The Ogre of Oglefort Read online

  Ivo’s face was streaked with tears. Though he and Mirella had quarreled every time they met, he minded losing her more than he could have believed.

  The Hag and the other rescuers, too, were very unhappy about what was to happen.

  “I used to think it would be nice to be a frog when I lived in the Dribble” she said. “Just plopping in and out of puddles . . . But it was only a fancy. This is too much magic, it’s too strong.”

  But what could they do when Mirella was determined to starve herself to death? So now they assembled in the Hall, waiting. The troll had strewn some pine needles on the floor of the platform where she was to stand; the Hag had picked a red rose for Mirella to hold while she still had hands.

  Then Mirella came in. She had cleaned herself up as well as she could, rubbing her face with a wet cloth and shaking out her hair, but she still looked rather a mess—and very small, dwarfed by the huge room.

  Then the door opened and the troll, straining all his muscles, pushed in the ogre in a wheelchair which his grandmother had used in her last days. He still wore his pajamas and his legs were covered in a blanket made of moleskins which had been nibbled rather badly by mice.

  Charlie, sitting at Ivo’s feet, gave a whimper. The ogre put one foot on the ground and moaned.

  “My back,” he moaned. “The pain . . .”

  But as no one took any notice, he managed to stand up and stood there, swaying.

  The Hag came forward and put the rose in Mirella’s hand.

  Mirella stood as though she was made of stone. If she was frightened she didn’t show it. In a few minutes—a few seconds even—she would be flying over the heads of everyone. She looked around to see how she would get away afterward, and Ivo came up to her and said, “I’ve left the window open—the round one above the banners,” and she whispered her thanks.

  The ogre began to pass his hands back and forth over Mirella’s head.

  In the Hall everyone held their breath.

  Everyone except Charlie.

  The little white dog had been watching, his piebald ears pricked as the ogre bent over Mirella. Now for some reason he left Ivo, leaped onto the platform, and ran up to Mirella, yapping excitedly, and began to wag his tail and lick her feet.

  Mirella bent down to him. “It’s all right, Charlie,” she said. “Lie down. Be quiet.” And to Ivo she said, “Call him off, can’t you?”

  “No, I can’t,” said Ivo. “He has a perfect right to say good-bye. He wants you to stroke him.”

  “I know perfectly well what he wants,” snapped Mirella.

  She had never touched Charlie before. Now as she felt his rough coat under her hand, his warm tongue licking her bare leg, something extraordinary happened to her. It was as though the scales fell from her eyes. She saw the Hag, so old and weary, who had trekked miles believing Mirella to be in danger. She saw the other rescuers—the troll and the wizard—and Ivo, who had thought she might be his friend. Above all, she saw the living, warm, excited little dog.

  And suddenly a feeling flooded through her—of thankfulness for being alive, of joy in the world. She looked up at the window through which in a few moments she would fly out and away forever and felt panic, thinking of the loneliness that would follow.

  But she had to go through with it now. She had suffered so much to get here, she had been so obstinate and determined—she couldn’t now change her mind. She closed her eyes and lifted her head as the ogre’s hand came down toward her.

  The hand never reached her. The ogre gave a terrible cry, took two tottering paces forward, and fell to the ground with a crash that echoed through the Hall.

  Everyone rushed forward, but the ogre could not move; he only pointed with his great arm to the doorway, where a figure as large and hideous as he was himself was standing, wreathed in a ghostly mist.

  “Germania,” whispered the ogre—and fainted.

  CHAPTER

  13

  REMOVING THE GRUMBLERS

  The ogre had bruised his forehead badly when he fainted at the sight of his wife. The Hag had found the foot water which the Norns had given them, and it helped a little, but not very much.

  “They must have been the wrong kind of feet,” said Ivo, who was beginning to have a very low opinion of the Norns.

  But it was not the bruise that was worrying them; it was the ogre’s state of mind. He had decided that Germania’s ghost had appeared to him because the ogress wanted him to join her in her bone-covered mound.

  “She has been hovering over me ever since she passed on,” said the ogre. “I have felt her hover. A heavy hover, because she’s a big woman. So I have to die,” added the ogre. “I have to die quickly so that she doesn’t get impatient.”

  The ogre having a breakdown had been bad, but the ogre deciding to die was worse.

  “I can’t stop eating at once, but I shall stop eating slowly, so every day you must weigh my food and take off an ounce. And I must decide which pajamas to wear for the funeral and whom to invite. My three aunts, of course, and they’ll have to bring Clarence.”

  “Who’s Clarence?” asked Ivo—but the ogre only shook his head and sighed.

  “But you can’t do this,” said the Hag. “You’ve got a castle to care for—look at all the land out there and the gardens and the lake. What’s going to happen to it?”

  “I shall make a will,” said the ogre. “Perhaps my Aunt-with-the-Eyes should have it—she’s the eldest. Or the Aunt-with-the-Nose. Obviously I can’t leave it to Clarence. It’ll probably take a few weeks for me to be properly dead—I’ll have decided by then.” He waved a lordly hand. “And you can look after everything till then, can’t you?”

  The rescuers looked at each other. They thought that the ogre was getting a bit above himself.

  “I have a house in London, you know,” said the Hag.

  “And I have a job,” said the troll.

  “My mother is waiting for me,” said the wizard.

  But the truth was that 26 Whipple Road did not look very inviting from a distance. Mr. Prendergast would be all right, and after the way Gladys had behaved the Hag did not feel that she had to hurry back to her toad. And there was going to be a terrible row about Ivo whenever they got back. Nor did Ulf long to go back to pushing trolleys down hospital corridors. The ogre might be taking a lot for granted, but actually no one was in a hurry to return.

  “We’ll look after things for a while,” said Ulf, “but you must give up the idea of dying. It’s a really silly idea.”

  But the ogre just closed his eyes and said Germania was waiting for him. “You’ll have to make the mound bigger so we can both get in. And I’ll need someone to write things down as they occur to me. I think my mauve pajamas would be best for the funeral, but mauve’s rather a sad color. I don’t want to depress people.”

  The ogre had been dragged back to his bed, still muttering his wife’s name, and was now in a deep sleep, and Mirella had joined the others in the kitchen. She was no longer the sulky, obstinate girl who had shut herself in the tower but had straightaway helped the Hag to prepare the lunch, and now she and Ivo were doing the washing up.

  “I know how to get rid of the people in the dungeon,” said Mirella.

  “How?” asked Ivo. “How can you get rid of them?”

  “I’ll show you,” said Mirella. “Come with me.”

  With Charlie running at their heels, they made their way across the courtyard and knocked on the door of the dungeon.

  “Have you brought us some lunch?” asked Mrs. Hummock.

  “No,” said Mirella. “But we have some news from the ogre.”

  The sulky pair came hurrying up to her.

  “He’s going to change us then?” asked Mr. Hummock.

  “At last, at last!” said his wife, clapping her hands. “I knew he’d come around.”

  Mirella put up her hand. “Well, yes—but there’s something he’d like you to do first.”

  “And what is that?” asked M
r. Hummock.

  “Well, you see, the ogre is feeling very weak. That was why he hasn’t changed you up to now. But he feels sure that if he had one particular thing to drink—and lots of it—he’d get better very quickly.”

  “And what is that?” asked Mrs. Hummock.

  Mirella paused. Then she said dramatically: “Blood!”

  There was a moment of silence.

  Then: “What kind of blood?” asked the headmistress.

  “Human blood. It must be human blood and he needs lots of it. Not just a few pints like one gives in a hospital, but buckets of it. He says if you’d all allow yourselves to be completely drained, he could drink enough blood from you to get up his strength for the changing. Of course you’d be almost dead—just white wraiths, really—but it wouldn’t matter because the next moment you’d be whatever you want to be. It hurts rather, as you’d expect—there’s a special syringe that goes into you and it just sucks and sucks—you can see your muscles turning paler and paler and your skin going blue, but the ogre is sure you won’t mind. He’s sending someone down first thing tomorrow morning to do it. You’ll need a good knife to make a cut in the flesh for the nozzle to go in and—”

  “All right, all right, we get the idea,” said Mrs. Hummock.

  “Are you going to do it, too?” asked her husband. “Give your blood?”

  “Of course. I’m a princess—I’m not afraid of pain,” said Mirella grandly. “Well, we’ll see you later. There’s no need to tidy up down here, the ogre said, because there’s always a bit of leakage and the blood gets around; the whole place will have to be swilled out afterward.”

  She waved cheerfully and left the dungeon.

  “Do you think it’ll work?” asked Ivo.

  “It’ll work, you’ll see,” said Mirella.

  The Hag was a little shocked when she found out what Mirella had done, but that didn’t stop her going to the kitchen window several times an hour to see if anything was happening. There was no movement all that afternoon and when they went to bed the Grumblers were still there. But in the morning, when they made their way cautiously to the grating, the dungeon was empty.

  And now at last with the ogre in bed and the Grumblers gone, the rescuers could set to work outside.

  As they crossed the drawbridge they could see the lie of the land. To the west was a dark line of trees at which the troll stared longingly, and the blue glimmer of a lake. To the east the ground was flat, a kind of marshland stretching away to the sea. But straight ahead of them, past Germania’s burial mound, was the walled garden and the orchard, and it was the garden that they were heading for. The Hag carried a basket; Ulf trundled a wheelbarrow full of tools. The wizard was sitting with the ogre, but the children ran ahead with Charlie; it was wonderful to be out in the open.

  The kitchen garden must have been a marvelous place before the ogre had let everything go to seed, but now the great yellow squash and swollen cucumbers were overripe and rotten; the creepers had run riot. What had been a strawberry bed was just a mass of moldy straw with a few red splotches where the berries had fallen to the ground.

  “All the same the soil is excellent,” said the Hag. “If one had the labor one could grow anything.”

  They set to work, digging up those vegetables that one could still eat, wheelbarrowing the rotten ones away to the compost heap. Along a wall of old bricks grew peaches and apricots—some were mildewed but some could be used—and the children found a stepladder in the toolshed and started to pick them.

  They worked for a couple of hours. The sun was hot on their backs, but there was a tap in the wall where they could drink when they got thirsty.

  “I’m going to go and look in the orchard,” said the Hag when she had squirted water over her shoes. “I’m sure there will be some windfalls we can use.”

  The troll followed her but the children stayed, picking blackberries from a bush which grew over the cold frames.

  “Look, here’s another door,” said Mirella, pushing back a creeper which covered the wall.

  They pushed it open and found they were in a second garden which now grew mostly long grass. There was a trellis covered in rambler roses along one wall and a few rosebushes with dark red blooms in a border. An old greenhouse stood in the corner; two of the windows were broken and the roof looked as though it would collapse at any minute. They were about to go back when a volley of excited barks from Charlie made them turn. He was standing at the door of the greenhouse, his coat bristling, his nose quivering with excitement.

  “What’s the matter, Charlie?” asked Ivo.

  Charlie’s barks grew louder. The children hushed him and went to look in at the open door.

  Lying on a heap of sacking, lifting his great head sleepily, was an enormous creature like an outsize antelope. Two curved horns came from the sides of his head; large yellow eyes stared at them. A tufted beard hung down from his face, and he did not seem to be at all pleased to be disturbed.

  “What is it?” whispered Ivo.

  “It’s a gnu,” breathed Mirella. “A kind of wildebeest. There was one in the zoo at home.”

  For a moment the children just stared. Gnus are strange-looking beasts at the best of times. They belong on the African savanna, moving in herds between their watering holes. To see one a few feet away, lying on the floor of an old greenhouse, was incredible.

  The gnu gazed at them in silence. Then he rose and stalked away over the grass.

  Two days later the children were in the orchard picking the last of the apples. Ivo was holding the ladder, Mirella was reaching up for the ripe fruit. The Hag had taken a wheelbarrow of windfalls up to the kitchen.

  “They’ll make excellent jam,” she’d said contentedly. She had lived through the war when everyone grew their own food and knew there is nothing better than that.

  The children went on working. It was very peaceful; wasps droned over the fallen fruit, the sun shone. They were moving the ladder to another tree when there was a sudden eerie cry—a wail of fear it sounded like, high- pitched and shrill—and looking up they saw a dark creature, about the size of a small cat, bounding along one of the branches. For a second it turned and looked at them, then it fled, leaping away toward a stand of tall oaks which sheltered the orchard. They only had time to make out two enormous yellow eyes with black rings around them, a pair of naked ears, and a long bushy tail.

  “Is it a lemur?” wondered Ivo.

  Mirella shook her head. “The tail’s wrong. Lemurs’ tails are striped. I think it’s an aye-aye,” she said excitedly. “They come from the rain forests of Madagascar—usually you only see them at night. Oh this is so amazing—I’ve always wanted to live among animals—it’s like being in Paradise.”

  Over lunch in the big kitchen, Dr. Brainsweller told them more about these mysterious little beasts.

  “The people who live in the rain forest are very superstitious about them—there are all sorts of legends. Some of the tribes believe they carry the souls of the dead up to heaven,” he said. “We’re very lucky to have one here. I knew a wizard who’d have given his right arm for a hair from an aye-aye’s head—he wanted it for a spell to raise his dead grandmother from her grave. Not at all the thing to do, of course, but he had set his heart on it.”

  Though they were working harder than they had ever done in their lives, the children had never been so happy. Ivo was right when he’d thought that he and Mirella might become friends; already they seemed to read each other’s minds. It was great to be doing really useful things—picking fruit, digging, clearing ditches—instead of sitting at their desks learning stuff they would probably never need. The adults, too, loved working out of doors—but they had their work cut out looking after the ogre.

  “Are you making my mound bigger?” he wanted to know. “Must be able to get in comfortably beside Germania.”

  He had decided against wearing the mauve pajamas for the funeral.

  “Say what you like, mauve is a sad color.
Melancholy. I think the striped pajamas would be best.”

  And he’d changed his mind about which aunt he was going to leave the castle to.

  “I think the Aunt-with-the-Eyes should have it,” he said. “She’s the oldest, so I think it would be fair. I shall expect you to witness my will when I’ve written it. And I shall need a hearse.”

  “A hearse takes people to the graveyard for burial, doesn’t it?” asked Ivo. “And you’re only going to go as far as the mound.”

  “All the same, I want everything to be done properly. There’s a cart in the shed. You only have to build it up and paint it black and put my name on it. And a skull and crossbones perhaps.”

  So that was another job for the rescuers to do.

  They saw the gnu several times; he did not seem at all bothered by their presence—but the aye-aye was dreadfully shy. They heard its thin eerie screech, and a couple of times they were close enough to see its strange fingers, thin and long like the fingers of a witch, as it dug in the bark looking for grubs, but it never came down from the trees.

  But the aye-aye was not the last of their discoveries.

  The glimmer of blue they had seen when they first crossed the drawbridge turned out to be a beautiful lake, large and silent, with water lilies covering the surface. In the middle of the lake was a flat rock, the kind that mermaids used to sit on and comb their hair.

  Then one day, after a hard morning’s weeding and digging, Ivo and Mirella went down to the water to cool off. They sat under an overhanging willow and dabbled their feet in the water, and they were just wondering whether to plunge in and have a proper swim, when there was a great swirl on the surface of the lake, and then slowly a head came above the surface. In the head were two round piggy eyes and a huge mouth, which opened to show vast pink gums.

  As they watched, the animal pulled itself slowly and laboriously out of the water and heaved itself onto the rock, where it stood for a moment—yawning and shaking itself and looking about.

  It was a hippopotamus. Not a full-size beast but a pygmy hippo about the size of a small cow, but with all the characteristics of its bigger brethren. Its hide was smooth and shiny in the sunlight, and it looked very clean and appetizing. A piece of waterweed hung from the side of its mouth, and it gazed at the children for a long moment before it slid into the water once again.