House of Many Ways (5 page)

“Yes,” Charmain said. “That was breakfast.” She picked the fallen teapot up. The tea that had spilled out of it rapidly turned into brown bubbles, which whirled upward to make a brown streak among the other bubbles. “Now look what you’ve done.”

“A bit more won’t make any difference to this mess,” Peter said. “Don’t you ever tidy up? This is a really good pie. What’s this other one?”

Charmain looked at Waif, who was sitting soulfully beside the apple tart. “Apple,” she said. “And if you eat it, you have to give some to Waif too.”

“Is that a rule?” Peter said, swallowing the last of the pork pie.

“Yes,” said Charmain. “Waif made it and he—I mean
she
—is very firm about it.”

“She’s magical, then?” Peter suggested, picking up the apple tart. Waif at once made small soulful noises and trotted about among the teapots.

“I don’t know,” Charmain began. Then she thought of the way Waif seemed to be able to go anywhere in the house and how the front door had burst open for her earlier on. “Yes,” she said. “I’m sure she is.
Very
magical.”

Slowly and grudgingly, Peter broke a lump off the apple tart. Waif’s frayed tail wagged and Waif’s eyes followed his every movement. She seemed to know exactly what Peter was doing, no matter how many bubbles got in the way. “I see what you mean,” Peter said, and he passed the lump to Waif. Waif gently took it in her jaws, jumped from the
table to the chair and then to the floor, and went pattering away to eat it somewhere behind the laundry bags. “How about a hot drink?” Peter said.

A hot drink was something Charmain had been yearning for ever since she fell off the mountainside. She shivered and hugged her sweater round herself. “What a good idea,” she said. “Do make one if you can find out how.”

Peter waved bubbles aside to look at the teapots on the table. “
Someone
must have made all these pots of tea,” he said.

“Great-Uncle William must have made them,” Charmain said. “It wasn’t me.”

“But it shows it can be done,” Peter said. “Stop standing there looking feeble and find a saucepan or something.”

“
You
find one,” Charmain said.

Peter shot her a scornful look and strode across the room, waving bubbles aside as he went, until he reached the crowded sink. There he naturally made the discoveries that Charmain had made earlier. “There are no taps!” he said incredulously. “And all
these saucepans are dirty. Where does he get water from?”

“There’s a pump out in the yard,” Charmain said unkindly.

Peter looked among the bubbles at the window, where rain was still streaming across the panes. “Isn’t there a bathroom?” he said. And before Charmain could explain how you got to it, he waved and stumbled his way across the kitchen to the other door and arrived in the living room. Bubbles stormed in there around him as he dived angrily back into the kitchen. “Is this a joke?” he said incredulously. “He
can’t
have only these two rooms!”

Charmain sighed, huddled her sweater further around herself, and went to show him. “You open the door again and turn left,” she explained, and then had to grab Peter as he turned right. “No. That way goes to somewhere very strange.
This
is left. Can’t you tell?”

“No,” Peter said. “I never can. I usually have to tie a piece of string round my thumb.”

Charmain rolled her eyes toward the ceiling and
pushed him left. They both arrived in the corridor, which was loud with the rain pelting across the window at the end. Light slowly flooded the place as Peter stood looking around.

“
Now
you can turn right,” Charmain said, pushing him that way. “The bathroom’s this door here. That row of doors leads to bedrooms.”

“Ah!” Peter said admiringly. “He’s been bending space. That’s something I can’t wait to learn how to do. Thanks,” he added, and plunged into the bathroom. His voice floated back to Charmain as she tiptoed toward the study. “Oh, good! Taps! Water!”

Charmain whisked herself into Great-Uncle William’s study and closed the door, while the funny twisted lamp on the desk lit up and grew brighter. By the time she reached the desk, it was almost bright as daylight in there. Charmain shoved aside
Das Zauberbuch
and picked up the bundle of letters underneath. She had to check. If Peter was telling the truth, one of the letters asking to be Great-Uncle William’s apprentice had to be from him. Because she had only skimmed through them
before, she had no memory of seeing one, and if there
wasn’t
one, she was dealing with an imposter, possibly another lubbock. She had to know.

Ah! Here it was, halfway down the pile. She put her glasses on and read:

So
that
seems to be all right! Charmain thought, half relieved and half annoyed. When she had
skimmed the letters earlier, her eye must have caught the word
apprentice
near the top and the word
hoping
near the bottom, and those words were in
all
the letters. So she had assumed it was just another begging letter. And it looked as if Great-Uncle William had done the same. Or perhaps he had been too ill to reply. Whatever had happened, she seemed to be stuck with Peter. Bother! At least he’s not sinister, she thought.

Here she was interrupted by dismayed yelling from Peter in the distance. Charmain hastily stuffed the letters back under
Das Zauberbuch,
snatched off her glasses, and dived out into the corridor.

Steam was blasting out of the bathroom, mixing with the bubbles that had strayed in there. It almost concealed something vast and white that was looming toward Charmain.

“What have you d—” she began.

This was all she had time to say before the vast white something put out a gigantic pink tongue and licked her face. It also gave out a huge trumpeting sound. Charmain reeled backward. It was like being
licked by a wet bath towel and whined at by an elephant. She leaned against the wall and stared up into the creature’s enormous, pleading eyes.

“I know those eyes,” Charmain said. “What has he
done
to you, Waif?”

Peter surged out of the bathroom, gasping. “I don’t know what went wrong,” he gasped. “The water didn’t come out hot enough to make tea, so I thought I’d make it hotter with a Spell of Enlargement.”

“Well, do it backward at once,” Charmain said. “Waif’s the size of an elephant.”

Peter shot the huge Waif a distracted look. “Only the size of a carthorse. But the pipes in here are red hot,” he said. “What do you think I should do?”

“Oh,
honestly
!” Charmain said. She pushed the enormous Waif gently aside and went to the bathroom. As far as she could see through the steam, boiling water was gushing out of all four taps and flushing into the toilet, and the pipes along the walls were indeed glowing red. “Great-Uncle William!” she
shouted. “How do I make the bathroom water
cold
?”

Great-Uncle William’s kindly voice spoke among the hissing and gushing. “You will find further instructions somewhere in the suitcase, my dear.”

“
That’s
no good!” Charmain said. She knew there was no time to go searching through suitcases. Something was going to explode soon. “Go
cold
!” she shouted into the steam. “Freeze! All you pipes, go cold at
once
!” she screamed, waving both arms. “I
order
you to cool down!”

It worked, to her astonishment. The steam died away to mere puffs and then vanished altogether. The toilet stopped flushing. Three of the taps gurgled and stopped running. Frost almost instantly formed on the tap that
was
running—the cold tap over the washbasin—and an icicle grew from the end of it. Another icicle appeared on the pipes that ran across the wall and slid, hissing, down into the bath.

“That’s better,” Charmain said, and turned round to look at Waif. Waif looked sadly back. She was as big as ever. “Waif,” Charmain said, “go small. Now. I order you.”

Waif sadly wagged the tip of her monstrous tail and stayed the same size.

“If she’s magic,” Peter said, “she can probably turn herself back if she wants to.”

“Oh, shut up!” Charmain snapped at him. “What did you think you were trying to do anyway? No one can drink scalding water.”

Peter glowered at her from under the twisted, dripping ends of his hair. “I wanted a cup of tea,” he said. “You make tea with boiling water.”

Charmain had never made tea in her life. She shrugged. “Do you really?” She raised her face to the ceiling. “Great-Uncle William,” she said, “how do we get a hot drink in this place?”

The kindly voice spoke again. “In the kitchen, you tap the table and say ‘Tea,’ my dear. In the living room, tap the trolley in the corner and say ‘Afternoon Tea.’ In your bedroom—”

Neither Peter nor Charmain waited to hear about the bedroom. They dived forward and slammed the bathroom door, opened it again—Charmain giving Peter a stern push to the left—
and jammed themselves through it into the kitchen, turned round, shut the door, opened it again, and finally arrived in the living room, where they looked eagerly around for the trolley. Peter spotted it over in the corner and reached it ahead of Charmain. “Afternoon Tea!” he shouted, hammering mightily upon its empty, glass-covered surface. “Afternoon Tea! Afternoon Tea! Aftern—”

By the time Charmain got to him and seized his flailing arm, the trolley was crowded with pots of tea, milk jugs, sugar bowls, cups, scones, dishes of cream, dishes of jam, plates of hot buttered toast, piles of muffins, and a chocolate cake. A drawer slid out of the end of it, full of knives, spoons, and forks. Charmain and Peter, with one accord, dragged the trolley over to the musty sofa and settled down to eat and drink. After a minute, Waif put her huge head round the door, sniffing. Seeing the trolley, she shoved a bit and arrived in the living room too, where she crawled wistfully and mountainously over to the sofa and put her enormous hairy chin on the back of it behind Charmain. Peter gave her a distracted look
and passed her several muffins, which she ate in one mouthful, with huge politeness.

A good half hour later, Peter lay back and stretched. “That was great,” he said. “At least we won’t starve. Wizard Norland,” he added experimentally, “how do we get lunch in this house?”

There was no reply.

“He only answers me,” Charmain said, a trifle smugly. “And I’m not going to ask now. I had to deal with a lubbock before you came and I’m exhausted. I’m going to bed.”

“What
are
lubbocks?” Peter asked. “I think one killed my father.”

Charmain did not feel up to answering him. She got up and went to the door.

“Wait,” Peter said. “How do we get rid of the stuff on this trolley?”

“No idea,” said Charmain. She opened the door.

“Wait, wait, wait!” Peter said, hurrying after her. “Show me my bedroom first.”

I suppose I’ll have to, Charmain thought. He can’t tell left from right. She sighed. Unwillingly,
she shoved Peter in among the bubbles that were still storming into the kitchen, thicker than ever, so that he could collect his knapsack, and then steered him left, back through the door to where the bedrooms were. “Take the third one along,” she said. “That one’s mine and the first one’s Great-Uncle William’s. But there’s miles of them, if you want a different one. Good night,” she added, and went into the bathroom.

Everything in there was frozen.

“Oh, well,” Charmain said.

By the time she got to her bedroom and into her somewhat tea-stained nightdress, Peter was out in the corridor, shouting, “Hey! This toilet’s frozen over!” Bad luck! Charmain thought. She got into bed and was asleep almost at once.

About an hour later, she dreamed that she was being sat on by a woolly mammoth. “Get off, Waif,” she said. “You’re too big.” After this she dreamed that the mammoth slowly got off her, grumbling under its breath, before she went off into other, deeper dreams.

When Charmain woke, she discovered that Waif had planted her vast head on the bed, across Charmain’s legs. The rest of Waif was piled on the floor in a hairy white heap that filled most of the rest of the room.

“So you can’t go smaller on your own,” Charmain said. “I’ll have to think of something.”

Waif ’s answer was a series of giant wheezings, after which she appeared to go to sleep again. Charmain, with difficulty, dragged her legs out from under Waif ’s head and edged round Waif ’s vast
body finding clean clothes and getting into them. When she came to do her hair, Charmain discovered that all the hairpins she usually put it up with seemed to have vanished, probably during her dive off the cliff. All she had left was a ribbon. Mother always insisted that respectable girls needed to have their hair in a neat knot on the top of their heads. Charmain had never worn her hair any other way.

“Oh, well,” she said to her reflection in the neat little mirror, “Mother’s not here, is she?” And she did her hair in a fat plait over one shoulder and fastened it with the ribbon. Like that, she thought her reflection looked nicer than usual, fuller in the face and less thin and grumpy. She nodded at her reflection and picked her way around Waif to get to the bathroom.

To her relief, the bathroom had thawed overnight. The room was full of soft dripping sounds from water dewing all the pipes, but nothing else seemed to be wrong until Charmain tried the taps. All four of them ran ice-cold water, no matter how long they ran for.

“I didn’t want a bath anyway,” Charmain said, as she went out into the corridor.

There was no sound from Peter. Charmain remembered Mother telling her that boys always were hard to wake in the morning. She did not let this worry her. She opened the door and turned left into the kitchen, into solid foam. Clots of foam and large single bubbles sailed past her into the corridor.

“Damnation!” Charmain said. She put her head down and her arms across her head and plowed into the room. It was as hot in there as her father’s bake house when he was baking for a big order. “Phew!” she said. “I suppose it takes
days
to use up a cake of soap.” After that she said nothing else, because her mouth filled with soapy froth when she opened it. Bubbles worked up her nose until she sneezed, causing a small foamy whirlwind. She collided with the table and heard another teapot fall down, but she plowed on until she ran into the laundry bags and heard the saucepans rattle on top of them. Then she knew where she was. She spared one hand from her face in order to fumble for the sink
and then along the sink until she felt the back door under her fingers. She groped for the latch—for a moment she thought that had vanished in the night, until she realized it was on the other edge of the door—and finally flung the door open. Then she stood gulping in deep, soapy breaths and blinking her running, smarting, soap-filled eyes into a beautiful mild morning.

Bubbles sailed out past her in crowds. As her eyes cleared, Charmain stood admiring the way big shiny bubbles caught the sunlight as they soared against the green slopes of the mountains. Most of them, she noticed, seemed to pop when they got to the end of the yard, as if there was an invisible barrier there, but some sailed on and up and up as if they would go on forever. Charmain followed them up with her eyes, past brown cliffs and green slopes. One of those green slopes must be that meadow where she had met the lubbock, but she was unable to tell which. She let her eyes go on to the pale blue sky above the peaks. It was a truly lovely day.

By this time there was a steady, shimmering
stream of bubbles pouring out of the kitchen. When Charmain turned to look, the room was no longer solid foam, but there were still bubbles everywhere and more piling out of the fireplace. Charmain sighed and edged back indoors, until she could lean over the sink and throw the window open too. This helped enormously. Two lines of bubbles now sailed out of the house, faster than before, and made rainbows in the yard. The kitchen emptied rapidly. It was soon clear enough for Charmain to see that there were now
four
bags of laundry leaning beside the sink, in place of last night’s two.

“Bother that!” Charmain said. “Great-Uncle William, how do I get breakfast?”

It was good to hear Great-Uncle William’s voice among the bubbles. “Just tap the side of the fireplace and say ‘Breakfast, please,’ my dear.”

Charmain rushed hungrily over there at once. She gave the soapy paintwork there an impatient tap. “Breakfast, please.” Then found she was having to back away from a floating tray, nudging at the glasses dangling on her chest. In the center of this
tray was a sizzling plate of bacon and eggs, and crammed in around it were a coffee pot, a cup, a rack of toast, jam, butter, milk, a bowl of stewed plums, and cutlery in a starched napkin.

“Oh,
lovely
!” she said, and before it could all get too soapy, she seized the tray and carried it away into the living room. To her surprise, there was no sign of the afternoon tea feast that she and Peter had had last night, and the trolley was neatly back in its corner; but the room was very musty and there were quite a few escaped bubbles coasting around in it. Charmain went on and out through the front door. She remembered that, while she was picking the pink and blue petals for the spell from
The Boke of Palimpsest
, she had noticed a garden table and bench outside the study window. She carried the tray round the corner of the house to look for it.

She found it, in the place where the morning sun was strongest, and above it, over the pink-and-blue bush, the study window, even though there was no space in the house for the study to be. Magic is interesting, she thought as she set the tray on the
table. Though the bushes around her were still dripping from the overnight rain, the bench and the table were dry. Charmain sat down and consumed the most enjoyable breakfast she had ever had, warm in the sun and feeling lazy, luxurious, and extremely grown up. The only thing missing is a chocolate croissant, like Dad makes, she thought, sitting back to sip her coffee. I must tell Great-Uncle William when he comes back.

She had an idea that Great-Uncle William must have sat here often, enjoying his breakfast. The blooms on the hydrangeas around her were the finest in the garden, as if for his special pleasure. Each bush had more than one color of flowers. The one in front of her had white flowers and pale pink and mauve. The next one over started blue on the left side and shaded over into a deep sea green on the right. Charmain was feeling rather pleased that she had not allowed the kobold to cut these bushes down, when Peter stuck his head out through the study window. This rather destroyed Charmain’s pleasure.

“Hey, where did you get that breakfast?” Peter demanded.

Charmain explained, and he put his head inside and went away. Charmain stayed where she was, expecting Peter to arrive any moment and hoping that he wouldn’t. But nothing happened. After basking in the sun a while longer, Charmain thought she would find a book to read. She carried the tray indoors and through to the kitchen first, congratulating herself on being so tidy and efficient. Peter had obviously been there, because he had shut the back door, leaving only the window open, so that the room was once more filled with bubbles, floating gently toward the window and then streaming swiftly out of it. Among these bubbles loomed the great white shape of Waif. As Charmain arrived, Waif stretched out her huge frayed tail and wagged it sharply against the mantelpiece. A very small dog dish, piled with the amount of food suitable for a very small dog, landed among the bubbles by her enormous front paws. Waif surveyed it sadly, lowered her vast head, and
slurped up the dog food in one mouthful.

“Oh, poor Waif!” Charmain said.

Waif looked up and saw her. Her huge tail began to wag, thrumming against the fireplace. A new tiny dog dish appeared with each wag. In seconds, Waif was surrounded in little dog dishes, spread all over the floor.

“Don’t overdo it, Waif,” Charmain said, edging among the dishes. She put the tray down on one of the two new laundry bags and said to Waif, “I’ll be in the study looking for a book, if you want me,” and edged her way back there. Waif ate busily and took no notice.

Peter was in the study. His finished breakfast tray was on the floor beside the desk and Peter himself was in the chair, busily leafing through one of the large leather books from the row at the back of the desk. He looked far more respectable today. Now that his hair was dry, it was in neat tawny curls and he was wearing what was obviously his second suit, which was of good green tweed. It was crumpled from his knapsack and had one or two round wet
patches on it where bubbles had burst, but Charmain found that she quite approved of it. As Charmain came in, he slammed the book shut with a sigh and pushed it back in its place. Charmain noticed that he had a piece of green string tied round his left thumb. So that’s how he managed to get in here, she thought.

“I can’t make head or tail of these,” he said to her. “It
must
be in here somewhere, but I can’t find it.”

“What are you trying to find?” Charmain asked.

“You said something last night about a lubbock,” Peter said, “and I realized that I didn’t really know what they are. I’m trying to look them up. Or do you know all about them?”

“Not really—except that they’re very frightening,” Charmain confessed. “I’d like to find out about them too. How do we?”

Peter pointed his thumb with the green string round it at the row of books. “These. I know these are a wizards’ encyclopedia, but you have to know the sort of thing you’re looking for before you can
even find the right volume to look in.”

Charmain pulled her glasses up and bent to look at the books. Each one was called
Res Magica
in gold, with a number under that and then a title.
Volume 3,
she read,
Giroloptica
;
Volume 5, Panacticon
; then down at the other end,
Volume 19, Advanced Seminal
;
Volume 27, Terrestrial Oneiromancy
;
Volume 28, Cosmic Oneiromancy.
“I see your problem,” she said.

“I’m going through them in order now,” Peter said. “I’ve just done Five. It’s all spells I can’t make head or tail of.” He pulled out Volume 6, which was labeled simply
Hex,
and opened it. “You do the next one,” he said.

Charmain shrugged and pulled forward Volume 7. It was called, not very helpfully,
Potentes.
She took it over to the windowsill, where there was space and light, and opened it not far from the beginning. As soon as she did, she knew it was the one. “Demon: powerful and sometimes dangerous being,” she read, “often confused with an Elemental
qv,
” and leafing on a few pages, “Devil: a creature of hell….” After
that she was at “Elfgift: contains powers gifted by Elves
qv
for the safety of a realm…,” and then, a wad of pages later, “Incubus: specialized Devil
qv
, inimical mostly to women….” She turned the pages over very slowly and carefully after that, and twenty pages on, she found it. “Lubbock. Got it!” she said.

“Great!” Peter slammed
Hex
shut. “This one’s nearly all diagrams. What does it say?” He came and leaned on the windowsill beside Charmain and they both read the entry.

“
LUBBOCK
: a creature fortunately rare. A lubbock is a purple-hued insectile being of any size from grasshopper to larger than human. It is very dangerous, though nowadays luckily only to be encountered in wild or uninhabited areas. A lubbock will attack any human it sees, either with its pincer-like appendages or its formidable proboscis. For ten months of the year, it will merely tear the human to pieces for food, but in the months of July and August it comes into its breeding season and is then especially dangerous; for in those months it will
lie in wait for human travelers and, having caught one, it will lay its eggs in that human’s body. The eggs hatch after twelve months, whereupon the first hatched will eat the rest, and this single new lubbock will then carve its way out of its human host. A male human will die. A female human will give birth in the normal fashion, and the offspring so born will be a
LUBBOCKIN
(see below). The human female then usually dies.”

My goodness, I had a narrow escape! Charmain thought and her eyes, and Peter’s, scudded on to the next entry.

“
LUBBOCKIN
: the offspring of a
LUBBOCK
qv
and a human female. These creatures normally have the appearance of a human child except that they invariably have purple eyes. Some will have purple skin, and a few may even be born with vestigial wings. A midwife will destroy an obvious lubbockin on sight, but in many cases lubbockins have been mistakenly reared as if they were human children. They are almost invariably evil, and since lubbockins can breed with humans, the evil nature does not disappear
until several generations have passed. It is rumored that many of the inhabitants of remote areas such as High Norland and Montalbino owe their origins to a lubbockin ancestor.”

It was hard to describe the effect of reading this on both Charmain and Peter. They both wished they had not read it. Great-Uncle William’s sunny study suddenly felt entirely unsafe, with queer shadows in the corners. In fact, Charmain thought, the whole house did. She and Peter both found themselves staring around uneasily and then looking urgently out of the window for danger in the garden. Both jumped when Waif gave an outsize yawn somewhere in the corridor. Charmain wanted to dash out there and make sure that window at the end was quite, quite shut. But first she had to look at Peter very, very carefully for any signs of purple in him. He said he came from Montalbino, after all.

Peter had gone very white. This showed up quite a few freckles across his nose, but they were pale orange freckles, and the meager new hairs that grew on his chin were a sort of orange too. His eyes were
a rusty sort of brown, nothing like the greenish yellow of Charmain’s own eyes, but not purple either. She could see all this easily because Peter was staring at her quite as carefully. Her face felt cold. She could tell it had gone as white as Peter’s. Finally, they both spoke at once.