The Ogre of Oglefort Page 5

  And she flounced out of the room and slammed the door.

  The ogre had been lying limply on the sofa. Now he looked up.

  “You’ll have to take over,” he said. “I absolutely can’t go on and you can tell them so. I’m feeling very faint. And keep that dreadful girl away from me.”

  And he slumped back onto the cushions with a weary groan.

  CHAPTER

  8

  GRIEF IN THE PALACE

  At first no one at the palace could believe that Mir-ella had gone. They were sure she was playing a trick on them, hiding somewhere close by, and they searched in all sorts of ridiculous places. Inside chests of drawers, or behind curtains or in cooking pots. They called and whistled and begged and entreated her to come out from wherever she was, and her mother even offered to bring Squinter back if only Mirella stopped teasing them.

  When this didn’t work a proper hunt began. The police were called and scoured every inch of the palace grounds and went into every house in Waterfield, and the army was sent out to hunt in the surrounding countryside. The sound of bloodhounds baying could be heard all through the night, the schoolchildren were told to pray and sing hymns, and people wept openly in the streets.

  At first her parents had thought it might be a kidnap attempt, and they waited every moment of every day for a ransom note but none came.

  “She can’t possibly have run away,” said her mother. “Not when she had everything a girl could want.”

  So had she met with some dreadful accident? Wells and rivers were searched, the lifeguards put out to sea, the Boy Scouts looked in potholes and caves—but still day followed day and there was no sign of the princess.

  Both her sisters were sent for—Sidony came with her husband, who had brought his stamp collection to sort out while they waited, and Angeline came with her husband, who sucked even more peppermints when he was worried. Both the sisters were expecting babies and they sat and knitted baby clothes and shook their heads.

  “Could she have run away to a traveling zoo or something?” Sidony wondered. “She was so nutty about animals.”

  But there hadn’t been any traveling zoos or circuses in the neighborhood for many months, and their mother always began to cry again when anyone suggested that Mirella had not been entirely happy at home.

  After a week the schoolchildren were given a day’s holiday; the flags flew at half-mast as people began to think that Mirella might be dead; and they could no longer put off giving the terrible news to Prince Umberto.

  So Mirella’s father went to Amora, where he found Prince Umberto in a mauve quilted dressing gown being measured for a new suit by his tailor while a hairdresser rubbed pomade into his hair.

  The prince was very upset indeed to hear that his intended bride was missing and perhaps dead.

  “Oh dear,” he said. “This is terrible. Quite terrible.”

  And indeed it was. Umberto owed money to his tailor and his shoemaker and to the man who trained his racehorses, and he hadn’t paid for his new carriage. Up to now he had kept everyone quiet by telling them he was going to marry a princess whose father was very rich and would pay all his debts, and now he didn’t know what to do.

  “I shall have to order some mourning clothes, I suppose—fortunately black suits me—or is it too early? I mean, there may still be good news.”

  But as the days passed there was no news at all. In the war, when someone disappeared, they put out bulletins saying “Missing: Presumed Dead.”

  It was these words that the police now wrote in their files.

  CHAPTER

  9

  WHAT OGRES EAT

  The troll bent over the ogre, lying limply on the sofa. His breath was shallow, and when the troll levered up the giant’s huge wrist and felt his pulse, he found that it was far too fast.

  “If you hurry, you can free those poor wretches down in the dungeon,” said Ulf quietly to the others, “and then we can think what to do about the princess. I’ll stay here and if it looks as though he’s coming around I’ll warn you.”

  So the others hurried downstairs and across the courtyard to the grating. There were no groping hands this time, but they could hear voices and the same wails as before.

  “Hullo there,” called Ivo. “We’ve come to help you! We’re going to set you free. Do you know where the key is for the dungeon?”

  A head appeared—it had thinning black hair combed over a bald patch and a drooping black moustache. A second head bobbed up beside it—that of a woman with a sharp nose and tight, blue-rinsed curls.

  “What key?” said the man.

  “There isn’t a key,” said the woman. “You can get in if you go down the steps over there to the oak door. Just open it; it’s not locked.”

  “You mean you’re not locked in?” The Hag was completely bewildered. “But then why don’t you escape?”

  But the heads had disappeared. The rescuers made their way to the steps and down to an oaken door. It was opened from the inside—and two people dashed toward them.

  “Where is the ogre?” asked the woman with blue-rinsed hair.

  “Do you bring news?” inquired the man with the sad moustache.

  The dungeon was furnished in a rather unusual way. There was a sofa in one corner and a table with chairs in another. On the table was a large teapot, a plate of biscuits, and a pack of playing cards.

  “Yes, we do,” said the Hag. “We bring you wonderful news. The ogre is ill and he won’t harm you—so you can go home. You’re free. Only you must hurry, there’s no time to waste.”

  There was a moment of total silence, and then it began.

  “Go home?” said the man. “You must be mad. I can’t go home—I’ve sold my house and my car to come here and I’m staying.”

  “You mean our house and our car,” said the woman, glaring at him. “And I’ve given up my job,” she went on, “so we can’t possibly go back.”

  “I’ve never heard of anything so silly,” said the man, tugging at his moustache. “Why would we want to go home after taking all the trouble to get here? If the ogre isn’t feeling well enough today, we’ll just wait till he feels better.”

  “Tell him we’re not going home and no one has any right to make us,” said the woman. “And tell the people in the kitchen that we’ve run out of tea bags.”

  The rescuers looked at one another. None of them could make head or tail of all this.

  “We’d better go back upstairs and try to find out what is going on,” said the wizard.

  They found the ogre propped up on cushions, sipping something the troll had mixed for him.

  “They won’t go away,” said the Hag wearily. “And they’re not imprisoned, either.”

  The ogre put down his cup. “Did you say they won’t go away?” he rumbled in his hoarse voice.

  “That’s right,” said the Hag. “They said they couldn’t go back to where they’d come from.”

  “Did you tell them that I was finished? Through?” asked the ogre.

  “Yes. Well, we told them you were ill.”

  “Oh God—what have I done to deserve this,” said the ogre, clutching his forehead.

  But the rescuers had had enough. “However ill you feel,” said the Hag firmly, “you really must tell us what all this is about.”

  There was a groan from the sofa.

  “No, it’s no good groaning,” the Hag went on. “We’ve come a long way and nothing is what it seems. If you explain we may be able to help but not otherwise.”

  The ogre looked at the troll, hoping perhaps that he would be forbidden to excite himself, but Ulf, too, was looking at him and waiting. So the ogre gave one more deep groan—and then he began.

  “You know what ogres do?” he said.

  “They eat people?” suggested Ivo.

  “Exactly so. But I never liked the taste of human flesh,” he said. “The first time I ate a person it turned the corners of my mouth blue and gave me a pain here.” He put his ha
nd on his side. “It’s my liver, I think. The livers of ogres are very sensitive. I thought maybe he was too fresh—the bloke I ate—so after that they brought me an idiot who’d shot himself instead of the deer he was after, but it wasn’t any better.” The ogre shuddered. “Ugh, I can taste him still.

  “My wife was alive then—a wonderful ogress—she didn’t care what she ate. Her grave is behind the castle. She reminded me of my duty. Which was to be terrifying, to be ferocious. So I began to do what ogres have been doing for thousands of years. Next best thing to eating people was to change them into beasts. Turning human beings into animals. A dreadful punishment it was considered to be and quite right, too. Anyone who came near I changed, and when I ran low I sent my servants out to find more. I turned the postman into a wolverine and the plumber into an okapi and the man who came to mend the roof into a worm. I was the best shape changer in Ostland, and humans were terrified to come near me.

  “Then my wife died. She was a wonderful woman,” said the ogre again. “I wish you could have met her—the tops of her legs measured twelve feet around and every square inch covered in long black hair.” He sighed and went on with his story. “I rather let the castle go after that, but I went on changing people—it was what she’d wanted.

  “Then one day a truly awful thing happened. I’ll never forget it. It was a Thursday. The last day on which a thing like that should have happened.”

  “Because Thursday’s Thor’s day, isn’t it?” put in Ivo. “The God of Thunder. I saw it in the encyclopedia.”

  “That’s right,” said the ogre. “I found a man trespassing near my wife’s grave. Weedy little fellow. Well, I picked him up and brought him in and I told him I was going to turn him into a fish and throw him into the moat. A fish, mind you—wet and dumb and slimy to hold. So I waited for him to scream and plead and beg me not to, and do you know what he did?”

  The ogre paused and searched them with his bloodshot eyes.

  “He smiled,” said the ogre. “I can see it now, that smile—and he said, ‘Oh yes, thank you, thank you. A fish would be so restful. I wonder . . . I suppose it couldn’t be a gudgeon; they have such pretty fins.’” The ogre paused. “That’s what he said. Those were his very words. I was so shocked, I did what he said—he’s out there now in the moat, you can tell him, he’s got a look.

  “And that was the beginning of the end. People came—more and more of them—and asked me to turn them into animals. Said they were tired of being human, nothing worked—their jobs, their marriages. They’d thought of killing themselves and then they’d thought no, they’d rather go on living but as an animal.

  “Since then I’ve been besieged. People come all the time and they won’t take no for an answer. The place they’re in used to be a perfectly good dungeon with torture instruments and hooks for hanging, and they’ve turned it into a sort of club room and sit there drinking tea. What’s more, they come with lists of animals they want to be—not just a dog but a Mexican hairless dog . . . not just a rabbit but an Angora rabbit with lop ears and spots.” The ogre’s voice was getting higher and higher, and the troll poured a spoonful of medicine and gave it to him.

  “Well, I can’t eat them so I changed them—after all, I am an ogre. And then along comes this girl—the Princess Mirella—and suddenly I couldn’t take any more. A young, beautiful girl—a princess—and she wants to be a bird. Can’t face being a princess, can’t face being married to the prince her parents picked out for her. And not any bird—a white bird. I could tell her a thing or two about birds—if you want to see something really nasty, watch two turtledoves having a fight. And I’m sick of it,” said the ogre. “I’m turning into someone who’s taking on the sins of the world—making life better for people who have mucked up the planet. Do you hear me? I’m making life better—me, an ogre.”

  He tried to sit up, dreadfully agitated, and began to cough.

  “I’m not being true to myself,” he spluttered. “Ogres are fierce and wicked; they’re here to do harm. So I told her I wouldn’t do it and then . . . well you saw her—tears, pleading, fuss. I tell you, I’m through. No more changing, not ever.” He let his head roll back onto the cushion once more and closed his eyes. “I need a rest,” he said. “A long, long rest. I think I’m having a nervous breakdown.”

  The troll now took charge. The sofa had casters, and with all of them pushing, they managed to wheel it into the ogre’s bedroom, and in a few minutes the ogre was lying back against the pillows of his enormous four-poster bed.

  As they tiptoed out, his voice followed them. “You’ll have to stay and look after me,” he said. “They’re nasty things, these breakdowns. Very nasty indeed.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  CHARLIE

  Now what?” wondered the Hag.

  They were all completely exhausted. If everything had gone according to plan, they would now be dragging the body of the ogre away and setting Mirella free. Instead the troll was making medicine for him, and the princess they had come to rescue had locked herself into a room in the tower and wouldn’t come out. Was there a punishment for failing their mission? If so, they were in trouble.

  Ivo settled matters by yawning, and the Hag made up her mind.

  “We must all go to bed. Now. There are sure to be enough bedrooms in the castle. After a night’s sleep we shall know what to do.”

  So they went exploring, opening and shutting various doors. Some were storerooms and some were empty with clouds of dust rising up from them, but eventually they found a corridor with a number of doors which led into fairly ordinary bedchambers. The beds were enormous, of course, as were the chairs and bedside tables, but the rescuers were too tired to care about details. The troll shared a bedroom with Ivo, not too far away from the ogre so that he could hear him if he called in the night; but the Hag and the wizard had rooms to themselves.

  It was as he was undressing that the poor wizard had a nasty shock. Undressing was always difficult for him—he so easily got tangled up in his trousers—and he was holding onto the bedpost to keep his balance when he thought he saw, on the ceiling, the same floating face he had seen when they were crossing the sea.

  Was it his mummy again, checking up on him? When he was a little boy she had often come in at bedtime to make sure that he was reading his Book of Spells and not the comic book he had saved up for.

  But when he looked again, he saw two spiders scuttling away and realized that the gray shape was the webs they had been spinning, and with a sigh of relief, he climbed into bed.

  Ivo slept heavily and at first he did not hear the scratching on his door. Ulf’s bed was empty—he must have been tending the ogre—but he had left a candle, so Ivo went to open the door, and in a minute the animal that stood outside ran past Ivo and took a flying leap onto his bed.

  It was a small mongrel dog, white, with brown splotches on his back and ears, alert, intelligent eyes, and whiskery eyebrows. It was clear at once that he liked Ivo’s bed, and liked Ivo. His tail went like a windmill; whimpers of pleasure came from his throat. He rolled over so that Ivo could scratch his stomach, and as Ivo scratched, he closed his eyes and helped him, moving one paw in rhythm with Ivo’s hand, as kind dogs do.

  “Where do you come from?” Ivo wondered.

  But it didn’t matter where he came from; Ivo was just incredibly pleased to see him. After all the fear and the strangeness, here was a warm friendly living thing, and something ordinary.

  The little dog yawned and burrowed into the pillow, setting it right for the night, and Ivo curled up beside him. He was just drifting off to sleep when it occurred to him that perhaps the dog was not so ordinary after all. Perhaps he was someone the ogre had changed, and Ivo was going to spend the night hugging a headmaster or a tax inspector.

  For a moment the thought was frightening; then he put it out of his mind. Whatever the little mongrel had been once, what he was now was a warm, breathing, loving dog—and Ivo’s friend.

  A
nd while everyone in the castle was asleep something sinister happened down in the kitchens. The door opened and a procession of strange people in brown capes and hoods came out and set off across the drawbridge and down the path that led to the sea. They carried sacks filled with their working clothes and with food that they had stolen. These were the ogre’s servants, who had finally decided to leave. They had been thinking about going for a long time because everything was going to pieces in the castle since the ogress had died, but it was the tea bags that were the final straw. When a message came from the people in the dungeon that they had run out, something just cracked in the cook. She said she was leaving and then all the other servants said they were leaving, too.

  So when the Hag woke in the morning and made her way down to the kitchen, she found it deserted. The great range was cold; there was scarcely any food to be seen.

  She turned to find Ivo, who had left the troll asleep. Trotting behind him was the small white dog, who greeted the Hag enthusiastically, sniffing her shoes and wagging his tail.

  “He’s really nice,” said Ivo. “I’ve called him Charlie.”

  But it was what to do about breakfast that was the problem.

  They hunted in the larder and found a piece of bacon that looked as though it might be edible and a loaf of stale bread—and at least there was some coffee.

  “I might as well be back in Whipple Road,” grumbled the Hag as she fried the bacon while Ivo put out the plates.

  The other rescuers came in then and they had breakfast, but it was clear that something had to be done. The ogre was bedridden; the dungeon was full of people who refused to go away; and the princess was still locked in her room.

  “I’ve saved some bacon for her but you’d better take it up,” said the Hag. “She may be better with someone her own age.”