Читать книгу The Ogre Downstairs - Diana Wynne Jones - Страница 8

In the days that followed, Johnny experimented. He made black mixtures, green mixtures and red ones. He made little smells, big smells, and smells grandiose and appalling. These met with the smells coming from Malcolm’s efforts and mingled with them, until Sally said that their landing seemed like a plague spot to her. But whatever smell or colour Johnny made, he was no nearer finding the right mixture. He went on doggedly. He remembered that Gwinny had put pipe ash in the mixture, so he always made that one of the ingredients.

“Who is it keeps taking my pipes?” demanded the Ogre, and received no answer. And in spite of running this constant risk, Johnny’s efforts were not rewarded. Nevertheless, he persevered. It was his nature to be dogged, and Caspar and Gwinny were thankful for it; for, as Gwinny said, the idea of being really able to fly made it easier to bear the awfulness of everything else.

Each day seemed to bring fresh trials. First there was the trouble over the purple face flannel, and then the affair of the muddy sweater on the roof, mysteriously found wrapped round the chimney. The Ogre, as a matter of course, blamed Caspar, and when Caspar protested his innocence, he blamed Johnny. And twice Caspar forgot that the Ogre was at home and played Indigo Rubber – the third time, the noise came from Douglas, but Douglas said nothing and let Caspar take the blame.

Then the weather turned cold. The house had very old central heating, which seemed too weak to heat all four floors properly. The bathroom, and the bedroom shared by Sally and the Ogre, were warm enough, but upwards from there it grew steadily colder. Gwinny’s room got so cold that she took to sneaking down to her mother’s room and curling up on the big soft bed to read. Unfortunately, she left a toffee bar on the Ogre’s pillow one evening, and the boys were blamed again. It took all Gwinny’s courage to own up, and the Ogre was in no way impressed by her heroism. However, he did find her an old electric heater, which he installed in her room with instructions not to waste electricity.

“We don’t need to be pampered,” Malcolm said odiously. “You should see what it’s like at a boarding school before you complain here.”

“Quait,” said Caspar. “Full of frosty little snobs like you. Why don’t you go back there where you belong?”

“I wish I could,” Malcolm retorted, with real feeling. “Anything would be better than having to share this pigsty with you.”

Nearly a week passed. One afternoon, Caspar was as usual hurrying home in order not to have to walk back with Malcolm, when he discovered himself to be in a silly kind of mood. He knew he was going to have to act the goat somehow. He decided to do it in the Ogre’s study, if possible, because it was the warmest room in the house and also possessed a nice glossy parquet floor, ideal for sliding on. As soon as he got home, he hurried to the study and cautiously opened its door.

The Ogre was not there, but Johnny was. He was rather gloomily turning ash out of the Ogre’s pipes into a tin for further experiments.

“How’s it going?” Caspar asked, slinging his bag into the Ogre’s chair and sitting on the Ogre’s desk to take his shoes off.

Johnny jumped. The Ogre’s inkwell fell over, and Johnny watched the ink spreading with even deeper gloom. “He’ll know it’s me,” he said. “He always thinks it’s me anyway.”

“Unless he thinks it’s me,” said Caspar, casting his shoes to the floor. “Wipe it up, you fool. But is the Great Caspar daunted by the Ogre? Yes, he is rather. And the ink is running off the desk into his shoes.”

Johnny, knowing he would get no sense out of Caspar in this mood, picked up the Ogre’s blotting paper and put it in the pool of ink. The blotting paper at once became bright blue and sodden, but there seemed just as much ink as before.

Gwinny came in, hearing their voices. “There’s ink running off on to the floor,” she said.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” said Johnny, wondering how one small inkwell always contained such floods of ink.

“I’ll do the floor,” said Gwinny. “Can’t you help, Caspar?”

“No,” said Caspar, gliding smoothly in his socks across the floor. He did not see why he should be deprived of his pleasure because of Johnny’s clumsiness.

“Well, we think you’re mean,” said Gwinny, fetching a newspaper from the rack and laying it under the streams of ink.

“The Great Caspar,” said Caspar, “is extremely generous.”

“Take no notice,” said Johnny. “And pass me a newspaper.”

Caspar continued to slide. “The Great Caspar,” he said kindly, “will slide for your entertainment while you work, lady and gentleman. He has slid before all the crowned heads of Europe, and will now perform, solely for your benefit, the famous hexagonal turn. Not only has it taken him years to perfect but—”

“Oh shut up!” said Johnny, desperately wiping.

“—it is also very hazardous,” said Caspar. “Behold, the hazardous hexagon!” Upon this, Caspar spun himself round and attempted to jump while he did it. While he was in the air, he saw the Ogre in the doorway, lost his balance and ended sitting in a pool of ink. From this position, he looked up into the dour face of the Ogre. His own face was vivid red, and he hoped most earnestly that the Ogre had not heard his boastful fooling.

The Ogre had heard. “The Great Caspar,” the Ogre said, “appears to have some difficulty with the hexagonal turn. Get up! AND GET OUT!”

To complete Caspar’s humiliation, Malcolm appeared in the doorway, snorting with laughter. “What is a hexagonal turn?” he said.

The Ogre’s roar had fetched Sally too. “Oh just look at this mess!” she cried. “Those trousers are ruined, Caspar. Don’t any of you have the slightest consideration? Ink all over poor Jack’s study!”

It was the last straw, being blamed for falling in the ink. Caspar, with difficulty, climbed to his feet. “Poor Jack!” he said, with his voice shaking with rage, and fear at his own daring. “It’s always poor flipping Jack! What about poor us for a change?”

The hurt, harrowed look on Sally’s face deepened. The Ogre’s face became savage and he moved towards Caspar with haste and purpose. Caspar did not wait to discover what the purpose was. With all the speed his slippery socks would allow, he dodged the Ogre, dived between Malcolm and Sally and fled upstairs.

There he changed into jeans, muttering. His face was red, his eyes stung with misery and he could not stop himself making shamed, angry noises. “I wish I was dead!” he said, and surged towards the window, wondering whether he dared throw himself out. His progress scattered construction kits and hurled paper about. He knocked against a corner of the chemistry box. It shunted into its lid, which Johnny had left lying beside it, and a tube of some white chemical lying on the lid rolled across it and spilt a little white powder on Caspar’s sock as he passed.

Caspar found himself reaching the window in two graceful slow-motion bounds, rather like a ballet dancer’s, except that his socks barely met the floor as he passed. And when he was by the window, instead of stopping in the usual way, his feet again left the floor in a long, slow, drifting bounce. Hardly had he realised what was happening, than he was down again, quite in the usual way, with a heavy bump, on top of what felt like a drawing pin.

He was so excited that he hardly noticed it. He simply pulled off his sock, and the drawing pin with it, and waded back with one bare foot to the chemistry set. The little tube of chemical was trembling on the edge of the lid and white powder was filtering down from it on to the carpet. Caspar’s hands shook rather as he picked it up. He planted its stopper firmly in, and then turned it over to read the label. It read Vol. pulv., which left Caspar none the wiser. But the really annoying thing was that the little tube was barely half full. Either most of it had gone the night Gwinny took to the ceiling, or Johnny had unwittingly used it up since in other mixtures that destroyed its potency. Wondering just how potent the powder was, Caspar carefully put his bare foot on the place where the tube had spilt. When nothing happened, he trod harder and screwed his foot around.

He was rewarded with a delicious feeling of lightness. A moment later, his feet left the ground and he was hanging in the air about eighteen inches above the littered floor. He was not very light. He gave a scrambling sort of jump to see if he could go any higher, and all that happened was that he bounced sluggishly over towards the window. It was such a splendid feeling that he bounced himself again and went jogging slowly towards Johnny’s bed.

“Yippee!” he said, and began to laugh.

He invented a kind of dance then, by jumping with both feet together first to one side and then to the other. Bounce and… Bounce and… His head swung, his hair flew, and he brandished the tube in his hand. Bounce and… Bounce and… “Yippee!”

Johnny and Gwinny came soberly and mournfully into the room while he was doing it. For a moment they could not believe their eyes. Then Johnny hastily slammed the door shut.

“I’ve found it!” said Caspar, bouncing away and waving the tube at them. “I’ve found it! It’s called Vol. pulv. and it works by itself. Yippee!” He suddenly felt himself becoming heavy again and was just in time to bounce himself over to his bed before the powder stopped working and he came down with a flop that made the bedsprings jangle. He sat there laughing and waving the tube at the others.

“How marvellous!” said Gwinny. “You are clever, Caspar.”

Johnny came slowly over to the bed. He took the tube and looked at it. “I was going to try this one today,” he said.

Caspar looked up at his gloomy face and understood that Johnny, not unreasonably, was feeling how unfair it was that Caspar should discover the secret, when Johnny had worked so hard over it and had just been in dire trouble about the ink as well. “You still need to do a lot of work on it,” Caspar said tactfully. “I used it dry, and it ought to be mixed with water. You’ll have to work out the right proportions.”

Johnny’s face brightened. “Yes,” he said. “And experiment to find out how much you need, not to go soaring right out of the atmosphere. I’ll have to do tests on myself, bit by bit.”

“That’s right,” agreed Caspar. “But for goodness sake don’t use too much while you do it. The tube’s less than half full already.”

“I’ve got eyes,” Johnny said crossly. Then, feeling he was being rather ungracious, he added, “I’m the Great Scientist. I think of everything.”

He tried to make good his boast by fencing off a corner of the room, so that no accidents should happen while the experiments were in progress. For the rest of the evening he sat in this pen, carefully putting the powder, grain by grain, into a test tube of water, and then bathing his big toe with the result.

“What’s the matter with Johnny?” their mother wanted to know, when she came in around bedtime.

Johnny, by this time, was bobbing an inch or so from the floor. He took hold of a chair that was part of his fence to hold himself down, and pretended not to have heard.

“I knocked over one of his experiments this afternoon,” Caspar explained anxiously, “and he doesn’t want anybody to do it again. Be careful of him. He’s very angry.”

Sally gave Johnny a puzzled look. “All right, darling. I won’t interfere. It was you I wanted to talk to anyway, Caspar.”

“About what I said about Jack? I’m sorry,” Caspar said hurriedly, dreading a scene. Scenes with his mother were always painful, not because she scolded, but because she believed in absolute honesty.

Sure enough, she said, “That’s not quite the point, darling. I could see you were hurt and miserable, and it upset me. Can’t you bring yourself to like Jack a little better? He really is very nice, you know.”

“Why should I? He doesn’t like us,” Caspar retorted with equal honesty.

“He tries,” Sally said earnestly. “I can think of at least a hundred occasions when he’s been very forebearing indeed.”

“There are about a thousand when he hasn’t,” Caspar said bitterly.

“That’s partly because you’ve been so awful,” Sally said frankly. “Truly, I’m ashamed of you most of the time – all of you, but particularly you as the eldest.”

Caspar’s face was red and he wanted to mutter again. He looked over at Johnny. Johnny looked sulkily at his big toe and gave it a slight waggle. He was hating the scene as much as Caspar, and he was also mortally afraid that he was going to rise from his pen any minute and float about.

Caspar did his best to send Sally away. “I’m sorry,” he said, sounding so sincere and nice that he made himself feel ill. “I will try.” He was quite unable to keep up this level of piety. He found himself adding, “I do try, only he keeps blaming me so.”

“You must remember,” said Sally, “that he isn’t really used to children. Malcolm and Douglas have been away at school most of the time, and he simply had no idea what it could be like.”

“He’s finding out, isn’t he?” said Caspar.

Sally laughed. “You can say that again! All right. Good night, darlings. And do try a bit harder in future.”

She went out and shut the door. Johnny gave a sigh of relief, let go of the chair and bobbed clear of the floor again.

Before he went to bed, he had risen to three feet. Caspar was rather glad to find that there was no horrible smell this time, as the mixture in the test tube grew stronger. It must have been due to all the other things Johnny had put in. They were discussing it when Malcolm, in his usual manner, knocked and came in despite being told to go away. Johnny was only just in time to pull himself over to the cupboard and pretend to be sitting on top of it.

“My father says you’re to put your light out,” Malcolm said. His eyes wandered critically to Johnny. “What are you sitting up there with one shoe off for?”

“We’ve both got one shoe off,” said Caspar, stretching out his bare foot and wriggling the toes at Malcolm’s face. “It’s the badge of our secret society. Now go away.”

“You don’t think I came in here for pleasure, do you?” Malcolm said, and went away.

Johnny looked anxiously at Caspar. “Do you think he suspected anything?”

“He’s far too flipping dim for that,” said Caspar. “But you’d better be careful. If he did find out, he’d tell the Ogre like a shot.”

“I think I’ll stop now,” said Johnny. “For tonight.” So Caspar washed his big toe for him, and Johnny climbed off the cupboard and went to bed.

The next day, Johnny skipped games and pelted home from school to continue his experiments. When Caspar came in, he found Johnny, again with one shoe off, triumphantly floating just below the ceiling.

“Look at this!” he said. “I could go higher if I put more on, only all the powder’s in the water now and I don’t want to waste it. Can you take the test tube and prop it carefully on that stand down there?”

Caspar stood on the cupboard and took the test tube from Johnny’s reaching hand. Then he climbed down and propped it upright in Johnny’s pen, while Johnny looked on tensely from the ceiling.

“What are you going to do now?” Caspar asked. “Come down?”

“I think I ought to practise a bit,” said Johnny. “You hold the door in case Malcolm comes in.”

Caspar stood against the door and watched a little wistfully while Johnny pushed off from the ceiling and swooped this way and that across the room, as Gwinny had done. It looked enormous fun. Johnny was laughing. And now that he knew what a splendid feeling it was to be nearly as light as air, Caspar could hardly wait to get up there and swoop about himself.

“Hadn’t I better shut the window?” he called up at Johnny’s whisking feet.

“It’s all right,” Johnny said happily. “It’s quite easy to control where you go. Like swimming, only not such hard work.”

Caspar watched him doing slow, swooping breaststroke through the air, and yearned to see what a fast overarm would do. “When shall we all try?”

Johnny turned over and trod water, or rather air. “What about going out tonight, after dark, for a fly round town?”

Caspar was about to say that this was the best idea Johnny had had in his life, when there was a thump on the door behind him. He flung himself against it, with his feet braced. “Go away. We’re busy.”

“Buzz off!” Johnny shouted down from the ceiling.

The doorknob began turning. Caspar grabbed it and held it hard. In spite of this, the knob continued to turn and the door moved slightly. Caspar had not thought Malcolm was so strong. “Go away!” he said.

“I only want to borrow Indigo Rubber,” said a much deeper voice than Malcolm’s. “What’s so special that I can’t come in?”

Caspar looked up helplessly at Johnny’s alarmed face. “I thought you didn’t like Indigo Rubber,” he shouted through the door.

“I’ve come round to them,” Douglas called back. “And I’ve got some friends coming tonight who want to hear it.”

“You can’t have it,” called Caspar.

“But I promised them,” said Douglas. “Be a sport.”

“You’d no business to promise them my records!” Caspar said, with real indignation. “You can’t have them. Go away.”

“I knew you’d go and be mean about it,” said Douglas. “It’s typical. I only want to borrow their second LP for an hour this evening. I won’t hurt it, and you can come and listen, if you like. Father’s said we can have it in the dining room.”

“You should have asked me first,” said Caspar. But put like that, Douglas’s request was reasonable, and he did not want to be thought mean.

“Tell him to come back for it in five minutes,” Johnny whispered from the ceiling. “Then get me some water.”

Caspar drew his breath to shout, but Douglas had lost patience. “You are a mean little squirt, aren’t you?” he said. “It’s no good trying to be polite to you. You lend me that record, or watch out!” The doorknob turned sharply under Caspar’s hands and the door began to open.

“Come back in five minutes!” Caspar said desperately, his braced feet sliding.

“And give you time to hide it?” said Douglas. “What kind of a fool do you think I am?” The door opened nearly a foot, and Douglas’s leg and shoulder came through the gap. It was clear that the rest of him was following.

Johnny did the only thing he could think of. With a strong thrust at the ceiling and a desperate kick of his legs, he got himself to the open window and, as the door crashed open and Douglas plunged into the room, he pushed himself out of it. And, whether it was the draught from the door, or the different conditions outside, Johnny promptly soared. The last Caspar saw of him was his bare foot and his shoe vanishing upwards beyond the top of the window.

Luckily, Douglas was looking malevolently at Caspar. “Got any more mean excuses?” he said.

“It’s not mean. You shouldn’t promise things that aren’t yours,” said Caspar. But his heart was not in the argument. All he could think of was Johnny soaring away into the heavens.

“Well, I’d have asked you this morning, only you’d gone by the time I’d persuaded Father to let me have the dining room,” Douglas said. “Are you going to lend it me, or not?”

“You can have them all. They’re down there by my bed. And I’ve got their new one too,” Caspar said hastily.

“Their new one!” Douglas said delightedly. “Really? Brainpan, you mean?” He waded over to Caspar’s bed and went on his knees by the window to sort out the records. Instead of taking the records at once, he knelt there looking disgusted. “I wonder you can hear these,” he said. “They’re coated with dust. Hasn’t anyone ever told you to keep LPs clean? You’re ruining them and your stylus.”

“I know, but I’ve lost my cleaner,” said Caspar, almost beside himself with impatience to get to the window and see what had become of Johnny.

“I’m not surprised,” said Douglas, looking round the crowded room. “You can borrow mine, if you’re careful with it. I’ve got one of those attachments now. Thanks, anyway. I’d better go and give these a clean.” And to Caspar’s relief, Douglas got up and waded to the door.

Caspar sped to the window and craned out of it. Johnny was not far off. He was clinging like a monkey to the corner of the house, about four feet above the window. “You can come back now,” Caspar told him. “He’s gone.”

“I can’t!” Johnny said tensely.

“Why not?”

“It’s worn off. I’m stuck. I can’t hold on much longer, either.”

Caspar felt rather sick. He looked down and realised that the ground was a very long distance away. Worse still, the Ogre’s car was now parked on the gravel at the side of the garden. For two very good reasons, Johnny had better not go down. He looked up. The roof and the gutter, which came lower at the back of the house, were only three feet or so above Johnny’s head.

“Can you climb up and grab the roof?” he said.

“What do you think I’ve been trying to do?” snapped Johnny. “It’s all I can do to stay in one place.”

“Then hang on. I’ll go out of the trap door in the loft,” said Caspar, “and see if I can pull you up. Hold on.”

“What do you expect me to do? Let go?” said Johnny.

Caspar sped to the door and up the stairs that led to Gwinny’s room. The loft was behind a low door opposite Gwinny’s. Gwinny came out to see what was going on as Caspar was frenziedly rattling at it.

“You don’t pull, you push,” she said. “Is there something the matter?”

“Yes,” said Caspar. “Johnny’s stranded halfway up the house and I’ve got to pull him up from here. Where’s the Ogre?”

“In the study, I think. I’ll fetch my dressing gown cord,” said Gwinny.

Caspar crashed the door open inwards and hurried into the loft. There was no proper floor, and he had to jump from joist to joist, which was not easy in the dim light. He was struggling to open the trap door to the roof, when Gwinny came crawling after him with the dressing gown cord in her mouth so that she could use both hands for crawling.

“Th’Ogre,” she said indistinctly.

“Where?”

“I don’t know,” Gwinny said, removing the cord. “But I could hear him shouting at someone. He sounded awfully angry.”

“I hope it’s Malcolm. And I hope it keeps them both busy,” said Caspar. “Help me with this bolt.”

It was no easy matter to open the trap. The bolts were rusty, and the Ogre had packed putty round the door itself to keep the rain out after he had fetched the muddy sweater in off the chimney. To Caspar’s frantic imagination, it took them an hour to unpack it again. Rust, dust, putty and cobwebs spattered down on them, and Caspar, unwisely bracing his foot between two joists, managed to put his knee through the plaster floor. But they got the door open in the end. Caspar hastily raised it and stood up into a cold sunset to lower it on to the tiles of the roof. Gwinny stood up beside him.

“Shall I climb out? I’m the lightest,” she said.

“No. You’re to stay there,” said Caspar. “It’s dangerous.”

He had one leg out over the edge of the trap, when, to his amazement, Johnny, looking white and shaken, appeared over the edge of the roof and started to crawl up it towards him.

“How did you climb up?” said Caspar. Johnny, for some reason, fiercely shook his head at him. “You must have done,” said Caspar. “You—”

The head and shoulders of the Ogre appeared behind Johnny. Even for the Ogre, they looked grim. All Caspar could do was to make haste to get himself back inside the loft again.