“I took the shop,” he told Michael. “It’s got a useful shed at the back and a house at the side, and I took the lot. I’m not sure what I shall pay for it all with, though.”
“What about the money you get if you find Prince Justin?” Michael asked.
“You forget,” croaked Howl, “the whole object of this operation is
Michael had to leave the spell and rush upstairs. Sophie might have gone, except the dog-man got in the way when she tried. This was another part of his odd behavior. He did not like Sophie to do anything for Howl. Sophie felt this was fairly reasonable. She began on her eighty-fifth triangle.
Michael came cheerfully down and worked on his spell. He was so happy that he was joining in Calcifer’s saucepan song and chatting to the skull just as Sophie did, wile he worked. “We’re going to live in Market Chipping,” he told the skull. “”I can go and see my Lettie every day.”
“Is that why you told Howl about the shop?” Sophie asked, threading her needle. By this time she was on her eighty-ninth triangle.
“Yes,” Michael said happily. “Lettie told me about it when we were wondering how we’d ever see one another again. I told her-”
He was interrupted by Howl, trailing downstairs in his quilt again. “This is positively my last appearance,” Howl croaked. “I forgot to say that Mrs. Pentstemmon is being buried tomorrow on her estate near Porthaven and I shall need this suit cleaned.” He brought the gray-and-scarlet suit out from inside his coverlet and dropped it on Sophie’s lap. “You’re attending to the wrong suit,” he told Sophie. “This is the one I like, but I haven’t the energy to clean it myself.”
“You don’t need to go to the funeral, do you?” Michael said anxiously.
“I wouldn’t dream of staying away,” said Howl. “Mrs. Pentstemmon made me the wizard I am. I have to pay my respects.”
“But your cold’s worse,” said Michael.
“He’s
Howl at once put on his noblest expression. “I’ll be all right,” he croaked, “as long as I keep out of the sea wind. It’s a bitter place, the Pentstemmon estate. The trees are all bent sideways and there’s no shelter for miles.”
Sophie knew he was just playing for sympathy. She snorted.
“And what about the Witch?” Michael asked.
Howl coughed piteously. “I shall go in disguise, probably as another corpse,” he said, trailing back toward the stairs.
“Then you need a winding sheet and not this suit,” Sophie called after him. Howl trailed away upstairs without answering and Sophie did not protest. She now had the charmed suit in her hands and it was too good a chance to miss. She took up her scissors and hacked the gray-and-scarlet suit into seven jagged pieces. That ought to discourage Howl from wearing it. Then she got to work on the last triangles of the blue-and-silver suit, mostly little fragments from round the neck. It was now very small indeed. It looked as if might be a size too small even for Mrs. Pentstemmon’s page boy.
“Michael,” she said. “Hurry up with that spell. It’s urgent.”
“I won’t be long now,” Michael said.
Half an hour later he checked things off on his list and said he thought he was ready. He came over to Sophie carrying a tiny bowl with a very small amount of green powder in the bottom. “Where do you want it?”
“Here,” said Sophie, snipping the last threads. She pushed the sleeping dog-man aside and laid the child-sized suit carefully on the floor. Michael, quite as carefully, tipped the bowl and sprinkled powder on every inch of it.
Then they both waited, rather anxiously.
A moment passed. Michael sighed with relief. The suit was gently spreading out larger. They watched it spread, and spread, until one side of it piled up against the dog-man and Sophie had to pull it further away to give it room.
After about five minutes they both agreed that the suit looked Howl’s size again. Michael gathered it up and carefully shook the excess powder off into the grate. Calcifer flared and snarled. The dog-man jumped in his sleep.
“Watch it!” said Calcifer. “That was strong.”
Sophie took the suit and hobbled upstairs n tiptoe with it. Howl was asleep on his gray pillows, with his spiders busily making new webs around him. He looked noble and sad in his sleep. Sophie hobbled round to put the blue-and-silver suit on the old chest by the window, trying to tell herself that the suit had got no larger since she picked it up. “Still, if it stops you going to the funeral, that’s no loss,” she murmured as she took a look out of the window.
The sun was low across the neat garden. A large, dark man was out there, enthusiastically throwing a red ball towards Howl’s nephew, Neil, who was standing with a look of patient suffering, holding a bat. Sophie could see the man was Neil’s father.
“Snooping again,” Howl said suddenly behind her. Sophie swung round guiltily, to find that Howl was only half awake really. He may have even thought it was the day before, because he said, “ ‘Teach me to keep off envy’s stinging’-that’s all part of past years now. I love Wales, but it doesn’t love me. Megan’s full of envy because she’s respectable and I’m not.” Then he woke up a little more and asked, “What are you doing?”
“Just putting out your suit for you,” Sophie said, and hobbled hastily away.
Howl must have gone back to sleep. He did not emerge again that night. There was no sign of him stirring when Sophie and Michael got up next morning. They were careful not to disturb him. Neither of them felt that going to Mrs. Pentstemmon’s funeral was a good idea. Michael crept out onto the hills to take the dog-man for a run. Sophie tiptoed about, getting breakfast, hoping Howl would oversleep. There was still no sign of Howl when Michael came back. The dog-man was starving hungry. Sophie and Michael were hunting in the closet for things a dog could eat when they heard Howl coming slowly down the stairs.
“Sophie,” Howl’s voice said accusingly.
He was standing holding the door to the stair open with an arm that was entirely hidden in an immense blue-and-silver sleeve. His feet, on the bottom stair, were standing inside the top half of a gigantic blue-and-silver jacket. Howl’s other arm did not come anywhere near the other huge sleeve. Sophie could see that arm in outline. Making bulging gestures under a vast frill collar. Behind Howl, the stairs were full of blue-and-silver suit trailing back all the way to his bedroom.
“Oh, dear!” said Michael. “Howl, it was my fault !-”
“Your fault? Garbage!” said Howl. “I can detect Sophie’s hand a mile off. And there are several miles of this suit. Sophie dear, where is my other suit?”
Sophie hurriedly fetched the pieces of gray-and-scarlet suit out of the broom cupboard, where she had hidden them.
Howl surveyed them. “Well, that’s something,” he said. “I’d been expecting it to be too small to see. Give it here, all seven of it.”
Sophie held the bundle of gray-and-scarlet cloth out toward him. Howl, with a bit of searching, succeeded in finding his hand inside the multiple folds of blue-and-silver sleeve and working it through a gap between two tremendous stitches. He grabbed the bundle off her. “I am now,” he said, “going to get ready for the funeral. Please, both of you, refrain from doing anything whatsoever while I do. I can tell Sophie is in top form at the moment, and I want this room the usual size when I come back into it.”
He set off with dignity to the bathroom, wading in blue-and-silver suit. The rest of the blue-and-silver suit followed him, dragging step by step down the stairs and rustling across the floor. By the time Howl was in the bathroom, most of the jacket was on the ground floor and the trousers were appearing on the stairs. Howl half-shut the bathroom door and seemed to go on hauling the suit in hand over hand. Sophie and Michael and the dog-man stood and watched yard after yard of blue or silver fabric proceed across the floor, decorated with an occasional silver button the size of a millstone and enormous, regular, ropelike stitches. There may have been nearly a mile of it.
“I don’t think I got that spell quite right,” Michael said when the last huge scalloped edge had disappeared round the bathroom door.
“And didn’t he let you know it!” said Calcifer. “Another log, please.”
Michael gave Calcifer another log. Sophie fed the dog-man. But neither of them dared do anything much else except stand around eating bread and honey for breakfast until Howl came out of the bathroom.
He came forth two hours later, out of a steam of verbena-scented spells. He was all in black. His suit was black, his boots were black, and his hair was black, the same blue-raven black as Miss Angorian’s. His earring was a long jet pendant. Sophie wondered if the black hair was in honor of Mrs. Pentstemmon. She agreed with Mrs. Pentstemmon that black hair suited Howl. His green-glass eyes went better with it. But she wondered very much which suit the black one really was.
Howl conjured himself a black tissue and blew his nose on it. The window rattled. He picked up one of the slices of bread and honey from the bench and beckoned the dog-man. The dog-man looked dubious. “I only want you where I can look at you,” Howl croaked. His cold was still bad. “Come here, pooch.” As the dog crawled reluctantly into the middle of the room, Howl added, “You won’t find my other suit in the bathroom, Mrs. Snoop. You’re not getting your hands on any of my clothes again.”
Sophie stopped tiptoeing toward the bathroom and watched Howl walk round the dog-man, eating bread and honey and blowing his nose by turns.
“What do you think of this as a disguise?” he said. He flicked the black tissue at Calcifer and started to fall forward onto hands and knees. Almost as he started to move, he was gone. By the time he touched the floor, he was a curly red setter, just like the dog-man.
The dog-man was taken completely by surprise and his instincts got the better of him. His hackles came up, his ears lowered, and he growled. Howl played up-or else he felt the same. The two identical dogs walked round one another, glaring, growling, bristling, and getting ready to fight.
Sophie caught the tail of the one she thought was the dog-man. Michael grabbed for the one he thought was Howl. Howl rather hastily turned himself back. Sophie found a tall black person standing in front of her and let go of the back of Howl’s jacket. The dog-man sat down on Michael’s feet, staring tragically.
“Good,” said Howl. “If I can deceive another dog, I can fool everyone else. No one at the funeral is going to notice a stray dog lifting its leg against the gravestones.” He went to the door and turned the knob blue-down.
“Wait a moment,” said Sophie. “If you’re going to the funeral as a red setter, why take all the trouble of getting yourself up in black?”
Howl lifted his chin and looked noble. “Respect to Mrs. Pentstemmon,” he said, opening the door. ‘She liked one to think of all the details.” He went into the street of Porthaven.
16. In which there is a great deal of witchcraft.
Several hours passed. The dog-man was hungry again. Michael and Sophie decided to have lunch too. Sophie approached Calcifer with the frying pan.
“Why can’t you have bread and cheese for once?” Calcifer grumbled.
All the same, he bent his head. Sophie was just putting the pan on top of the curly green flames when Howl’s voice rang out hoarsely from nowhere.
“Brace yourself, Calcifer! She’s found me!”
Calcifer sprang upright. The frying pan fell across Sophie’s knees. “You’ll have to wait!” Calcifer roared, flaming blindingly up the chimney. Almost at once he blurred into a dozen or so burning blue faces, as if he was being shaken violently about, and burned with a loud, throaty whirring.
“That must mean they’re fighting,” Michael whispered.
Sophie sucked a slightly burned finger and picked slices of bacon off her skirt with the other hand, staring at Calcifer. He was whipping from side to side of the fireplace. His blurred faces pulsed from deep blue to sky blue and then almost to white. One moment he had multiple orange eyes, and the next, rows of starry silver ones. She had never imagined anything like it.
Something swept overhead with a blast and a boom which shook everything in the room. A second something followed, with a long, shrill roar. Calcifer pulsed nearly blue-black, and Sophie’s skin fizzed with the backblast from the magic.
Michael scrambled for the window. “They’re quite near!”
Sophie hobbled to the window to. The storm of magic seemed to have affected half the things in the room. The skull was yattering its jaw so hard that it was traveling round in circles. Packets were jumping. Powder was seething in jars. A book dropped heavily out of the shelves and lay open on the floor, fanning its pages back and forth. At one end of the room, the scented steam boiled out of the bathroom: at the other, Howl’s guitar made out-of-tune twangings. And Calcifer whipped about harder than ever.
Michael put the skull in the sink to stop it from yattering itself onto the floor while he opened the window and craned out. Whatever was happening was maddeningly just out of sight. People in the houses opposite were at doors and windows, pointing to something more or less overhead. Sophie and Michael ran to the broom cupboard, where they seized a velvet cloak each and flung them on. Sophie got the one that turned its wearer into a red-bearded man. Now she knew why Calcifer had laughed at her in the other one. Michael was a horse. But there was no time to laugh just then. Sophie dragged the door open and sped into the street, followed by the dog-man, who seemed surprisingly calm about the whole thing. Michael trotted out after her with a clatter of non-existent hooves, leaving Calcifer whipping from blue to white behind them.
The street was full of people looking upward. No one had time to notice things like horses coming out of houses. Sophie and Michael looked too, and found a huge cloud boiling and twisting just above the chimney tops. It was black and rotating on itself violently. White flashes that were not quite like light stabbed through the murk of it. But almost as soon as Michael and Sophie arrived, the clot of magic took on the shape of a misty bundle of fighting snakes. Then it tore in two with a noise like an enormous cat fight. One part sped yowling across the roofs and out to sea, and the second went screaming after it.
Some people retreated indoors then. Sophie and Michael joined the rush of braver people down the sloping lanes to the dockside. There everyone seemed to think the best view was to be had along the curve of the harbor wall. Sophie hobbled to get out along it too, but there was no need to go beyond the shelter of the harbor master’s hut. Two clouds were hanging in the air, some way out to sea, on the other side of the harbor wall, the only two clouds in the calm blue sky. It was quite easy to see them. I was equally easy to see the dark patch of storm raging on the sea between the clouds, flinging up great, white-topped waves. There was an unfortunate ship caught in that storm. Its masts were beating back and forth. They could see spouts of water hitting it on all sides. The crew were desperately trying to take in the sails, but one at least had torn to flying gray rags.
“Can’t they have a care for that ship!” someone said indignantly.
Then the wind and the waves from the storm hit the harbor wall. White water lashed over and the brave persons out on the wall came crowding hurriedly back to the quayside, where the moored ships were heaving and grinding in their moorings. Among all this was a great deal of screaming in high, singing voices. Sophie put her face out into the wind beyond the hut, where the screaming came from, and discovered that the raging magic had disturbed more than the sea and the wretched ship. A number of wet, slithery-looking ladies with flying green-brown hair were dragging themselves up onto the harbor wall, screaming and holding long wet arms out to more screaming ladies tossing in the waves. Every one of them had a fishtail instead of legs.
“Confound it!” said Sophie. “The mermaids from the curse!” that meant only two more impossible things to come true now.
She looked up at the two clouds. Howl was kneeling on the lefthand one, much larger and nearer than she would have expected. He was still dressed in black. Typically enough, he was staring over his shoulder at the frantic mermaids. He was not looking at them as if he remembered they were part of the curse at all.
“Keep your mind on the Witch!” the horse beside Sophie yelled.
The Witch sprang into being, standing on the righthand cloud, in a whirl of flame-colored robe and streaming red hair, with her arms raised to invoke further magic. As Howl turned and looked at her, her arms came down. Howl’s cloud erupted into a fountain of rose-colored flame. Heat from it swept across the harbor, and the stones of the wall steamed.
“It’s all right!” gasped the horse.
Howl was on the tossing, nearly sinking ship below. He was a tiny black figure, leaning against the bucking mainmast. He let the Witch know she had missed by waving at her cheekily. The Witch saw him the instant he waved. Cloud, Witch, and all at once became a savagely swooping red bird, diving at the ship.
The ship vanished. The mermaids sang a doleful scream. There was nothing but sulkily tossing water where the ship had been. But the huge diving bird was going too fast to stop. It plunged into the sea with a huge splash.
Everyone on the quayside cheered. “I knew that wasn’t a real ship really!” someone behind Sophie said.
“Yes, it must have been an illusion,” the horse said wisely. “It was too small.”
As proof that the ship had been much nearer than it looked, the waves from the splash reached the harbor wall before Michael had stopped speaking. A twenty-foot green hill of water rode smoothly sideways across it, sweeping the screaming mermaids into the harbor, rolling every moored ship violently sideways, and thudding in swirls round the harbor master’s hut. An arm came out of the side of the horse and hauled Sophie back toward the quay. Sophie gasped and stumbled in knee-high gray water. The dog-man bounded beside them, soaked to the ears.
They had just reached the quay, and the boats in the harbor had all just rolled upright, when a second mountain of water rolled over the harbor wall. Out of its smooth side burst a monster. It was a long, black, clawed thing, half cat, half sea lion, and it came racing down the wall toward the quay. Another burst out of the wave as it smashed into the harbor, long and low too, but scalier, and came racing after the first monster.
Everyone realized that the fight was not over yet and splashed backward hurriedly against the sheds and houses on the quayside. Sophie fell over a rope and then a doorstep. The arm came out of the horse and dragged her upright as the two monsters streaked past in a scatter of salt water. Another wave swirled over the harbor wall, and two more monsters burst out of that. They were identical to the first two, except the scaly one was closer to the catlike one. And the next rolling wave brought two more, closer together yet.
“What’s going on?” Sophie squawked as this third pair raced past, shaking the stones of the jetty as they ran.
“Illusions,” Michael’s voice came out of the horse. “Some of them. They’re both trying to fool one another into chasing the wrong one.”
“Which is who?” said Sophie.
“No idea,” said the horse.
Some of the onlookers found the monsters too terrifying. Many went home. Others jumped down into the rolling ships to fend them off from the quay. Sophie and Michael joined the hard core of watchers who set off through the streets of Porthaven after the monsters. First they followed a river of sea water, then huge, wet paw prints, and finally white gouges and scratches where the claws of the creatures had dug into the stones of the street. These led everyone out the back of the town to the marshes where Sophie and Michael had chased the shooting star.
By this time all six creatures were bounding black dots, vanishing into the flat distance. The crowd spread out into a ragged line on the bank, staring, hoping for more, and afraid of what they might see. After a while no one could see anything but empty marsh. Nothing happened. Quite a few people were turning away to leave when of course everyone else shouted,
“I reckon they must have done for one another,” people said. The crowd gradually split into separate figures hurrying away to jobs they left half done.