted for the door, tore it open, hammered downstairs shoulder to
shoulder to the bathroom, and flung themselves inside it. But by this time, their
heaving stomachs had subsided somewhat.
  “I think I’m all right now,” Malcolm said.
  “So am I. Just about,” said Caspar.
  And they both began to laugh. Malcolm fell across the washbasin, and
Caspar doubled up over the towel rail, and they laughed till their eyes watered
again.
  “Are you boys drunk or something?” demanded the Ogre on the threshold.
  Malcolm looked up and caught Caspar’s streaming eye. “Eyeballs!” he
gasped. They both fell in a heap on the bathmat, laughing hysterically.
  “Get up,” said the Ogre irritably. “Get to bed. I want to have a bath.”
   They staggered up and climbed the stairs, whimpering with mirth. Caspar
laughed all the time he was crunching about his room hunting for his pajamas,
and he was still laughing a little when he went to sleep.
  He did not sleep very soundly. He kept having wild dreams—possibly
because of all the chemicals he had eaten— and once or twice he woke up
almost completely, with a feeling that somebody was walking about the room.
But the moon shining between the curtains showed him that no one was there.
   He was woken in the morning by a shout from Johnny. “It’s that stuff Douglas
spilled. Look what it’s gone and done!”
   Caspar sat up and found Johnny, very scruffy and irritable from having slept
in his clothes, standing up on his bed opposite. “What?” said Caspar.
  Johnny went suddenly cautious. “Are you Caspar or-Malcolm?”
   “Caspar,” said Caspar. “Break my heart across your knee,” he added, seeing
that Johnny was still not sure.
  Since this was a private family expression, Johnny was satisfied. “How did
you get back?” he asked, with scientific interest.
  “Douglas made us eat something of everything in the box.”
  “He would!” said Johnny. “The flipping bully. And look what else he’s done.
Down on the floor beside your bed.”
   Caspar leaned over and looked. He saw an oozing, a shimmering, and a
writhing. The heap of colored construction kits was in slow, wriggling motion,
heaving and seething, each piece moving separately—almost as if it were alive.
As Caspar watched, a bright blue plastic brick left this heap and looped its way
slowly over an Indigo Rubber record toward his bed. Then it began to crawl up
Caspar’s trailing blankets, for all the world like a bright blue caterpillar.
  “I think they’re alive,” said Caspar.
  “That’s what I thought,” said Johnny. “They’re all over the place, too.”
   Johnny was right. Now that Caspar looked, he could see pieces of plastic
crawling slowly in every part of the room. A pink, screw-shaped one was
climbing the wall beside Johnny’s bed. Several of the red kind with holes in
them were clinging to the curtains. Green and purple rods of different lengths
were looping across comics, in company with red, black, and yellow bricks. A
cluster of the flat, gray bits meant to make an airplane was hanging on the edge
of the open cupboard door, quivering, not unlike a swarm of bees. Still barely
able to believe it, Caspar reached out and plucked the blue brick off his
blankets. It was just a small oblong building block, and it felt like plastic, but it
nevertheless rotated itself between his finger and thumb as if it were trying to
get loose. And when it found it was caught, it tried to curl up into a ball.
  “They’re alive all right,” said Caspar.
  “What are we going to do with them all?” Johnny said helplessly. “Blast
Douglas!”
  “What did it?” asked Caspar. “Animal Spirits?”
  “Yes,” said Johnny.
   “Malcolm thought that was dull and didn’t do anything,” said Caspar. “Fat lot
he knew!”
   “We mustn’t let him know,” Johnny said. “We’ll have to catch them all and
hide them somehow.”
   So Caspar got up and found the four large biscuit tins that Sally had given
them to keep the construction kits in, and they set to work to fill them with
squirming pieces of plastic. The heap by Caspar’s bed was easy enough to
catch and scoop into tins—though pieces would keep writhing themselves over
the edge of the tin and flopping to the floor—but the bits wandering over the
room were quite another matter. It took them nearly an hour to collect them all.
And each time they came back to the tins with a new handful, they had to pick
up all the bits that had escaped onto the floor, and cram them back into the tins
too.
   “They’re worse than fishing bait,” Johnny said crossly. “They look rather
like bait, don’t they?” Caspar agreed. Even though the pieces of plastic were all
colors of the rainbow, they did, all the same, look remarkably like grubs and
larvae. “Find the lids,” Johnny said. “They’ll never stay in all day if we don’t
shut them up.”
   By pulling everything out of the cupboard and raking through the resulting
heap with an old golf club, Caspar found three of the lids. The fourth lid was
missing. They had to cover the remaining tin with comics and stick them down
with tape. Johnny taped the other lids, too, to be on the safe side. There began to
be quite a noise of soft writhings and tappings, as the imprisoned construction
kits tried to get out. By this time it was late. They heard Gwinny going
downstairs, followed by Douglas. Caspar had to hurry to get dressed.
  “I think I ought to make holes in the lids,” Johnny said, while Caspar was
hunting for his shirt. “If they’re alive, it’s not kind if I don’t, is it?”
   “Well, don’t make the holes too big or they’ll get out through them,” Caspar
said, pulling his shirt out from under the heap of things by the cupboard.
   Johnny found a skewer in the same heap and hammered away at the lids,
punching holes. “Lucky we’ve got some Animal Spirits left still,” he called,
above the battering. “I wonder what else it works on. I must try. I’d rather like a
table that was alive, wouldn’t you? It could follow me about until I wanted to
use it.”
   “Could you train it to keep still while you were writing, though?” Caspar
wondered. “And you’d have to get it to sham dead in front of the Ogre, or
there’d be trouble.”
   Johnny, quite enraptured with this idea, finished making holes and hunted for
the Animal Spirits bottle while Caspar tied his shoes. As their mother called up
to them to hurry, he found it. He gave a cry of despair.
  “Blast Douglas! Blast the Ogre, too! I had to get into bed when he came
upstairs and I forgot to put the stopper in. It’s all evaporated!”
  “Borrow some of Malcolm’s,” Caspar suggested as they hurried downstairs.
  “Catch him lending anything!” Johnny said crossly. “Oh, blast!”
  He was still cross when they set off for school, and crosser still at break,
when Caspar insisted on finding Malcolm.
  “What do you want to find him for?” he demanded.
   “If you’d been him for a day, you’d know why,” Caspar retorted, and went
off to search. He found Malcolm at the very moment when Malcolm hit Dale
Curtis as hard as he could and made Dale’s lip bleed. Dale looked so savage at
this, and Malcolm so unexpectedly small, that Caspar made haste to range
himself beside Malcolm and give Dale the long, menacing look that gangsters
give on television. Dale returned it. But he saw he would have to reckon with
Caspar Brent as well as Malcolm McIntyre. He decided to leave Malcolm
alone for the moment, and strolled loftily away.
  “Come and play football with a tennis ball,” Caspar invited Malcolm.
  Malcolm gingerly flexed a hand that Caspar guessed was numbed. “You
don’t have to look after me,” he said haughtily.
  “I’m not,” said Caspar. “I knew you wouldn’t play. I only asked you because
our goalie’s no good.”
  There was a pause. Then Malcolm said graciously. “I’ll keep goal for you if
you like.” Caspar, rather pleased with his cunning, took him over to the game.
Johnny did not say anything, but the expression on his face was not pleasant.
And Caspar had a premonition that there was going to be trouble with
Johnny—bad trouble—perhaps not now, but sometime soon.



                                  Chapter 9
                                                                         «^»
Gwinny, meanwhile, had a queer experience at her school. She was nature
monitor, and it was her job to come in before afternoon school and get things
ready. It was one of those fine, warm days that happen in late autumn, and, since
it was Friday, Gwinny was looking forward to the weekend. The Ogre was
going to be away all Saturday and Sunday at a conference and things would be
fun for once. Gwinny sang to herself as she gave out pencils and nature folders.
   As she leaned forward over the big table in the center of the classroom to
push the folders across it, something climbed out of her pocket and landed with
a soft clump on the table. Gwinny craned her head round. She stared, frozen and
bent over. It was the toffee-bar she had borrowed from Johnny, complete with
its white and yellow wrapper. And it was crawling across the table in a slow,
deliberate way, as if it knew where it was going.
   “No, stop! Come back!” Gwinny said to it. She felt all guilty and
responsible. The toffee-bar was alive, and she had no doubt that it was the
bottle Douglas spilled that had done it. She put down the folders, a little
nervously. She was not exactly frightened. The toffee-bar was only four inches
long and flat as a ruler. But, even so, if it was alive, it was not precisely a
toffee-bar any longer.
  The toffee-bar crawled steadily on until it came to a patch of sunlight in the
middle of the table. There, it stopped and stretched and coiled itself this way
and that with evident enjoyment.
  “Oh, do come back!” Gwinny said to it.
   But the toffee-bar took no notice. It stretched several times more, rather
harder. Then, quite suddenly, the white and yellow paper split in two along the
top of it. The toffee inside wriggled a little, and then it crawled out from the
paper, a smooth yellow-brown strip.
   “I’ll have to catch you,” Gwinny said firmly. She reached out, not quite so
firmly, and tried to take hold of the toffee-bar. It must have seen her hand
coming. Its limber brown body jackknifed and leaped away from her fingers. In
a flash, it had jumped off the table, wriggled over the floor, and gone to earth in
a shelf of library books.
   Gwinny had to leave it there, because the rest of the class was coming in. She
hurriedly put the cast-off wrapper in her pocket and gave out the rest of the
folders. For the rest of the afternoon she was in agony. The toffee-bar just
would not stay quiet. Gwinny could hear it slithering and clumping behind the
books in the bookshelf, and so could the rest of the class.
  “Has somebody brought a mouse in here?” asked Mrs. Clayton.
   Nobody answered, but, to judge from the looks and giggles, everybody
thought somebody had. Gwinny felt more and more guilty and ashamed.
   When everyone went out for P.E. last period, Gwinny borrowed Linda
Davey’s handkerchief, because her own was only a tissue, and stayed behind.
As soon as she had collected the folders, she set out, with great determination,
to trap the toffee-bar by emptying the bookshelf, book by book. The toffee-bar
scuttled away from the open spaces, until she had it penned in a corner, behind
three Mary Plain books. Then she took those out all at once and pounced. She
got it. It wriggled frantically. Gwinny did not like it, because she hated smooth,
warmish, wriggly things. But she managed to wrap it in Linda’s handkerchief
and knot the corners together so that it could not escape. It seemed strong, and
Gwinny rather thought it had grown since it cast its wrapper.
   Somehow—she did not know why—she was deeply ashamed of it. After
school, she avoided all her usual friends and went home secretly by back ways.
The toffee-bar was wriggling so wildly by then that Gwinny had to take the
knotted handkerchief out of her pocket and hold it hard by the knots in order not
to lose it. And she wondered what on Earth she was going to do with it when
she did get it home.
  It made her later than usual. She reached the front gate at the same time as
Malcolm. “What have you got there?” he asked, looking with interest at the
bulging, jerking handkerchief. “A mouse?”
   Gwinny felt she knew Malcolm quite well now that she had spent a whole
evening thinking he was Caspar. Besides, she was desperate to tell someone
who would understand. “No, it’s a toffee-bar,” she said. “And it’s rather awful.
It’s alive.”
  “Not really?” said Malcolm, and his face went pink with excitement. “Show
me.”
   “Get ready to catch it, then,” said Gwinny. “You wouldn’t believe how
nimble it is. It got away like a flash before nature this afternoon.” Malcolm
nodded and held his hands out ready. Gwinny began unknotting the
handkerchief. But the toffee-bar was too lithe for either of them. It was out, and
slithering down Gwinny’s arm, before Malcolm could move. It dodged as he
grabbed it, leaped from the hem of Gwinny’s coat to the ground, and made off
like a yellow-brown streak into the bottom of the hedge. “Oh, bother!” said
Gwinny.
   Malcolm gave a roar of delighted laughter. “And it really was toffee?” he
said. “How splendid! Was it that bottle Douglas kicked over?”
  “I think it must have been,” said Gwinny.
   “How marvelous!” said Malcolm. “Gwinny, I’ll give you a big reward for
this. Wait and see.” And, with a whoop of excitement, he went dashing into the
house and pounding up the stairs as heavily as ever Johnny did.
  Gwinny followed him. She found the Ogre in the hall, balefully watching
Malcolm’s flying heels disappearing round the corner. “The habits of your
family must be catching,” he said to Gwinny. “That was Malcolm, wasn’t it?”
  “Yes,” said Gwinny. “He’s excited about something.”
  “Evidently,” said the Ogre sourly.
  “He’s not doing any harm,” said Gwinny. “He needed to run about a bit. He’s
much too old-fashioned usually.”
   “Old-fashioned?” said the Ogre. “It’s odd you should say that. I’ve always
thought you were the old-fashioned one.”
   “Oh, not me,” Gwinny said. “I’m modern. In fact,” she said, thinking of the
toffee-bar, “I may be quite new-fangled. I’ve just made a really up-to-date
invention.”
   The Ogre laughed. “Then you’d better take out a patent.” he said, as he went
into the sitting room, “before somebody else steals your invention.”
   Gwinny went upstairs rather thoughtfully. For the invention, though it had
been Douglas who kicked the bottle, might be said to be Johnny’s, and she had a
feeling Johnny would be furious to know she had told Malcolm. She went past
the door of Johnny’s and Caspar’s room and straight on up to her own.
  Beyond that door, Caspar and Johnny were staring fascinated at the six or
seven toffee-bars curled up on comics and basking in the afternoon sun. They
had all cast their wrappers, and these lay littered about, most of them near the
space where the construction kits had been. Johnny set off to catch one of them.
Immediately, another toffee-bar darted out from under a comic beside his foot
and flashed away toward the cupboard. The basking bars, aroused by the
movement, uncurled and shot off, also. In a second, there was not a sign of them,
except for a faint rustling here and there.
  “Just like lizards,” Johnny said, more fascinated still.
  Caspar was looking at the cast-off wrappers. “There’s an awful lot of these,”
he said. “Twice as many as we saw.”
  “Some of them may be off ones we ate,” said Johnny.
  “How many did we have?” said Caspar.
  “No idea,” said Johnny.
  “Then we’d better count these wrappers,” said Caspar. “And find another
box to put the toffee-bars in when we do catch them. They’re going to get all
over the house if we don’t look out.”
   “I’ll go down and look for a box,” said Johnny. But, before he went, he
untaped the lid of one of the biscuit tins and had a look to see how the
construction kits were getting on. They seemed to be writhing and heaving much
as before, and the inevitable one or two came over the edge and had to be put
back. “Oughtn’t we to feed them?” he said. “If they are alive.”
  “Bring some biscuits when you get the box,” said Caspar. “The toffee-bars
may be hungry, too.”
   So Johnny rammed the lid back on and went down to the kitchen, while
Caspar collected all the toffee-wrappers he could find and made a careful
count. It came to nineteen. The thought of catching nineteen nimble toffee-bars
was a little daunting. He had only succeeded in catching one by the time Johnny
came back with a large cardboard box and a packet of Small Rich Tea Biscuits,
and the only reason he caught that one was that Johnny had bitten a piece off it
the evening before. It was much slower than the others in consequence, and
went with a sort of limp.
   “Oh, the poor thing!” Johnny said, when Caspar showed him. “I’ll never eat
another toffee-bar again!” He put it tenderly in the cardboard box and made it
comfortable with some comics and a Small Rich Tea Biscuit. It did not want to
stay. Crippled as it was, it kept trying to get out, until Caspar thought of putting
the box against the radiator. The lame bar seemed to like that. It curled up
peacefully and began to look a little sticky.
   Then they tried to catch the eighteen others. After half an hour of tearing
around and desperate pouncing, they had caught exactly one each, and both the
Ogre and Douglas were roaring for silence. The only thing for it seemed to be
to clear the floor.
   So, for the first time in their lives, they put everything in the cupboard or on
the bookshelves, and piled the other things on the windowsill. And very hard
work it was, too. But they had their reward. It was an easy matter then to hunt
the flying toffee-bars as they shot along the sides of the room, and almost as
easy to catch the ones that retreated under the beds.
   “Well, at least we know nothing else came alive now,” Caspar said, dusty
and triumphant, carrying a whipping handful of toffee-bars over to the radiator
and counting them as he dropped them into the box. “Nineteen. That’s all of
them at last.”
   The warmth of the radiator pleased their captives. They curled up drowsily
among the comics, and Johnny gave them some biscuits. But the biscuits were
untouched after supper, and the construction kits had not eaten theirs, either.
Johnny became worried. He was leaning over the cardboard box trying to tempt
at least the lame bar to eat, when Sally came in.
  “What a wonderfully tidy room!” she said. “What have you got in that box?”
  “It’s my comic-store,” said Johnny, deftly pulling a couple of comics over
the captives.
   “What system!” said Sally, laughing. “Have either of you seen Jack’s best
pipe? He wants it to go away with.” They had not. “I’d better ask Gwinny,”
said Sally.
   When she had gone, Johnny fetched some lettuce, but neither the construction
kits nor the toffee-bars seemed to care for lettuce, either. So, on Caspar’s
advice, Johnny gave the problem up for the moment and started to learn the
poem he should have learned last week. Caspar began on his homework.
    They were interrupted by a sharp scuttering noise. They looked up, and then
at one another, mystified. The scuttering came again. Johnny pointed. Out from
under Caspar’s bed, into the middle of the empty floor, came the strangest
creature yet. It was dark brown, and moved in a quick, lively way that put them
in mind of a miniature squirrel or chipmunk. Yet its small chunky body did not
seem to have a recognizable head. It had a long stiff tail that it held high behind
it as it ran and that it seemed to use for balance. And it seemed to have a bold
and inquiring disposition, for it stopped to sniff with interest at Caspar’s foot,
which was hanging down from his bed, and its tail quivered as it sniffed.
  It took them nearly a minute to recognize the Ogre’s pipe, which Gwinny had
dropped the night the flying-mixture splashed on her.
  “Who was it said nothing else had come alive?” said Johnny.
  Caspar could not help laughing. “Let’s give it him to go away with,” he said,
and he got off his bed to catch it. The pipe at once dropped on its side and
shammed dead.
  “You’ve frightened it!” said Johnny. “And don’t you dare give it to the Ogre.
He’d try to light it.”
   Caspar realized this would be cruel. He got gently back on his bed again, and
they waited to see what the pipe would do. It lay for a while. But when neither
of them moved, it got up on its bowl again with a powerful whisk of its stem
and began scuttering about the carpet, exploring. It seemed very interested in the
biscuit tins. For some time it ran round and round on all fours. Then, with a
mighty hop, it managed to jump on top of one. There, it scrabbled round the
holes Johnny had made and seemed to become increasingly desperate. It uttered
a tiny agitated squeak or so.
  “I think it wants it open,” said Johnny. “Shall I open one?”
  “Yes,” said Caspar. “Let’s see what it does then.”
  Johnny stole heavily over to the tins. The pipe took fright and hid from him,
by jumping into the gap between two tins. But when Johnny had taken off a lid
and retreated, it came boldly out and hopped up onto the edge of the open tin.
They watched it bend forward over the writhing plastics, with its tail cocked
for balance and quivering. Its bowl moved, and they both distinctly heard a
golloping.
  “It’s eating them!” Johnny exclaimed.
   Having fed largely and, incidentally, solved two of their problems at one go,
the pipe decided they were friendly and went roaming boldly about the room.
Caspar could not resist fetching Gwinny to see it. Gwinny was enthralled. The
Ogre’s pipe so enchanted her that her lack of surprise and interest in the
toffee-bars passed unnoticed—to her great relief
  “Show Mummy,” she said. “She’ll love it.”
   But Johnny refused, on the grounds that Sally could not be trusted not to tell
the Ogre. At this, Gwinny became rather thoughtful and went away as soon as
she could.
   The Ogre left Saturday morning. There was a wonderful feeling of freedom
without him, though this was a little spoiled for Caspar by Johnny worrying
about what toffee-bars ate. To make up for starving them, Johnny turned the
cardboard box on its side and let the toffee-bars have the freedom of the room.
He put them down a saucer of water. The pipe, when it wanted a drink, drove
the toffee-bars off with a vicious curving rush that sent them scattering all over
the room, but, otherwise, it took no notice of them.
    All the same, the toffee-bars had definitely grown. Caspar could not see what
Johnny was worrying about. He played Indigo Rubber full blast and refused to
listen to him. Across the landing, Douglas’s guitar thrummed. Then Douglas
went off on his bicycle and returned with two Indigo Rubber records of his
own.
  “Thank heaven Jack can’t hear this,” Sally said, when both record players
were going.
  “I think it’s because he isn’t here,” Malcolm explained.
  “I’m aware of that,” Sally said wryly. “And I’m going shopping. Who’s
coming?”
   Gwinny and Malcolm both went, and not only did they help Sally and spend
their pocket money, but they had coffee with Sally in a snack bar and enjoyed
themselves very much. Gwinny found she was liking Malcolm more and more,
and she was rather pleased to see that Sally seemed to like him, too. In fact, she
enjoyed herself so much that she began to feel disloyal to Johnny and Caspar.
   After lunch, Caspar and Johnny came into their room to find toffee-bars all
along the edge of the carpet, nibbling it. They had eaten it quite frayed. Johnny’s
relief was boundless,
  “It’s the fluffy part they seem to like,” he observed, inspecting the damage.
“Can I give them your green sweater?”
  “No,” said Caspar, who was fond of that green sweater. “But Gwinny’s
probably got some she’s grown out of.”
  They went up to Gwinny’s room to ask. To their surprise, Douglas and
Malcolm were just coming down from it. Douglas was carrying a bucket of
water—the selfsame bucket with which Johnny had drenched Gwinny and
Caspar that first fateful night. Maybe it was the associations of that bucket, or
something about Douglas’s or Malcolm’s manner, but Johnny instantly
suspected dirty work of some kind.
  “What have you been doing to Gwinny?” he demanded.
  “Nothing,” said Malcolm.
  “Go and ask her if you like,” said Douglas.
   Johnny and Caspar squeezed past Douglas and hurried up to Gwinny’s room.
Gwinny was kneeling in the middle of it, and it was evident that she had been
crying. But she stoutly denied that Douglas and Malcolm had harmed her in any
way.
  “They were very kind,” she said.
  “Then why are you crying?” Johnny asked accusingly.
   “About something else,” said Gwinny. “I was being silly, and Malcolm made
me feel better. I like Malcolm. So there!” She trembled a little after making this
awful admission, and she did not dare go on to say that she had always secretly
admired Douglas. To her relief, Caspar took it well. Johnny, of course, was
utterly disgusted.
  “Flipping girls!” he said. “Give me some old sweaters for the toffee-bars
and then don’t come near me for a month. You stink!”
  Gwinny handed over two sweaters, thankful that she had got off so lightly,
and the boys took them away downstairs.
  “That bucket,” said Johnny. “You don’t think they were brainwashing her, do
you?”
  “You don’t brainwash people by dipping their heads in a bucket, you nit!”
said Caspar. “Besides, her hair wasn’t wet.”
   The toffee-bars fell on the sweaters so hungrily that, by Sunday evening, only
the ribbing-parts were left. The toffee-bars, even the lame one, had grown to the
size of twelve-inch rulers. Caspar felt a little uneasy about them. He wished
they were like the pipe which, in spite of having eaten nearly half a tin of
construction kits, had remained exactly the same size.
  The room began to smell, rather. By Sunday evening, it was horrible.
  “I think it’s their droppings,” said Johnny. “They’re not house-trained, really,
you see.”
   Caspar, knowing the Ogre was due back for supper, hastened downstairs and
fetched the vacuum cleaner. The noise frightened the toffee-bars into the back of
their box, and the pipe took the long hose of the cleaner for a snake and hid in
the cupboard. But at least the smell grew less.
  “We’ll have that, after you,” Douglas said, appearing in the doorway.
  “Too lazy to bring it up for yourself, are you?” Johnny said.
   “None of your cheek,” Douglas replied, and hit him a sharp smack. He took
the vacuum cleaner and left Johnny raging.
  “You might say something, Caspar! He hit me! Did you see him?”
   “Yes, I saw him,” said Caspar. It was hard to know what to do about it.
Douglas was technically the eldest, and no one denied the eldest his right to
thump younger ones who cheeked him. And Johnny had cheeked Douglas. And
Douglas had not hit him hard. And Caspar had no wish to stir Douglas up in
case he remembered about the night the Ogre caught him. Besides, he owed it to
Douglas that he was not still Malcolm. But, of course, Caspar was really
Johnny’s elder brother, not Douglas. He could think of only one solution. “It
should have been me to hit you, I suppose. I will if you like.”
  “You’re as bad as Gwinny!” said Johnny.
  “Well?” said the Ogre at supper. “Did you all have a good weekend?”
  “Oh yes!” they said, all five, with what was, everyone saw at once, quite
undue enthusiasm.
  “I see,” said the Ogre sourly.
   Johnny swore it was in revenge that the Ogre suddenly appeared in the
doorway of their room that evening. Johnny himself was quite legally engaged
in puzzling out which of the remaining chemicals belonged to the bottom layer
of the chemistry set. The toffee-bars were huddled in the box sleeping off
Gwinny’s sweaters, and the lids were firmly on the biscuit tins. But Gwinny
was there when she should have been in bed. She and Caspar were trying to
teach the pipe to do tricks. It would have been hard to say whether Gwinny or
the pipe was more frightened when the Ogre came in. The pipe instantly
dropped on its side and shammed dead, and Gwinny wished she could, too.
   “You’ve had some sort of revolution here, haven’t you?” said the Ogre,
seeing the unusually bare room. Then he looked at Gwinny, and Gwinny
quailed. But, at that moment, the Ogre saw the pipe. “I’ve been hunting high and
low for that,” he said, and, to their horror, he came and picked it up. The pipe
shammed dead for all it was worth. “How did it get here?” asked the Ogre.
  “It—it came to light after we’d tidied up,” said Caspar.
   “Did it indeed?” said the Ogre. “Better late than never, I suppose.” And, to
their further horror, he fetched out his tobacco and began filling the pipe. “I
came up to ask you something,” he said, packing tobacco into the stiff, terrified
creature. “I wondered— Oh, are you here, too? Good.”
   Douglas and Malcolm were standing in the doorway. “We came to borrow a
record,” Douglas said, and Caspar thought it sounded remarkably like an
excuse.
  “Well, I wanted to talk to all of you,” the Ogre said, pressing tobacco home.
“You know Sally and I are giving this party on Wednesday. A lot of people
have been very kind to us, and we wanted to pay them back in style. And we
wondered—” Here he struck a match and brought it toward the pipe.
   This was too much for the poor pipe. It gave a frantic twist and tried to break
loose from the Ogre’s hand. The Ogre looked at it rotating and squirming in
front of his face as if he thought he had gone mad. Caspar, Johnny, and Gwinny
did not know what to do or say. They could only hope that, as the Ogre’s back
was half-turned toward the door, Malcolm had not noticed what was going on.
Douglas could not have seen, because he had fortunately been overcome with a
sudden attack of coughing.
   The Ogre, plainly thinking he was imagining the whole thing, put the pipe
firmly back in his mouth and applied the match to it. The pipe stopped
squirming and went stiff again. “We thought that two of you children could act
as waiters,” the Ogre said, between puffs. “Pass round olives and sandwiches
and so on.” They hardly heard him. They were all trying to see how the pipe
was faring among the clouds of smoke. “Best behavior and suits,” said the
Ogre, applying another match.
  “I’d like that,” said Johnny, without the least idea what he was saying.
Douglas’s cough came on again.
   “Would you?” said the Ogre, striking a third match. “Frankly, Johnny, you’re
the last one I’d choose, left to myself But Sally said I was to leave it to you.”
   Johnny found himself forced to defend his mistake. “You can eat an awful lot
of crisps and things while you’re passing them,” he said.
  “Precisely,” said the Ogre. The pipe was well alight now, and it had given
no further sign of life. “Gwinny’s too young to stay up, but—”
   Gwinny would have made a hearty protest at any other time. Now, all she
could think of was that the pipe seemed to be dead. “Oh, I hope it didn’t suffer
much!” she said. Douglas seemed to have got something badly stuck in his
throat. He was coughing fit to burst.
   The Ogre looked at Gwinny in some surprise. “So that leaves you boys,” he
said. “Which of you’s going to join Johnny as waiter?”
   Douglas looked up, rather wet-eyed, and said firmly, “I’ve got an awful lot
of homework these days.”
  While Caspar was trying to tear his mind from the terrible end of the pipe
and to think of a likely excuse, Malcolm said, “Football. I’ve got a football
match.”
  “Yes, we’ve both probably got a football match on Wednesday,” said
Caspar.
  “Very convenient,” said the Ogre, puffing blue smoke. The pipe was
suddenly making an extraordinary noise. It was plainly not dead yet, and that
made them very unhappy. The noise was a kind of rumbling and a rasping.
Caspar thought it must be the poor thing’s death-rattle, but it went on and on and
sounded almost too placid for that.
   Gwinny realized what it was. “The pipe!” she said. “It’s purring!” It was,
almost as loudly as Douglas was coughing. Johnny and Caspar were too
relieved for words.
  “Not really,” said the Ogre. “They make this noise when they need cleaning.
Then, since you three so plainly can’t decide, I suggest you toss for it.”
   Douglas recovered. “I want two volunteers: you and you,” he said hoarsely.
The Ogre looked at him unpleasantly over the purring pipe. “Well, it is a bit
like that, isn’t it?” said Douglas.
  The Ogre, without answering, took out a coin and spun it. “Heads or tails,
Caspar?”
  Malcolm won the toss, and looked very dejected about it.
  “I advise you to look a little less happy,” said the Ogre. “Our guests can be
counted on to eat you.” Then he went away downstairs, in a cloud of smoke,
with the pipe still purring happily in his mouth.
  “Oh, bother!” said Malcolm.
  “Flipping pest!” said Johnny.
  “Hard luck,” Douglas said cheerfully. “Sorry we barged in like that, but our
room’s in rather a mess at the moment, and we didn’t want him going in there.”
  “I think they’ve made a new discovery,” Johnny said, as he and Caspar were
getting into bed. “I wonder what. I know what I’m going to try for next.”
  “What?” said Caspar.
  “Invisibility,” said Johnny. “They can’t make me be a waiter if I’m invisible,
can they?”



                                   Chapter 1
                                                                          «^»
On Monday morning, the toffee-bars had finished Gwinny’s sweaters and were
bigger than ever. They had to give them Caspar’s green sweater, after all, while
they went to school. And, when Johnny came galloping up to their room that
afternoon, eager to begin on his search for invisibility, to his great dismay, he
met a toffee-bar half under the door, coming out. He collected it—with
difficulty, for it was now more like a long heavy belt than anything else—and
took it back to its box.
   He told Caspar, and Caspar felt this was ominous. The green sweater was
nearly all gone, too. They blocked the space under the door by doubling up
comics and nailing them to the bottom of the door. While the Ogre was
demanding from downstairs what that noise was, and they were trying to
hammer the nails as quietly as possible, a peculiar and awful smell came to
their nostrils. It was rather like the smell an electric fire makes when it has gone
wrong, only ten times stronger.
   They tracked it to the biscuit tins and Johnny took one of the lids off “I think
they’re dead,” he said, sadly surveying the motionless plastics.
  Caspar knew they were. The smell proved it. Johnny might be sad, but
Caspar could not help feeling relieved. It looked as if a number of the creatures
had been growing wings before they died. Caspar thought of them all buzzing
round the house and was thankful they had not had the chance. “You watch the
toffee-bars,” he said. “I’ll go and bury these in the garden.”
   He staggered down with the pile of smelly tins and took them to the very
furthest corner of the garden to bury. He was digging the hole, when he looked
round to see the Ogre’s pipe. It was watching him perkily from under a bush. It
looked wonderfully healthy, glossy, and happy. Evidently being smoked agreed
with it. Caspar made a fuss of it and offered it a dead, pink brick. It refused to
eat it, but when Caspar’s spade turned up a worm, the pipe pounced on that and
ate it greedily.
   “Then it’s quite happy” Gwinny said, when Caspar told her. “Do you think
the toffee-bars might be happy being eaten? That’s what they’re for, after all.”
   Somehow, neither Caspar nor Johnny felt like trying. So the toffee-bars
continued to grow and thrive. On Tuesday morning they had to find all the
cast-off trousers they could spare to make that day’s food for them. After that,
they supposed they would have to think of an excuse to ask Malcolm and
Douglas for clothes.
   Caspar came back that afternoon to find Johnny on the stairs, frantically
struggling to hold back a huge whipping toffee-bar. “Help!” said Johnny.
   Caspar cast down his schoolbags and came to Johnny’s aid. They managed
between them to catch the bar, and hauled it, flailing and resisting, back to their
room. The comics had been torn aside from the door, all the trousers eaten, and
some more carpet nibbled. Nine of the toffee-bars had draped themselves over
the radiator above the box. Luckily, it was only lukewarm. Caspar and Johnny
peeled them off it, despite their struggles. Caspar stood the box on its bottom
and they thrust the toffee-bars into it. But they were now big enough to climb
straight out again. They could only keep them in by covering the box with a
Monopoly board and weighting that down with books.
  “How many have we got?” Johnny said anxiously.
  Caspar by now heartily hated the toffee-bars, and he did not care.
“Hundreds.”
  “No, I think we’ve only got ten,” said Johnny. “That means there are nine
somewhere downstairs.”
  “Oh, my heavens!” said Caspar.
  They found the toffee-bars in the Ogre’s and Sally’s bedroom. They must
have gone there for warmth. The radiator there was the hottest in the house.
Every one of those nine bars had draped itself over the radiator and melted on
it. They were no longer creatures. Each was simply a strip of melted
golden-brown toffee plastered flat to the radiator and oozing and trickling
sluggishly onto the carpet. Johnny was near tears at the sight.
   “Don’t be an idiot!” Caspar snapped. “Start trying to get it off. I’ll go and get
a bucket of water and a scrubbing-brush.”
   Johnny mournfully knelt down in front of the radiator and began rather
hopelessly picking at the toffee. Caspar dashed off down to the kitchen to get the
fateful bucket and hurried upstairs again to the bathroom with the
scrubbing-brush clattering about in the bottom of the bucket. He put the bucket
in the bath and was just about to turn on the hot water, when he heard the Ogre
coming upstairs.
   Caspar’s first impulse was to bolt the bathroom door and lie low. But he had
left Johnny kneeling in front of the incriminating radiator. He knew he would
have to go out onto the landing instead and distract the Ogre somehow. Caspar
sighed. He went out onto the landing, perhaps not as swiftly as he might have
done. And he was just in time to see the Ogre’s back as he marched into the
bedroom.
   There was a silence. Caspar waited, nervously clutching the
scrubbing-brush. The bedroom door was flung open. The Ogre, with his face
distorted, shot out through it. He saw Caspar guiltily holding the brush, gave a
snarl of fury, and grabbed at him. Caspar turned and raced upstairs for his
bedroom. The Ogre pounded after him, much faster than Caspar had believed
possible. Caspar climbed madly, and felt as if he was moving in slow motion.
The Ogre climbed the stairs three at a time and seized Caspar’s arm as he was
rounding the bend. Caspar was so frightened that he used the judo-thing that
should have brought him twisting out from under the Ogre’s arm. But the Ogre
proved unexpectedly resistant to judo. He lost his balance, but he hung on
grimly. The result was that they both came heavily backward downstairs, in a
sort of stumbling rush, just as Johnny, hoping to get clear while the Ogre was
chasing Caspar, dodged out of the bedroom door with everyone’s towels held
to his chest in a wet bundle.
  The Ogre, now thoroughly enraged, grabbed Johnny without letting go of
Caspar and brought them together with a smash. Then he ran them into the
bedroom, much as Douglas had run Caspar and Malcolm.
  “Clean it,” he said, putting them in front of the radiator. “Get rid of this mess
before supper, or you go without. And you’re not going to be a waiter
tomorrow, Johnny, not even over my dead body!” He went straight upstairs and
told Douglas he could be waiter instead. Douglas was not pleased. He came
down and stood behind them as they labored.
   “Can’t you little squits keep out of trouble for one day?” he demanded. They
did not answer. “Well, don’t forget I owe you for this, too,” said Douglas.
   After that, Caspar tried to make Johnny get rid of the other ten toffee-bars.
Sally’s hurt and harrowed face when the Ogre showed her the mess made him
hate them more than ever. It upset Johnny, too, but he would not part with the
toffee-bars for all that.
 “Then for heaven’s sake make sure they can’t get out,” Caspar said, on
Wednesday morning.
  Johnny saw reason in this. They piled every book they had on top of the
Monopoly board over the box, and left for school feeling they had done
everything they could to keep the toffee-bars inside it.
  They came home from school to the not quite unexpected sight of six
enormous toffee-bars undulating down the stairs toward them.
   Caspar and Johnny, without a word, each seized three and wondered where
the others were. Malcolm was just behind them on the stairs and wanted to
know what was going on.
  “Nothing to do with you,” panted Johnny.
  “Because if—” Malcolm began.
   But Sally came up behind Malcolm at that moment, saying, “Please, can I ask
all of you to be very careful and quiet today, particularly this evening.”
  “Of course,” called Caspar. He and Johnny mounted the stairs as hard as they
were able, with the toffee-bars beating like cart ropes in their arms. Malcolm
had seen them by this time, and his eyes were wide. The only fortunate thing
was that Malcolm was in Sally’s way.
  “What are you doing?” Sally said.
  “Cleaning the stairs,” gasped Johnny.
  They opened the door of their room, threw the toffee-bars inside, and shut the
door firmly on them.
   “Well, don’t make that kind of noise anymore,” said Sally, arriving on the
landing behind Malcolm. “Remember we’re trying to give a grown-up party this
evening. Malcolm, I think I’ll need to press your suit. Can I get it?”
   She and Malcolm went to the other room. Caspar and Johnny opened the door
of theirs just in time to stop two of the toffee-bars coming out underneath it
again. The books were scattered all over the room, and there was now a hole in
one of Caspar’s blankets. The four missing toffee-bars had draped themselves
over the lukewarm radiator again. Caspar and Johnny once more peeled them
off it and packed them into the box with the other six. Then they piled not only
books, but cricket bats, train sets, rollerskates, and any other heavy things they
could lay hands on onto the Monopoly board, until the heap stretched halfway
up the wall. The box still heaved and bulged beneath it.
  “Oh, this is hopeless, Johnny!” Caspar said, adding his pink football to the
heap. “Please get rid of them.”
   By this time, Johnny was feeling much the same. But he wanted to be the one
to suggest it. “I’ll think about it,” he said, and busied himself with the chemistry
set.
  Then Gwinny came in and looked at the heap and the heaving box in
undisguised alarm. “Johnny, you must get rid of them,” she said.
   But this only made Johnny obstinate. “They’re only cold, poor things,” he
said. “They can’t help it.” And, after nearly an hour of arguing, he had managed
to convince himself that he was sorry for the toffee-bars and had never wanted
to get rid of them at all. “And they’d freeze in the garden,” he said.
   At that moment, Douglas thumped at the door and called out crossly. Caspar
hurried to open it, in case Douglas came in and asked about the heap of things
on the box. But Douglas did not attempt to come in. He simply stood on the
landing looking worried and annoyed. “One of you’s going to have to be waiter
after all,” he said. “Malcolm can’t.”
  “Why not?” said Caspar.
   Douglas hesitated. “Oh, come and look at him,” he said at length. “Serve him
right if you all laugh your heads off!”
  They all trooped across the landing after Douglas, feeling very interested.
Douglas flung open the door of the room and bowed to them as they went in.
   “Lady and gentlemen,” he said. “My brother, the— Hey, Malcolm! You were
orange when I went out!”
  “You didn’t have to show everyone,” Malcolm said uncomfortably.
   He was a beautiful bright green all over, even his hair and his fingernails.
His mouth and his eyes were a slightly darker green. He looked very peculiar
indeed. But, while they were staring at him, quite confounded, he became more
peculiar still. Another color seemed to be emerging through the green. At first
they could not tell what color it was going to be. Then it spread slowly,
stronger and stronger, like rings in water, or even more like the colored circles
you see when you press your eyes, and turned out to be deep crimson.
  “The green was quite pretty,” Gwinny said, in some disappointment.
  “How did you get like that?” said Caspar—and had a feeling he had said
something like this before.
  “Doing an experiment,” the now crimson Malcolm admitted. He looked as if
he had some dire disease.
  “Stupid little ass!” said Douglas. “I’d warned you.”
  “You didn’t do it on purpose, I suppose?” Johnny said suspiciously. “So as
not to be a waiter.”
   Malcolm looked indignant and began, at the same time, to flush slowly
indigo. “Of course not! It was something I was doing.” He waved toward the
table. Gwinny kept her eyes carefully on the experiment set up there, because
Malcolm now looked as if he were turning into dark stone and it worried her. “I
was just pouring in Irid. Col.” Malcolm explained, “and it splashed in my eye
and I went blue.”
  “What were you doing?” said Johnny.
  “Something complicated,” said Malcolm. “Looking for invisibility, if you
must know.”
   “Oh, so am I!” Johnny said in surprise. To Gwinny’s relief, Malcolm began
to turn yellow. She felt he looked more natural like that, even if it was a bright
daffodil yellow. “Bet I find it first,” said Johnny.
  “Who cares?“ said Douglas. ”Which of you’s going to be waiter?”
  “It’ll have to be me, I suppose,” Caspar said reluctantly.
  “Then go down and tell the Ogre,” said Douglas. “I’ll fix Sally.”
  “How?” said Caspar. “If she sees Malcolm like that, she’ll have a fit. Hey!
You called him the Ogre, too!”
  “Well, he is, isn’t he?” said Douglas. “And I’m going to tell Sally Malcolm’s
shamming ill in order not to be a waiter.” Malcolm gave a cry of indignation
and went lavender-colored. “Serve you right,” Douglas said unfeelingly. “If you
can think of any other way of stopping her coming to look at you, tell me.”
   Malcolm obviously could not. “Cheer up, Malcolm,” Gwinny said, seeing
how dejected he looked. “That’s a really pretty color.” Malcolm sighed. He
was beginning to be a deep chestnut brown when Caspar left the room to find
the Ogre.
    The Ogre, with his pipe contentedly purring in his mouth, was in the dining
room, moving the table. When Caspar came in, he said, “Take the other end and
lift it over to the wall. Then go away.”
   While they were carrying the table, Caspar explained— rather
haltingly—that Malcolm seemed to be ill. “So I think I’ll have to be waiter
instead,” he said.
   The Ogre put the table down with a thump. “No,” he said. Caspar was
intensely relieved. “You’re bound to do something unspeakable,” said the Ogre.
  “I swear I won’t,” Caspar said unconvincingly.
  “No,” said the Ogre. “If you’re there, all I’ll be able to think of is what
horrible thing you’re going to do next. I’ll make do with Douglas, thank you.”
   Caspar should have gone away at once after that. But he wanted to be able to
assure Douglas that the Ogre refused whatever he said. So he said, “But if I
promise—”
   “Then you’ll break that promise,” said the Ogre, “as surely as you’ll break
all the wine glasses.”
  Thankfully, Caspar turned to leave. But he had to stop rather suddenly as
Sally hurried in with a tray of wine glasses.
  “Don’t bring those near Caspar!” said the Ogre.
   Sally laughed. “Isn’t it a pity Malcolm’s unwell?” she said, and Caspar
could see she knew Malcolm was perfectly all right. “But it’s an ill wind. I
rather like the idea of a representative from both sides. Don’t you, Jack?”
  The Ogre looked at her balefully. “All right,” he said, to Caspar’s dismay.
“You win. But don’t blame me if he wrecks everything.”
  “Does your suit still fit you, Caspar?” said Sally.
   Three hours later, the lower part of the house had been feverishly cleared
until it looked like somewhere completely different. Gwinny was hanging about
outside the bathroom watching her mother put on make-up. Sally was wearing a
silvery dress, and Gwinny could not take her eyes off it.
   “Doesn’t Mummy look beautiful?” she said to the Ogre. She was rather
surprised to find he agreed.
  Upstairs, Malcolm was turning from puce to mustard-color, and Johnny was
anxiously watching the mound of things heaving above the toffee-bars.
Downstairs in the kitchen, Caspar and Douglas, both feeling tight in the sleeve
and constricted in the neck, were moodily standing by the trays and plates of
food spread ready on the kitchen table. Caspar was feeling that Fate had played
him a dirty trick. Douglas was worrying about Malcolm.
  “Sally’s bound to find out tomorrow,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.”
  “Have you tried washing his eye?” asked Caspar.
  “I thought of that. It doesn’t work. He is a stupid, careless idiot!” said
Douglas.
  “You sounded just like the Ogre when you said that,” said Caspar.
  “Are you trying to be funny?” growled Douglas.
   “No,” said Caspar, who was in no mood to be bullied. “Sometimes I’m
surprised Malcolm even survives, the way you sit on him.”
  Douglas glared at him, which made him look like the Ogre, too. “If you—”
    But the doorbell rang. Douglas had to hurry to let in a troop of cheerful
guests. After them came more, and more. People filled the dining room and the
sitting room, and then packed into the hall, where they stood shouting happily at
one another. The Ogre pushed his way among them with bottles of wine, and
both Douglas and Caspar were far too busy pushing their way after him with
trays of food to think of being annoyed with one another for some time. Then
they met again in the hall, where the noise seemed to be solid and Caspar could
see nothing but people’s backs. Caspar’s head was aching, and he was hating
being a waiter even more than he had thought he would. Nobody seemed to
want food anyway.
   The Ogre was pouring a drink for a lady standing at the foot of the stairs, and
Douglas was just beside him. “Oh, are these your two sons?” the lady cried
shrilly to the Ogre. The Ogre, who was too busy pouring wine to listen, nodded.
“How nice!” exclaimed the lady. “I could see they were brothers. They look so
much alike.”
   Douglas and Caspar looked at one another unlovingly over their trays. “This
was all I needed!” Douglas said into Caspar’s ear. “Fancy being taken for one
of your family!”
   “Same here,” said Caspar. And it was annoying to see from the hall mirror
that he and Douglas were, in fact, not unlike one another. Caspar turned away
crossly from their reflections and saw a toffee-bar making its way downstairs.
   Douglas had seen it, too. Caspar could tell from the expression on his face in
the mirror when he turned back to balance his tray on the hall-stand. But
Douglas said nothing. He simply held his tray of food persuasively out to the
lady.
   “Oh, those do look nice!” she said. “I oughtn’t, you know. I’m supposed to be
slimming.”
   While her attention was occupied, Caspar slipped round her and went flying
up the stairs. He caught the toffee-bar on the fifth stair and lugged it on upward,
raging.
   Johnny was near the head of the next flight, looking absolutely desperate,
wrestling with an octopus-like bundle of threshing toffee-bars. Malcolm, at that
moment a startling shade of orange, was out on the landing holding another. He
looked very nervous of it. It kept curling round his arm and he kept shaking it off
   “What on Earth do you mean, letting them out like this!” Caspar roared, with
a ferocity which would have done credit to the Ogre.
  “I can’t help it!” panted Johnny. “They keep getting out whatever I do.”
   “Then get rid of them. Now. This moment,” ordered Caspar. “This one was
right down near the hall.”
  “How can I?” demanded Johnny. “I can’t take them down through that beastly
party, can I?”
  Malcolm, flushing deep blue, suggested, “Why not throw them out of the
window?”
  “I’m not going to hurt them!” Johnny said hysterically.
   “All right,” thundered Caspar, “if you’re that soft, you can take them to the
bathroom, put them in the bath, and run hot water on them until they melt. And
do it now! You help him,” he said to Malcolm, since Malcolm plainly knew all
about it anyway.
  “But—” said Malcolm.
  “No, I—” began Johnny.
   “Do as you’re told!” Caspar howled at them. He slung the strayed toffee-bar
at Malcolm and went rushing away downstairs to retrieve his tray before
someone knocked it off the hall-stand. As he galloped downward, the noise and
smell from the party rose about him in warm waves. As he rounded the last
bend, he had a glimpse of Sally, looking very busy and pink and happy, pushing
among the shouting people, and he realized the party was going very well. But
suppose the toffee-bars got loose in it! It did not bear thinking of.
   Douglas had rescued Caspar’s tray. He was waiting at the bottom of the
stairs as Caspar came hurtling down. “Here you are,” he said. “That was one of
the Animal Spirits things, wasn’t it?”
    “Yes,” said Caspar, too distraught to wonder how he knew. “And that stupid
little fool Johnny insisted on keeping them, and now they’re all over the place!”
  “What’s he doing about them?”
   “I told him to put them in the bath and melt them,” Caspar said, rather
pleased with his idea.
   “Go back and tell him not to risk it,” Douglas said urgently. “They’ll swim
like fish, if ours are anything to go by, and think how near the bathroom is! Go
on. Go back and stop him. Hurry!”
   He glanced nervously over his shoulder. Caspar looked, too, and found that
the Ogre was pushing his way across the hall, obviously coming to ask what he
and Douglas thought they were doing. But Douglas pushed Caspar toward the
stairs and Caspar fled up them again, feeling the force of the Ogre’s glare like a
hot blast on his back.
  When he arrived in the bathroom, it was full of steam. The plug was in the
bath, the hot tap—which never ran properly—was trickling hot water, and
Johnny and Malcolm were obediently lowering struggling toffee-bars into it.
  “Take them out again,” Caspar said breathlessly. “Douglas says they’ll swim
and not to risk it.”
  “Oh, blast Douglas!” said Johnny. “Malcolm’s already told me that, and I’m
going to risk it.”
  Caspar looked at Malcolm properly and found he was his right color again.
“Thank goodness!” he said. “That’s one thing gone right, at least. How do you
know they’ll swim?”
   “Because all ours did,” said Malcolm. “Douglas tried to drown the dustballs
in Gwinny’s room and the ones in ours, and he couldn’t. Would you like to see
them?”
   “No!” bellowed Caspar. “Get those toffee-bars out. Throw them out of the
window. And I’m sending Douglas up in five minutes to make sure you’ve done
it!” Feeling extremely hectic, he pelted down into the roaring party again.
  As soon as he had gone, Johnny said to Malcolm, “What do you mean,
dustballs?”
   “Just lumps of dust,” said Malcolm. “At least, we think they were, but they
grew. They look a little like mice now.
  Shall I show you?”
  “If you like,” Johnny said, with alacrity. He took a look at the toffee-bars in
the bath. They were evidently enjoying the warm water. Each bar was nestling
down into it, and two were struggling for the place under the trickling tap. The
water was already brownish with melted toffee. “Caspar can give orders all he
likes,” he said. “But you can see that’s the kindest end for them. Come on.”
   He shut the bathroom door reverently and followed Malcolm up to his room.
There, Malcolm opened the glass cupboard and showed him a shoe box on the
bottom shelf. Huddled in it were six or seven grayish, fluffy lumps. Johnny was
charmed. To his mind, they were even better than the toffee-bars. He admired
them wholeheartedly.
   Malcolm was obviously pleased by Johnny’s admiration. “They’re not bad,”
he admitted. “But they keep getting out. There used to be loads more.” Then, as
if he were letting Johnny into an even better secret, he said, “And these are my
pencils.”
   Johnny, extremely flattered and quite lost in admiration, stared open-mouthed
at the six pencils standing upright in a row on top of the cupboard. “What do
they eat?”
  “Wood-shavings,” said Malcolm. “I have to keep sharpening ordinary
pencils for them, or they eat the furniture. They only eat at night, too. They hop
about and keep Douglas awake, and he throws things at them. That’s how he
knocked the Animal Spirits over and made the dustballs.”
  “But how did they get up to Gwinny’s room?” said Johnny. “You said—”
   “No. I made those,” Malcolm said, looking a little self-conscious. “I spilled
Animal Spirits in her room when I— when I was—Well, come and see, if you
like.”
   So once again Johnny followed Malcolm upstairs. The noise of the party
faded away behind them, and everything faded out of Johnny’s mind except
amazement at Malcolm’s secret cleverness and acute curiosity about what he
would see in Gwinny’s room.
   Gwinny was kneeling in the middle of her room cooking something in an old
tobacco tin over the spirit-lamp from Malcolm’s chemistry set. Seeing Johnny,
she looked alarmed and rather guilty.
  “It’s all right,” said Malcolm. “Can I show him the people?”
  “If you want,” Gwinny said cautiously.
  Malcolm beckoned to Johnny. “Over here. But go quietly, because they get
awfully angry if you frighten them.”
  Mystified, Johnny went to the place Malcolm showed him, to one side of
Gwinny’s dollhouse, and Gwinny watched him rather apprehensively while
Malcolm leaned forward and gently eased off the front of the dollhouse. Johnny
peered past him into its small dining room. The ten dollhouse dolls were sitting
at the table, in the middle of eating supper. They were only too clearly alive. A
number of them looked round irritably at the gap in the front of their house.
Johnny could not help laughing at the expression on their faces.
  Gwinny relaxed. “Are they ready for their pudding?” she asked.
  “I think so,” said Malcolm.
  “Well, it won’t be long,” said Gwinny.
  One of the men dolls left his chair and came to the gap. He pointed at Johnny
and shouted something in a small grating voice that reminded Johnny of a tummy
rumbling. Johnny laughed again, rather nervously.
  “I don’t understand their language,” Gwinny explained. “But I think he means
go away, they’re having supper. Move over and let me give them this.”
   Johnny obediently moved, and watched, fascinated, while Gwinny spooned
warmed-up custard into a tureen one of the women dolls fetched for her. He
could not have described his thoughts. He felt he ought to be angry with Gwinny
for making friends with Malcolm behind his back like this—except that he felt
quite friendly toward Malcolm himself. He felt extremely honored to be shown
all Malcolm’s secrets, too. His only unpleasant feeling was a certain amount of
envy. Malcolm had done such clever things with the Animal Spirits.
  “I must get them a kitchen,” said Gwinny. “They insist on a hot meal a day.
But Malcolm lends me his lamp very kindly.”
   Malcolm was looking shyly at Johnny, to see what he thought of the people.
“It’s a terribly good idea,” Johnny said. “I wish I’d thought of it.”
   “We didn’t do anything as good as the Ogre’s pipe,” said Malcolm. “I
thought Douglas was going to burst when he saw it.”
  “My people are quite as good!” Gwinny said indignantly.
  “What else did you do?” asked Johnny.
   Malcolm looked a little shamefaced. “Well—Douglas did it actually. He
said it was to pay Caspar back.”
  “Did what?” Johnny asked suspiciously.
  “I think I’d better show you,” Malcolm said glumly, and got up.
  Since Gwinny was quite as anxious as Johnny to know just what Douglas had
done, she followed the boys downstairs, into the noise and smell of the party
again. To their surprise, Malcolm took them into Johnny’s and Caspar’s room
this time, and over to the cupboard.
   “In here,” he said, opening it. “You’ll curse.” Then he said, in considerable
dismay, “Oh dear!”
   Johnny thrust him aside and looked in. On the bottom shelf, comfortably
curled up in the remains of Douglas’s old sweater, were the two largest
toffee-bars yet. They were the dark, treacly kind and had probably been the
large seven-penny size to begin with. By now, they were as big as conger eels.
And, in a wriggling heap beside them, were at least a dozen tiny toffee-bars,
still too small to have cast their red and yellow wrappers.
  “Oh!” exclaimed Gwinny. “They’ve had babies! How sweet!”
   “Sweet!” Johnny said bitterly. All he could think about was the number of
them. “Oh, blast Douglas! And I daren’t tell Caspar. He’d go mad!” Talking of
Caspar took his mind to other things. A troublesome thought struck him. “I say!
Did I turn the bathwater off, or not?”
   Caspar, meanwhile, was still trying to get hold of Douglas. He could see him
in the doorway of the sitting room as he came downstairs. But Sally was at the
foot of the stairs talking to the lady who thought he was Douglas’s brother.
   “Darling, what have you been doing?” she said. “Do, please, stop
disappearing like this.”
  “Sorry,” said Caspar. “It’s the younger ones, really.”
  “Ah, you take your new responsibilities seriously, do you?” said the lady,
and made Caspar want to scream quietly.
   He rescued his tray and set off toward where he had seen Douglas, but Sally
said, “Not that way, Caspar. You go to the dining room.”
   Caspar pushed his way toward the dining room, meaning to go the other way
as soon as he was out of sight. The more he thought about it, the less he trusted
Johnny and Malcolm either to throw the toffee-bars out of a window or to melt
them without letting most of them loose. Only Douglas, he felt, could see that
they did it. And he thought he ought to set Douglas’s mind at rest about
Malcolm, too. But luck was against him. The Ogre was in the doorway of the
dining room. He was not pleased with Caspar, and let him know it.
   “Oh, are you with us again?” he said in a loud voice. “I’d hoped you’d gone
for good.” A number of people around the Ogre laughed heartily. Caspar
thought it a typically mean and Ogrish thing to say. “They’re shouting for food in
the dining room,” added the Ogre.
   So Caspar was forced to go into the dining room without having found
Douglas. He thought the best thing to do was to work his way to the other end,
go out through the kitchen, and from the kitchen to the hall. But it took him some
time. All the people packed into the dining room seemed ravenous for food,
suddenly. They called Caspar this way and that and wanted to know if there
were any sausages.
   “I’ll go and see,” Caspar promised. He was more uneasy than ever, and he
felt he simply had to find out what Johnny was up to. Leaving his nearly empty
tray on the sideboard, he pushed his way to the other end of the dining room.
   He had nearly fought his way to the kitchen door, when something warm
splashed on his wrist. It was followed by a warm wet splash on his nose. He
looked up. Most of the people round Caspar were looking up, too, and looking
annoyed. The reason was a brownish, spreading stain on the ceiling. It doubled
in size while Caspar looked at it, and the drips came faster and faster.
   Caspar dived for the kitchen door. The drips, at the same moment, turned into
a waterfall. Water fairly thundered down. Sally opened the kitchen door,
holding a tray of sausages. She and Caspar stared at one another through a
steaming cascade.
  “What’s happening?” said Sally.
   “I’ll find out,” said Caspar. He rushed through the waterfall into the kitchen
and ran, steaming and gasping, into the hall. Water was coming through there,
too, and he got another ducking, shut his eyes, and ran into Douglas coming the
other way.
  “What the—?”
  “They’ve let the bath run over,” said Caspar. “Come on.”
   He and Douglas struggled for the stairs. From the dining room came the
sounds and smells of a tropical rainstorm. Sopping people, crying out with
dismay, came surging out into the hall and made it difficult for the two boys to
get through at all. When they reached the foot of the stairs, the lady who thought
they were brothers was no longer there. Her place had been taken by a fat jolly
man who playfully prevented them from getting by—unless the lady had turned
into a man. Caspar felt anything was possible just then.
  “What’s going on, eh?” said the fat man, blocking the end of the stairs.
  “Accident,” said Douglas. “Please let us through.”
  “Reinforcements at hand! Taran-taran-tarar!” shouted the fat man and sat
heavily on the bottom stair. They climbed over him desperately, and he tried to
hit them as they went.
   They pounded up the stairs and reached the bathroom at the same time as
Johnny, Malcolm, and Gwinny The door was open. The landing was a fog of
steam. Through it, dimly, they saw the bathroom floor awash and the bath
brimful of slightly toffee-colored water.
  “You stupid little oaf.” Douglas thundered at Johnny.
  “I told you not to!” bawled Caspar.
  “I didn’t mean—” said Johnny.
   The Ogre breasted the steam and materialized in the bathroom door. He was
carrying the back-brush. “Which of you did this?” he enquired in an
unpleasantly quiet voice.
  “Er,” said Johnny. “Me.”
   “And me,” said Malcolm bravely, though he was white with terror. “I
distracted his attention at a crucial moment.”
   “Then,” said the Ogre, “the rest of you get downstairs and pass out umbrellas
or something. You two come in here.”
  Johnny found he had been right to postpone being hit by the Ogre. It was an
exceedingly unpleasant experience. To Caspar’s mind, the most unpleasant part
was what the Ogre said to Sally after the last draggled guest had departed.



                                 Chapter 11
                                                                        «^»
Sally did not appear at breakfast the next day. “Your mother’s feeling rather
tired,” the Ogre said, when Gwinny asked. No one was surprised. The Ogre’s
idea of breakfast was thick, lumpy porridge, which he ate with salt and seemed
to enjoy. No one else found it easy to eat, and Malcolm, who was looking white
and ill, had none at all. And, as they set off for school, Caspar was positive he
saw a toffee-bar crossing the sitting-room floor. It looked as if Johnny’s
disaster had not got rid of them, after all.
    When Gwinny got home, the house was queerly silent. At first, she thought
the queerness had to do with the stale wine smell left over from the party. Then
it dawned on her that she could not hear Sally moving about anywhere. Sally
always reached home before Gwinny did.
  “She must be ill,” Gwinny thought. “Poor Mummy, all alone ill all day.”
   She went quietly and considerately upstairs and softly opened her mother’s
bedroom door. The room was empty and the bed unmade. A heavy smell of
toffee hung in the air. The reason, Gwinny saw, was that every remaining
toffee-bar in the house had made for the warmth of this room’s radiator and
melted to death on it. More than half of them were Douglas’s dark ones. Parents
and babies, too, had flocked to the radiator. Little red and yellow wrappers
fluttered in the updraft or slowly slid down the sleepy, dark rivers of melting
toffee. Pale toffee overlaid dark toffee, and dark toffee trickled on top of that.
The radiator was fat with it, and it had dripped to the carpet in a dozen small
growing mountains.
   That must have upset Mummy, Gwinny thought. But she was too puzzled
about where Sally could be to bother with the poor, silly toffee-bars. Sally was
not in the still-damp bathroom, or in any other bedroom. She was nowhere
downstairs. Gwinny went back to the toffee-scented room and thoughtfully
opened Sally’s wardrobe. The silvery party dress was hanging there, but most
of the everyday clothes had gone.
    With an anxious, heavy, foreboding feeling, Gwinny went downstairs to the
Ogre’s study and sat in the Ogre’s leather chair to wait for the Ogre. After a
minute, there was a slight clatter, and the Ogre’s pipe hopped up from the
garden onto the sill of the open window. It looked at Gwinny inquiringly.
Gwinny stretched out a hand and made a fuss of it, but her heart was not in it.
She was waiting. At length, the Ogre’s car growled past the side of the house
and crunched on the gravel. The door slammed. The Ogre’s heavy footsteps
filled the empty house. The pipe, knowing the sound, scuttled across to the
pipe-rack on the desk and put itself there, ready to be smoked.
  The Ogre opened the study door and came in, with his least likable
expression on his face. “What do you think you’re doing here?” he said when he
saw Gwinny. “Get out.”
   Gwinny stood up. “Will you please tell me where Mummy is?” she said
bravely.
  The Ogre glowered. “She went to your grandmother’s. She needed a rest.”
  “Oh,” said Gwinny. “Did she go straight from work?”
  “She did,” said the Ogre. “Out.”
  Gwinny, very straight and upright, walked past him and along the hall. She
knew something was not right. And she felt heavier and more anxious than ever.
The front door opened as she reached the hall. Gwinny stood still and watched
Caspar, Johnny, and Malcolm come in.
  “Is something wrong?” Caspar said, seeing her face.
   Gwinny nodded. “Mummy’s gone. The Ogre said she’s gone to Granny’s
straight from work.”
  All three looked at her in dismay. None of them were exactly surprised,
remembering the expression on Sally’s face the night before, and the things the
Ogre had said to her. But it was odd.
  “Why didn’t she tell us?” Johnny said.
   “I don’t know,” said Gwinny. “But I don’t think the Ogre was telling the
truth.”
  “Why not?” said Caspar.
  “Because she hasn’t made her bed,” said Gwinny. “She always does.”
Johnny and Caspar looked at one another in alarm and bewilderment.
  “You could check up,” Malcolm suggested. “Does your grandmother have a
phone?” He was very pale and tired-looking. Gwinny thought he might be ill.
  “Are you all right?” she asked.
  “Perfectly,” said Malcolm.
   Caspar threw down his schoolbags and seized the address-book by the
telephone. He found the number and dialed.
  “Where’s the Ogre?”
  “Study,” said Gwinny. “Don’t talk loud.”
   Granny answered the phone. “Caspar! Well, I never!” She was both
surprised and delighted. “And how are you all?”
   With his stomach sinking a little, Caspar said, “Fine, Granny. Has Mum
arrived yet?”
  “Your mother?” said Granny. “No, I’ve not seen Sally, dear. Why?”
  Caspar did not quite know what to say after this. “Well,” he explained
hesitantly, “I thought she was supposed to be coming to see you straight from
work.”
  “Oh, I see!” cried Granny. “Thank you for warning me, dear. Sally knows
how I hate being taken by surprise. I’ll go and put a cake in the oven for her.
Thank you, dear. Goodbye.” Since Caspar had no idea how to explain what he
meant without alarming Granny thoroughly, he was thankful when she rang off
  “Well?” asked Johnny.
  “Granny didn’t know she was coming. But she might just not have got there
yet,” Caspar said, hoping for the best.
  “Well, she ought to have done,” said Gwinny. “Because I think she went this
morning.”
  “So do I, now I think about it,” said Malcolm.
   They looked at one another, all thoroughly alarmed, wondering what this
meant. And while they were standing in a group, staring, the front door opened
again and Douglas came in. He stopped short when he saw the look on their
faces. “What’s up?” he said.
  “Mummy’s gone,” said Gwinny. “And the Ogre told me a lie about where she
was.”
   Douglas looked as dismayed as they were, and more dismayed still as they
explained. “You have to hand it my father,” he said at length. “He certainly has
a knack of getting rid of his wives.”
   The story of Bluebeard burst into Johnny’s head. “You don’t think,” he said,
“that he’s killed her and buried her at the end of the garden, do you?” Gwinny
was horrified.
   “Don’t be a nit!” said Douglas. “People don’t do that.” Somehow; neither
Gwinny nor Johnny was reassured by the way he said it. And, unfortunately,
Caspar was too worried himself to think of backing Douglas up. So Gwinny and
Johnny both gained a distinct impression that, if it had chanced to be the fashion
to kill your wife and bury her at the end of the garden, Douglas would have
expected the Ogre to do it. “You see,” said Douglas, glancing at Malcolm. Then
he saw how ill Malcolm was looking. “You’d better get to bed,” he said.
  “If you don’t mind,” Malcolm said politely, “I think I will.”
   At that, Caspar and Johnny noticed how poorly he seemed and loudly told
him not to be a fool and to go to bed at once. Malcolm went away upstairs
rather gladly.
   “He always gets ill if people hit him,” Douglas explained. “I was up half the
night with him and—”
  “Don’t you hit him, then?” Caspar asked, in some surprise.
   “Of course not!” Douglas said irritably. “But the point is, I think Sally may
even have left last night. They had a flaming row, anyway. They were shouting
at one another until after three o’clock.”
  “What about?” Johnny asked miserably.
   “You, I think,” said Douglas. “Then I heard Sally slamming round the house
afterward. And I don’t think she was here this morning, whatever Father said.”
  “Then where do you think she went?” said Caspar.
  “Couldn’t tell you for toffee, I’m afraid,” said Douglas.
  Gwinny clapped her hands over her mouth. “Oh! The toffee-bars! They’re all
over that radiator again. I forgot.”
  “Oh no!” said Johnny.
  They all streamed upstairs to look. The mess was, if possible, worse now.
“Wow!” said Douglas, when he saw it.
   “The ones you hid in our cupboard had babies, in case you didn’t know,”
Johnny told him. Caspar was too depressed to do more than give Douglas a
disgusted look.
  “I’m sorry,” said Douglas. “How was I to know they’d do this? We’d better
get it cleared up before the Ogre sees it.”
   Nobody argued about that. Douglas fetched the fateful bucket again. Johnny
brought six towels—Sally’s was missing. Gwinny found soap and soda and
washing-powder, and Caspar collected all the fluttering wrappers. Then they
all set to work to peel the upper layers of toffee off the radiator.
   The Ogre, alerted by the clattering of the bucket and the running of taps,
appeared in the doorway while they were doing it. Johnny uttered a yelp of
dismay. They all froze. “Who did it this time?” said the Ogre.
  Since nobody exactly had done it, nobody answered.
  “Are you here in an organizing capacity, Douglas?” the Ogre inquired. “Or
have they corrupted you, too?”
   Douglas went red. “It may surprise you to know,” he said, “that it was at
least half my fault.”
    The Ogre shook his head. “It doesn’t surprise me at all. Johnny and Caspar
could corrupt a saint. And I’ve had enough of them. I’m going to get rid of them
if I can.”
 “Get rid of them?” Gwinny said, quite appalled. “Like you got rid of
Mummy, you mean?”
  “I haven’t got rid of Sally,” the Ogre said irritably.
  “Then what have you done with her?” demanded Caspar. “You didn’t tell
Gwinny the truth, did you?”
  “You lied,” said Johnny.
  “Yes, whatever you did, you’d no call to lie to them,” Douglas said angrily.
   The Ogre looked at their four defiant faces in the greatest surprise. He could
not in the least understand why they should be so angry. It never once occurred
to him that they needed to be told the truth. “You’re all being quite ridiculous,”
he said. “Sally’s simply gone away for a short holiday. You wretched children
had tired her out between you.”
  “She hasn’t gone to Granny, though,” said Caspar. “And why didn’t she tell
us?”
  “If you must know, she’s gone to a hotel by the seaside,” said the Ogre. “And
she didn’t tell you because she was sick and tired of you.”
  “Is that the truth this time?” Douglas demanded.
   “Douglas,” said the Ogre, “you may bully Malcolm, but you are not going to
use that tone with me.” They all knew at once from this that he had not told them
the truth. And, if they needed anything more to complete their hatred and distrust
of him, they had it in what he said next. “This is your fault, Caspar and Johnny,”
he said. “You two are destroying Sally’s health, what with your water and your
toffee and climbing on roofs, and I’m going to send you away to boarding
school after Christmas to learn some decent behavior. I’ve had enough of you.”
  Caspar and Johnny were too appalled to speak. Douglas said, “That’s quite
unfair! It’s just that these two haven’t learned how not to be found out yet, and
we have!”
  “I take it you’re asking to be sent away, too?” said the Ogre.
  “No fear!” said Douglas, with deep feeling.
  “Then don’t provoke me,” said the Ogre. “Get this revolting mess cleaned
up, and then get down to the kitchen and find something we can eat.”
   It took them well over an hour to get all the toffee off the radiator. Then
Douglas went down to the kitchen and did his best there. His best turned out to
be large quantities of baked beans, which were stuck together in lumps, and
also rather chilly.
  “Is this all you could manage?” demanded the Ogre discontentedly.
  “It’s the only thing I know how to cook,” Douglas explained.
  Caspar, Johnny, and Gwinny were astonished at his ignorance. “We can all
do bacon and eggs,” said Caspar. “And Gwinny knows lots of things.”
  “Thank God!” said the Ogre. “Then put those beans back in the tins and do
bacon and eggs.”
   They obeyed him. Gwinny thought that perhaps the beans would not keep in
opened tins, so Caspar reheated them in the frying pan. “Go and ask Malcolm if
he wants any,” he told Johnny.
  “Where is Malcolm?” asked the Ogre. “Buried in an experiment?”
  “No, ill. And you haven’t even noticed,” said Douglas.
   When Johnny went upstairs, he found Malcolm asleep, with the six pencils
standing on his pillow as if they were guarding him. His face was so wan and
white that it quite worried Johnny. But Johnny felt it was no good telling the
Ogre. The Ogre did not care two hoots whether any of them lived or died—with
perhaps a bias in favor of their dying.
   At this notion, the beginnings of an idea came into Johnny’s head. He went
over to the table, where Malcolm had left his chemistry set, and took a cautious
look to see how Malcolm was getting on with his search for invisibility. To his
pleasure, he found Malcolm had actually left a page of notes about it. Johnny,
who carried everything comfortably jostling about in his head, was rather
astonished by this, but he picked the paper up all the same. Then, feeling rather
dishonorable, and keeping a wary eye on Malcolm’s sleeping face, he read the
notes through.
   It was a list of the combinations Malcolm had tried, using one main
ingredient from the lower layer and a number of other things, and an account of
what he had done to each combination. One way and another, Johnny had tried
two-thirds of them, too. The other third, Malcolm had now saved him doing.
Better still, Malcolm had made two headings for his next experiments, which
“were to be with Dens Drac. and Petr. Philos., both of which Johnny had
already tried. Which left only Noct. Vest, that neither of them had tried. They
were very close! Johnny promised to himself that he would make Malcolm a
present of the formula when he had it, to make up for reading his notes, and
crept out of the room.
  “He’s asleep,” he reported downstairs.
  “More for the rest of us,” said the Ogre, with a total lack of feeling.
  “You wait!” thought Johnny. “With any luck, you’ll be in prison by Sunday.”
    Everyone ate the bacon and eggs with such gusto that Gwinny was hard put to
it to find any spare food for her people. All she could collect was baked beans,
bacon-rind, and a rather old tangerine. She put these things in a teacup and went
upstairs to borrow Malcolm’s spirit-lamp as usual.
   Malcolm was still asleep, and the pencils were still standing guard on his
pillow. Gwinny was alarmed at how pale his face was. She stood and looked at
him for a while, and, the longer she looked, the more angry and motherly she
felt about him. “But it’s no good telling the Ogre,” she thought. “He won’t
care.” Besides, it was the Ogre who had made Malcolm ill by hitting him last
night. He must have hit him awfully hard, Gwinny thought. Johnny had cried his
eyes out. She stared at Malcolm’s pale face, quite forgetting the damage he and
Johnny had done between them, and the list of the Ogre’s crimes grew longer in
her head. After hitting the boys, the Ogre had done something dreadful to
Sally—something so dreadful that he dared not tell them the truth. He was going
to send Caspar and Johnny to a horrible school—Gwinny knew it must be
horrible, since Douglas preferred to stay at home with the Ogre rather than be
sent there. And now the Ogre did not care that Malcolm was ill.
   It seemed to Gwinny that it was high time someone put the Ogre down, before
he did anything else.
   She squared her shoulders and went over to the chemistry set. The chemicals
with the most poisonous names seemed to be Noct. Vest., a nasty, spiky name,
and Petr. Philos., which sounded like the noise you made being sick. Gwinny
took two fresh test-tubes and carefully poured two-thirds of each chemical into
them. After that, with great consideration, she sharpened a heap of
pencil-shavings onto Malcolm’s pillow, so that his pencils should not disturb
him by asking for food in the night. Then she took her test-tubes and the
spirit-lamp away upstairs.
   There was a scampering of dustballs as she opened her door. Gwinny was no
longer afraid of them—as she had been when Malcolm first made them—but
there were such a lot of them that they were a dreadful nuisance. They ran
everywhere and ate her people’s food. Her people had taken all her pins and
needles to use as weapons against them. The dollhouse was in a state of siege
this evening. The people would not let her open it, even when she had shooed
the dustballs away. In the end, she had to hand them their baked beans on a
teaspoon through their bedroom window.
  “Oh dear!” Gwinny said. “I wish I had some rat poison.”
   This caused her to look at her two test-tubes again. Petr. Philos. had turned
out to be little pieces of stone, rather like road chippings. She decided, on
second thought, not to use it, in case the Ogre noticed it crunching in his teeth.
So she took just Noct. Vest, downstairs with her.
  Half an hour later, the smell of baking drew Douglas from the sitting room,
where he was working in order not to disturb Malcolm, and Caspar from
upstairs. Johnny was very busy with crucibles and would not leave them.
  “Those look good!” Caspar exclaimed, as Gwinny carefully turned out
twelve warm, golden buns onto a wire tray. He seized one and crammed it
whole into his mouth. Douglas seized two and did the same.
   Gwinny smiled as she went to the oven again. That meant her baking was
sure to tempt the Ogre. Very carefully, she fetched out the thirteenth cake.
  Douglas looked at it over her shoulder. “What’s that?” he asked, with his
mouth full.
  “It’s not for you,” Gwinny said firmly.
  “I should hope not!” said Douglas.
   This cake was not golden, but gray. It had a hard, rocky look, and its surface
glittered in an odd way. Gwinny had tried to make it look more edible by
planting a cherry not quite in the middle.
   Caspar looked at it critically. “If I were you,” he said, “I should give that to
the O—”
    The Ogre, also attracted by the smell, came in at that moment. Gwinny, rather
pink in the face, hastily put the gray cake back in the oven and shut the door on
it. She had no wish to do her deed in public.
  “Congratulations, Gwinny,” said the Ogre with his mouth full, and went out
again.
  Douglas and Caspar stared outraged at the one bun remaining.
  “He ate eight!” said Caspar.
  “Isn’t that typical?” said Douglas, but Gwinny only smiled.
   As Caspar went back into his room, Johnny gave a cry of triumph and held up
a piece of filter-paper with a hole in the middle.
  “Got it! It’s when you heat it up and let it go cool again.”
  “Got what?” said Caspar.
  “Aha!” said Johnny. “Just try putting your finger through the hole in this
paper, then you’ll see.”
   He held the paper out in both hands toward Caspar. Caspar obligingly knelt
down beside Johnny and put out a finger. To his surprise, his finger did not go
straight through the hole. It met, instead, something which felt exactly like damp
filter-paper. Almost unable to believe it, Caspar carefully ran his finger all
over the blank space. It was astonishing. He could see Johnny’s sweater through
the space, but the hole was blocked with invisible, pulpy filter-paper.
   “Good Lord!” he said. “It’s invisible!” He took his finger away and found
that the tip of it had gone slightly blurry. As he looked, the whole top joint
blurred and then vanished. It had gone so completely that Caspar could not help
taking a quick look down at his finger from top view. He had half-expected to
see a cross-section of bone and flesh. But it simply looked pink. Gingerly, he
touched the space where the missing top joint should have been. And he could
feel it still there.
  “I wish you hadn’t done that!” Johnny said crossly.
  “Why?” said Caspar, who was beginning to feel rather pleased with it.
  “Because the Ogre’s bound to notice.”
   “The Ogre wouldn’t notice if I stuck it in his eye,” said Caspar. “And do
let’s think about where Mum’s gone now. She must be somewhere.”
   But Johnny did not seem to want to discuss Sally. “It’s the Ogre’s fault,” he
said. “And he’ll pay for it. You wait.” Then somewhat to Caspar’s surprise, he
packed up his chemistry set and went to bed.
   Since Caspar was also rather tired, he, too, went to bed early, and then lay
awake a long time wondering where Sally was, why she had gone, and why the
Ogre would not tell them. Then he thought of sixteen totally unlikely ways of
finding her. And, finally, he began dismally wondering whether boarding school
was as dreadful as he feared. The only comfort he could see was that Malcolm
had survived one. And that was not very comforting.



                                 Chapter 12
                                                                          «^»
As soon as he was quite sure that Caspar was asleep at last, Johnny got up again
and dressed. Stealthily, in the dark, he felt about and found the test-tube he had
put out ready. Carefully, quietly, feeling his way by the wall, he crept
downstairs to the bathroom. Only when he had the door safely locked did he
dare turn on a light. He sighed with relief then, and turned on the hot tap to its
smallest, quietest trickle. As soon as it was running properly hot, he put the plug
in the bath and began shaking the powder from the test-tube into the hot trickle,
until he had about four inches of clear, steaming, lilac-colored liquid. Then he
turned the tap off and sat down on the clothes basket to wait for the liquid to
cool. He was determined to do this properly, and he knew it was going to be a
long job.
   Gwinny meanwhile, tossed and turned in her bed. The scutterings of the
dustballs kept waking her up, and in between she had terrible dreams. The first
time she woke up she told herself she did not repent of her crime—not in the
least. All she had done, after all, was to rid the world of an Ogre, quickly and
quite kindly. The others would say she had done right. And they might even
wish they had thought of it, too.
   The second time she woke up, the cistern in the loft was making a great deal
of noise, almost more than the dustballs. This was Johnny’s doing, but Gwinny
thought it must be the Ogre having a bath. And that meant the Ogre had not gone
to bed yet and not yet eaten the cake. Gwinny knew she would have to lie and
listen for the dreadful moment when he did. She had left the cake on his bedside
table, with a doily under it to make it look prettier, and she had sort of made his
bed, to give him the idea she was looking after him now that Sally was gone.
But, in the dark, with the cistern running and the dust-balls scuffling, Gwinny
began to think that this had been deceitful of her. She had no business to let the
Ogre think she liked him enough to make his bed and give him cakes. But she
had to admit she could hardly have got him to eat the gray cake any other way.
So she covered her head with the bedclothes, in order not to hear when he came
out of the bathroom, and fell asleep.
   The third time she woke up, the dustballs were running about in droves,
squeaking. And Gwinny started up, with the most vivid memory of all the things
she had put in the gray cake. They were more than even an Ogre’s stomach
could bear. Gwinny could see, before her in the dark, a vision of the Ogre
clutching his stomach and rolling in agony. It was awful. In her efforts to finish
him off quickly, she had been most horribly unkind. She knew it now. She just
had to get up and see if he was dead yet—and if he was not, she would have to
wake Douglas and ask him to put the Ogre out of his misery.
  Gwinny did not like the dark, particularly not with a corpse in the house. She
switched on lights as she crept downstairs, until she came to the door of the
Ogre’s bedroom. She did not quite like to turn on the light in the room itself, so
she pushed the door wide open to let the light from the landing shine in.
  As she did so, the Ogre gave the most dreadful, rattling groan.
   Gwinny stopped in the doorway, appalled. She could see the Ogre quite
clearly. He was lying on his back, not moving. But his mouth was open and, as
Gwinny peered forward, out of it came another rattling groan. Just to make quite
sure, Gwinny crept into the room. The cake was gone, right enough. The doily
was still there, but the Ogre had eaten the cake, thinking Gwinny was being
kind, and now he was dying in his sleep. It was terrible. He groaned for a third
time.
  “Oh, wake up! Wake up!” Gwinny said frantically. Now she knew what she
had done, she wanted to stop it at once. But she dared not touch the Ogre in case
she finished him off completely. She dared not call Douglas. And when the
Ogre groaned yet again, she dared do nothing except wonder how she came to
be so wicked. “Oh dear!” Gwinny said, hovering round the edge of the bed. “Oh
dear! Oh dear! Oh dear!”
   The Ogre shut his mouth on another groan, rolled over, and switched on the
bedside light. “Oh, it’s you!” he said crossly. “What on earth are you doing at
this time of night?”
   Gwinny stared at him, confounded. He was blinking and tousled, and clearly
in none too good a temper, but he seemed nothing like dead. Perhaps the poison
took a long time to work after all. “Do you think you could make yourself go
sick?” Gwinny said earnestly.
  “No, I could not,” said the Ogre. “Whatever for?”
  “Because you may not know it, but you’re awfully ill,” said Gwinny. “You
were making the most terrible groans in your sleep just now—”
  The Ogre sighed. “Groans?” he said. “Oh, I shall never understand children!
Go back to bed, Gwinny. I was only snoring. I’m not in the least ill.”
  “Yes, you are!” Gwinny said, wringing her hands. “You ate my cake and
you’re going to die!”
   A shade of alarm entered the Ogre’s sleepy face. “I ate eight,” he said. Then
a reassuring thought struck him. “And Douglas and Caspar ate the rest, but
they’re all right, aren’t they?”
  “Not those, stupid!” Gwinny said. “My special gray cake that I put beside
your bed to poison you!” The Ogre looked completely blank. Feeling she was
never going to convince him, Gwinny pointed to the empty doily. “You must
have eaten it. It’s gone. It was on that. And you’re going to die and I don’t want
you to!” she said, bursting into tears.
  The Ogre, looking exceedingly alarmed, got hastily out of bed. “What did you
put in this gray cake, Gwinny?” But now Gwinny had started crying she was
quite unable to stop. The Ogre had to take hold of her and shake her slightly,
and ask her again, before she could answer.
  “I put,” she sobbed, “I put Noct. Vest, out of Malcolm’s chemistry set.”
  “Well, that’s supposed to be nontoxic,” said the Ogre. “Maybe there’s no
harm done.”
   “But I put six of Mummy’s sleeping pills squashed-up in it,” continued
Gwinny, “and detergent and the bottle from the cupboard that says Poison and
some firelighter and ammonia, and then I rolled it on the floor to get germs and
spat on it for more germs, and instead of sugar on the outside I put the burning
kind of soda. And I think it ended up awfully poisonous.”
   By the end of this list, the Ogre’s face was almost as gray as the cake had
been. “My God!” he said faintly. “I think it did!” But as Gwinny burst into
renewed sobs, he said, “And I haven’t eaten it. Gwinny, are you listening? I’ve
not seen it. It certainly wasn’t here when I came to bed. Are you sure you put it
here, really?”
  “Of course I did,” wept Gwinny. “You must have seen it.”
  “No, I haven’t,” insisted the Ogre. “So you see what that means, don’t you?
Someone else in the house must have eaten it.”
  This possibility had never occurred to Gwinny. She cried harder than ever.
“Not Caspar or Douglas,” she said. “They didn’t like the looks of it.”
 “That leaves Malcolm and Johnny,” the Ogre said anxiously “Oh, lord!
Malcolm didn’t have any supper, did he?”
  “Oh no!” wept Gwinny, quite horrified at the idea. “He was asleep!”
   “And what’s to prevent him waking up hungry?” asked the Ogre. “Gwinny,
don’t you understand—?” He stopped and listened. It sounded to her like the
water running out of the bath and someone at the same time quietly easing back
the bolt. “I think your victim may be in the bathroom at the moment,” said the
Ogre. “Wait here.” He got up and went out to the landing. Gwinny, most
anxious, followed him as far as the doorway. The Ogre waited for whoever it
was to open the bathroom door. When no one did, he opened it himself
   The bathroom was in darkness. The Ogre, as puzzled as Gwinny was, leaned
inside and switched on the light.
  “No one here,” said the Ogre, scratching his head a little.
  He went into the bathroom to make sure.
   As soon as he moved from the doorway, Gwinny heard someone come
through it. Someone crossed the landing— she felt the wind they made and the
slight warmth of them— and hurried with quiet, invisible footsteps upstairs.
After that, the Ogre might be puzzled enough to lie down and look under the
bath, but Gwinny knew that either Johnny or Malcolm had found out how to
make himself invisible. Struck by a sudden, beautiful hope, she scampered back
to the Ogre’s bedside. She put out her hand and felt the doily. And never had
she been more relieved in her life. The cake was there. Hard as a rock and
gritty as granite, it was there under her fingers. She had simply made it invisible
somehow.
   Heartily thankful, Gwinny put out both hands to it and picked it up. It was
heavy as a stone. She hurried with it to the wastepaper basket and opened her
hands above it. The invisible cake fell with a thump that rocked the wastepaper
basket and scattered toffee-wrappers. Gwinny was rubbing her hands on her
nightdress to get rid of the invisible soda, when the Ogre came back, looking
extremely sleepy and thoroughly puzzled.
  “I could have sworn—” he said.
  “I found the cake!” Gwinny said, pointing triumphantly. “It’s here, in your
wastepaper basket. Somebody threw it away.”
   She prayed that the Ogre would not come and look. Luckily, he was far too
sleepy, and he could see from her sudden cheerfulness that she was speaking the
truth. He sat heavily down on the bed. “Thank heaven for that! Now come over
here, Gwinny, and tell me what made you decide to poison me.”
   Gwinny began to cry again at this, and she approached very reluctantly
indeed. It was some time before she was perched on the bed also, as far away
from the Ogre as she could be. It was difficult to explain, too. “Well,” she
began, at last. “You’re so horrible, you see.”
  “I am?” said the Ogre dismally. “A promising beginning. Go on.”
  Gwinny twiddled her toes for encouragement, and went on. “Always fussing
about noise and never letting anyone do anything and making everyone afraid of
you. But I’d sort of got used to that. But then you hit Johnny and hit him, and hit
Malcolm so that he was ill. And you got rid of Mummy and told lies about it,
and Johnny thinks you buried her at the end of the garden, and Douglas almost
agreed, but I think you must have done it farther afield than that. Now you’re
going to get rid of Johnny and Caspar, too—”
  “Only send them to school,” the Ogre protested, sounding rather depressed.
  “But they go to school, anyway,” Gwinny pointed out. “You just want them
out of the way because they disturb you a lot. And Douglas would rather live
with you than go to boarding school, so you can see what it’s like. But it was
mostly because of what you did to Mummy and Malcolm that I decided to put
you down.”
   This finished what Gwinny had to say, so she stopped. A silence followed.
Gwinny could not help looking nervously sideways at the Ogre. She expected to
see his face distorted with rage, but, in fact, he just looked tired and gloomy and
seemed to be deep in thought. She sat twiddling her toes, until the Ogre asked,
rather cautiously, “Are you going to have another shot at putting me down?”
  “No. It’s too wicked,” Gwinny said sadly. “I found out it was when I saw
you groaning.”
   The Ogre seemed relieved. “You know,” he said, “Sally said that if you kids
chose to murder me she wouldn’t blame you, but I didn’t think she meant it
literally.”
  “She didn’t tell me to,” Gwinny said. “I thought of it myself.”
  “I know that,” said the Ogre. “You don’t really think I murdered Sally, do
you?”
   Gwinny hooked one big toe behind the other and considered. “Not quite,” she
said. “Douglas said people didn’t—but there was a murder on the news last
week, so you could have done. Why did you tell lies, if you didn’t?”
   “Well, you don’t expect me to tell you children all about something that was
private between Sally and me, do you!” the Ogre retorted. “Sally’s left. That’s
all you need to know.”
  “No, it isn’t!” Gwinny said passionately, with tears quivering out of her eyes
again. “If Mummy’s gone, it’s private between us, too!”
   There was another short silence, while the Ogre considered this. “I suppose
you have a point,” he admitted. “All right. I don’t know where Sally’s gone. I
spent most of today trying to find out. We had a terrific quarrel, which started
about the bathwater and went on to other things, and Sally left about three
o’clock on Thursday morning. Does that satisfy you?”
  “Yes,” said Gwinny. “No. Isn’t she coming back?”
   The Ogre sighed. “Only to collect you five children. She’d have taken you
then, except you were asleep at the time. Now she’s trying to find somewhere
for you all to live—I think. And I must say, if you can think I—” The Ogre
seemed to come to the end of what he had to say, too. There was a pause, in
which Gwinny, somewhat comforted by the thought that Sally might be coming
back to fetch her, sniffed and tried to stop crying. Then the Ogre said, as if he
had made up his mind about something, “Look here, Gwinny, I seem to
remember you used to like me at the beginning. Tell me truthfully—haven’t you
let Caspar and Johnny influence you? Don’t you think you may have let them
build me up in your mind as a—as a sort of ogre?”
  This was not easy. Gwinny went rather pink at the way he put it. “A bit of
both,” she admitted. “I mean, I was angry about Malcolm, too.”
  “Now, Sally talked about Malcolm,” the Ogre said thoughtfully.
  “Malcolm’s nice,” said Gwinny.
  “He’s a complete mystery to me,” the Ogre said frankly. “All right—I’ll do
my best to understand Malcolm, if you can promise me to give up poisoning for
good. What do you say?”
  “Yes,” said Gwinny.
  “Good. And,” continued the Ogre, as if he were not so certain of what came
next, “it might be possible to be friends again, don’t you think? If we were,
we’d have a much better chance of persuading Sally to come back.”
  “Do you want Mummy back?” Gwinny asked, in some surprise.
  “Of course I do!” said the Ogre, equally surprised that she should ask.
   Gwinny began to cry again. The Ogre was being so kind that she was
ashamed. She was overwhelmed with her wickedness in trying to poison him,
worse than when she had thought he was dying, and far more than she would
have been if he had been angry and fierce. “I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “I’ll be nice
to you now. I promise I’ll try.”
  “And I’ll try, too,” said the Ogre. “Look, I think you’re tired—and I know I
am. Suppose you come back to bed?”
  Gwinny nodded and slid to the floor. “But Caspar and Johnny—” she said.
   “Don’t worry about them,” the Ogre said cheerfully. “When Sally hears
they’re going to school and not at home to wear her out, she’ll be all the readier
to come back.”
  Gwinny was dubious about this, but she was too tired to argue. Now that the
Ogre had talked of being tired, she found her head was nodding forward.
   “Come on,” said the Ogre and picked her up. Gwinny had not been carried
for years. She had thought she was too old. But it was such a pleasantly
trouble-free way of going upstairs that, far from protesting, she fell asleep on
the way. She woke up a little when the dustballs scuttered, because the Ogre
said, “We seem to have mice.”
  “Not quite mice,” Gwinny said, as she was put on her bed, and went to sleep
without hearing the Ogre’s answer.
                                  Chapter 13
                                                                           «^»
Caspar was mildly surprised next morning when Johnny was not there. But he
supposed Johnny must have got up early for some reason, and simply got on
with the oddly difficult task of dressing with one finger-joint invisible. As long
as he did not look at what he was doing, it was all right. But, whenever he
actually watched his fingers working on buttons and shoelaces, he
miscalculated. His eyes kept telling him he lacked the usual length of finger and
he kept believing them. It gave him an unusual, angry, frustrated feeling.
   He met Malcolm on the landing when he had at last finished. “Are you all
right?” Caspar asked.
   Malcolm nodded—he looked unusually jolly—and they went downstairs
together. “Johnny left me a note,” Malcolm said. “He’s gone to school already.”
  “He must be mad!” said Caspar.
   On the lower landing, Douglas was just going into the bathroom with a dirty
shirt. The Ogre, looking half asleep and more than usually terrifying, came
stumbling out of his room and caught him at it. “What do you think you’re doing
with that?” he said.
  “Putting it to be washed,” Douglas said, evidently wondering if the Ogre was
mad.
  “Take it upstairs and put it on again,” growled the Ogre. “How the devil do
you think things are going to get washed with Sally not here? By magic?”
  “I’ve already put on a clean one,” Douglas said patiently. “I’ll be late if I
have to change.”
  “Then don’t dare do it again!” said the Ogre. “No one is to change anything
until they’ve worn it at least a week.” He went stumping away downstairs.
Douglas turned to Malcolm and Caspar, and to Gwinny, who was yawning her
way downstairs behind them, and expressively tapped his forehead.
  In the kitchen, there were the remains of Johnny’s breakfast. His schoolbag
and coat were missing, too. Caspar did not realize that anything was wrong until
someone asked him at lunchtime where Johnny was. After that, he could hardly
wait to get home and see what Johnny was up to.
  Douglas, Malcolm, and Gwinny seemed in the same hurry to get home. They
all four entered the musty and depressing house at the same moment. The hall
was alive with little gray, fluffy things, which scuttered and squeaked and ran
from their feet. They could see dustballs climbing chairs in the sitting room and
running round on the dining-room table. There seemed more of them in the
dining room than anywhere else.
  “Oh dear!” said Malcolm.
  “Your dustballs seem to have taken over where our toffee-bars left off,” said
Caspar. “Why are they all over the place like this?”
   Douglas marched over to the dining room, sending dustballs scurrying in
droves from under his feet. “Somebody’s been feeding them,” he said. They
crowded behind him at the dining room door. On the dining-room floor were a
dozen or so bowls and plates, each with a few corn flakes still in them. From
the rate the dustballs were eating the corn flakes, it was easy to see that they had
not been put down so very long ago.
  “I bet it was Johnny,” said Gwinny.
   Caspar was astonished by the vast numbers of the dustballs. “You never had
all these in your room, did you?”
   “We did,” said Malcolm. “We had them the day the Ogre tried to smoke his
pipe. But they were smaller then. Do you think if we put the corn flakes out in
the garden and opened the back door, they’d all go outside?”
   They tried it. But the dustballs evidently did not like the cold air outside. A
few came to the back door and no further. Most of them came only to the middle
of the kitchen.
   “Hopeless,” said Douglas. “Leave them. I’ll ring up a rat catcher. Caspar,
are all of Sally’s friends in that address-book by the telephone?”
  “I think so. Why?” asked Caspar.
  “I thought I’d have a go at finding her,” said Douglas. “She must be
somewhere, and one of them might know. I thought I’d ring—”
    The telephone rang at that moment. Both Caspar and Douglas ran to answer
it, both thinking it might be Sally. Douglas won, by pushing Caspar at the last
moment, and picked up the receiver. An agitated voice quacked.
  “Yes, Mrs. Anderson,” said Douglas. It was Granny. Caspar hopped from
one foot to the other. He could tell by the way Granny’s voice quacked on and
on that Sally certainly had not gone to Granny’s and Granny was worried stiff
by this time. “No—you see, Mrs. Anderson—” Douglas said several times, but
he could not get another word in for quite a while. At last he said loudly, “No.
It’s quite all right. I’d fetch her, only she’s out shopping at the moment. Caspar
got the wrong end of the stick. It’s next week she’s coming.” Then he let Granny
quack about how relieved she was and rang off
  “That was brilliant!” said Caspar, genuinely admiring.
   “Except that now we’ve got to find Sally,” said Douglas, picking up the
address-book. A dustball leapt off it and ran away across the hall. “And a rat
catcher,” said Douglas. “We’d better call them rats, hadn’t we?”
   Gwinny, meanwhile, inspired by her new friendship with the Ogre, was
doing what she had hurried home to do. She collected all the dirty clothes from
the bathroom and took them to the kitchen. There, she sorted them carefully and
put them into the washing machine with soap-powder. It was only when she
turned to the controls of the machine to switch it on that she realized she had not
the faintest idea how it worked. Still, she was determined to be a help to the
Ogre, so she hunted for the instructions on the shelf above the washing machine.
The vacuum cleaner lived on this shelf. Gwinny found instructions for it. She
found a cookbook and Johnny’s schoolbag hidden there. But when she finally
laid hands on the booklet that went with the washing machine, it seemed to be
written in Spanish. She gave up and yelled for Caspar.
   Caspar came, but was quite as ignorant. He took hold of a knob and tried
turning it. It came off in his hand.
    Gwinny snatched it and crammed it back on. “Now look what you’ve done!
Go and get me Malcolm. He’ll find out. Or Johnny. Johnny knows how to work
it. Where is Johnny anyway?”
  “Somewhere about,” said Caspar, and went upstairs to find Malcolm.
“Gwinny can’t work the washing machine,” he told Malcolm. “Can you?”
  “I expect I can find out,” said Malcolm. He left off carefully heating Noct.
Vest., which was what he had hurried home to do, and went downstairs to try.
   Caspar, at last, went into his room. And he stopped just inside the door,
appalled. Johnny’s bed was torn asunder. Its sheets trailed on the floor, and, in
the middle of the bottom sheet, was a large pool of blood. The carving knife lay
across Johnny’s pillow, also covered with blood. And, on the wall above the
bed, a desperate hand appeared to have clawed five long streaks of blood.
Below that, the same hand had written, also in blood, the word OGRE, and the
E of it fell away into a trail—as if the writer of it had been at his last gasp.
Johnny had been both artistic and thorough. Caspar felt a little sick. If he had not
known Johnny had been feeding dustballs half an hour ago, he might have
thought Johnny had indeed met with a singularly gruesome end.
  As it was, he understood what had happened. Feeling rather glad that the
Ogre had not come in yet, Caspar laughed—somewhat hysterically—and went
downstairs to fetch Douglas. The Ogre came in at the moment he reached the
hall, and Douglas hurriedly put the phone down.
  “Mice!” said the Ogre, staring at the scampering dustballs.
  “I’ve just rung up for a rat catcher,” said Douglas.
  “Good,” said the Ogre. “Though I should think the Pied Piper would be more
use. Where’s Gwinny?”
  “In the kitchen,” said Caspar, and signaled Douglas frantically to come
upstairs.
   Douglas turned quite pale when he saw Johnny’s bed. “Where did he get all
that blood from?” he said. “And where is he?”
   “Invisible,” said Caspar. “And I think the blood’s off that meat in the bottom
of the fridge. It has the same sort of smell.”
   Douglas drew a deep breath, perhaps to smell the blood, perhaps because he
was feeling sick. “Let’s get rid of it, anyway,” he said. “Or the Ogre might
really murder him.”
   Caspar, glad to find Douglas exactly agreed with his own feelings, went and
dragged at the gory sheets, while Douglas heaved the blankets clear.
  Behind them, Johnny’s voice said peremptorily, “Leave it alone!”
  They spun round and faced the empty room.
    “You’re not to touch it!” Johnny said out of thin air. “What do you think I did
it for? Ring up the police and get him arrested. Go on.”
  “Don’t be a silly little twit!” Douglas said scornfully. “They’ll know it’s
only animal’s blood. If you wanted to do it properly, you should have used your
own blood.”
   There was a hurt silence from the empty part of the room. Douglas and
Caspar dragged the sheets from the bed, took off the pillowcase, and picked up
the grisly knife. Then Johnny spoke again:
   “All right, you rotten spoil-sports! I’m going to try Plan B. I wish I’d tried
that first now.”
  “Get that blood off the wall before you start, then,” said Douglas.
   “Do it yourself, if you want it off,” Johnny retorted. Douglas dived for where
his voice came from, but missed him completely. And, as Johnny made no
further sound, neither of them could tell whether he was still in the room or not.
  “This is going to be real fun and games,” Douglas said, as they trailed the
gory sheets downstairs. “What do you think Plan B is?”
  Caspar had no idea. But he felt he would not put anything past Johnny. He
was out to get the Ogre and, as he was invisible, get him he surely would. If the
Ogre had been anyone else, Caspar would have felt sorry for him.
   The Ogre himself was in the kitchen translating the book of instructions for
Malcolm, while Malcolm tried to make the washing machine work. They had
managed to get it to fill itself with water, but nothing else, and they refused to
let Caspar put the sheets in it. So Douglas wrapped them in a bundle,
blood-side inward, and dumped them in a corner to wait. They tried to warn
Gwinny not to unwrap them, but she was gazing enchantedly at a dollhouse
kitchen the Ogre had bought her and would not listen.
  “My people will love this!” was all she would say.
  Feeling extremely harassed, Douglas and Caspar fetched the fateful bucket
again, to clean the blood off the wall.
   “Is Johnny at it again?” said the Ogre, hearing it clanking. “Try pressing the
third from the left, Malcolm.”
   When Douglas and Caspar came down again, the washing machine was
working. The Ogre, Malcolm, and Gwinny were all admiring it. An hour later,
they were not admiring it so much. An hour later still, they were not admiring it
at all and wondering how to stop it. By this time, it had washed and rinsed and
washed again, on Malcolm’s reckoning, seventeen whole times, and seemed set
to go on all night. Caspar, who was feeling rather hungry by then, went to the
larder and looked for food. All he could find was baked beans.
  “I say,” Douglas said to him, under the noise of rinsing and spinning. “Does
Johnny know how that thing works?”
  “Yes,” said Caspar, “now I come to think of it.”
  “Then I think he’s sitting on top of it pressing switches down,” said Douglas.
   They both went to see if this was true. At the same moment, the Ogre lost
patience with the washing machine and tore its plug out of the wall. The turning
and rinsing stopped, to the relief of everyone. Then the Ogre, in spite of
Malcolm and Gwinny loudly telling him not to, rashly bent down to open the
front.
  This was the moment Johnny had been waiting for. Everyone except the Ogre
saw the vacuum cleaner lurch up from the shelf over the washing machine. They
saw it whirl round on its hose and come whistling down toward the Ogre’s
head. Without a word, Gwinny, Malcolm, and Caspar threw themselves
sideways at the Ogre, and Douglas hurled himself at the space beneath the
vacuum cleaner. The vacuum cleaner crashed to the floor. Everyone, with the
Ogre underneath and Caspar on top, toppled into a spout of cold water and
washing and lay for a moment weltering. Nobody knew where Johnny was. But
the vacuum cleaner ended up under the kitchen table, a most peculiar shape.
   The Ogre threw the rest of them off and arose, red-faced and dripping. “What
the—!” he began at full roar. Then he caught Gwinny’s eye and changed to
speaking quietly. “Why did you do that?”
   “We were trying to stop you opening the washing machine.” Malcolm said in
a shaking voice. He and Gwinny did not need to be told what was happening.
And everyone felt the same: Johnny had gone too far.
   The Ogre looked round at their four frightened faces. “It’s all right,” he said.
“It was entirely my fault. You told me not to open it. Fetch me the fateful bucket,
one of you.”
  Douglas and Caspar squelched off to get it. They could see a line of wet
footprints leading to the hall, where Johnny had made off.
  “Has he gone mad?” Douglas whispered.
  “No,” said Caspar. “He just hates the Ogre.”
  “Well, I thought I hated him, too,” said Douglas. “But I’m almost sorry for
him now. What’s got into Johnny, if he isn’t mad?”
  “I think it’s being invisible,” said Caspar. “I’ve been feeling peculiar all day
with the top of one finger gone—so think how much worse he’s feeling.”
  Douglas gave Caspar’s shortened finger a hunted sort of look. “We can’t go
on like this,” he said. “We won’t know where to look for Johnny next.”
  “Bucket!” yelled the Ogre.
   “Coming!” bawled Douglas. Then he whispered to Caspar, “We’ll have to
think up some way to get the Ogre out of the house while we round up Johnny.
Think hard.”
   That was all very well, Caspar thought, going out into the hall among the
scampering dustballs, but what excuse would take the Ogre out of the house
without supper? Particularly as it was now raining. Raindrops pattered on the
glass over the front door, and the hall was dark. Caspar switched on the light.
He saw the telephone receiver in mid-air and the dial spinning.
  “Drop that, Johnny!” Caspar sped to the telephone. It was clear to him that
Johnny was now trying to ring the police and report himself dead.
  The receiver plummeted to the end of its cord and swung there. Caspar heard
Johnny scudding toward the stairs. He clapped the receiver back on its rest and
kept his hand on it, wondering whether to cut the cord. Short of a day and night
guard on the telephone, he could see no other way of stopping Johnny carrying
out what was presumably Plan C.
  “You mean pest!” said Johnny’s voice.
  “Please stop, Johnny,” Caspar said. “Everyone else thinks you’re mad. I
know you hate the Ogre, but—”
   “You keep stopping me, and he hasn’t even noticed I’m not here!” Johnny
said fiercely. “You may not care that he’s got rid of Mum, but I do. And I’m
going to get him for it—even if you are all on his side!”
  “We’re not on his side,” said Caspar. “You just can’t bash people’s heads
with vacuum cleaners.”
  “Yes, you can,” said Johnny. “I did. If you hadn’t—”
   But, in the kitchen, Malcolm had come up with an idea to get the Ogre out of
the house. Damp and harassed, the Ogre hurried into the hall. “Caspar,” he said,
“Malcolm’s saying Johnny’s run away. Do you know anything about it?”
  Caspar mentally took his hat off to Malcolm. “We—er—we think he may
have gone before breakfast,” he said, hoping that this tallied with what Malcolm
had said.
   The Ogre forgot all consideration for Gwinny and thundered, “WHAT?!” at
the top of his voice. In the echoing silence that followed, Caspar heard Johnny’s
feet flitting upstairs.
  “We were hoping you wouldn’t notice,” Caspar said uncomfortably.
    The Ogre glared at him, and then at Douglas, Malcolm, and Gwinny, who
came trooping out of the kitchen to see how the idea was going. “You stupid
little idiots!” said the Ogre. “Why didn’t you tell me at once? Where’s he gone?
Do you know?”
   Under the anxious eyes of the other three, Caspar cast about for somewhere
extremely far off. “Scotland,” he said. “He— we—our great-aunt lives there.
And she doesn’t have a phone,” he added hastily, as the Ogre strode toward the
telephone. “She lives in a very remote thingummy—er—glen, I mean.”
  “I see,” said the Ogre dourly. “Do you happen to know the way to this remote
glen?”
  Behind the Ogre, Douglas nodded vigorously, to show Caspar what to say
next. “Yes,” said Caspar, and tried to remember where Loch Lomond was on a
map—this being the only place in Scotland that came into his head.
   “Very well,” said the Ogre. “Get a raincoat, unless you’re wet enough
already, and come out to the car. We’d better go there.”
  This was not at all what anyone had intended. In considerable dismay,
Caspar slowly collected the coat that he had dropped on the dining-room floor,
very much hoping the Ogre would change his mind. But he did not.
  “Hurry up!” he said, getting into his own coat.
   Caspar was forced to put on his coat and follow the Ogre to the back door,
past the glum line of the other three. He jerked his thumb up as he went, to show
them where he thought Johnny now was, and went apprehensively across the
wet floor of the kitchen and out into the wetter night. Cold rain drove into his
face and pattered on the car when he was inside it. It was not a very good night
for going all the way to Scotland in, Caspar had to admit.
   He watched the Ogre start the engine and switch on the headlights and
wipers. His stomach fluttered. Going to Scotland might be all right, but what to
do when they got there was another matter. Caspar thought he ought to let the
Ogre get as far as Perth or Dundee or somewhere, and then remember another
great-aunt in Fishguard or Land’s End where Johnny might have gone. Then he
could think of another somewhere else, perhaps, and so work the Ogre back
home. He saw he was in for a very difficult night.



                                 Chapter 14
                                                                            «^»
The Ogre backed the car into the road and turned it with a wet smicker of tires.
“Not quite the night I would have chosen for driving to Scotland,” he remarked.
Since Caspar thoroughly agreed, he said nothing. The Ogre joined the nearest
northbound road. “I seem to have had no sleep lately,” he said plaintively. “If
we crash, blame Johnny, not me.” There seemed no reply Caspar could make to
this, either. He sat in silence, inventing great-aunts, until they came to the main
road north, full of wet squiggles of light and dim orange rain. “This is horrible,”
said the Ogre. “How far do we go on this wild-goose chase?”
  A nasty collapsing feeling came into the pit of Caspar’s stomach. “Why is it a
wild-goose chase?” he said.
   “Because I know Johnny’s at home,” said the Ogre. “I distinctly heard his
feet on the stairs, and I think I heard his voice in the hall just before that. Would
you mind telling me what’s going on?”
  “Nothing!” Caspar said. “You made a mistake. He’s not at home, really. He
may be in Land’s End, though.”
  “With another great-aunt?” said the Ogre.
  “Yes,” Caspar said uneasily.
   The Ogre braked, with a shriek of wet tires. Tires screamed behind them, and
horns honked. “I’m too tired to drive round the British Isles all night,” he said.
“I’m going home.”
  “No!” Caspar said frantically. “Please!”
   “Why?” said the Ogre. The car stopped by the side of the road, and other
cars went by, flashing their lights and honking indignantly.
   “Because Johnny might kill you,” said Caspar. “Or get you arrested for
killing him.”
  “Oh no! Not another!” exclaimed the Ogre. “And you brought the carving
knife with you, I suppose.”
  “Of course not!” said Caspar. “What do you take me for?”
   “I don’t know,” said the Ogre. “I gave up trying to understand any of you
months ago—and I know that was stupid of me, so don’t tell me. I’ll find a
lay-by and you tell me about Johnny.”
   He drove slowly on again. Caspar saw the game was up and that he would
have to explain in some way. He wished he knew how. If Malcolm had been
there, he might have thought of something. Caspar could only think of the truth
and, as he thought it, he realized he dared say nothing unless he made sure
Johnny was not in the car, too. He was forced to turn round and grope at the
back seat to see if it was empty.
  “What are you doing?” the Ogre asked suspiciously.
  “Making sure Johnny’s not in the car,” Caspar explained.
  The Ogre turned into a lay-by and stopped with a jerk. “All right,” he said
wearily, turning on the light in the car. “There. If he is here, he’s invisible.”
   “He is invisible,” said Caspar. To be on the safe side, he climbed over into
the back and felt all round it. To his relief, it really was as empty as it looked.
  The Ogre, who was watching him in the mirror, sighed. “This is a very pretty
pantomime,” he said. “Perhaps the invisible great-aunts are there, too.”
  “Oh, shut up!” said Caspar. “You wouldn’t joke about it if you knew how
Johnny nearly got you with the vacuum cleaner just now. If you don’t believe
me, take a look at my finger.” He scrambled back and thrust his hand under the
Ogre’s nose. “And it does awfully peculiar things to your mind,” he added
angrily.
   The Ogre gave Caspar’s hand an irritable look, but, when he saw that one
finger really was shorter than it should be, he seized Caspar’s wrist and looked
closer. Then he ran his finger and thumb along Caspar’s finger until they closed
on the invisible joint at the end. “Good grief!” he said. “It’s there!” He was
very shaken. Caspar could tell he was, though the expression on the Ogre’s face
was its normal grim one. It occurred to Caspar that the Ogre’s face was not
good at showing feelings, just like Malcolm’s. “This process,” said the Ogre,
still holding Caspar’s unseen fingertip. “Could it work on other things? Cakes,
for example?”
  “I expect so,” said Caspar. “It works on filter-paper and Johnny’s clothes.”
   “Ye gods!” said the Ogre. “And I thought she’d simply had a nightmare!”
Instead of explaining what he was talking about, he let go of Caspar’s finger and
said, “All right. How did it happen?”
   “Well, you know those chemistry sets,” Caspar began. Since it seemed
easiest to start at the beginning, he told the Ogre about the flying-powder. That
of course led to Malcolm shrinking and the way Douglas had gone heavy in the
road. Caspar, now he knew how bad the Ogre’s face was at showing feelings,
thought the Ogre seemed a little ashamed at the way he had misjudged Douglas,
but the Ogre did not interrupt him until Caspar was halfway through explaining
Misc. Pulv. Then Caspar was startled to find the Ogre glaring at him.
   “Look here,” said the Ogre. “Were you and Malcolm actually changed over
that day I met you in the shop? It’s all right. I’m not going to eat you.”
  Caspar let go of the back of the car seat, which he had grabbed for safety.
“Yes. We wanted the antidote, but you bought us pink footballs.”
  “You must have blessed me for that!” said the Ogre. “How did you get
back—or are you really Malcolm now?”
   “No,” said Caspar. “Douglas did it.” As he said it, he found himself
comparing the Ogre with Douglas. They were really remarkably alike. And the
thing about Douglas, Caspar now knew, was that though he seemed ferocious
and loved ordering people about, he did it because he could not help it, and
there was no harm in him, really. Perhaps the Ogre was the same. Certainly, he
was not being nearly as angry at the tale of crimes Caspar had to tell as Caspar
had expected. Caspar went on to explain the Animal Spirits with a growing,
guilty suspicion that he had been misjudging the Ogre horribly.
   He hoped the Ogre was believing him, but the Ogre’s face remained somber
and grim, and Caspar could not tell. Yet, as Caspar pointed out, the Ogre had
tried to light a living pipe, had twice seen the toffee-bars on the radiator, and
had met the dustballs in the hall that very evening. But the Ogre gave no sign of
what he thought, even when Caspar told him about Johnny’s bed, and the
vacuum cleaner, and Plan C.
  “So we had to get you out of the house while we rounded him up,” he said.
“You do believe me, don’t you?”
  “Oh yes,” said the Ogre. “You’re the worst liar I know. That’s why I brought
you along. You think being invisible has gone to Johnny’s head, do you?”
   Caspar made an effort to explain. “A bit But I think mostly he doesn’t feel
like him anymore—he’s a sort of angry ghost.”
  The Ogre thought. “I see. And what is he most angry about? Sally leaving?”
   “Yes,” said Caspar. “But about boarding school, too, and now us getting
together to stop him getting you.”
  “Does he think I murdered Sally?” asked the Ogre.
   It had not occurred to Caspar up to then that Johnny could think anything so
silly, but, now the Ogre mentioned it, it did seem possible. “I—I think he
might,” he said awkwardly. “He’s young enough to think stupid things.”
  The Ogre was acutely depressed. Even his face showed it. “What an ogre
you must think I am!” he said.
  “Oh no!” Caspar said hastily, in the greatest embarrassment. “It’s just
us—not trying to understand you.”
   “The same goes for me,” said the Ogre ruefully. “Well, all I can think of is
that we do what Douglas did, and go and ask the old man for the antidote.
Failing that, we get Malcolm to experiment, at the risk of turning himself into a
teaspoon or something.” He put out his hand to start the car again.
  “No, don’t!” said Caspar. “It isn’t safe to go back. Honestly.”
  “Listen, Caspar,” said the Ogre, “this is very kind of you, but I don’t like
what you’ve told me about the effects of invisibility at all. It sounds as if Johnny
has become all thoughts, and nothing else. And they were angry thoughts to
begin with. I think he might harm himself even more than he can harm me. And
another thing—I’m pretty sure he’s been invisible now for nearly twenty-four
hours, and if we leave him much longer he may be warped for life. Now do you
see?”
  “Yes,” said Caspar soberly.
    The Ogre started the car and made a U-turn out of the layby, in front of
another row of indignant, hooting, flashing motorists, and drove back much
faster than they had come. “Do you think,” he asked, peering between the
swatting wipers and the driving rain, “that it might help bring Johnny to reason
if I promised not to send him to boarding school?”
   “Yes, it would,” said Caspar. He sighed, rather, and thought it was just his
luck that he should be the only one being sent.
  “There’s no need to sound so dismal,” the Ogre said, as they reached the
outskirts of town. “If Johnny’s to be at home, I shall have to keep you, too, as a
Johnny-tamer. And, anyway, I can ill spare the money.”
  Caspar grinned with relief all the way to Market Street. “I say,” he said then.
“Don’t let on to Malcolm I told you about Irid. Col. and the other things, will
you? He’d be awfully upset.”
   The Ogre promised not to say a word, and drove into the little dark yard.
“Wait here,” he said, and hurried away to the shop. Caspar sat in the car,
waiting, worrying rather about Johnny, but mostly thinking how stupid he had
been to be so much afraid of the Ogre all this time. Then he saw the Ogre
coming back and eagerly wound down the window. At the sight of the Ogre’s
face, however, he had to grip the edge of the window hard and remind himself
that the Ogre was like Douglas and not as fierce as he seemed. But the Ogre
was not angry with Caspar. “What a very unpleasant old fellow that is!” he
said. “He laughed his head off at our misfortunes.”
   “Didn’t he tell you the antidote?” Caspar asked, wondering what on Earth
they would do.
  “Yes, when I threatened to wring his neck,” said the Ogre. “Plain water is the
answer. When did you last wash your hands, Caspar?”
   Caspar was not sure. The last time he clearly remembered was when Sally
had insisted on it, just before the party. But surely he could not have mopped the
blood off Johnny’s wall and then weltered in the washing without getting his
hands wet! He put his hand out of the window into the rain to see. Sure enough,
as soon as his hand was thoroughly covered in raindrops, a pink fuzz appeared
at the end of his shortened finger, and in no time at all it was fully visible. His
familiar fingernail glistened under the street lights, and Caspar was very glad to
see it again.
   “Not since last night, evidently,” said the Ogre, getting into the car. “Now
let’s go and get out that fateful bucket.”
   But they did not need to. When the car approached the house, they saw
Malcolm on the other side of the road, soaking wet and waving the mop.
Gwinny was in the middle of the road with the broom, and Douglas was posted
in the gateway, making menacing passes with a rake. They could all be clearly
seen in the drizzle drifting under the street lights. And, in the space into which
the broom, the mop and the rake were pointing, was the misty, speckled shape
of Johnny, slowly being washed visible again by the rain.
   The Ogre stopped the car with a squealing jerk. He leaped out of it, seized
the fuzzy shape by its collar, and took it away into the house. The other three,
panting rather, gathered round the car.
  “I had to tell him everything,” Caspar said apologetically out of the window.
   “I was afraid you would,” said Douglas. “Can’t be helped.” In fact, he and
Gwinny and Malcolm were too pleased at the way they had rounded Johnny up
and restored him to think of much else. They all told Caspar at once how
Malcolm had seen the soles of Johnny’s shoes when Johnny fled from the stream
of washing. That had given them their clue, but it had taken a deal of hard work
and cunning to drive Johnny out into the rain. They had only just got him there
before the Ogre came back
 “I think we ought to make sure the Ogre doesn’t hurt Johnny too much,” said
Gwinny, at length.
   They went indoors. But the Ogre and Johnny were in the study. Since no
sounds of violence were coming through the door, no one quite liked to
interrupt. It seemed as if they were simply talking. They never found out what
was said in there, but, when Johnny came out about half an hour later, he did not
seem at all unhappy. He looked a little sober, perhaps, but in a sort of way he
looked rather smug, too. The Ogre, on the other hand, looked tired to death.
Caspar looked from one to the other and guessed that Johnny had extorted a
number of promises from the Ogre. Johnny was rather good at turning things to
his own advantage. Caspar sighed, and foresaw that in the future it would be his
duty to defend the Ogre from Johnny—if he could.
  “We’re awfully hungry,” said Gwinny.
  “Baked beans?” suggested the Ogre.
  Everyone shuddered, and half of them groaned.
   “Oh, very well,” said the Ogre. He felt in his pockets and produced a
five-pound note. “Can someone find a fish-and-chip shop open, then?”
  Five hands snatched at the note. Douglas, naturally, won and held it high
above his head. “Then mind you get me sausages,” said Malcolm.
  “I like fish-cakes,” said Gwinny.
  “And at least a mountain of chips,” said Johnny.
  Douglas duly returned with a bulging carrier bag, which they dismembered
on the kitchen table. The smell was so delicious that the Ogre’s pipe struggled
out of his pocket and showed an active interest in the sausages. The Ogre
watched it nervously.
  “I shall never bring myself to smoke that again,” he said.
  “But you must! It likes it!” Caspar protested.
  So, when the vast meal was over, the Ogre dubiously picked the pipe up and
put some tobacco in it. The pipe at once went stiff and began purring.
Encouraged by this, the Ogre packed it properly and lit it. And shortly, he had
almost forgotten it was alive. “Go and get me these chemistry sets,” he said.
“Now. As the car’s still out, I’m going to take them back to that unpleasant old
man, before anything else happens.”
    Grudgingly, Johnny and Malcolm obeyed. Reluctantly, they brought the sets
to the kitchen and wistfully handed them over. And the Ogre got up from the
littered table and took them back to the shop there and then. Everyone felt rather
flat without them.
  “Nothing will ever be the same again,” Gwinny said sadly.
  “You’ve still got your people,” Malcolm reminded her.
  “Oh, good heavens!” exclaimed Gwinny. “I never gave them their supper!”
She hurried busily away at once with a handful of leftover chips.



                                 Chapter 15
                                                                        «^
Nobody really blamed the Ogre for staying in bed the next morning. They found
themselves breakfast. Then Caspar went upstairs and was just dropping the
stylus onto his favorite Indigo Rubber track, when he remembered the Ogre was
still asleep and took the record off again. It was just as well, because Douglas
came in the next minute.
  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s find Sally while the coast’s clear.”
   He and Caspar fetched two of the chairs from the sitting room to the hall and
sat in them while they went methodically through the address-book. They took it
in turns to telephone every soul in the book and ask them if they knew where
Sally was. They had only got to B, when the doorbell rang. Douglas bawled to
Gwinny to answer it.
   The visitor was a man from the Council who told Gwinny he was the Rodent
Operative. She and Malcolm and Johnny showed him the dustballs. They
thought he was rather a nice man. He looked shrewdly at the scuttering, fluffy
shapes.
  “One of you’s been breeding a fancy kind of mouse here and let it get out,
haven’t you?” he said. “I know children.”
   They followed him from place to place round the house, watching with
interest as he spooned out what looked like porridge oats with an old ladle and
poured a little heap of the stuff in every corner.
   “Don’t any of you touch this, mind,” he said. “It’s poison. Dries them up and
kills them.”
   This alarmed Gwinny. She was afraid her people might take it for porridge
and eat it. So, as soon as the Rodent Operative had gone, she got Malcolm and
Johnny to help her write out twenty-two cards, saying DANGER. They stuck the
cards to matches and the matches into empty spools and put each notice beside
one of the heaps of poison. Gwinny was not sure her people could read English,
but she hoped they would get the idea all the same.
  They were putting out the notices when Douglas and Caspar heard the Ogre
come out of his bedroom.
  “Take these chairs back,” Douglas said, with the receiver at his ear. “Then
keep him away from here.”
  Caspar trundled the chairs through the sitting room doorway and shut the
door on them. When the Ogre stumbled downstairs in his dressing-gown,
Caspar met him at the foot of the stairs and hurried him away to the kitchen
before he could ask what Douglas was doing. There he fed the Ogre solicitously
with tea and pieces of charred toast.
  “Very kind of you,” said the Ogre. “If I wasn’t so tired, I’d wonder what your
motive was. Those blessed dustballs kept me awake half the night. Has the rat
catcher been here?”
 “Yes,” said Caspar, pointing to the heap of poison in the corner. “But
Malcolm says you have to call him a Rodent Operative.”
   The Ogre blinked sleepily at the pile of poison and Gwinny’s notice in front
of it. “Why are you warning them?” he asked. “To give them a sporting
chance?”
   Caspar could not help laughing. “Gwinny did that,” he said. But he felt rather
guilty, now that he knew the Ogre better. The Ogre liked making jokes. But he
always made them with a perfectly straight face. Caspar feared that they had
taken him seriously on a lot of occasions when he had only meant to be funny.
“I’m sorry about the toast,” he said apologetically, “only the dustballs ate the
other end of the loaf, so I couldn’t make any more.”
   “I’ve heard charcoal’s good for indigestion,” the Ogre said philosophically,
and poured himself another cup of tea to help the toast down. Caspar was rather
touched, because he saw that the Ogre was determined to behave well. He was
wondering whether to go out and buy some more bread, when Douglas burst
jubilantly into the kitchen. And so determined was the Ogre to behave well, that
he did nothing but glower faintly.
  “I’ve found her!” boomed Douglas, beaming with triumph.
  “Found who?” the Ogre asked wearily.
  “Sally, of course!” said Douglas. “She’s—”
    The Ogre jumped up so hastily that his chair fell over and Caspar had to pick
it up. “How on Earth did you manage that?”
  “I rang up everyone in the address-book. And Aunt Joan told me.”
  “And I rang Joan twice!” the Ogre said, in considerable disgust. “Where is
Sally?”
  “You’ll never believe it—with Aunt Marion! She—”
   “Don’t tell me!” said the Ogre. “Joan and Marion thought it would teach me a
lesson. Why did I take those chemistry sets back? I would have enjoyed turning
Joan or Marion into a rather small hippopotamus. Did you ring Marion?”
  “Yes, and I talked to Sally. She—”
  The Ogre hastened to the door and shoved Douglas aside. “Let me get to that
phone!” But there he stopped and seemed puzzled. “What are you doing,
wanting Sally back?” he asked Douglas. “I thought you were the anti-Sally
party.”
   Douglas went red. “Yes—I know,” he said. “But that was because I didn’t
like all the change, really. Then the kids were so upset when she went,
and—and I felt it was rather my fault she’d gone, because she tried like mad to
be friends and I wouldn’t be.”
  “You relieve my mind,” said the Ogre. “I thought it was my fault. How do
you rate the chances of getting her back?”
  “I keep trying to tell you!” said Douglas. “She said she can’t get here till
about four o’clock, but—”
   “You mean she’s coming today? Oh my God!” said the Ogre. “Look at the
state this house is in!”
   There followed some hours of hectic work. Malcolm and Johnny, who were
busy wiring batteries to the dollhouse cooker so that Gwinny’s people could
cook for themselves, were reluctant to stop, even for Sally. But Gwinny swore
she would pull the wires out again unless they helped. She made them carry
dollhouse and people out into the garden, to be away from the dust. Then
everyone began work. It was hard work, because the vacuum cleaner proved to
be broken and they had to manage without, but in the end the house gleamed and
shone. No dust or dustballs remained. Even Johnny’s and Caspar’s room was
tidy, and the dustbins so full that their lids stood like hats, several feet too high,
on top of wedged-down rubbish. The mop and the broom, which had both
suffered much herding the invisible Johnny the night before, fell to pieces with
use. The Ogre said they had better buy new ones, and another dustbin, too.
  “And some more baked beans, while we’re at it,” he said looking round the
empty larder.
   Though Caspar knew this was only a joke, no one trusted the Ogre to go
shopping. They all said they would go, too, and crammed themselves into the
car. There Malcolm produced pencil and paper, rested the paper on Caspar’s
back, and made a list of essentials. It began with tinned salmon, because
Malcolm liked it, and went on to caviar, because Gwinny said she had never
had any.
  “Put down porridge,” said the Ogre.
  “Two dozen doughnuts, Malcolm,” said Johnny.
   While the Ogre drove toward the shopping center and the list lengthened, a
curious smell began to fill the packed car. Caspar sniffed. It reminded him
disturbingly of some of the smells Johnny had produced with the chemistry set.
Douglas was sniffing, too. They exchanged glances. But, for the moment, the
main worry was the shopping list. Douglas took it away from Malcolm.
  “We don’t want,” he said, crossing things out vigorously, “salmon, caviar,
porridge, peanuts, or more than a dozen doughnuts. But you haven’t put in
sandwich spread.” And he put it in.
  “Why sandwich spread, just because you like it?” Johnny demanded
belligerently. “Why can’t Malcolm have salmon?”
  “Douglas,” said the Ogre, “stop being so domineering and allow each of us
one luxury. Mine’s porridge. Gwinny can have caviar if she insists—though,
honestly, Gwinny, you’d be better off with crisps—and then we’ll buy a few
optional extras like eggs, bread, and butter.”
  “Do I get more crisps for the same money?” asked Gwinny.
  “About a hundred times more,” said Caspar.
  “Then put me down for crisps,” said Gwinny.
   The list was adjusted accordingly, and Caspar thought of tea just as they
reached the shopping center. The Ogre turned into the big gravelled parking
area and found a space over in the far corner. They opened the doors and piled
out. While the Ogre was locking the car, Douglas pounced on Johnny and
Malcolm.
  “You’ve kept some of those chemicals, haven’t you? Hand them over.”
   Johnny and Malcolm looked sulkily at one another, and then from Caspar to
the Ogre, hoping for some support against Douglas. But Caspar heartily
supported Douglas and said so, and the Ogre at that moment happened to be half
inside the car locking the far door.
   After a second, Malcolm fetched a small vial from his pocket. “Oh, all
right!” he said. “It was only Dens Drac, because I haven’t tried that yet.”
  “So’s mine!” Johnny said in surprise. Having given himself away in this
manner, Johnny was also forced to yield up his vial. Its stopper was cracked,
which accounted for the smell.
   “Typical!” Douglas said disgustedly. “Don’t you both realize we’ve all had
enough of that!” He took both vials and hurled them away into the lane between
the parked cars. Both burst as they hit the ground. Johnny and Malcolm
miserably watched the white grains inside soak away into the wet gravel.
   The Ogre came out of the car in time to see what Douglas had done. “That
was rather uncalled-for,” he said. “Have you considered the effect of broken
glass on car tires? Go and pick up the bits.” And, when Douglas had grudgingly
done so, the Ogre sent him with Johnny to the hardware store while the rest of
them went to buy food. “I’m not having either of you handle groceries with
whatever that is on your hands,” he said.
   Johnny and Douglas set off. Johnny was very resentful-. Whatever Caspar
said, it seemed to him that Douglas had no right to order him about. And he told
Douglas so, several times.
  “Oh, all right!” Douglas said at length. “I’m sorry. Are you satisfied now?”
  “No,” said Johnny. “You’d no call to break my Dens Drac.”
  “And what do you think you’d have done with it if I hadn’t?” said Douglas.
“Made some awful mess, I bet.”
  “I shall never know now, shall I?” Johnny pointed out.
   When they reached the hardware store, however, they stopped arguing about
the Dens Drac. in order to argue about whether to get an orange plastic dustbin
or a shiny metal one. And, having decided on the metal one, they disputed
brooms, then mops.
  “Sally likes them to match,” said Douglas. “I know she does.”
  “Just because you do,” said Johnny. “I say, let’s get her a present, shall we?”
   Quite suddenly, he and Douglas were overwhelmed with excitement that
Sally was really coming back. They bought the first mop at hand. Then, without
disputing at all, they went to the shop next door and pooled their money for a
cake of soap shaped like a strawberry, which pleased them both very much.
Douglas put it in the dustbin and carried that and the broom back to the car.
Johnny marched beside him carrying the mop like a lance, with the dustbin lid
for a shield.
   To their annoyance, they were first back to the car. It was locked and
deserted. They were wondering what to do with the dustbin while they went to
look for the others, when Douglas said:
  “Hey, look! Mushrooms or something.”
   It was in the spot where he had broken the vials. Several large round, white
things were pushing up through the gravel, definitely growing. They did almost
seem to be giant mushrooms. Douglas and Johnny were so intrigued by them that
they dragged the dustbin over there to have a look. Whatever they were, there
were nearly fifty of them, bulging and pressing up from the ground like big solid
bubbles. One or two of them had lines or strips of black-and-white squares
across them.
   “You know,” Johnny said, laughing a little, “they almost look like crash
helmets.”
   “They do, rather,” Douglas agreed. “I wonder what they are.” Cautiously, he
stretched out the broom and tapped the top of the nearest. It gave out a hard,
solid rapping—exactly the noise you would expect from hitting a crash helmet
with a broomstick.
   The thing—whatever it was—objected to being rapped. It shook angrily,
scattering gravel. The next second, it had grown to a complete sphere, and there
was a face in the front of it. It was not a pleasant face, either. It was a coarse,
sly, aggressive face, and it glared at them.
   “It is a crash helmet!” exclaimed Johnny. “What’s he doing buried in the
ground like that?”
   They stared at the buried man in some perplexity, wondering how he got
there and whether to help him out. While they stared, the face shook its chin free
of sand and stones and spoke.
  “ ‘Éôìéïí èå ëéäáãåéí Üíóå õï ‘ôéõãåô!” it said.
  “What language is that?” said Johnny.
  “It might be Greek,” Douglas guessed, equally mystified.
   A clattering of gravel made them look up. The other mushrooms, up and
down the lane between the cars, had also grown into men in crash helmets. The
next nearest was now only buried from the waist downward. He had his hands
on the gravel and was levering to get his legs free. Beyond him, a number had
grown to full height and were stepping up onto the ground, shaking their boots.
They were all identically dressed in black leather motorcycle suits and white
crash helmets, and they all had most unpleasant faces.
   With one accord, Douglas and Johnny looked round to see how near the car
was. It was twenty yards off. Between them and it, the lane was filled with
motorcyclists stepping free of the ground and moving menacingly down toward
them.
   “I don’t like the look of this,” said Douglas. “And don’t tell me it’s my fault.
I know.”
   The nearest man struggled up from the earth and shook himself. Stones
clattered from his leather clothes and mud spattered the boys. Carefully he drew
his boot from the last of the gravel and walked a step or so toward them.
  “Èéíê é Òí êõéô öåëëùò ï Òí èå å Òä äïõéïõ?” he demanded of Douglas.
  “I’m sorry. I don’t understand,” Douglas said.
  The man looked round at the other motorcyclists.
  “Èçò êéæ ôñáéä ôïõ èõìôô ìé öåëëùò!” he said angrily.
   From the way the others reacted, it was clear that, whatever this meant, it
meant no good for Johnny and Douglas. They all gave the boys most unpleasant,
blank looks and strolled nearer. “Ùêåé, ëåôò ôåéê âùèïöåì á Òôôáñô á Òâé,”
said one. And one who was still only half out of the ground added “Ëåôìé á Ò
ôôåì.” Neither of these suggestions sounded pleasant. Johnny looked
despairingly round what he could see of the car-park between the advancing
leather suits. He found nothing but cars, lines of them, locked, silent and
deserted. There did not seem to be another soul in sight.
  “Get back to back,” said Douglas. “Use the mop on them.”
   Johnny at once scrambled round Douglas and leaned against his back. He
held the dustbin lid as a genuine shield, and put the head of the mop under one
arm, with the stick pointing outward toward what was now a circle of menacing
motorcyclists. Behind him, he heard the clang of the strawberry soap rolling in
the dustbin as Douglas raised that for a shield and leveled the broom. Johnny
was glad that he had such a tall back as Douglas’s to stand against. If it had
been Caspar’s or Malcolm’s back, he would have felt a great deal more
frightened.
   Not that their defenses seemed to impress the motorcyclists. Some laughed
jeeringly. One said, “Öõëëá óôôéñéô, á Òñíôèåé?” which was clearly a
sarcastic remark of some kind, and all of them laughed.
   Then the first of them said, “Ëåôóãù, öåëëùò.” And they closed in. Johnny
found his mop gripped and twisted, and hung on to it desperately. Behind him,
Douglas braced his back against Johnny’s and hung on to the broom. Several
more motorcyclists converged casually and quietly from the sides.
  “Help!” shouted Johnny.
   The Ogre, walking heavily under an enormous cardboard box, led the others
up the next lane by mistake. Near the end of it, he stood on tiptoe to look for the
right lane. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s over there. What’s going on in that lane?”
   Caspar put his box on a convenient car bonnet and stood on its bumper to
see. “Those look like Hell’s Angels,” he said.
  “They do,” agreed the Ogre. “Perhaps we should wait till they go.”
   But at that moment, Johnny shouted for help from the middle of the bunch of
black-leather bodies. Then Douglas shouted, too. Caspar hastily picked up his
box, and all four of them edged between the cars as quickly as they could, until
they came out beside the Ogre’s car in the right lane. Beyond, near the fence of
the car-park, the fight was heaving. Clangs and exclamations came out of it.
  “Oh, they’re horrible!” said Gwinny. “What shall we do?”
   “It isn’t Hell’s Angels,” said Malcolm, “exactly. It’s that stuff Douglas
spilled. Look.”
  They looked, and saw the last motorcyclist growing and struggling out of the
ground, obviously in the most tremendous hurry to join in with the others.
  “What was it called?” asked the Ogre.
  “Dens Drac.,” said Caspar. “Do come on.”
   “Stay where you are,” said the Ogre. “All of you. We can’t possibly tackle
that number.” To their exasperation, he put his box down on the car bonnet and
calmly sorted through the things in it. He took out a tin of sardines.
  “But what about Johnny and Douglas?” Gwinny said, dancing with anxiety.
  “What are you doing?” said Caspar.
  “Hoping the old trick still works,” said the Ogre, and threw the sardines with
enormous force at a crash helmet bobbing in the middle of the scuffle.
  The helmet immediately turned. They saw its owner go for the man nearest to
him, evidently thinking he was the one who hit him.
  “Oh, I see!” said Malcolm, and lifted a tin of peaches out of his own box.
  “Not those,” said the Ogre. “I like them. Sardines and baked beans only.”
   He shared them out. Caspar weighed a tin of beans in his hand, liked the
weight, and hurled it into the crowd. He and Malcolm both scored direct hits on
crash helmets, and the Ogre scored another. Each man they hit immediately
turned on his neighbor. Within seconds, the whole group was savagely fighting
among itself. Black-leather arms and legs whirled. There were fierce shouts in
a strange language. Gwinny added to the confusion by missing with her baked
beans and producing an enormous clang, which must have been the dustbin.
   The Ogre threw Caspar the car keys. “Unlock it and get yourselves and this
stuff in,” he said. “Leave a door open for us.” He set off at a run for the milling
motorcyclists and fought his way in among them. He disappeared completely
almost at once. Gwinny wrung her hands in despair and could think of nothing
else. Malcolm had to push her into the car.
   They were hurriedly loading in the boxes, when the Ogre reappeared
backwards from the fight, dragging Johnny and Douglas. Johnny and Douglas
were pale and disordered, but they still had the mop, the broom, and both parts
of the dustbin. Gwinny’s tin was rolling thunderously about in the dustbin with
the strawberry soap. They came panting up to the car and the Ogre thrust them
into it. Nobody was sure how they all got in, but somehow they did it, and the
Ogre fell into the driving-seat and started the engine. By this time, the
motorcyclists were rolling in a heap on the ground, punching, kicking, and even
biting one another.
  “Aren’t we going to do anything about them?” Caspar asked.
  “No,” said the Ogre breathlessly. “We can leave that to the police.”
   “But what happens when they turn out not to have names and addresses and
things?” Malcolm wanted to know.
  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” said the Ogre, backing briskly down the lane
away from the struggle. “The police can think of something. Douglas, can you
possibly lower that dustbin so that I could see something else in the mirror?”
   Douglas tried, and produced yells of pain from Gwinny and Caspar. “I’m
afraid I can’t.”
   “Then I’ll have to guess,” said the Ogre. He turned round at the end of the
lane, missing another car by what Malcolm said was less than half an inch, and
sped across the gravel to the exit, with the dustbin jouncing deafeningly.
“Douglas,” he said loudly, “this was entirely due to your high-handedness. If
you do anything like that again, I’ll leave you to your fate.” Douglas answered
with a shamed mutter. “And,” said the Ogre, “please let this be the last
chemical event. If there are any more, I think I may go mad.”
   They assured him that it would be, and they meant it. But they were reckoning
without Gwinny. As they were carrying the boxes in through the back door, she
gave a cry and threw herself on her hands and knees by the doorstep. Caspar,
who nearly fell over her, wanted to know, rather loudly and angrily, what she
thought she was doing.
  “My pretty hairgrip!” said Gwinny. “Please help me find it. It’s so pretty.”
  “Humor her,” said Johnny. “She was born like that.”
   So they all put down their boxes again and, with some exasperation, hunted
for the hairgrip. As Douglas said, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
   Five minutes later, the Ogre said, “Is this it?” He stood up holding something
bright and yellowish.
  “Oh yes!” Gwinny said, reaching for it eagerly.
    But the Ogre lifted it out of her reach and turned round into the sunlight to see
it properly. “Where did you get this, Gwinny? It’s solid gold!”
    “No, it’s not,” said Gwinny. “It can’t be. It was just an ordinary one. I made
it pretty like that with Peter Fillus.”
   “What or who is Peter Fillus?” said the Ogre, still holding the hairgrip out of
reach.
   “It’s just some little stones out of Malcolm’s chemistry set,” said Gwinny.
“They’re called Peter Fillus, and if you rub them on things they go pretty. I did
my people some candlesticks. But they don’t work on carpets and tables and
things.”
  “Just metal?” asked the Ogre, with a strange expression on his face.
  “That’s right,” said Gwinny.
  “Fetch Peter Fillus here and let me see it,” said the Ogre, handing back the
hairgrip.
  While the others brought in the boxes, the dustbin, the mop, and the broom,
Gwinny sped upstairs and clattered down again breathless, holding a test-tube
half full of small stones.
  “That’s all there is now,” she explained.
   “I expect it will do,” said the Ogre and, still with the strange expression on
his face, he carefully took out one small chip of stone and rubbed it along the
handle of the dustbin lid. The place where the stone had touched immediately
became a long golden streak.
  “That’s real gold?” said Douglas.
  “I think it may be,” said the Ogre. “My guess is that Peter Fillus is the
Philosopher’s Stone—and that’s supposed to turn base metal into gold.”
  “Then we’re rich,” said Johnny. “Shall I get some money?”
    The Ogre laughed. “No. Money won’t do, because we’d never get away with
it. But any other metal thing that we don’t want—things that people might think
were valuable—”
  “Really horrible things, you mean?” asked Caspar.
  “The more horrible the better,” said the Ogre.
   There was a rush for metal, which rapidly became a competition to find the
ugliest thing in the house. Gwinny proudly brought out a bloated silver teapot.
Caspar fetched a set of spoons with handles like ships in full sail that were
designed to hurt your hand, no matter how you held them. Malcolm produced a
huge, twiddly toast-rack someone had given the Ogre and Sally for a wedding
present; and Johnny capped that with some fire irons on a stand disguised as
three dolphins. They found a brass corkscrew with a simpering swan for a
handle, a tormented iron cage for putting plants in, and a copper vase shaped
like a rabbit. The Ogre found an ashtray that everyone agreed looked like a
man-eating fungus, and a gilded model of a horse frantically trying to get loose
from a clock grafted onto its hind legs. But it was Douglas who produced the
cream of the collection. After a long and patient search, he came into the kitchen
carrying a pair of stainless steel candlesticks shaped like hen’s legs. Each had a
clawed foot, and under that a ball on a pedestal. Above the claw was a long
scaly leg, and, above that, metal feathers. The feathers just stopped at the top,
and there was a hole for the candle there.
  “Eughk!” said Gwinny, and the others looked at them with deep respect.
    “First prize to Douglas,” said the Ogre. “But there isn’t much of this Peter
Fillus. A careful selection, please. Those spoons are nickel silver, so they’re
out for a start. And I know that teapot has a silvermark, more’s the pity. Those
fire irons—Yes, I know, Johnny, but whoever heard of a golden poker? We’ll
have to choose things a jeweller would want to give us money for. Let’s take
the hen’s legs, the horrified horse, that toast-rack, the copper bunny, and—
What’s this?” He picked out of the heap a hollow aluminum cow with a hole in
its back.
    “It’s a jug,” explained Caspar, who knew it well. “You hold it by its tail, and
it sort of vomits milk through its mouth.”
  “Ah!” said the Ogre, profoundly pleased. “This, too, then.”
   “I say,” said Douglas, surveying the selected horrors, “is there any chance
these would make enough money to buy us a bigger house?”
  “That was my idea,” admitted the Ogre.
   This was enough to inspire everyone. They took the chosen horrors through to
the dining room, with pork pies to sustain them, and set to work with the tiny
chips of stone. Caspar and Douglas took a hen’s leg apiece. Gwinny worked on
the copper rabbit and Johnny on the hollow cow. These were all quite simple
things, soon finished and gleaming. So Johnny and. Gwinny went to lean over
the Ogre and point out to him the parts of the agonized horse he had missed.
Malcolm rubbed diligently away at his toast-rack. After a while, Caspar and
Douglas tore themselves away from admiring their candlesticks and helped
Malcolm. By this time, the stones were worn away to slivers and powder. They
collected the grains on the end of their fingers—rather inconvenienced by the
Ogre’s pipe, which was wandering hopefully in between, hunting up crumbs of
pork pie—and Malcolm used an accidentally gold-tipped knitting-needle to
work Peter Fillus into the twiddles of the toast-rack.
   The Ogre finished the horse. There were still a few grains of Peter Fillus
left, so, as a joke, he fetched the fateful bucket and gave it a golden rim. “A
reminder of the bad old days,” he was saying, when Sally came in from the
kitchen.
  She was looking ten years younger for her short holiday. When she saw the
bucket, the pipe, and the table laden with golden horrors, she stopped short in
amazement. “Good heavens!” she said. “What are you doing?”
   They rushed at her, clamoring explanations and welcome. She laughed. Half
an hour later, when everything was explained, she was still laughing, but she
seemed a little discontented, too. “Well, I feel a bit left out,” she said, when the
Ogre asked her what was the matter. “And I wish you’d waited with the Peter
Fillus. I’ve got something worse than any of those.”
  “What?” said the Ogre.
  “Aunt Violet’s bequest,” said Sally. “I’ll show you.”
  She went to the cupboard and brought out from the very back something that
was like quantities of metal ice cream cones on springs, with an extra large
cone in the middle. It was very big and very ugly, and they had not the least idea
what it could be.
  “It’s called an epergne,” said Sally. “Now don’t you wish you’d waited for
me?”
  They had to admit that it beat even the hen’s legs.
   Much later, when it was growing dark, Gwinny remembered her people, left
out in the garden in their dollhouse. She hurried out to bring them in. To her
dismay, the dollhouse was empty. Her people had gone. They had taken their
golden candlesticks and their wax fruit, and a number of other things besides,
and, it looked as if they did not mean to come back. Nevertheless, Gwinny
hopefully left the dollhouse in the garden for a week But her people never came
back. It seemed they must have set off in search of somewhere better to live.
Gwinny was very hurt.
  “They might at least have left me a note!” she said.
  “You wouldn’t have been able to read their language,” Malcolm pointed out.
  “It doesn’t matter. It would have been polite,” Gwinny said. But the fact was,
her people had never been at all polite. In a way, she was relieved that they had
gone.
   The Ogre took the golden horrors to be valued the next Monday. After some
delay, they were all sent to London to be auctioned, where they fetched prices
that staggered the children. The hen’s legs and the anguished clock proved to be
worth more than they had thought, even in their wildest dreams. They were
considered curiosities. But it was the hollow cow that fetched the most. It was
bought by a collector, who called it a Cow Creamer, and who paid through the
nose for it—much, as the Ogre said, as the cow poured milk—a price that
amazed even the Ogre.
   “Just think how much he might have paid for Aunt Violet’s epergne,” Sally
said wistfully. “I wish you’d waited.”
   They were able to move into a larger house almost at once, where, they all
admitted, they were much happier. Everyone had a room to himself. Caspar and
Douglas could play Indigo Rubber to their hearts’ content. The Ogre was still
often forced to bellow for silence, but, now everyone knew that his bark was so
much worse than his bite, nobody let his roars trouble them. And the Ogre said
he was growing hardened to living in a bear-garden.
   Malcolm took his pencils with him to the new house. For some months, they
hopped round his room at night. But, like the stick-insects they rather
resembled, they did not live very long. Soon, only the Ogre’s pipe was left to
remind them of the chemistry sets. And as time went on, even that began to seem
less like an animal and more like a pipe again. It spent longer and longer
propped stiffly in the pipe-rack, and seldom purred when the Ogre smoked it.
They thought the Animal Spirits must be gradually wearing off it.
    After his pencils died, Malcolm began to suggest going back to the old man’s
shop to see what else he had to sell. So, in the end, Caspar went there with him.
He was very much afraid they would get sold something worse than pink
footballs or the chemistry sets. But the shop was gone. Where the dark court had
been, they found a wide hole full of mechanical excavators. Next time they saw
it, the space was filled with an office-block even taller than the Ogre’s. That
seemed to be the last of Magicraft.
                                 —«»—«»—«»—
                [scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]

                           [A 3S Release— v1, html]

                                 [May 9, 2006]