Charmed Life

by Diana Wynne Jones

  Gwendolen touched the other creatures, one by one. The earwigs lumbered up and off, like shiny horned cows, bright brown and glistening. The frogs rose up, as big as men, and walked flap, flop on their enormous feet, with their arms trailing like gorillas. Their mottled skin quivered, and little holes in it kept opening and shutting. The puffy place under their chins made gulping movements. The black beetle crawled on branched legs, such a big black slab that it could barely get through the door. Cat could see it, and all the others, going in a slow, silent procession down the grass-green glowing corridor.

  “Where are they going?” he whispered.

  Gwendolen chuckled. “I’m sending them to the dining room, of course. I don’t think the guests will want much supper.”

  She took up a bone next, and knocked each end of it sharply on the floor. As soon as she let go of it, it floated up into the air. There was a soft clattering, and more bones came out of nowhere to join it. The green and purple flames roared and rasped. A skull arrived last of all, and a complete skeleton was dangling there in front of the flames. Gwendolen smiled with satisfaction and took up another bone.

  But bones when they are bewitched have a way of remembering who they were. The dangling skeleton sighed, in a hollow, singing voice, “Poor Sarah Jane. I’m poor Sarah Jane. Let me rest.”

  Gwendolen waved it impatiently towards the door. It went dangling off, still sighing, and a second skeleton dangled after it, sighing, “Bob the gardener’s boy. I din’t mean to do it.” They were followed by three more, each one singing softly and desolately of who it had been, and all five went slowly dangling after the black beetle. “Sarah Jane,” Cat heard from the corridor. “I din’t mean to.” “I was Duke of Buckingham once.”

  Gwendolen took no notice of them and turned to the earthworm. It grew too. It grew into a massive pink thing as big as a sea serpent. Loops of it rose and fell and writhed all over the room. Cat was nearly sick. Its bare pink flesh had hairs on it like a pig’s bristles. There were rings on it like the wrinkles around his own knuckles. Its great sightless front turned blindly this way and that until Gwendolen pointed to the door. Then it set off slowly after the skeletons, length after length of bare pink loops.

  Gwendolen looked after it critically. “Not bad,” she said. “I need one last touch though.”

  Carefully, she dropped another tiny pinch of dragons’ blood on the flames. They burned with a whistling sound—brighter, sicker, yellower. Gwendolen began to chant again, waving her arms this time. After a moment, a shape seemed to be gathering in the quivering air over the flames. Whiteness was boiling, moving, forming into a miserable bent thing with a big head. Three more somethings were roiling and hardening beneath it. When the first thing flopped out of the flames onto the carpet, Gwendolen gave a gurgle of pleasure. Cat was amazed at how wicked she looked.

  “Oh don’t!” he said. The three other somethings flopped onto the carpet too, and he saw they were the apparition at the window and three others like it. The first was like a baby that was too small to walk—except that it was walking, with its big head wobbling. The next was a cripple, so twisted and cramped upon itself that it could barely hobble. The third was the apparition at the window—pitiful, wrinkled, and draggled. The last had its white skin barred with blue stripes. All were weak and white and horrible. Cat shuddered all over.

  “Please send them away!” he said.

  Gwendolen only laughed again and waved the four apparitions towards the door.

  They set off, toiling weakly. But they were only halfway there when Chrestomanci came through the door and Mr. Saunders came after him. In front of them came a shower of bones and small dead creatures, pattering onto the carpet and getting squashed under Chrestomanci’s long, shiny shoes. The apparitions hesitated, gibbering. Then they fled back to the flaming bowl and vanished. The flames vanished at the same time, into thick, black, smelly smoke.

  Gwendolen stared at Chrestomanci and Mr. Saunders through the smoke. Chrestomanci was magnificent in dark blue velvet, with lace ruffles at his wrists and on the front of his shirt. Mr. Saunders seemed to have made an effort to find a suit that reached to the ends of his legs and arms, but had not quite succeeded. One of his big, black patent-leather boots was unlaced, and there was a lot of shirt and wrist showing as he slowly coiled an invisible skein of something around his bony right hand. Both he and Chrestomanci looked back at Gwendolen most unpleasantly.

  “You were warned, you know,” Chrestomanci said. “Carry on, Michael.”

  Mr. Saunders put the invisible skein in his pocket. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ve been itching to for a week now.” He strode down on Gwendolen in a billow of black coat, yanked her to her feet, hauled her to a chair, and put her facedown over his knee. There he dragged off his unlaced, big black boot and commenced spanking her with it hard and often.

  While Mr. Saunders labored away, and Gwendolen screamed and squirmed and kicked, Chrestomanci marched up to Cat and boxed Cat’s ears, twice on each side. Cat was so surprised that he would have fallen over, had not Chrestomanci hit the other side of his head each time and brought him upright again.

  “What did you do that for?” Cat said indignantly, clutching both sides of his ringing face. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “That’s why I hit you,” said Chrestomanci. “You didn’t try to stop her, did you?” While Cat was gasping at the unfairness of this, he turned to the laboring Mr. Saunders. “I think that’ll do now, Michael.”

  Mr. Saunders ceased swatting, rather regretfully. Gwendolen slid to her knees on the floor, sobbing with pain, and making screams in between her sobs at being treated like this.

  Chrestomanci went over and poked at her with his shiny foot. “Stop it. Get up and behave yourself.” And, when Gwendolen rose to her knees, staring piteously and looking utterly wronged, he said, “You thoroughly deserved that spanking. And, as you probably realize, Michael has taken away your witchcraft too. You’re not a witch any longer. In future, you are not going to work one spell, unless you can prove to both of us that you are not going to do mischief with it. Is that clear? Now go to bed, and for goodness sake try and think about what you’ve been doing.”

  He nodded to Mr. Saunders, and they both went out, Mr. Saunders hopping because he was still putting his boot back on, and squashing the rest of the dead creatures as he hopped.

  Gwendolen flopped forward on her face and drummed her toes on the carpet. “The beast! The beasts! How dare they treat me like this! I shall do a worse thing than this now, and serve you all right!”

  “But you can’t do things without witchcraft,” Cat said. “Was what Mr. Saunders was winding up your witchcraft?”

  “Go away!” Gwendolen screamed at him. “Leave me alone. You’re as bad as the rest of them!” And, as Cat went to the door, leaving her drumming and sobbing, she raised her head and shouted after him, “I’m not beaten yet! You’ll see!”

  Not surprisingly, Cat had bad dreams that night. They were terrible dreams, full of giant earthworms and great, slimy, porous frogs. They became more and more feverish. Cat sweated and moaned and finally woke up, feeling wet and weak and rather too bony, the way you do when you have just had a bad illness or a fearsome dream. He lay for a little while feeling wretched. Then he began to feel better and fell asleep again.

  • • •

  When Cat woke again, it was light. He opened his eyes on the snowy silence of the Castle and was suddenly convinced that Gwendolen had done something else. He had no idea what made him so sure. He thought he was probably imagining it. If Mr. Saunders had truly taken Gwendolen’s witchcraft away from her, she could not have done a thing. But he still knew she had.

  He got up and padded to the windows to see what it was. But, for once, there was nothing abnormal about the view from any of them. The cedars spread above the lawn. The gardens blazed down the hill. The day was swimming in sun and mist, and not so much as a footprint marke
d the pearly gray-green of the grass. But Cat was still so sure that something, somewhere, was different that he got dressed and stole off downstairs to ask Gwendolen what she had done.

  When Cat opened the door of her room, he could smell the sweet, charred, heavy smell that went with witchcraft. But that could have been left over from last night. The room was quite tidy. The dead creatures and the burned bowl had been cleared away. The only thing out of place was Gwendolen’s box, which had been pulled out of the painted wardrobe and stood with its lid half off near her bed.

  Gwendolen was a sleeping hump under the blue velvet bedspread. Cat shut the door very gently behind him, in order not to disturb her. Gwendolen heard it. She sat up in bed with a bounce and stared at him.

  As soon as she did, Cat knew that whatever was wrong, it was wrong with Gwendolen herself. She had her nightdress on back to front. The ribbons which usually tied it at the back were dangling at the front. That was the only thing obviously wrong. But there was something odd about the way Gwendolen was staring at him. She was astonished, and rather frightened.

  “Who are you?” she said.

  “I’m Cat, of course,” said Cat.

  “No you’re not. You’re a boy,” said Gwendolen. “Who are you?”

  Cat realized that when witches lost their witchcraft, they also lost their memories. He saw he would have to be very patient with Gwendolen. “I’m your brother, Eric,” he said patiently, and came across to the bed so that she could look at him. “Only you always call me Cat.”

  “My brother!” she exclaimed, in the greatest astonishment. “Well, that can’t be bad. I’ve always wanted a brother. And I know I can’t be dreaming. It was too cold in the bath, and it hurts when I pinch myself. So would you mind telling me where I am? It’s a Stately Home of some kind, isn’t it?”

  Cat stared at her. He began to suspect that her memory was perfectly good. It was not only the way she spoke and what she said. She was thinner than she should be. Her face was the right pretty face, with the right blue eyes, but the downright look on it was not right. The golden hair hanging over her shoulders was an inch longer than it had been last night.

  “You’re not Gwendolen!” he said.

  “What a dreadful name!” said the girl in the bed. “I should hope not! I’m Janet Chant.”

  9

  B Y THIS TIME, Cat was as bewildered as the strange girl seemed to be. Chant? he thought. Chant? Has Gwendolen a twin sister she hasn’t told me about? “But my name’s Chant too,” he said.

  “Is it, now?” said Janet. She knelt up in bed and scrubbed her hands thoughtfully about in her hair, in a way Gwendolen never would have done. “Truly Chant? It’s not that much of a common name. And you thought I was your sister? Well, I’ve put two and two together about a hundred times since I woke up in the bath, and I keep getting five. Where are we?”

  “In Chrestomanci Castle,” said Cat. “Chrestomanci had us to live here about a year after our parents died.”

  “There you are!” said Janet. “My mum and dad are alive and kicking—or they were when I said good night to them last night. Who’s Chrestomanci? Could you just sketch your life history for me?”

  Puzzled and uneasy, Cat described how and why he and Gwendolen had come to live in the Castle, and what Gwendolen had done then.

  “You mean Gwendolen really was a witch!” Janet exclaimed.

  Cat wished she had not said was. He had a growing suspicion that he would never see the real Gwendolen again. “Of course she is,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

  “Great heavens, no!” said Janet. “Though I’m beginning to wonder if I mightn’t have been, if I’d lived here all my life. Witches are quite common, are they?”

  “And warlocks and necromancers,” said Cat. “But wizards and magicians don’t happen so often. I think Mr. Saunders is a magician.”

  “Medicine men, witch doctors, shamans, devils, enchanters?” Janet asked rapidly. “Hags, fakirs, sorcerers? Are they thick on the ground too?”

  “Most of those are for savages,” Cat explained. “Hag is rude. But we have sorcerers and enchanters. Enchanters are very strong and important. I’ve never met one.”

  “I see,” said Janet. She thought for a moment and then swung herself out of bed, in a sort of scramble that was more like a boy’s than a girl’s, and again quite unlike the way Gwendolen would have done it. “We’d better have a hunt around,” she said, “in case dear Gwendolen has been kind enough to leave a message.”

  “Don’t call her that,” Cat said desolately. “Where do you think she is?”

  Janet looked at him and saw he was miserable. “Sorry,” she said. “I won’t again. But you do see I might be a bit cross with her, don’t you? She seems to have dumped me here and gone off somewhere. Let’s hope she has a good explanation.”

  “They spanked her with a boot and took away her magic,” Cat said.

  “Yes, you said,” Janet replied, pulling open drawers in the golden dressing table. “I’m terrified of Chrestomanci already. But did they really take away her magic? How did she manage to do this, if they did?”

  “I don’t understand that either,” Cat said, joining in the search. By now, he would have given his little finger for a word from Gwendolen—any kind of word. He felt horribly lonely. “Why were you in the bath?” he said, wondering whether to search the bathroom.

  “I don’t know. I just woke up there,” said Janet, shaking out a tangle of hair ribbons in the bottom drawer. “I felt as if I’d been dragged through a hedge backwards, and I’d no clothes on, so I was freezing.”

  “Why had you no clothes on?” Cat said, stirring Gwendolen’s underclothes about, without success.

  “I was hot in bed last night,” said Janet. “So naked I came into this world. And I wandered about pinching myself—especially after I found this fabulous room. I thought I must have been turned into a princess. But there was this nightdress lying on the bed, so I put it on—”

  “You’ve got it on back to front,” said Cat.

  Janet stopped scanning the things on the mantelpiece to look down at the trailing ribbons. “Have I? It won’t be the only thing I’m going to get back to front, by the sound of it. Try looking in that artistic wardrobe. Then I explored outside here, and all I found was miles of long green corridor, which gave me the creeps, and stately grounds out of the windows, so I came back in here and went to bed. I hoped that when I woke up it would all have gone away. And instead there was you. Found anything?”

  “No,” said Cat. “But there’s her box—”

  “It must be in there,” said Janet.

  They squatted down and unpacked the box. There was not much in it. Cat knew that Gwendolen must have taken a lot of things with her to wherever she had gone. There were two books, Elementary Spells and Magic for Beginners, and some pages of notes on them. Janet looked at Gwendolen’s large, round writing.

  “She writes just like I do. Why did she leave these books? Because they’re First Form standard and she’s up to O Levels, I suppose.” She put the books and notes to one side and, as she did so, the little red book of matches fell out from among them. Janet picked it up and opened it, and saw that half the matches were burned without hav-ing been torn out. “That looks suspiciously like a spell to me,” she said. “What are these bundles of letters?”

  “My parents’ love letters, I think,” said Cat.

  The letters were in their envelopes still, stamped and addressed. Janet squatted with a bundle in each hand. “These stamps are penny blacks! No, it’s a man’s head on them. What’s your King called?”

  “Charles the Seventh,” said Cat.

  “No Georges?” Janet asked. But she saw Cat was mystified and looked back at the letters again. “Your mother and father were both called Chant, I see. Were they first cousins? Mine are. Granny didn’t want them to marry, because it’s supposed to be a bad thing.”
/>   “I don’t know. They may have been. They looked rather alike,” Cat said, and felt lonelier than ever.

  Janet looked rather lonely too. She tucked the little book of matches carefully inside the pink tape that tied together the letters addressed to Miss Caroline Chant—like Gwendolen, she evidently had a tidy mind—and said, “Both tall and fair, with blue eyes? My mum’s name is Caroline too. I’m beginning to see. Come on, Gwendolen, give!” And saying this, Janet tossed aside the letters and, in a most untidy way, scrabbled up the remain-ing folders, papers, writing sets, pen wipers, and the bag with Souvenir from Blackpool on it. At the very bottom of the box was a large pink sheet of paper, covered all over with Gwendolen’s best and roundest writing. “Ah!” said Janet, pouncing on it. “I thought so! She’s got the same secretive mind as I have.” And she spread the letter on the carpet so that Cat could read it too. Gwendolen had written:

  Dear Replacement,

  I have to leave this terrible place. Nobody understands me. Nobody notices my talents. You will soon see because you are my exact double so you will be a witch too. I have been very clever. They do not know all my resauces. I have found out how to go to another world and I am going there for good. I know I shall be Queen of it because my fortune was told and said so. There are hundreds of other worlds only some are nicer than others, they are formed when there is a big event in History like a battle or an earthquake when the result can be two or more quite diferent things. Both those things hapen but they cannot exist together so the world splits into two worlds witch start to go diferent after that. I know there must be Gwendolens in a lot of worlds but not how many. One of you will come here when I go because when I move it will make an empty space that will suck you in. Do not greive however if your parents still live. Some other Gwendolen will move into your place and pretend to be you because we are all so clever. You can carry on here making Chrestomanci’s life a misery and I shall be greatful knowing it is in good hands.