Howl's Moving Castle

by Diana Wynne Jones

  Howl burst out onto the lawn. He had not bothered to alter his clothes. He did not bother to do any magic. He just charged straight at the Witch. The Witch made a grab for Mari, but Mari was still too far away. Howl got to Mari first, slung her behind him, and charged on. And the Witch ran. She ran, like a cat with a dog after it, across the lawn and over the neat fence, in a flurry of flame-colored robes, with Howl, like the chasing dog, a foot or so behind and closing. The Witch vanished over the fence in a red blur. Howl went after her in a black blur with trailing sleeves. Then the fence hid both of them from sight.

  “I hope he catches her,” said Martha. “The little girl’s crying.”

  Down below, Megan put her arm round Mari and took both children indoors. There was no knowing what had happened to Howl and the Witch. Lettie and Percival and Martha and Michael went back downstairs. Fanny and Mrs. Fairfax were transfixed with disgust at the state of Howl’s bedroom.

  “Look at those spiders!” Mrs. Fairfax said.

  “And the dust on these curtains!” said Fanny. “Annabel, I saw some brooms in that passage you came through.”

  “Let’s get them,” said Mrs. Fairfax. “I’ll pin that dress up for you, Fanny, and we’ll get to work. I can’t bear a room to be in this state!”

  Oh, poor Howl! Sophie thought. He does love those spiders! She hovered on the stairs, wondering how to stop Mrs. Fairfax and Fanny.

  From downstairs, Michael called, “Sophie! We’re going to look round the mansion. Want to come?”

  That seemed the ideal thing to stop the two ladies from cleaning. Sophie called to Fanny and hobbled hurriedly downstairs. Lettie and Percival were already opening the door. Lettie had not listened when Sophie explained it to Fanny. And it was clear that Percival did not understand either. Sophie saw they were opening it purple-down by mistake. They got it open as Sophie hobbled across the room to put them right.

  The scarecrow loomed up in the doorway against the flowers.

  “Shut it!” Sophie screamed. She saw what had happened. She had actually helped the scarecrow last night by telling it to go ten times as fast. It had simply sped to the castle entrance and tried to get in there. But Miss Angorian was out there. Sophie wondered if she was lying in the bushes in a dead faint. “No, don’t,” she said weakly.

  No one was attending to her anyway. Lettie’s face was the color of Fanny’s dress, and she was clutching Martha. Percival was standing staring, and Michael was trying to catch the skull, which was yattering its teeth so hard that it was threatening to fall off the bench and take a wine bottle with it. And the skull seemed to have a strange effect on the guitar too. It was giving out long, humming twangs: Noumm Harrummm! Noumm Harrummm!

  Calcifer flamed up the chimney again. “The thing is speaking,” he said to Sophie. “It is saying it means no harm. I think it is speaking the truth. It is waiting for your permission to come in.”

  Certainly the scarecrow was just standing there. It was not trying to barge inside as it had before. And Calcifer must have trusted it. He had stopped the castle moving. Sophie looked at the turnip face and the fluttering rags. It was not so frightening after all. She had once had fellow feeling for it. She rather suspected that she had just made it into a convenient excuse for not leaving the castle because she had really wanted to stay. Now there was no point. Sophie had to leave anyway: Howl preferred Miss Angorian.

  “Please come in,” she said, a little croakily.

  “Ahmmnng!” said the guitar. The scarecrow surged into the room with one powerful sideways hop. It stood swinging about on its one leg as if it was looking for something. The smell of flowers it had brought in with it did not hide its own smell of dust and rotting turnip.

  The skull yattered under Michael’s fingers again. The scarecrow spun round, gladly, and fell sideways toward it. Michael made one attempt to rescue the skull and then got hastily out of the way. For as the scarecrow fell across the bench, there came the fizzing jolt of strong magic and the skull melted into the scarecrow’s turnip head. It seemed to get inside the turnip and fill it out. There was now a strong suggestion of a rather craggy face on the turnip. The trouble was, it was on the back of the scarecrow. The scarecrow gave a wooden scramble, hopped upright uncertainly, and then swiftly spun its body round so that the front of it was under the craggy turnip face. Slowly it eased its outstretched arms down to its sides.

  “Now I can speak,” it said in a somewhat mushy voice.

  “I may faint,” Fanny announced, on the stairs.

  “Nonsense,” Mrs. Fairfax said, behind Fanny. “The thing’s only a magician’s golem. It has to do what it was sent to do. They’re quite harmless.”

  Lettie, all the same, looked ready to faint. But the only one who did faint was Percival. He flopped to the floor, quite quietly, and lay curled up as if he were asleep. Lettie, in spite of her terror, ran toward him, only to back away as the scarecrow gave another hop and stood itself in front of Percival.

  “This is one of the parts I was sent to find,” it said in its mushy voice. It swung on its stick until it was facing Sophie. “I must thank you,” it said. “My skull was far away and I ran out of strength before I reached it. I would have lain in that hedge forever if you had not come and talked life into me.” It swiveled to Mrs. Fairfax and then to Lettie. “I thank you both too,” it said.

  “Who sent you? What are you supposed to do?” Sophie said.

  The scarecrow swung about uncertainly. “More than this,” it said. “There are still parts missing.” Everyone waited, most of them too shaken to speak, while the scarecrow rotated this way and that, seemingly thinking.

  “What is Percival a part of?” Sophie said.

  “Let it collect itself,” said Calcifer. “No one’s asked it to explain itself bef—” He suddenly stopped speaking and shrank until barely a green flame showed. Michael and Sophie exchanged alarmed glances.

  Then a new voice spoke, out of nowhere. It was enlarged and muffled, as if it were speaking in a box, but it was unmistakably the voice of the Witch. “Michael Fisher,” it said, “tell your master, Howl, that he fell for my decoy. I now have the woman called Lily Angorian in my fortress in the Waste. Tell him I will only let her go if he comes himself to fetch her. Is that clear, Michael Fisher?”

  The scarecrow whirled round and hopped for the open door.

  “Oh, no!” Michael cried out. “Stop it! The Witch must have sent it so that she could get in here!”

  Chapter 21

  In which a contract is concluded before witnesses.

  Most people ran after the scarecrow. Sophie ran the other way, through the broom cupboard and into the shop, grabbing her stick as she went.

  “This is my fault!” she muttered. “I have a genius for doing things wrong! I could have kept Miss Angorian indoors. I only needed to talk to her politely, poor thing! Howl may have forgiven me a lot of things, but he’s not going to forgive me for this in a hurry!”

  In the flower shop she hauled the seven-league boots out of the window display and emptied hibiscus, roses, and water out of them onto the floor. She unlocked the shop door and towed the wet boots out onto the crowded pavement. “Excuse me,” she said to various shoes and trailing sleeves that were walking in her way. She looked up at the sun, which was not easy to find in the cloudy gray sky. “Let’s see. Southeast. That way. Excuse me, excuse me,” she said, clearing a small space for the boots among the holiday-makers. She put them down pointing the right way. Then she stepped into them and began to stride.

  Zip-zip, zip-zip, zip-zip, zip-zip, zip-zip, zip-zip, zip-zip. It was as quick as that, and even more blurred and breathless in both boots than in one. Sophie had brief glimpses between long double strides: of the mansion down at the end of the valley, gleaming between trees, with Fanny’s carriage at the door; of bracken on a hillside; of a small river racing down into a green valley; of the same river sliding in a much broader valley; of the same valley turned so wide it seemed endless and blue in the distanc
e, and a towery pile far, far off that might have been Kingsbury; of the plain narrowing toward mountains again; of a mountain which slanted so steeply under her boot that she stumbled in spite of her stick, which stumble brought her to the edge of a deep, blue-misted gorge, with the tops of trees far below, where she had to take another stride or fall in.

  And she landed on crumbly yellow sand. She dug her stick in and looked carefully round. Behind her right shoulder, some miles off, a white, steamy mist almost hid the mountains she had just zipped through. Below the mist was a band of dark green. Sophie nodded. Though she could not see the moving castle this far away, she was sure the mist marked the place of flowers. She took another careful stride. Zip. It was fearsomely hot. The clay-yellow sand stretched in all directions now, shimmering in the heat. Rocks lay about in a messy way. The only growing things were occasional dismal gray bushes. The mountains looked like clouds coming up on the horizon.

  “If this is the Waste,” Sophie said, with sweat running in all her wrinkles, “then I feel sorry for the Witch having to live here.”

  She took another stride. The wind of it did not cool her down at all. The rocks and bushes were the same, but the sand was grayer, and the mountains seemed to have sunk down the sky. Sophie peered into the quivering gray glare ahead, where she thought she could see something rather higher than rock. She took one more stride.

  Now it was like an oven. But there was a peculiar-shaped pile about a quarter of a mile off, standing on a slight rise in the rock-littered land. It was a fantastical shape of twisted little towers, rising to one main tower that pointed slightly askew, like a knotty old finger. Sophie climbed out of the boots. It was too hot to carry anything so heavy, so she trudged off to investigate with only her stick.

  The thing seemed to be made of the yellow-gray grit of the Waste. At first Sophie wondered if it might be some strange kind of ants’ nest. But as she got nearer, she could see that it was as if something had fused together thousands of grainy yellow flowerpots into a tapering heap. She grinned. The moving castle had often struck her as being remarkably like the inside of a chimney. This building was really a collection of chimney pots. It had to be a fire demon’s work.

  As Sophie panted up the rise, there was suddenly no doubt that this was the Witch’s fortress. Two small orange figures came out of a dark space at the bottom and stood waiting for her. She recognized the Witch’s two page boys. Hot and breathless as she was, she tried to speak to them politely, to show she had no quarrel with them. “Good afternoon,” she said.

  They just gave her sulky looks. One bowed and held out his hand, pointing toward the misshapen dark archway between the bent columns of chimney pots. Sophie shrugged and followed him inside. The other page walked after her. And of course the entrance vanished as soon as she was through. Sophie shrugged again. She would have to deal with that problem when she came back.

  She rearranged her lace shawl, straightened her draggled skirts, and walked forward. It was a little like going through the castle door with the knob black-down. There was a moment of nothingness, followed by murky light. The light came from greenish yellow flames that burned and flickered all round, but in a shadowy way which gave no heat and very little light either. When Sophie looked at them, the flames were never where she was looking, but always to the side. But that was the way of magic. Sophie shrugged again and followed the page this way and that among skinny pillars of the same chimney-pot kind as the rest of the building.

  At length the pages led her to a sort of central den. Or maybe it was just a space between pillars. Sophie was confused by then. The fortress seemed enormous, though she suspected that it was deceptive, just as the castle was. The Witch was standing there waiting. Again, it was hard to tell how Sophie knew—except that it could be no one else. The Witch was hugely tall and skinny now and her hair was fair, in a ropelike pigtail over one bony shoulder. She wore a white dress. When Sophie walked straight up to her, brandishing her stick, the Witch backed away.

  “I am not to be threatened!” the Witch said, sounding tired and frail.

  “Then give me Miss Angorian and you won’t be,” said Sophie. “I’ll take her and go away.”

  The Witch backed away further, gesturing with both hands. And the page boys both melted into sticky orange blobs which rose into the air and flew toward Sophie. “Yucky! Get off!” Sophie cried, beating at them with her stick. The orange blobs did not seem to care for her stick. They dodged it, and wove about, and then darted behind Sophie. She was just thinking she had got the better of them when she found herself glued to a chimney-pot pillar by them. Orange sticky stuff stranded between her ankles when she tried to move and plucked at her hair quite painfully.

  “I’d almost rather have green slime!” Sophie said. “I hope those weren’t real boys.”

  “Only emanations,” said the Witch.

  “Let me go,” said Sophie.

  “No,” said the Witch. She turned away and seemed to lose interest in Sophie entirely.

  Sophie began to fear that, as usual, she had made a mess of things. The sticky stuff seemed to be getting harder and more elastic every second. When she tried to move, it snapped her back against the pottery pillar. “Where’s Miss Angorian?” she said.

  “You will not find her,” said the Witch. “We will wait until Howl comes.”

  “He’s not coming,” said Sophie. “He’s got more sense. And your curse hasn’t all worked anyway.”

  “It will,” said the Witch, smiling slightly. “Now that you have fallen for our deception and come here. Howl will have to be honest for once.” She made another gesture, toward the murky flames this time, and a sort of throne trundled out from between two pillars and stopped in front of the Witch. There was a man sitting in it, wearing a green uniform and long, shiny boots. Sophie thought he was asleep at first, with his head out of sight sideways. But the Witch gestured again. The man sat up straight. And he had no head on his shoulders at all. Sophie realized she was looking at all that was left of Prince Justin.

  “If I was Fanny,” Sophie said, “I’d threaten to faint. Put his head back on at once! He looks terrible like that!”

  “I disposed of both heads months ago,” said the Witch. “I sold Wizard Suliman’s skull when I sold his guitar. Prince Justin’s head is walking around somewhere with the other leftover parts. This body is a perfect mixture of Prince Justin and Wizard Suliman. It is waiting for Howl’s head, to make it our perfect human. When we have Howl’s head, we shall have the new King of Ingary, and I shall rule as Queen.”

  “You’re mad!” Sophie said. “You’ve no right to make jigsaws of people! And I shouldn’t think Howl’s head will do a thing you want. It’ll slither out somehow.”

  “Howl will do exactly as we say,” the Witch said with a sly, secretive smile. “We shall control his fire demon.”

  Sophie realized she was very scared indeed. She knew she had made a mess of things now. “Where is Miss Angorian?” she said, waving her stick.

  The Witch did not like Sophie to wave her stick. She stepped backward. “I am very tired,” she said. “You people keep spoiling my plans. First Wizard Suliman would not come near the Waste, so that I had to threaten Princess Valeria in order to make the King order him out here. Then, when he came, he grew trees. Then the King would not let Prince Justin follow Suliman for months, and when he did follow, the silly fool went up north somewhere for some reason, and I had to use all my arts to get him here. Howl has caused me even more trouble. He got away once. I’ve had to use a curse to bring him in, and while I was finding out enough about him to lay the curse, you got into what was left of Suliman’s brain and caused me more trouble. And now when I bring you here, you wave your stick and argue. I have worked very hard for this moment, and I am not to be argued with.” She turned away and wandered off into the murk.

  Sophie stared after the tall white figure moving among the dim flames. I think her age has caught up with her! she thought. She’s crazy! I must ge
t loose and rescue Miss Angorian from her somehow! Remembering that the orange stuff had avoided her stick, just as the Witch had, Sophie reached back over her shoulders with her stick and wagged it back and forth where the sticky stuff met the pottery pillar. “Get out of it!” she said. “Let me go!” Her hair dragged painfully, but stringy orange bits began to fly away sideways. Sophie wagged the stick harder.

  She had worked her head and shoulders loose when there came a dull booming sound. The pale flames wavered and the pillar behind Sophie shook. Then, with a crash like a thousand tea sets falling downstairs, a piece of the fortress wall blew out. Light blinded in through a long, jagged hole, and a figure came leaping in through the opening. Sophie turned eagerly, hoping it was Howl. But the black outline had only one leg. It was the scarecrow again.

  The Witch gave a yowl of rage and rushed toward it with her fair pigtail flying and her bony arms stretched out. The scarecrow leaped at her. There was another violent bang and the two of them were wrapped in a magic cloud, like the cloud over Porthaven when Howl and the Witch had fought. The cloud battered this way and that, filling the dusty air with shrieks and booms. Sophie’s hair frizzed. The cloud was only yards away, going this way and that among pottery pillars.