He dropped the mattress in a further cloud of dust, snatched up a broom and ran up the stairs in a frenzy of fear and guilt, where he battered on the door with the broom handle. “Help!” he screamed. “Tony’s suffocating! Help!”
Nothing happened. As soon as Cat stopped beating on the door, he could tell from the sort of silence beyond that Master Spiderman was not bothering to listen. He ran down again, into the thick, thick dust, seized the choking Tonino by one elbow and pushed him up the stairs.
“Get up by the door,” he said. “It’s clearer there.” He could hear Tonino choking his way upwards as he himself ran towards the dirty, murky high-up window and slammed the end of the broom handle into it like a spear.
Cat had meant to smash out a pane. But the grimy glass simply splintered into a white star and would not break any further however hard Cat poked at it with the broom. By this time he was coughing almost as wretchedly as Tonino. And angry. Master Spiderman was trying to break their spirits. Well, he was not going to! Cat dragged one of the heavy, splintery work benches under the window and climbed on it.
The window was one of the kind that slides up and down. Standing on the bench brought Cat’s nose level with the rusty old catch that held the two halves shut in the middle. He took hold of the catch and wrenched at it angrily. It came to pieces in his hand, but at least it was not holding the window shut any more. Cat threw the broken pieces down and gripped the dirty frame with both sets of fingers. And pulled. And heaved. And rattled.
“Let me help,” Tonino said hoarsely, climbing up beside Cat, and breathed out hugely because he had been holding his breath as he came across the room.
Cat moved to one side gratefully and they both pulled. To their joy, the top half of the window juddered and slid, making an opening about four inches wide above their heads. Through it, they could just see the bottom of a set of railings, level with the pavement outside, and pairs of feet walking past – feet in old-fashioned sort of shoes with high heels and buckles on the front.
This struck them as strange. So did the way that warm wafts of fresh air came blowing in their faces through the open gap at the same time as clouds of the dust went streaming out. But they did not stop to think about either of these things. It had dawned on both of them that if they could pull the top half of the window right down, they could climb through and get away. They hung by their hands from the top of the window, pulling grimly.
But no amount of pulling seemed to get the window any further open. As Cat left off, panting, Tonino hammered the lower half of the window with his fist and shouted at the next pair of buckled shoes that walked past.
“Help! Help! We’re shut in!”
The feet went by without pausing.
“They didn’t hear,” said Cat. “It must be a spell.”
“Then what do we do?” Tonino wailed. “I am so hungry!”
So was Cat. As far as he could tell, it was at least teatime by then. He thought of tea going on at the castle, with cress sandwiches and cream cakes – Hang on! What castle? But the flash of memory was gone, leaving just the notion of cress sandwiches, luxurious ones with all the crusts cut off, and cakes oozing jam and cream. Cat’s stomach grumbled and he felt ready to wail like Tonino. But he knew he had to be sensible, because he was older than Tonino.
“He said we could have food when we’d cleaned the whole room,” he reminded Tonino. “We’d better get on and finish it.”
They climbed down and set to work again. This time, Cat tried to organise it properly. He made sure they worked only in short bursts and he found two not-so-broken chairs so that they could sit on them and rest while the latest lot of dust was sucked away out through the open window. Slowly they worked their way towards the far end of the basement. By the time the light filtering in past the dirt on the window was golden, late evening light, they were ready to start on the end wall.
They were not looking forward to this. From ceiling to floor, that end was draped in a mass of filthy, dust-hung cobwebs at least two feet thick, fluttering and heaving grey and sinister in the small draught from the window. Under the draped webs, they could just see another of the splintery work benches. On it, in the very middle, there seemed to be a small black container of some kind.
“What do you think that is?” Tonino wondered.
“I’ll see. More old rubbish, I expect.” Cat shudderingly put his left hand through the cobwebs, hating the sticky, tender touch of them, and took hold of the black thing.
As soon as his fingers closed round it, he had a feeling it was important. But when he had pulled it gently out, avoiding touching the cobwebs where he could, it was just an old black cannister with a round hole clumsily punched in its lid. “Only a tin tea caddy,” he said. “It looks as if someone’s tried to make it into a money box.” He shook it. Something inside rattled quite sharply.
“See what’s in there,” said Tonino. “It might be valuable.”
Cat pried at the lid, getting a big new patch of black dirt on his front as he did so. The tin was coated in generations of sooty grease. But the lid was quite easy to move and came off with a clatter. Inside were a very few red kidney beans. Seven of them.
Cat tipped them out on to his hand to be sure, and they were indeed, most disappointingly, beans. They must have been in that tin a very long time. Four of them were wrinkled and shrivelled, and one was so old it was just a withered brown lump. It was clear they were nothing valuable at all.
“Beans!” Cat said disgustedly.
“Oh yes,” said Tonino, “but think of Jack and the Beanstalk.”
They stared at one another. In an enchanter’s basement anything was possible. Both had visions of mighty bean plants growing through the ceiling and on through the roof of the house, and each of them climbing one, away from Master Spiderman and out of his power. And while they stared, they heard the sound of the door being unbolted at the other end of the room.
Cat hastily thrust the handful of beans into his pocket and jammed the lid back on the cannister while Tonino picked up his broom. Tonino waited until Cat had carefully put the old tin back through the cobwebs, into the dust-free circle on the wooden bench where it had stood before, and then reached up with the broom and began virtuously sweeping billows of cobweb off the wall.
Master Spiderman threw open the door and raced down the stone steps, shouting, “No, no, no, you wretched boy! Stop that at once! Don’t you know a spell when you see one?” He came rushing through the room and advanced on Tonino with his hand raised in a fist.
Tonino dropped the broom with a clatter and backed away. Cat was not sure whether Master Spiderman was going to hit Tonino or cast a spell on him, but he got between them quickly anyway. “You’ve no call to hurt him,” he said. “You told us to clean the place up.”
For a moment, Master Spiderman bent over the two of them, clearly seething with rage. Cat smelt the unclean old-man smell from Master Spiderman’s breath and the mildew from his black coat. He looked into the round glaring eyes, and at the moving wrinkles and long hairs on Master Spiderman’s face, and he felt as much sick as he was frightened.
“And you promised us some food when we’d done it,” he added.
Master Spiderman ignored this, but he seemed to control his rage a little. “For this spell,” he said, in that way he had of almost talking to himself. There were little flecks of white round his wide, lipless mouth. “For this spell, I have kept myself alive for countless years beyond my natural span. This spell will change the world. This spell will give me the world! And one miserable boy nearly ruins it by trying to sweep it off the wall!”
“I didn’t know it was a spell,” Tonino protested. “What is it supposed to do?”
Master Spiderman laughed – a private sort of laugh, with his mouth closed as if he were shutting in secrets. “Supposed?” he said. “It is supposed to make a ten-lifed enchanter, who is to be more powerful than any of your Chrestomancis. It will do so, as long as neither of you meddles wit
h it again. Don’t dare touch it!”
He stepped around them and made gestures at the wall, rather as if he were plaiting or twisting something. The grey swathe of cobweb which Tonino had brought down billowed itself and lifted upwards. Master Spiderman made flattening and twiddling motions with his hands then, and the cobwebs began moving this way and that, growing thicker as they moved, and wafting themselves up to stick to the ceiling. Cat thought he could see a host of little half-invisible creeping things scurrying about among the grey swathes, repairing the spell the way Master Spiderman wanted it, and had to look away. Tonino, however, stared at them, amazed and interested.
“There,” Master Spiderman said at last. “Don’t go near it again.” He turned to leave.
“Hang on,” said Cat. “You promised us something to eat. Sir,” he added quickly, as Master Spiderman swung angrily round at him. “We have cleaned the room, sir.”
“I’ll give you food,” Master Spiderman said, “when you tell me which of you is Eric.”
As before, the name meant nothing to either of them. But they were both so hungry by then that Cat instantly pointed to Tonino and Tonino just as promptly pointed at Cat. “He is,” they said in chorus.
“I see,” snapped Master Spiderman. “You don’t know.” He swung round again and hurried away, muttering to himself. The mutters turned into distinct speech while Master Spiderman was clambering up the steps. He must have thought they could not hear him from there. “I don’t know which of you is either, damn it! I’ll just have to kill both of you – one of you more than once, I imagine.”
As the door shut with a boom, Cat and Tonino stared at one another, really frightened for the first time. “Let’s try the window again,” Cat said.
But the window still would not budge. Cat was standing on the work bench wagging the broom handle out through the open space in hopes of breaking the spell on it, when he heard the door opening again. He came down hastily and kept hold of the broom for a weapon.
Master Spiderman came through the door with a lighted lamp, which he put down on the top step. They were glad to see the light. It was getting quite dark in the basement by then. They watched Master Spiderman turn and push a tray out on to the top step beside the lamp. “Here is your supper, boys,” he said. “And here is what I want you to do next. Listen carefully. I want you to watch that spell at the end of the room. Don’t take your eyes off it. And the moment you see anything different about it, you are to come and knock on the door and tell me. Do that, and you shall have a currant cake each as a reward.”
There was a sort of oily friendliness about Master Spiderman now which made both boys very uneasy. Cat nudged Tonino and Tonino at once began trying to find out what this new friendliness was about. “What are you expecting to happen to the spell?” he asked, looking very earnest and innocent.
“So we know what to look for,” Cat explained.
Master Spiderman hesitated, obviously wondering what to tell them. “You will see a disturbance,” he said. “Yes, a disturbance among the webs. It will look quite strange, but you must not be frightened. It will only be the soul of an enchanter who is presently on his deathbed, and it will, almost at once, turn harmlessly into a bean. Make sure that the bean has dropped correctly into the container on the bench and then tell me. Then you shall each have a currant cake. You will do that and you shall have a cake each. You are good boys, are you not?”
“Oh yes,” they both assured him.
“Good.” Master Spiderman backed out through the door and shut it again.
Cat and Tonino went cautiously up the stairs to look at the tray. On it was a tin jug of water, a small stale loaf, and a block of cheese so old and sweaty that it looked like a piece of soap someone had just washed with.
“Do you think it’s poisoned?” Tonino whispered.
Cat thought about it. In a way, it was a triumph, that they had forced Master Spiderman to give them anything to eat, but it was quite plain that, even so, Master Spiderman was not going to waste decent food on people he was planning to kill. Giving them this food was just to lull them. “No,” Cat said. “He’d use better food. I bet it’s the currant cakes that are going to be poisoned.”
Tonino was evidently thinking as well, while they carried the lamp and the tray down the steps and set both up on a work bench in the middle of the room. “He said,” he observed, “that he has kept himself alive much longer than his normal lifetime. Do you think he does this by killing boys – his apprentices?”
Cat dragged the two least rickety chairs up beside the bench. “I don’t know,” he said, “but he might. I think when that enchanter’s ghost gets here, we ought to ask it to help.”
“A good idea,” said Tonino. Then he added dubiously, “If it can.”
“Of course it can,” Cat said. “He’ll still be an enchanter even if he is a ghost.”
They tore the hard bread into lumps and set to work to gnaw at these and the rubbery cheese, taking it in turns to swig water out of the tin jug. The water tasted stale and pond-like. Cat’s stomach began to hurt almost at once. Perhaps, he thought, his reasoning had been wrong and this nasty supper was poisoned after all. On the other hand, it could be that this food was simply indigestible – or just that the mere idea of poison had made his stomach think it was.
He watched Tonino carefully to see if he was showing any signs of poisoning. But Tonino evidently trusted Cat’s judgement. Under the soft lamplight, Tonino’s eyes became brighter as he ate and his dirty drawn-looking cheeks became rounder and pinker. Cat watched him use his teeth to scrape the very last of the cheese off the rind and decided that there was no poison in this food. His stomach unclenched a little.
“I’m still hungry,” Tonino said, laying the rind down regretfully. “I’m so hungry I could even eat those dry beans.”
Cat remembered that he had crammed those beans into his pocket when Master Spiderman had come charging down the steps. He fetched them out and laid all seven under the lamp. He was surprised to see that they were glossier and plumper than they had been. Four of them had lost their wrinkles entirely. Even the oldest and most withered one looked more like a bean and less like a dried brown lump. They glowed soft reds and purples under the light. “I wonder,” he said, pushing at them with a finger. “I wonder if these are all enchanters too.”
“They might be,” Tonino said, staring at them. “He said he was to make a ten-lifed enchanter. Here might be seven lives, with an eighth one coming soon. Where does he get the other two lives from though?”
From us, Cat thought, and hoped that Tonino would not think of this too.
But at that moment, the newest and glossiest bean gave a sudden jump and flipped over, end to end. Tonino forgot what they had been talking about and leaned over it, fascinated. “This one is alive! Are all the others living too?”
It seemed that they were. One by one, each of the beans stirred and then flipped, until they were all rolling and hopping about, even the oldest bean, although this one only seemed to be able to rock from side to side. The newest bean was now flipping so vigorously that it nearly jumped off the work bench. Cat caught it and put it back among the others. “I wonder if they’re going to grow,” he said.
“Beanstalks,” Tonino said. “Oh, please, yes!”
As he spoke, the newest bean split down its length to show a pale, greenish interior, which was clearly very much alive. But it was not so much like a bean growing. It was more like a beetle spreading its wings. For an instant, the boys could see the two mottled purplish-red halves of its skin, spread out like wing-covers, and then these seemed to melt into the rest of it. What spread out then was a pale, greenish, transparent growing thing. The growing thing very quickly spread into a flatness with several points, until it looked like nothing so much as a large floating sycamore leaf made of greenish light. There were delicate veins in it and it pulsed slightly.
By this time, five of the others were splitting and spreading too. Each grew points
and veins, but in slightly different shapes, so that Cat thought of them as an ivy leaf, a fig leaf, a vine leaf, a maple leaf, and a leaf from a plane tree. Even the oldest seventh bean was trying to split. But it was so withered and hard and evidently having such difficulty that Tonino put a forefinger on each half of it and helped it break open. “Oh, enchanters, please help us!” he said, as the bean spread into a smaller, more stunted shape.
Wild service tree leaf, Cat thought, and wondered a little how he knew about trees. He looked sadly at the cluster of frail, quivering, greenish shapes gathered by the base of the lamp and realised that Tonino had been right to be doubtful in the first place. The green shapes might once have been enchanters – Cat thought Tonino was right about that – but they were not ghosts. These beings were soft, helpless and bewildered. It was like asking newly hatched butterflies for help.
“I don’t think they can help,” he said. “They don’t even know what’s happened to them.”
Tonino sighed. “They do feel awfully old,” he agreed. “But they feel new too. We shall have to help them instead. Make them hide from Master Spiderman.”
He tried to catch the old, stunted leaf, but it fluttered away from his fingers, frantically. This seemed to alarm the rest. They all fluttered and trembled and moved in a glowing group to safety behind the tin jug.
“Leave off! You’re frightening them!” Cat said. As he said it, he heard a sort of scuffling from behind him, at the end of the room. He and Tonino both whipped round to look.
There, glowing faintly among the draped cobwebs, another leaf-shaped thing, a big one, was struggling among the clinging, dusty threads. It was struggling even more frantically than the stunted leaf had struggled to get away from Tonino, but every flap and wriggle only brought it further into the midst of the tangled webs and lower and lower towards the black cannister.
“This is the dead enchanter!” Tonino said. “Oh, quickly! Help it!”
Cat got up slowly. He was rather afraid of the thing. It was like the times when a bird gets into your bedroom – a panic that was desperately catching – but when he saw the thing suddenly turn into a bean and plummet towards the black cannister he raced to the end of the room and pushed his hands nervously into the grey tangled shrouds of cobweb. He was just in time to deflect it with the edge of his left hand. The bean pinged against the cannister and bounced out on to the floor. Cat scooped it up. The instant it was in his hand, the bean split and grew and became a bigger, brighter and more pointed leaf-shape than any of the others. Cat carried it, whirring between his hands, and deposited it carefully beside the rest, where it lay beside the others as part of a transparent, pulsing, living group, shining under the lamp. Like a shoal of fish, Cat thought.
Mixed Magics (UK) Page 5