by Joan Aiken
Over the whole huge flat beach not a living soul was to be seen. And this was not surprising, for it was a cold frosty day in late September.
So where had the voice come from? It had sounded quite close at hand.
Michael searched and hunted, up and down, here and there. At last he realized that the voice seemed to come out of a turtle shell, which lay not far from his foot. Out of the shell poked a head.
“Was that you crying?” said Michael.
“Yes, it was. It was! They’ve taken my mother! They’ve taken her off to the zoo. Please won’t you go and fetch her back?”
“I can’t do that,” said Michael. “The people at the zoo wouldn’t allow me.”
“Then take me to her. Oh please do, please, please!”
Michael didn’t much want to do that. He would have preferred to stay on the empty beach, looking at the sea, and thinking about his future. But the turtle begged and prayed and pleaded, and then it said, “I’ll give you a wish! You can wish for anything you want, if only you’ll take me to my mother.”
At that, Michael said quickly, “All right, I’ll take you to your mother, if you will make me the best painter in the whole world.”
“It’s a bargain,” said the turtle, pulling its head back inside the shell. “Only carry me to the zoo. Main road to town, first gate on the left when you pass the station.”
So Michael picked up the turtle and began walking. He was full of joy to think that he was going to be the best painter in the world. But after a while, he began to notice how very heavy the turtle was growing. He felt as if he were lugging along a sack of coal. Or a box of pig iron. Or a bucket filled with lead shot. And with every step it seemed to grow heavier. Michael began to be rather annoyed about it. “A bargain’s a bargain,” he thought, “but if I’d known how heavy the beast was going to be, I’d at least have gone home first and fetched a wheelbarrow.”
He would have been even more annoyed if he had known that the turtle was not a real turtle at all, but a water kelpie playing a joke on him. Kelpies love to play jokes on people. And some of their jokes are not at all kind.
At last, panting and limping and staggering and red in the face, Michael reached the zoo entrance.
There he stopped and began to wonder what he would say to the keeper. “I have a turtle here that says you have a turtle there who is the mother of my turtle. So will you please put my turtle with your turtle?”
He set the heavy, heavy shell down on the bank at the side of the road and said to it, “Hey, you turtle? When did they bring in your mother? Which day? And what is her name so that I can ask for her properly?”
But he got no answer.
“Come on, tell me!” said Michael. “Speak up! Which day did your mother get taken into the zoo?”
Still no answer.
Michael looked inside the shell, and was dumbfounded to find that it was bare and empty. There was no turtle inside, or anything else.
Very angry and puzzled, he left the shell lying on the bank and stumped off home. And when he told his father that a turtle had promised he should be the best painter in the world, and had then vanished, his father said, “I never heard such a peck of rubbish!” and sent Michael to work next day in a grocer’s shop.
After a while Michael guessed that a kelpie had been playing a trick on him.
Work in the grocer’s shop wasn’t too bad. But just the same, Michael still wanted to be a painter, and so, in all his free time, though there wasn’t much of that, he painted pictures. He painted the blue bags of sugar, and the white bags of flour. He painted the brown lumps of dates, and the piles of oranges, the green ginger, the yellow lentils, and the brown sticks of macaroni. He painted the red sticky cherries, the yellow butter, and the creamy cheese.
He painted so much, and so diligently, that by and by he began to paint very well. A traveling teacher, seeing one of Michael’s pictures propped at the back of the grocery shop, offered to give him lessons. Michael worked hard at the lessons, and harder still at his painting.
After a while, people began to buy his pictures. So then he could stop working in the shop, and do nothing but paint. Indeed, people thought his pictures were beautiful; they were eager to buy them as fast as he could paint them.
After a while it began to be said that Michael was the best painter in the whole world.
By now, Michael had stopped painting groceries. No more currants or jam or flour or salt or lumps of butter. No, the pictures he painted were of rooms. A room with two chairs in it, or a table set with cups for breakfast, or a peaceful bedroom with the bed turned down tidily and a candle burning; or a playroom with toys scattered on the floor, or a kitchen with board and rolling pin set out, ready to make pastry. And each of these rooms looked so comfortable, so joyful, so welcoming and pleasant, that when you saw the picture, you just wanted to step right into that room and live there for the rest of your life.
Well! All this was fine, and time rolled along, and presently Michael was to hold a big exhibition, in a famous art gallery. There were to be all the pictures he had painted in the last few years. A van came to collect them all and take them to the gallery. And you may be sure that Michael went to make certain they had been hung up straight, not crooked, and not too high, and all in the right order.
And the first thing he gasped out, when he stepped inside the big room, was, “Murder! Who in the world has been playing the fool with my paintings?”
For into each of his beautiful pictures of a room, something new had been added. And what was that something but a great ugly kelpie!
A kelpie—you may know—is a huge horrid water monster, with the body of a horse, and the head of a cow, and two sets of teeth as big as gravestones, and enormous web-toed feet with claws on them as well. And it is all wet and hairy and whiskery and muddy and slippery and weedy and horrible. Of course, a kelpie can take any form it pleases, or vanish away entirely, but that is its real shape.
What a thing to see lolling in Michael’s nicely turned-down bed, or squatting among the toys in the playroom, or munching toast among the broken plates on the breakfast table, or squatting by the sitting-room fire with its head turned and its eyes glinting, as if it were just waiting for you to walk into the room so that it could gobble you up! What a thing to find in the middle of each of Michael’s beautiful, tidy, cozy, peaceful, welcoming pictures!
Poor Michael was in despair, and can you wonder? He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t dare face the owner of the art gallery, or the people who would soon be coming to look at his paintings, or the men from the newspapers who would be writing about them.
He ran out of the building and jumped on a bus, which took him to a train, and on the train he went back to the place where he had lived as a boy.
His father and mother were dead by now, and the old house had fallen down, but the beach was still there, and the sea was still there, green and thunderous, for a stormy wind was blowing hard and the waves were rolling in, big as castles, and crashing on the beach.
Michael walked along the shore and he shouted at the sea. “You cheated me! You promised that I should be the best painter in the world. You had no right to put your nasty self into my pictures!”
He heard a booming laugh come from behind him, and he spun around in a hurry. But there was nothing to see, only a big empty conch shell lying on the beach. Michael looked at it warily, and called, “Is that you in there?”
“It is I,” boomed the kelpie. “And I never cheated you. Did you keep your promise? Did you take me to my mother?”
“How could I?” demanded Michael crossly. “She was never there—you know perfectly well they don’t have kelpies in zoos.”
“You didn’t keep your promise,” the kelpie went on. “When I met you first, you were planning to paint a picture of the beach, this beach, with the green sea, and the gray sand, the waves r
olling in, the white stones, the black breakwaters, and the golden hills. You have never painted that picture. And that was the one I wanted to see.
Michael stood and scratched his head.
“Well—that’s true,” he said at last. “I forgot all about it.”
“Go home and paint that picture,” said the kelpie, “and bring it here to me. And if I like it, maybe I’ll see my way to taking myself out of all those kitchens and pantries and drawing rooms that you’ve been so busy putting into all your pictures.”
So Michael left the beach and found himself a room at a pub, and he bought a roll of canvas and brushes and tubes of paint, and he painted a big picture of the shore, with all the waves, and the rocks, and the seaweed and creamy foam, the wintry hills behind, and the blue stormy clouds overhead, and a ray of light striking the sea like a spear.
Meanwhile, back in the city, everybody was hunting and searching for Michael. Why? Because his pictures of rooms with the hideous kelpie squatting in them had been a huge success. “What a talent!” people said. “What an imagination! What a strange, wild vision!”
All his pictures had been sold, for a great deal of money, and the art gallery owner was anxious for Michael to paint as many more as he could. Michael was wanted, too, for interviews on TV and in the newspapers.
But Michael, staying quietly at the pub and painting his picture of the sea, knew nothing about all this.
When the picture was quite finished, he took it down to the beach.
“Let’s see, then,” boomed a voice from a big razor shell, and so Michael laid the picture against a rock, and there was a long, long silence.
“Yes,” said the voice at last. “That’s the picture I wanted. Or very near it. I’ll take it. You can throw it into the sea.”
“What?” cried Michael in anguish. “Throw in my beautiful picture?”
“Keep it then,” said the voice. “And you’ll have me, too, for the rest of your life.”
“No, no, you can have it,” said Michael hastily, and he took the picture and hurled it far, far out, into the waves. They seemed to jump up and catch it among their curling crests.
“Good-bye, then,” said the voice. “You won’t be hearing from me again.”
And when Michael picked up the razor shell, he found that it was empty.
So he took a train, and caught a bus, and went back to the city, back to the gallery. What a fuss and commotion he found there, for all the people who had bought pictures of rooms with a kelpie in them suddenly woke up one day to find that the kelpie had vanished clean away, and all they had was an empty painted room with nobody in it.
“Paint some more pictures of rooms with kelpies in—do!” the gallery owner urged Michael. “Everybody wants a kelpie!”
But Michael couldn’t do that.
For he had never seen the kelpie, only heard its voice, and so he wasn’t able to paint its portrait.
From that day on, Michael painted only pictures of the beach, hoping that the kelpie would come back and sit in them. But he never heard from it again.
The Spider in the Bath
ONCE THERE WAS A PRINCESS called Emma. Her father the king was a fussy, selfish man, always finding fault with the weather. If there were several hot days together, he would grumble, “When in the world is it going to rain?” If the wind blew, he said, “I can’t stand this tiresome wind,” and if it rained, he said, “Why doesn’t the sun ever shine?”
He was so busy complaining about the weather that he had no time to spare for his daughter, who led a rather glum life. Her mother the queen had died when Emma was only two, and she had nobody to play with. The king would not permit her to play with the palace pages or the prime minister’s daughter. Parcheesi, or dominoes, or Chutes and Ladders with the under nursemaid were the only games allowed her.
So Emma was often lonely and bored, and as lonely and bored people often do, she had become rather selfish and nasty.
The king’s great-grandmother had been a witch, and Emma had a little seed of witchcraft in her—not much, but as she grew lonelier and nastier, the seed of witchcraft grew bigger.
When she was six, she discovered an interesting thing about herself. She found that, if she kept her whole mind very still, and thought very hard indeed, she could move small objects from one place to another without touching them.
For instance, she could move a pea or a potato chip from one side of her plate to the other, just by watching it and thinking about it and willing it to move.
She found this out by accident one day when the palace doctor had come to see her because she had a cold. He took her temperature and shook an aspirin out of a bottle, and was just about to pop it into Emma’s mouth when the aspirin rolled out of his hand, fell on the floor, and bounced out of sight under Emma’s bed.
“Confound it!” said the doctor. “Where’s that pill got to?”
He shook out another aspirin, and that did the same thing.
Emma’s face was perfectly straight, but inside she was laughing her head off. After he had lost four aspirins, the doctor, very annoyed, gave the bottle to the under nursemaid, Hattie, and told her to see that the princess had one before she went to sleep. He had better things to do with his time.
Of course Emma never took an aspirin. She detested medicine. And she could always get her own way with Hattie, who was very shy in her new job, only seven or eight years older than the princess herself, and a little frightened of Emma. With good reason. For soon, Hattie discovered that when Emma’s cold blue eyes were on her, pins were likely to drop out of her fingers, or prick her sharply; buttons that she was supposed to be sewing on shirts would roll away and lose themselves; plates would slip from her grasp; or the hairpins would drop, all together, out of her shining hair, and Miss Targe, the head nurse, coming in and seeing Hattie’s hair fall over her face, would scold her for untidiness.
Hattie soon began to suspect that the Princess Emma was the cause of these troubles, but how could she be sure? And anyway, there was nothing in the world she could do about it.
When Hattie played Parcheesi with the princess, the dice would be sure to roll over and over, giving the princess nothing but fives and sixes, while Hattie had a steady run of ones and twos. Also, Emma’s counters seemed to skip ahead around the board by themselves, even when Emma’s hands were nowhere near the table. When they played games, Hattie always lost.
After a while, Emma found that she was able to move larger things—oranges and apples and shoes and plates and hairbrushes. It was hard work doing this—she had to squeeze her mind together like a clenched fist inside her head, while sitting completely still, watching the thing she was trying to move. She had to hold her breath, and almost stop her heart from beating. The first time she managed to roll an orange from one end of the breakfast table to the other, she felt so tired that she had to go and lie down on her bed for half an hour.
But soon she grew better at her strange game. One day she even managed to move an apple right through the wall, from the nursery into her bedroom next door. Moreover, the apple went clean through the plaster without even leaving a hole! How about that! Emma was so proud of what she had done that she wanted to dance around the room and shout—but there was nobody whom she could tell.
The king her father would have said, “Quiet, please, Emma. Princesses should be seen and not heard,” and then gone on grumbling about the weather. Hattie would have been scared to death, and worried as well. The palace pages would snigger disbelievingly. And the head nurse, Miss Targe, would say, “That’s quite enough of that, Your Highness. We don’t want such goings-on in our nurseries. Now go and wash your hands.”
So Emma went on practicing by herself, in secret.
She moved a tooth out of her father’s head, just before he bit into a piece of toast. She moved Hattie’s fur bonnet onto the fire, one snowy afternoon, so the
poor girl had to take Emma for a walk without it, and caught a nasty cold. Emma moved a rosebush into the middle of the palace lawn, greatly annoying the head gardener, who wondered for the rest of his life how it had happened. She moved a shoe from the hoof of one of the horses pulling the royal carriage, and a rolling pin from the cook’s hand into the oven.
Sometimes Emma’s trick went wrong.
You know how, if somebody knocks your elbow when you are pouring milk into a cup, the milk splashes all over the table. If some sudden sight or sound startled Emma when she was concentrating on moving an object, the result was rather queer.
The first time it happened was at lunch, when the footman set a dish of strawberries in front of the king. Emma fixed her mind on the dish, intending to move it just out of her father’s reach, but a speck of dust on her nose made her sneeze, and instead of sliding away, the plate of berries shook and quivered and splintered and split up—so that suddenly, instead of just one dish, there were a hundred identical blue bowls, each full of red strawberries, lined up before the king in ten rows of ten.
He was furious, of course.
“Is this supposed to be some sort of joke?” he roared, and dismissed the cook, the butler, and all the footmen.
Emma wasn’t in the least bit sorry for the people who had been sacked, just interested in what had gone wrong with her magic.
The same thing happened on a day when she was trying to move a narrow gold ring off Hattie’s little finger. The ring had been left to Hattie by her mother when she died, and this annoyed Emma, whose own mother had left her nothing but a crown, which she would not be allowed to wear until she grew up. But the ring, a child’s ring, very tiny, was tight on Hattie’s finger, and in struggling to shift it, Emma’s mind must have lost its grip for a second. The result was a hundred little gold rings glittering and clinking in the bathroom basin, which Hattie was doing her best to polish.