The Ogre of Oglefort Read online

  But that wasn’t all. Something had to be done about the rescuers who had failed so spectacularly in their mission.

  “Rescuers must be punished,” said the First Norn.

  “Pulverized,” said the Second.

  “Obsquatulated,” said the Third.

  But who could they send? They had tried to find proper warriors at the meeting of Unusual Creatures and they had failed. Too frail to leave their beds, the Norns peered hopelessly at the empty platform.

  The ghost train went past. The white-faced specters stared blankly in front of them. Water dripped from the roof.

  “Who?” said the First Norn.

  “Yes, who?” said the Second.

  When a princess is in danger, something has to be done. This is a rule which binds all ancient creatures.

  They went on swallowing pills, shaking their wobbly heads.

  The ghost train came around again and still nothing occurred to them. Their eyes were beginning to close. What they wanted desperately was to sleep and sleep and sleep. . . .

  With a great effort they shook themselves awake. The ghost train came in sight for a third time.

  The Norns looked at one another. They struggled to their knees again. They stretched out their bony arms.

  “Stop!” ordered the First Norn as the train drew level with the mouth of the cave.

  “Stop!” said the Second Norn.

  “Stop absolutely!” demanded the Third.

  The train slowed down, stopped. The door opened a crack, opened a little farther, opened completely—and the specters’ white dead faces stared out in puzzlement.

  The ghosts in the train were not there for nothing. The sins they were being punished for by circling the circle line forever and ever all had to do with traveling.

  Now they were bewildered. The train had never stopped before—it just went around and around.

  But it had stopped.

  And the doors never opened.

  But they had opened; they were sliding slowly apart. And, not quite believing it, the specters glided out onto the platform.

  There was the Honker—a very old ghost with one leg and a crutch who had done nothing when he was alive but honk and spit and let out huge, revolting gobbets of saliva which got on the seats and the floor of the train for other passengers to slip on.

  There was a ghost in city clothes and a bowler hat who had sharpened the point of his umbrella like a rapier and stuck it into the feet of any passenger who got in the train ahead of its owner. The umbrella still had bits of skin and blood clinging to it even now.

  Behind him came the Aunt Pusher—a bruiser of a ghost with great hands like coal scuttles. He had pushed his aunt off the platform and under a train because he wanted her money, but when her will was read he found that she had left everything to a lost dogs’ home, and after that he went mad and started pushing everyone under trains who looked like her and wore a hat with feathers.

  Two women ghosts glided out next. The Bag Lady was a fat ghost wearing a flannel nightdress and carrying a number of bulging shopping bags. During the war she had sheltered in the underground to get away from the bombs, but instead of lying quietly on the platform like the other shelterers, she had spread out a whole lot of clothes and blankets and pretended she had a family who was coming and had kept the other people away. Once she had turned away a young couple and they had gone back up the staircase and been caught by the blast from a bomb and been badly hurt.

  The Smoking Girl was a very young ghost hung all over with gaudy scarves and floating shawls, and she would have been pretty except that her fingers and the corners of her mouth were stained yellow with nicotine. She had smoked a hundred cigarettes a day, coughing and blowing smoke at the other passengers on purpose. There was nothing she liked better than breathing her poisonous fumes into other people’s lungs.

  There was even a Headless Ghost, the Chewer—whose head was so stuck up with chewing gum that he had left it on the train.

  But there was one more ghost to come! He came slowly, and at first he was only a gray wavery shape—a space, a nothingness. But what a nothingness! A cold and hopeless emptiness; a pit of such pointlessness and despair and fear that those who came near felt that life had no sense or meaning.

  “The Inspector!” whispered the other ghosts, and stood back to let him pass.

  The wavery shape became more distinct. It was the figure of a man in a uniform with shiny buttons whose merciless dazzle pierced the eyes—and in his hand a ticket puncher with which he had punched the tickets of the passengers who were on the train.

  But no face. Only two eyes, narrowed to slits, and a mouth set in a slimy calculating leer. The Inspector had had power over the specters when they were alive, kicking off passengers whose tickets were not in order, pushing them out onto the platform, separating mothers from children, making sure that trains stuck in tunnels for hours—and always talking about “the regulations” to justify his cruelest deeds. His creepily soft call of “Tickets, please” had sent shivers down their backs, and even now they were afraid of him.

  The Inspector seldom spoke. He did not need to. His ticket puncher, which once had pierced paper, could now pierce ectoplasm.

  The Norns looked at the ghosts and were pleased with what they saw. The ghosts were deeply disgusting. Ectoplasmic spit is probably the nastiest substance there is, and the Honker had just produced a gobbet of it, which landed in the lap of one of the nurses. The Bag Lady’s phantom knickers had risen from one of her shopping bags and were drifting around the cave, looking for a victim. All the garments in her bags could wrap themselves around people’s faces so that they couldn’t see.

  But that wasn’t what pleased the Norns. An ogre might not be scared of ghosts that were just disgusting. He himself was probably disgusting, too. No, what was terrifying about these ghosts was the sheer evil and selfishness that seemed to hang over them like a black mist. There is nothing more frightening than specters who have lived with cruelty and viciousness day after day, and even the Norns, used as they were to strangeness, found themselves shivering. One murderous deed may be forgiven but these ghosts had practiced evil morning noon and night.

  “Ogre must be killed,” began the First Norn.

  “Ogre of Oglefort,” said the Second Norn.

  “Killed absolutely. Finished,” said the Third.

  “Frightened to death,” said the First Norn.

  “Terrorized,” said the Second.

  “Pulverized,” said the Third.

  “And the rescuers must be punished,” said the First Norn.

  “Horribly.”

  “Cruelly.”

  “Shouldn’t be difficult,” said the Aunt Pusher, smiling his horrible smile. “Ogres are afraid of ghosts, ev-eryone knows that.”

  “What about our reward?” asked the Ghost with the Umbrella. “What do we get if we do the job?”

  The Norns blinked at each other. They were not used to rewarding people—but the ghosts just stared with their relentless eyes.

  Then, “Train will be rerouted,” said the First Norn.

  “Not just around and around,” said the Second.

  “Different stations,” said the Third.

  “Junctions,” said the First Norn.

  “Branch lines,” said the Second.

  “Tunnels,” said the Third.

  The ghosts were satisfied, nodding their horrible heads.

  “How do we get to Oglefort?” asked the Bag Lady.

  “Orders will be given,” said the First Norn.

  “Instructions,” said the Second Norn.

  “Information,” said the Third.

  The Norns were now exhausted. The nurses came forward with syringes to give them an injection but nothing could stop the Old Ones from falling asleep. One by one their heads fell forward on to their chests, they slid down under the bedclothes . . . they began to snore. And the ghosts glided back onto the platform and into the train and sat staring out of the window
at the dark tunnel—and waited.

  CHAPTER

  17

  THE MAGIC BEANS

  The children and Charlie had followed the stream which led from the lake. They had taken off their shoes and socks and were treading carefully over the bright sharp pebbles. Charlie was not content with paddling. He plunged into the water, swam across to the other bank and back again, shook himself all over them, and plunged again. He waited with his head on one side while they threw sticks for him, and more sticks and more sticks still, and after that he began a ferocious tug-of-war with a tree root, growling like a werewolf, but whatever he was doing he came back to them, sneezing with pleasure and sharing his happiness. He was a great believer in sharing.

  “I thought I’d never love a dog after Squinter, but I was wrong,” said Mirella.

  “He makes everything seems as though it’s just been invented, doesn’t he?” said Ivo. “I mean, look at him with that stick—you’d think there’d never been a stick like it in the whole world.”

  The little dog still slept on Ivo’s bed, but as soon as he woke in the morning he trotted off to see Mirella, who now had a bedroom along the corridor, and when the children were apart he simply went backward and forward between them.

  “He’d never let us quarrel,” said Mirella.

  But the children had no wish to quarrel. They agreed exactly about what they wanted to do: make the castle gardens grow, stock the larder, tend the land. And perhaps—though they did not put this into words—turn the place into somewhere where people would not want to be changed but would be content to be themselves.

  “If only we had more help,” said Ivo as they made their way back to the castle. “The kitchen garden needs digging all over and the rose garden needs mulching and Ulf says we ought to be pruning the trees in the orchard. And the Hag gets so tired.”

  “Yes, I know. Maybe the animals could help. People used to use animals on farms.”

  “But not hippos or gnus or aye-ayes.”

  “No . . . but why not? The gnu could pull a cart; it takes ages to wheelbarrow the stuff to the compost. And the hippo could help us to find out what’s going on in the lake. Catching fish would be a big help.”

  “We could ask the ogre a bit more about who the animals were—the gnu and the rest. He might remember.”

  But the ogre said he couldn’t remember anything like that, and anyway he was far too busy with the arrangements for the funeral.

  “I’ve changed my will again,” he told them. “I’m going to leave the castle to the Aunt-with-the-Ears. I’ve thought about it and I think she’ll do better than the Aunt-with-the-Eyes. She dances, you know. She goes around and around when you play a waltz and her teeth flash, and I think it will be jolly when I’m under the mound to have a dancing aunt about the place, don’t you agree? And what about the hearse, how is that getting on?”

  He had also changed pajamas again. Not the ones he was wearing, which were turning a rather messy gray color, but the ones he was going to be buried in.

  “I think they should be my silk ones. I shan’t be cold if I’m beside Germania. Oh, and there’s the music for the funeral. I think we want a brass band with lots of trombones—I’ve always been fond of trombones.”

  So it was no good trying to get help from the ogre. But in the night Ivo woke and remembered something which made him sit bolt upright and disturb Charlie, who was not at all pleased.

  The Norns had given them three presents before they set off on their quest. The sword had been useless, and the foot water hadn’t been much good either. So probably the magic beans which would make whoever ate them understand the language of the animals would turn out to be useless, too.

  But not necessarily, and as soon as it got light he ran along to Mirella’s room.

  “It’s worth a try,” she said. “Do you want to tell the others?”

  “I don’t think so. The Hag will only worry—she’ll think we shouldn’t swallow anything that hasn’t been tried. I know where the beans are—in the suitcase she keeps under her bed.”

  “Good. Let’s go for it then,” said Mirella.

  The beans in the leather pouch looked small and black and . . . well, like beans.

  “I suppose we’ll have to eat one each and at the same time, if we’re both to understand what the animals are saying,” said Ivo.

  So they took two beans and put the pouch back in the suitcase, and then they shut Charlie in the kitchen and made their way out of the castle toward the walled garden.

  They had decided to talk to the gnu first—and they found him in his usual place, dozing in the greenhouse.

  “Well, here goes,” said Ivo. He held the enamel mug under the tap in the wall and swallowed his bean and Mirella swallowed hers.

  Then they waited.

  “Nothing’s happening,” said Mirella. And then, “No wait. I feel sort of . . . fizzy. No, more light-headed.”

  “And my ears are buzzing a bit,” said Ivo.

  They walked over to where the gnu was lying. Then together they said, “Good morning.”

  The gnu opened his yellow eyes and stared at them. He began to squeal and grunt—and then quite suddenly the grunts turned into “And good morning to you.”

  It was an amazing moment. Each word was perfectly clear to them. They could even make out the Scottish accent in which he spoke.

  “Could we ask your name?” said Mirella, sounding every inch a princess.

  “Certainly,” said the antelope. “I’m Hamish Mac-Laren. And who might you be?”

  “I’m Mirella and this is Ivo. You’ll have seen us about.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said the gnu. “But it is strange that I can understand you suddenly—and you can understand me. Why is this?”

  “We’ve eaten some magic beans,” explained Ivo.

  And because the gnu sounded so reliable and sensible, they told him of all their adventures, the illness of the ogre, and what they hoped to do in the gardens and grounds.

  And in return, the gnu, in his deep, steady Scottish voice, told them his story.

  He had been brought up in the Highlands, the youngest of four brothers. His parents died when he was small and he went to live with his grandfather in his stately home. The older brothers fitted in well—they liked doing all the things that Scottish aristocrats did—hunting and shooting and fishing.

  “But I couldn’t take to it,” said Hamish. “The whole place smelled of blood: dead pheasants hanging in the larder, carcasses brought in on litters, dead fish with glazed eyes . . .

  “I wanted to be an astronomer. I love stars, don’t you?” said the gnu, looking up at the sky. “But I wasn’t clever enough. So I just had to help my grandfather, which meant bullying the tenants and killing things all day long.

  “The house was full of the stuffed heads of animals that my grandfather had shot. There was a bison and a buffalo and a whole lot of stags; they had such nice glass eyes. My favorite was the gnu; he was in my bedroom and at night when I couldn’t sleep I talked to him. Then one day a traveler from Ostland came to see us and he told us about an ogre who turned people into animals. My grandfather didn’t believe it, but I thought anything would be better than living there and having to shoot animals that I liked a hundred times better than I liked my relatives. So I sold my father’s gold watch and took a boat to Ostland and found my way here. I knew exactly what animal I wanted to be and . . . well here I am, and I have no regrets.”

  When Hamish stopped speaking, everything in the garden seemed very quiet.

  They could hear a bird singing in the orchard but it didn’t seem to be saying anything.

  Then they plunged into what they wanted to ask him.

  “You see, we so much want to make this garden really grow. And we were wondering if—whether you might help us. The Hag is very old and . . . well there aren’t many of us. Would you consider maybe pulling a cart . . . or grazing bits of lawn that we can’t get around to cutting or . . . anything like that?�
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  The gnu was silent and for a moment the children were worried in case they had offended him. After all a Scottish laird might not want to work as a gardener.

  But the gnu was nodding his great head. “I’d be delighted to help,” he said. “To be honest, the time does go rather slowly when one is just sleeping or eating—and I’m quite strong. Pulling a cart would be nothing . . . or mulching a vegetable bed. Just tell me what you want me to do.”

  “What a nice person,” said Mirella when they left the gnu. “He couldn’t have been more helpful.”

  They had no idea how long the effect of the beans would last, and as the aye-aye was nowhere to be seen they hurried down to the lake to talk to the hippo.

  They walked around the edge, peering into the water, but it was some time before the creature’s piggy eyes appeared above the surface.

  “Please, could you come a bit closer so that we can talk to you?” called Ivo.

  The hippo stopped in the middle of a yawn and looked up, surprised.

  “Would you tell us your name? I’m Mirella and this is Ivo.”

  There was another long pause and the children were worried that the effect of the beans had worn off. Then in a deep voice with a Northern accent, the hippo said, “Bessie. I’m Bessie.”

  She said it in a resigned sort of way, as though being Bessie wasn’t a particularly good thing to be, but she didn’t sound unfriendly, just tired.

  “How long have you lived here in the lake?” asked Ivo.

  Bessie lifted her great head and opened her mouth. This seemed to be her way of thinking.

  “A long time,” she said at last.

  “Do you like it here?”

  “Yes, I like it.” Bessie spoke slowly, but they thought this was nothing to do with being a hippo. It was more that she had been a rather slow and dozy person.

  Getting her to tell her story took much longer than learning about the gnu but after a while the children pieced together her life before she came to Oglefort.

  Bessie had lived in a small house in a drab industrial town. Her husband had left her with four children who seemed to be able to do nothing for themselves. Bessie cooked and shopped and mopped up after them; then when the children were grown up, they brought their own babies back to the dark little house, and it all started again: the screams, the mess, the diapers.