House of Many Ways (11 page)

“Now!”
said Charmain.

To her relief, Peter went crossly splashing off, muttering about bossy, bad-tempered
cats.
Charmain pretended not to hear. Meanwhile, she dared not let go of the slit and the slit kept spraying and she was getting wetter every second. Oh,
blast
Peter! She put her other hand on the farther end of the slit and began pushing and sliding her hands together as hard as she could. “Close up!” she ordered the pipe. “Stop leaking and close
up
!” Water spouted rudely into her face. She could feel the slit trying to dodge, but she refused to let it. She pushed and pushed. I can do magic! she thought at the pipe. I worked a spell. I can
make
you close up! “So
close up
!”

And it worked. By the time Peter came wading back with just two cloths, saying those were all he could find, Charmain was soaked through to her underclothes but the pipe was whole again. Charmain took the cloths and bound them around the pipe on either side of where the slit had been. Then she snatched up the long back brush from beside the bath—this being the only thing remotely like a wizard’s staff that she could see—and batted at the cloths with it.

“Stay there. Don’t dare move!” she told the cloths. She batted at the mended slit. “You stay shut,” she told it, “or it’ll be the worse for you!” After that she turned the back brush on Peter’s blobby gray spells and batted at them too. “Go!” she told them. “Go away! You’re
useless
!” And they all obediently vanished. Charmain, flushed with a sense of great power, batted at the hot tap beside her knees. “Run hot again,” she told it, “and let’s have no nonsense!
And
you,” she added, reaching across to bat at the hot tap on the washbasin. “Both hot—but not too hot, or I’ll give you grief. But you stay
running cold,” she instructed the cold taps, batting them. Finally, she came out of the bath with a great splash and batted at the water on the floor. “And you
go
! Go on, dry up, drain away. Go! Or else!”

Peter waded over to the washbasin, turned the hot tap on, and held his hand under it. “It’s warm!” he said. “You really did it! That’s a relief. Thanks.”

“Huh!” said Charmain, soaked and cold and grumpy. “Now I’m going to change into dry clothes and read a book.”

Peter asked, rather pathetically, “Aren’t you going to help mop up, then?”

Charmain did not see why she should. But her eye fell on poor Waif, struggling toward her with water lapping at her underside. It did not look as if the back brush had worked on the floors. “All right,” she sighed. “But I have done a day’s work already, you know.”

“So have I,” Peter said feelingly. “I was rushing about all day trying to stop that pipe leaking. Let’s get the kitchen dry, at least.”

As the fire was still leaping and crackling in the
kitchen grate, it was not unlike a steam bath in there. Charmain waded through the tepid water and opened the window. Apart from the mysteriously multiplying laundry bags, which were sodden, everywhere but the floor was dry. This included the suitcase, open on the table.

Behind Charmain, Peter spoke strange words and Waif whimpered.

Charmain whirled round to find Peter with his arms stretched out. Little flames were flickering on them, from his fingers to his shoulders. “Dry, O waters on the floor!” he intoned. Flames began to flicker across his hair and down his damp front too. His face changed from smug to alarmed. “Oh dear!” he said. As he said this, the flames rippled all over him and he began to burn quite fiercely. By then he looked plain frightened. “It’s
hot
! Help!”

Charmain rushed at him, seized one of his blazing arms, and pushed him over into the water on the floor. This did no good at all. Charmain stared at the extraordinary sight of flames flickering away under the water and simmering bubbles appearing
all round Peter, where the water was starting to boil, and hauled him up again double quick in a shower of hot water and steam. “Cancel it!” she shouted, snatching her hands off his hot sleeve. “What spell did you use?”

“I don’t know how!” Peter wailed.

“What
spell
?” Charmain bawled at him.

“It was the spell to stop floods in
The Boke of Palimpsest
,” Peter babbled, “and I’ve no idea how to cancel it.”

“Oh, you are
stupid
!” Charmain cried out. She grabbed him by one flaming shoulder and shook him. “Cancel, spell!” she shouted. “
Ouch!
Spell, I order you to cancel at once!”

The spell obeyed her. Charmain stood shaking her scorched hand and watched the flames vanish in a sizzle, a cloud of steam, and a wet, singeing smell. It left Peter looking brown and frizzled all over. His face and hands were bright pink and his hair was noticeably shorter. “Thanks!” he said, flopping over with relief.

Charmain pushed him upright. “Pooh! You smell
of burned hair! How
can
you be so stupid! What other spells have you been doing?”

“Nothing,” Peter said, raking burned bits out of his hair. Charmain was fairly sure he was lying, but if he was, Peter was not going to confess. “And it wasn’t that stupid,” he argued. “Look at the floor.”

Charmain looked down to see that the water had mostly gone. The floor was once again simply tiles, wet, shiny, and steaming, but not flooded any longer. “Then you’ve been very lucky,” she said.

“I mostly am,” Peter said. “My mother always says that too, whenever I do a spell that goes wrong. I think I’m going to have to change into different clothes.”

“Me too,” Charmain said.

They went through the inner door, where Peter tried to turn right and Charmain pushed him left, so that they went straight and arrived in the living room. The wet trickles on the carpet there were steaming and drying out rapidly, but the room still smelled horrible. Charmain snorted, turned Peter round, and pushed him left through the door again.
Here, the corridor was damp, but not full of water any longer.

“See?” Peter said as he went into his bedroom. “It did work.”

“Huh!” Charmain said, going into her own room. I wonder what
else
he’s done. I don’t trust him an inch. Her best clothes were a wet mess. Charmain took them off sadly and hung them around the room to get dry. And nothing was going to cure the big scorch mark down the front of her best jacket. She would have to wear ordinary clothes tomorrow when she went to the Royal Mansion. And do I dare leave Peter alone here? she wondered. I bet he’ll spend the time experimenting with spells. I know I would. She shrugged a little, as she realized she was no better than Peter really. She had been quite unable to resist the spells in
The Boke of Palimpsest
either.

She was feeling much more kindly toward Peter when she came back to the kitchen, dry again except for her hair and wearing her oldest clothes and her slippers.

“Find out how to ask for supper,” Peter said, as Charmain put her wet shoes to dry in the hearth. “I’m starving.” He was looking much more comfortable in the old blue suit that he had arrived in.

“There’s food in the bag Mother brought yesterday,” Charmain said, busy arranging the shoes in the best place.

“No, there isn’t,” Peter said. “I ate it all for lunch.”

Charmain stopped feeling kindly toward Peter. “Greedy pig,” she said, banging on the fireplace for food for Waif. Waif, in spite of all the crumpets she had eaten in the Royal Mansion, was delighted to see the latest dog dish. “And so are you a greedy pig,” Charmain said, watching Waif gobble. “Where do you put it all? Great-Uncle William, how do we get supper?”

The kindly voice was very faint now. “Just knock on the pantry door and say ‘Supper,’ my dear.”

Peter got to the pantry first. “Supper!” he bellowed, banging hard on the door.

There was a knobby, flopping sound from the
table. Both of them whirled round to look. There, lying beside the open suitcase, were a small lamb chop, two onions, and a turnip. Charmain and Peter stared at them.

“All raw!” Peter said, stunned.

“And not enough anyway,” Charmain said. “Do you know how to cook it?”

“No,” said Peter. “My mother does all the cooking in our house.”

“Oh!” said Charmain.
“Honestly!”

Peter and Charmain naturally converged on the fireplace then. Waif scuttled out of the way as, one after another, they beat on the mantelpiece and cried out, “Breakfast!” But it seemed that this spell only worked properly in the morning.

“I wouldn’t even have minded kippers,” Charmain said, miserably surveying the two trays. They had rolls, honey, and orange juice on them, and nothing else.

“I know how to boil eggs,” Peter said. “Will Waif eat this lamb chop?”

“She’ll eat almost anything,” Charmain said. “She’s as bad as—as we are. I don’t think she’ll eat a turnip, though. I wouldn’t.”

They had a somewhat unsatisfactory supper. Peter’s eggs were—well—solid. In order to take Charmain’s mind off them, Peter asked her about her time in the Royal Mansion. Charmain told him, in order to take both their minds off the way hard boiled eggs did not mix with honey. Peter was highly intrigued by the way the King seemed to be looking for gold, and even more intrigued by the arrival of Morgan and Twinkle.

“And a fire demon?” he said. “Two infants with magical powers
and
a fire demon! I bet the Princess has her hands full. How long are they staying?”

“I don’t know. Nobody said,” Charmain said.

“Then I bet you two Afternoon Teas and a Morning Coffee that the Princess turns them out before the weekend,” Peter said. “Have you finished eating? Then I want you to look through your Great-Uncle’s suitcase.”

“But I want to read a
book
!” Charmain protested.

“No, you don’t,” Peter said. “You can do that any time. This suitcase is full of stuff you need to know. I’ll show you.” He pushed the breakfast trays aside and pulled the suitcase in front of her. Charmain sighed and put her glasses on.

The suitcase was full to the brim with paper. Lying on top was a note in Great-Uncle William’s beautiful but shaky writing. “For Charmain,” it said. “Key to the House.” Under that was a large sheet of paper with a tangle of swirly lines drawn on it. The lines had labeled boxes drawn on them at intervals, and each line ended in an arrow at the edge of the page, with the word “Unexplored” written beside it.

“That’s the short key you’ve got there,” Peter said as Charmain picked this paper up. “The rest of the stuff in the suitcase is the proper map. It folds out. Look.” He took hold of the next sheet of paper and pulled, and it came out with the next sheet joined to it, and then the next, folded back and forth to fit in the suitcase. It came out on to the table in a huge zigzag. Charmain stared at it resentfully. Each piece had carefully drawn rooms and corridors
on it and neatly written notes beside each thing. The notes said things like “Turn left twice here” and “Two steps right and one left here.” The rooms had blocks of writing in them, some simple, like “Kitchen,” and some eloquent, like the one that read “My store of wizardly supplies, kept constantly replenished by an intake spell I am rather proud of. Please note that the ingredients on the left hand wall are all highly dangerous and must be handled with great care.” And some of the joined sheets seemed to be all criss-crossing corridors labeled “To unexplored North Section,” “To Kobolds,” “To Main Cistern” or “To Ballroom: I doubt if we shall ever find a use for this.”

“I was quite right to leave this suitcase shut,” Charmain said. “It’s the most confusing map I ever saw in my life! It
can’t
all be this house!”

“It is. It’s enormous,” Peter said. “And if you look, you’ll see that the way the map is folded is a clue to how you get to the different parts of it. See, here’s the living room on the top page, but if you go to the next page, you don’t get his study or the
bedrooms because those are folded back, see. You get the kitchen instead because that’s folded the same way….”

Charmain’s head began to go round, and she closed her ears to Peter’s enthusiastic explanations. She looked at the swirling lines on the piece of paper in her hand instead. It almost seemed easier. At least, she could see “Kitchen” right in the middle of it, and “Bedrooms” and “Swimming Pool” and “Study.” Swimming Pool? Not really, surely? An interesting swirl led off to the right, underneath these boxes, into a tangle containing a box labeled “Conference Room.” An arrow pointed off from this box labeled “To Royal Mansion.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “You can get to the King’s house from here!”

“…out to a mountain meadow that says ‘Stables,’ but I can’t see how to get there from his workroom yet,” Peter expounded, unfolding another zigzag. “And here’s ‘Food Store.’ It says ‘Stasis Spells operate.’ I wonder how you take those off. But what interests me are the places like this
one, where he’s written ‘Storage Space. Just Junk? Must investigate someday.’ Do you think he created all this bent space himself? Or did he find it already there when he moved in?”

“He found it,” Charmain said. “You can tell by these arrows that say ‘Unexplored’ that he doesn’t know what’s out there yet.”

“You may be right,” Peter said judiciously. “He really only uses the middle bits, doesn’t he? We can do him a favor by exploring more of it.”

“You can if you like,” Charmain said. “I’m going to read my book.” She folded up the paper with the swirly lines on it and stowed it in her pocket. This could save her a journey in the morning.

In the morning, Charmain’s good clothes were still damp. She had to leave them draped depressingly around her room and get into her next-nicest, while she wondered if she could manage to leave Waif behind with Peter today. Perhaps not. Suppose Peter tried another spell and contrived to turn Waif inside out or something.

Waif of course came trotting eagerly after Charmain into the kitchen. Charmain tapped the fireplace for dog food and then, a little doubtfully, for her own breakfast. It could be that she and Peter had thrown the spell out by demanding breakfast yesterday evening.

But no. Today she got a full tray, with a choice of tea or coffee, and toast, and a plate piled high with something made with fish and rice, and a peach to follow. I think the spell’s apologizing, she thought. She didn’t like the fish stuff much, so she gave most of it to Waif, who liked it the way she always liked food and smelled quite fishy as she trotted after Charmain when Charmain unfolded her swirly paper, ready to go to the Royal Mansion.

Looking at the swirls confused Charmain. She found she had been even more confused by the chart in the suitcase. Bending the paper backward and forward to try and reproduce what was in the suitcase did not help at all. After several turns left and right, she found herself walking into a place that was large and well lighted by big windows overlooking the
river. There was a fine view of the town across the river, where, most frustratingly, she could see the golden roof of the Royal Mansion gleaming in the sunlight.

“But I’m trying to get
there
, not
here
!” she said, looking around.

There were long wooden tables under the windows, loaded with strange implements and more implements stacked in the middle of the room. The other walls were full of shelves piled with jars, tins, and odd-shaped glassware. Charmain sniffed the smell of new wood here, which was overlaid by the same thunderstorm-and-spice smell she had noticed in Great-Uncle William’s study. The smell of magic having been done, she thought. This must be his workroom. To judge by the way Waif was trotting cheerily about, Waif knew this place well.

“Come on, Waif,” Charmain said, pausing to look at a piece of paper on top of the strange implements in the middle of the room. It said, “Please do not touch.” “Let’s go back to the kitchen and start again.”

It did not work out that way. A left turn from the workroom door brought them into a warm, warm place open to the sky, where a small blue pool rippled amid white stone surrounds. The place was fenced off by white stone trellises with roses growing up them, and there were white reclining chairs beside the roses, piled with large fluffy towels. Ready for when you’d finished swimming, Charmain supposed. But poor Waif was terrified of this place. She crouched against the gateway, whining and trembling.

Charmain picked her up. “Did someone try to drown you, Waif? Were you a puppy someone didn’t want? It’s all right. I’m not going near this water either. I’ve no idea how to swim.” As she turned left through the gateway, it occurred to her that swimming was only one of a very large number of things she had no idea how to do. Peter had been right to object to her ignorance. “It’s not that I’m lazy,” she explained to Waif as they arrived in what seemed to be the stables, “or stupid. I’ve just not bothered to look round the edges of Mother’s way of doing things, you see.”

The stables were rather smelly. Charmain was relieved to see that the horses that must belong there were up in a meadow beyond a fence. Horses were another thing she had no idea about. At least Waif did not seem to be frightened here.

Charmain sighed, put Waif down, scrabbled up her glasses, and looked at the confusing swirly chart again. “Stables” were here, up in the mountains somewhere. She needed two right turns from there to the kitchen again. She turned right twice, with Waif pattering behind, and found herself in near dark outside what seemed to be a large cave full of hurrying blue kobolds. Each one of them turned and glowered at Charmain. Charmain hurriedly turned right again. And this time she was in a store for cups, plates, and teapots. Waif whined. Charmain stared at several hundred teapots, in rows on shelves, of every possible color and size, and began to panic. It was getting late. Worse than that, when she put her glasses on again and consulted the plan, she found she was somewhere near the bottom left-hand part of the swirls, where the arrow pointing off
to the edge had a note that said “A group of lubbockins live down this way. Care necessary.”

“Oh,” Charmain exclaimed. “This is
ridiculous
! Come on, Waif.” She opened the door they had just come through and turned right yet again.

This time they were in complete darkness. Charmain could feel Waif nosing anxiously up against her ankles. Both of them sniffed and Charmain said, “Ah!” This place had a damp stone smell that she remembered from the day she had arrived in the house. “Great-Uncle William,” she asked, “how do I get from here to the kitchen again?”

Much to her relief, the kindly voice answered. It sounded very faint and far away now. “If you are there, my dear, you are rather lost, so listen carefully. Make one turn clockwise…”

Charmain had no need to listen anymore. Instead of making a complete turn, she turned carefully halfway and then peered forward. Sure enough, there was a dimly lighted stone corridor ahead, crossing the one she seemed to be standing in. She
strode thankfully toward it, with Waif trotting behind her, and turned into that corridor. She knew she was now in the Royal Mansion. It was the same corridor where she had seen Sim pushing a trolley on her first day in Great-Uncle William’s house. Not only did it smell right—with faint foody smells on top of the damp stone smell—but the walls had the typical Royal Mansion look, with lighter squares and oblongs where pictures had been taken away. The only trouble was that she had no idea whereabouts in the Mansion this was. Waif was no help. She simply plastered herself against Charmain’s ankles and shivered.

Charmain picked Waif up and walked down the corridor, hoping to find somewhere she knew. She turned two corners without being any the wiser and then almost ran into the colorless gentleman who had passed the crumpets round yesterday. He jumped backward, thoroughly startled.

“Dear me,” he said, peering at Charmain in the gloom. “I had no idea you had arrived yet, Miss…er…Charming, is it? Are you lost? Can I assist?”

“Yes, please,” Charmain said resourcefully. “I went to the…to the…er…um…you know, the one for ladies—and I must have turned the wrong way afterward. Can you tell me the way back to the library?”

“I can do better than that,” said the colorless gentleman. “I’ll
show
you. Just follow me.”

He turned round and led the way back where he had been coming from, along another dim corridor and across a large, cold lobby, where a flight of stone stairs led upward. Waif’s tail began to twitch slightly, as if she found this part familiar. But her tail stopped moving as they crossed in front of the stairs. Morgan’s voice came booming down from the top of the flight.

“Don’t
want
to! Don’t
want
!
Don’t
WANT!”

Twinkle’s shriller voice joined in. “I can’t wear
thethe
! I want my
thtwipey oneth
!”

Sophie Pendragon’s voice echoed down too. “Be quiet, both of you! Or I’ll do something dreadful, I warn you! I’ve no patience left!”

The colorless gentleman winced. He said to
Charmain, “Small children bring so much life to a place, don’t they?”

Charmain looked up at him, meaning to nod and grin. But something made her shudder instead. She was not sure why. She managed to give a little nod and that was all, before she followed the gentleman through an archway, where the booming of Morgan and the screaming of Twinkle died away into the distance.

Round another corner, the colorless gentleman opened a door that Charmain recognized as the door to the library. “Miss Charming seems to have arrived, Sire,” he said, bowing.

“Oh, good,” said the King, looking up from a pile of thin leather books. “Come in and sit down, my dear. I found an absolute heap of papers for you last night. I’d no idea we had so many.”

Charmain felt as if she had never been away. Waif settled down, rolled tummy upward in the heat from the brazier. Charmain settled down also, in front of a toppling heap of different-sized papers, found pen and paper, and started in. It was very companionable.

After a while, the King said, “This ancestor of mine, who wrote these diaries, fancied himself as a poet. What do you think of this one? To his lady love, of course.

“Would you call that romantic, my dear?”