same. There were tense little noises, and the thrumming feeling of people diligently busy just out of earshot. Cat knew it was going to be a big, important dinner party.
After supper, he craned out of Gwendolen’s window watching the guests come up the piece of avenue he could see from there. They came in carriages and in cars, all very large and rich-looking. One carriage was drawn by six white horses and looked so impressive that Cat wondered if it might not even be the King.
“All the better,” said Gwendolen. She was squatting in the middle of the carpet, beside a sheet of paper. At one end of the paper was a bowl of ingredients. At the other crawled, wriggled or lay a horrid heap of things. Gwendolen had collected two frogs, an earthworm, several earwigs, a black beetle, a spider and a little pile of bones. The live things were charmed and could not move off the paper.
As soon as Cat was sure that there were no more carriages arriving, Gwendolen began pounding the ingredients together in the bowl. As she pounded, she muttered things in a groaning hum and her hair hung down and quivered over the bowl. Cat looked at the wriggling, hopping creatures and hoped that they were not going to be pounded up as ingredients too. It seemed not. Gwendolen at length sat back on her heels and said, “Now!”
She snapped her fingers over the bowl. The ingredients caught fire, all by themselves, and burnt with small blue flames. “It’s working!” Gwendolen said excitedly. She snatched up a twist of newspaper from beside her and carefully untwisted it. “Now for a pinch of dragon’s blood.” She took a pinch of the dark brown powder and sprinkled it on the flames. There was a fizzing, and a thick smell of burning. Then the flames leapt up, a foot high, blazing a furious green and purple, colouring the whole room with dancing light.
Gwendolen’s face glowed in the green and purple. She rocked on her heels, chanting, chanting, strings of things Cat could not understand. Then, still chanting, she leaned over and touched the spider. The spider grew. And grew. And grew more. It grew into a five foot monster – a greasy roundness with two little eyes on the front, hanging like a hammock amid eight bent and jointed furry legs. Gwendolen pointed. The door of the room sprang open of its own accord – which made her smile exultingly – and the huge spider went silently creeping towards it, swaying on its hairy legs. It squeezed its legs inwards to get through the door, and crept onwards, down the passage beyond.
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 didn’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 didn’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 round 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 dragon’s blood on the flames. They burnt 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 on to 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 on to 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 on to 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 he 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 round 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 face down over his knee. There he dragged off his unlaced black boot and commenced spanking her with it, hard and often.
While Mr Saunders laboured 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
