“For this reason—” Gabriel began.
Then the thing Cat had been dreading happened.
Gabriel de Witt’s face suddenly lost all expression. Behind him, the pillows began slowly subsiding, letting the old man down into lying position again. As they did so, Gabriel de Witt seemed to climb out of himself. A tall old man in a long white nightshirt unfolded himself from the old man who was lying down and stood for a moment looking rather sadly from Cat to Tonino, before he walked away into a distance that was somehow not part of the white bedroom.
Both their heads turned to follow him as he walked. Cat realised he could see Tonino through the shape of the departing old man, and the lilies-of-the-valley on the bedside table, and then the corner of the white wardrobe. The old man was getting smaller all the time as he walked, until at last he was lost into white distance.
Cat was astonished not to find himself screaming – although he almost did when he looked back at Gabriel de Witt lying on his pillows and found Gabriel’s face blue-pale and more sunken than ever, and his mouth slowly dropping wider and wider open. Cat could not seem to utter a sound, or move either, until Tonino whispered, “I saw you through him!”
Cat gulped. “Me too. I saw you. Why was that?”
“Was that his last life?” Tonino asked. “Is he truly dead now?”
“I don’t know,” said Cat. “I think we ought to call someone.”
But it seemed as if someone already knew. Footsteps thumped on the carpet outside and Miss Rosalie burst into the room, followed by Mr Roberts, who both rushed to the bed and stared anxiously down at Gabriel de Witt as if they expected him to wake up any minute. Cat snatched another look at that gaping mouth and strange, blue-wax complexion, and thought that he had never seen anyone more obviously dead. He had seen his parents just before their funeral, but they had looked almost asleep and not like this at all.
“Don’t worry, boys,” Miss Rosalie said. “It’s only another life gone. He’s still got two more.”
“No, you’re forgetting the life he gave to Asheth,” Mr Roberts reminded her.
“Oh, so I am,” Miss Rosalie said. “Silly of me. But he’s still got one left. Why don’t you go downstairs, boys, until the new life takes over. It can sometimes be quite a while.”
Cat and Tonino jumped thankfully out of their chairs. But as they did so, Gabriel stirred. His mouth shut with a snap and his face became the face of a person again – a person who looked pale and unwell, but full of strong feelings despite that.
“Rosalie,” he said, weak and fretful, “warn Chrestomanci. Neville Spiderman is sniffing round this house. I felt him very clearly just now.”
“Oh, nonsense, Gabriel!” Miss Rosalie said, brisk and bossy. “How could he be? You know Neville Spiderman – whatever his real name was – lived at the time of the first Chrestomanci. That was more than a hundred years before you were born!”
“I felt him, I tell you!” Gabriel insisted. “He was there when my last life was leaving.”
“You can’t possibly know that,” Miss Rosalie insisted.
“I do know. I made a study of the man,” Gabriel insisted in return. His voice was more and more weak and quavery. “When I was first made Chrestomanci, I studied him, because I needed to know what a really evil enchanter was like and he was the most ingenious of the lot. And this is very ingenious, Rosalie. He’s trying to make himself stronger than any Chrestomanci ever was. Warn Christopher he’s not safe. Warn Eric particularly.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Miss Rosalie said, so obviously humouring him that Gabriel began rolling about in distress, spilling bedclothes on to the floor. “Of course I’ll warn them,” Miss Rosalie said, hauling blankets back. “Settle down, Gabriel, before you make yourself ill, and we’ll do everything you want.” She made meaning faces at Mr Roberts to take Cat and Tonino out of the room.
Mr Roberts nodded. He put a hand on each boy’s shoulder and steered them out on to the landing. Behind them, as he gently shut the door, they heard Gabriel say, “Listen, Rosalie, my mind is not wandering! Spiderman has learnt to travel in time. He’s dangerous. I mean what I say.”
Gabriel de Witt sounded so weak and so upset that Mr Roberts said, looking extremely worried, “Look, I think you boys had better go home now. I don’t think he’ll be well enough to talk to you again today. I’ll call you a cab and telephone the castle to say you’ll be back on an earlier train.”
There was nothing Cat wanted more by this time. Tonino, from the look of him, felt the same. The only thing Cat regretted was that they were going to miss lunch. Still, Miss Rosalie’s idea of lunch was usually a tomato and some lettuce, and they did have Millie’s five shillings. He followed Mr Roberts downstairs thinking of doughnuts and station pies.
Luckily there was a cab just clopping along the road as they reached the front gate. It was one of those old-fashioned horse drawn hackneys, like a big upright box on wheels, with the driver sitting up on top of the box. It was shabby and the horse was scrawny, but Mr Roberts hailed it with strong relief and paid the driver for them as the boys climbed in. “You can just catch the twelve thirty,” he said. “Hurry it along, driver.”
He shut the door and the cab set off. It was smelly and jolting and its wheels squeaked, but Cat felt it was worth it just to get away so soon. It was not far to the station. Cat sat back in the half dark inside the box and felt his mind go empty with relief. He did not want to think of Gabriel de Witt again for a very long time. He thought about station pies and corned beef sandwiches instead.
But half an hour of jolting, smelling and squeaking later, something began puzzling him. He turned to the other boy in the dimness beside him. “Where were we going?”
Tonino – if that was his name: Cat found he was not at all sure – shook his head uncertainly. “We are travelling north east,” he said. “I feel sick.”
“Keep swallowing then,” Cat told him. One thing he seemed to be sure of was that he was supposed to look after this boy, whoever he was. “It can’t be that far now,” he said soothingly. Then he wondered what, or where, was ‘not far’. He was a little puzzled to find he had no idea.
At least he seemed to be right about its not being far. Five minutes later, just as the other boy’s swallowing was getting quite desperate, the cab squealed to a stop with a great yell of “Woa there!” from the driver up above, and the door beside Cat was pulled open. Cat blinked out into grey light upon a dirty pavement and a row of old, old houses as far as he could see in both directions. We must be in the outskirts of London, he thought. While Cat puzzled about this, the driver said, “Two blondie lads, just like you said, governor.”
The person who had opened the door leaned round it to peer in at them. They found themselves face to face with a smallish elderly man in a dirty black gown. The peering round brown eyes and the brown whiskery face, full of lines and wrinkles, were so like a monkey’s that it was only the soft black priestly sort of hat on the man’s head that showed he was a man and not a monkey. Or probably not. Cat found, in some strange way, that he was not sure of anything.
The monkey’s flat mouth spread in a grin. “Ah yes, the right two,” the man said, “as ordered.” He had a dry, snapping voice, which snapped out, “Out you get then. Make haste now.”
While Cat and Tonino obediently scrambled out to find themselves in a long street of the old tumbledown houses – all slightly different, like cottages built for a town – the man in the black gown handed up a gold coin to the driver. “Charmed to take you back,” he muttered. It was hard to tell if he was speaking to himself or to the driver, but the driver touched his hat to him anyway with great respect, cracked his whip and drove away, squealing and clattering. The cab seemed to move away from them up the tumbledown street in jerks, and each jerk seemed to make it harder to see. Before it quite reached the end of the street, it had jerked out of sight entirely.
They stared after it. “Why did that happen?” Tonino asked.
“Belongs
to the future, doesn’t it?” the monkey-like man snapped. Again he might have been talking to himself. But he seemed to notice them then. “Come along now. No stupid questions. It’s not every day I hire two apprentices from the poorhouse and I want you indoors earning your keep. Come along.”
He turned and hurried into the house beside them. They followed, quite bewildered, past an unpainted front door – which closed with a slam behind them – into a dark, wooden hallway. Beyond this was a big room which was much lighter because of a row of filthy windows looking out on to bushes. As the monkey-man hurried them on through it, Cat recognised the place as a magician’s workshop. It breathed out the smell of magic and of dragon’s blood, and there were symbols chalked over most of the floor. Cat had a tantalising feeling that he should have known what most of those symbols were supposed to do, and that they were not quite in any order he was used to, but when he thought about this, the symbols meant nothing to him.
The main thing he noticed was the row of star charts along one wall. There were eight of them, getting newer and newer from the old, brown one at the far left, to the one on the right, after a gap where a ninth chart had been torn down, which was white and freshly drawn.
“Gave up on that one. Too well protected,” the monkey-man remarked as Cat looked at the gap. Again he was probably talking to himself, for he swung round at once and opened a door at the end of the room. “Come along, come along,” he snapped and hurried on down a sideways flight of stone steps into the cold stone basement under the house. Cat, as he hurried after, only had time to think that the last chart, after the torn-down one, had looked uncomfortably familiar in some way, before the monkey-man swung round on both of them at the bottom of the steps. “Now then,” he said, “what are your names?”
It seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to ask, but they stood shivering on the chilly flagstones, staring from him to one another. Neither of them had the least idea.
The man sighed at their stupidity. “Too much of the forgettery,” he muttered in that way that seemed to be talking to himself. He pointed to Cat. “All right,” he said to Tonino. “What’s his name?”
“Er—” said Tonino, “it means something. In Latin, I think. Felix, or something like that. Yes, Felix.”
“And,” the man said to Cat, “his name is?”
“Tony,” said Cat. This did not strike him as quite right, any more than Felix did, but he did not seem to be able to get any closer than that. “His name’s Tony.”
“Not Eric?” snapped the man. “Which of you is Eric?”
They both shook their heads, although Cat had a faint, fleeting idea that the name meant a protected kind of heather. That was such an idiotic idea that he gave it up at once.
“Very well,” snapped the man. “Tony and Felix, you are now my apprentices. This room here is where you will eat and sleep. You will find mattresses over there.” He pointed a brown hairy hand at a dim corner. “In that other corner, there are brooms and dustpan. I require you to sweep this room and make it as clean and tidy as you can. When that is done, you may lay out the mattresses.”
“Please, sir—” Tonino began. He stopped, looking frightened, as the withered old monkey face swung round to stare at him. Then he said something that was obviously not what he had started to say. “Please, sir, what should we call you?”
“I am known as Master Spiderman,” snapped the man. “You will address me as Master.”
Cat felt a small, chilly jolt of alarm at the name. He put it down to the fact that he was already disliking this monkey-faced old man very much indeed. There was a smell that came off him, of old clothes, mustiness and illness, which reminded Cat of – of – of something he could not quite remember, except that it made him frightened and uneasy. So, to make himself feel better, he said what he knew Tonino had really been going to say.
“Sir, we haven’t had any lunch yet.”
Master Spiderman’s round monkey eyes blinked Cat’s way. “Is that so? Well, you may have food as soon as you have swept and tidied this room.” At that, he turned and ran up the stone steps to the door, with his musty black coat swirling. He stopped at the top. “Do not try to do any magic,” he said. “I’ll have nothing like that here. Nothing stupid. This place is in a time apart from any other time and you must behave yourselves here.” He went out through the door and shut it behind him. They heard a bolt shoot home on the other side of it.
That door was the only way out of the basement. The only other opening in the stone walls was a high up window, fast shut and too dirty to see through, which let in a meagre grey light. Cat and Tonino stared from the door to the window, and then at one another. “What did he mean,” asked Tonino, “to do no magic? Can you do magic?”
“I don’t think so,” said Cat. “Can you?”
“I – I can’t remember,” Tonino said miserably. “I am blank.”
So was Cat, whenever he thought about it. He was uncertain of everything, including why they were here and whether he ought to be frightened about it, or just miserable. He clung to the two things he was certain about. Tonino was younger than he was and Cat ought to be looking after him.
Tonino was shivering. “Let’s find the brooms and start sweeping,” Cat said. “It’ll warm us up and he’ll give us something to eat when we’ve done it.”
“He might,” Tonino said. “Do you believe him or trust him?”
“No,” said Cat. This was something else his fuzzy mind was clear about completely. “We’d better not give him an excuse not to give us any food.”
They found two worn down brooms and a long-handled dustpan in the corner by the stairs, along with a heap of amazingly various rubbish – rusty cans, cobwebby planks, rags so old they had turned into piles of dirt, walking sticks, broken jars, butterfly nets, fishing rods, half a carriage wheel, broken umbrellas, works of clocks and things that had decayed too much for anyone to guess what they had once been – and they set about cleaning the room.
Without needing to discuss it, they started at the end where the stairs were. It was clearer that end. The rest of the room was filled with a clutter of old splintery work benches and broken chairs, which got more and more jumbled towards the far end, where the entire wall was completely draped in cobwebs, thicker and dustier than Cat would have thought possible. For another thing, when they were near the stairs, they could hear Master Spiderman creaking and muttering about in the room overhead and it seemed reasonable to think that he could hear them too. It was in both their minds that, if he heard them truly hard at work, he might decide to bring them something to eat.
They swept for what seemed hours. They used the least smelly of the old rags for dusters. Cat found an old sack, into which they noisily poured panloads of dust, cobwebs and broken glass. They thumped with their brooms. Tonino hauled out another load of rubbish from another corner, making a tremendous clatter, and found the mattresses among it. They were filthy, lumpy things, so damp they felt wet.
Cat slammed about making a heap of the most broken chairs and hung the mattresses over it in a gust of mildew-smell, to air. By this time, slightly to Cat’s surprise, more than half the room was clear. Dust hung in the air, making Tonino’s nose and eyes run, filling their clothes and their hair, and streaking their faces with grey. Their hands were black and their fingernails blacker. They were hungry, thirsty, and tired out.
“I need a drink,” Tonino croaked.
Cat swept the stairs a second time, very noisily, but Master Spiderman gave no sign of having heard. Perhaps if he called out…? It seemed to take a real effort to muster the courage. And, somehow, Cat could not bring himself to call Master Spiderman “Master”, try as he would. He knocked politely on the door and called out, “Excuse me, sir! Excuse me, please, we’re terribly thirsty.”
There was no reply. When Cat put his ear to the door he could no longer hear any sounds of Master Spiderman moving about. He came gloomily back down the stairs. “I don’t think he’s there now.”
> Tonino sighed. “He will know when this room is cleared and he will come back then, but not before. I am fairly sure he is an enchanter.”
“There’s nothing to stop us having a rest anyway,” Cat said. He dragged the two mattresses over to the wall and made a seat out of them. They both sat down thankfully. The mattresses were still extremely damp and they smelt horrible. Both of them tried not to notice. “How do you know he’s an enchanter?” Cat asked, to take his mind off the smell and the wetness.
“The eyes,” said Tonino. “Your eyes are the same.”
Cat thought of Master Spiderman’s round, glossy eyes and shuddered. “They’re nothing like the same!” he said. “My eyes are blue.”
Tonino put his head down and held it in both hands. “Sorry,” he said. “For a moment I thought you were an enchanter. Now I don’t know what I think.”
This made Cat shift about uncomfortably. It was frightening, if he let himself notice it, how whenever he thought about anything, particularly about magic, there seemed to be nothing to think. There seemed to be only here and now in this cold basement, and the horrible bad-breath smell coming up from the mattresses, and the damp creeping up with the smell and coming through his clothes.
Beside him, Tonino was shivering again. “This is no good,” Cat said. “Get up.”
Tonino climbed to his feet. “I think it is a spell to keep us obedient,” he said. “He told us we could lay the mattresses out after the room was clean.”
“I don’t care,” said Cat. He picked up the top mattress and shook it, trying to shake the smell – or the spell – out.
This proved to be a bad mistake. The whole basement became full, almost instantly, of thick, choking, bad-smelling, chaffy dust. They could hardly see one another. What Cat could see of Tonino was alarming. He was bending over coughing and coughing, a terrible hacking cough, with a whooping, choking sound whenever Tonino tried to breathe in. It sounded as if Tonino was choking to death, and it frightened Cat out of what few wits he seemed to have.
Mixed Magics (UK) Page 4