Диана Джонс - Wizard's Castle - Omnibus

So Sophie made Michael serve in the shop for at least an hour every morning while she went and talked to Calcifer. She invented guessing games to keep Calcifer occupied when she was busy. But Calcifer was still discontented. “When are you going to break my contract with Howl?” he asked more and more often.

And Sophie put Calcifer off, “I’m working on it,” she said. “It won’t be long now.” This was not quite true. Sophie had stopped thinking of it unless she had to. When she put together what Mrs. Pentstemmon had said with all the things Howl and Calcifer had said, she found she had some strong and rather terrible ideas about that contract. She was sure that breaking it would be the end of both Howl and Calcifer. Howl might deserve it, but Calcifer did not. And since Howl seemed to be working quite hard in order to slither out of the rest of the Witch’s curse, Sophie wanted to do nothing unless she could help.

Sometimes Sophie thought it was simply that the dog-man was getting her down. He was such a doleful creature. The only time he seemed to enjoy himself was when he chased down the green lanes between the bushes every morning. For the rest of the day he trudged gloomily about after Sophie, sighing deeply. As Sophie could do nothing about him either, she was rather glad when the weather grew hotter and hotter toward Midsummer Day and the dog-man took to lying in patches of shade out in the yard, panting.

Meanwhile the roots Sophie had planted had become quite interesting. The onion had become a small palm tree and was sprouting little onion-scented nuts. Another root grew into a sort of pink sunflower. Only one was slow to grow. When at last it put out two round green leaves, Sophie could hardly wait to see what it would grow into. The next day it looked as if it might be an orchid. It had pointed leaves spotted with mauve and a long stalk growing out of the middle with a large bud on it. The day after that, Sophie left the fresh flowers in the tin bath and hurried eagerly to the alcove to see how it was getting on.

The bud had opened into a pink flower like an orchid that had been through a mangle. It was flat, and joined to the stalk just below a round tip. There were four petals sprouting from a plump pink middle, two pointing downward and two more halfway up that stuck out sideways. While Sophie stared at it, a strong scent of spring flowers warned her that Howl had come in and was standing behind her.

“What is that thing?” he said. “If you were expecting an ultraviolet violet or an infra-red geranium, you got it wrong, Mrs. Mad Scientist.”

“It looks to me like a squashed-baby flower, Michael said, coming to look.

It did too. Howl shot Michael an alarmed look and picked up the flower in its pot. He slid it out of the pot into his hand, where he carefully separated the white, thready roots and the soot and the remains of the manure spell, until he uncovered the brown, forked root Sophie had grown it from. “I might have guessed,” he said. “It’s mandrake root. Sophie strikes again. You do have a touch, don’t you, Sophie?” He put the plant carefully back, passed it to Sophie, and went away, looking rather pale.

So that was almost all the curse come true, Sophie thought as she went to arrange the fresh flowers in the shopwindow. The mandrake root had had a baby. That only left one more thing: the wind to advance an honest mind. If that meant Howl’s mind had to be honest, Sophie thought, there was a chance that the curse might never come true. She told herself it served Howl right anyway, for going courting Miss Angorian every morning in a charmed suit, but she still felt alarmed and guilty. She arranged a sheaf of white lilies in a seven-league boot. She crawled into the window to get them just so, and she heard a regular clump, clump, clump from outside in the street. It was not the sound of a horse. It was the sound of a stick hitting the stones.

Sophie’s heart was behaving oddly even before she dared look out of the window. There, sure enough, came the scarecrow, hopping slowly and purposefully down the center of the street. The rags trailing from its outstretched arms were fewer and grayer, and the turnip of its face was withered into a look of determination, as if it had hopped ever since Howl hurled it away, until at last it had hopped its way back.

Sophie was not the only one to be scared. The few people about that early were running away from the scarecrow as hard as they could run. But the scarecrow took no notice and hopped on.

Sophie hid her face from it. “We’re not here!” she told it in a fierce whisper. “You don’t know we’re here! You can’t find us. Hop away fast!”

The clump, clump of the hopping stick slowed as the scarecrow neared the shop. Sophie wanted to scream for Howl, but all she seemed to be able to do was to go on repeating, “We’re not here. Go away quickly!”

And the hop-hopping speeded up, just as she told it to, and the scarecrow hopped its way past the shop and on through Market Chipping. Sophie thought she was going to come over queer. But she seemed just to have been holding her breath. She took a deep breath and felt shaky with relief. If the scarecrow came back, she could send it away again.

Howl had gone out when Sophie went into the castle room. “He seemed awfully upset,” Michael said. Sophie looked at the door. The knob was black-down. Not that upset! she thought.

Michael went out too, to Cesari’s, that morning, and Sophie was alone in the shop. It was very hot. The flowers wilted in spite of the spells, and very few people seemed to want to buy any. What with this, and the mandrake root, and the scarecrow, all Sophie’s feelings seemed to come to a head. She was downright miserable.

“It may be the curse hovering to catch up with Howl,” she sighed to the flowers, “but I think it’s being the eldest, really. Look at me! I set out to seek my fortune and I end up exactly where I started, and old as the hills still!”

Here the dog-man put his glossy red snout round the door to the yard and whined. Sophie sighed. Never an hour passed without the creature checking up on her. “Yes, I’m still here,” she said. “Where did you expect me to be?”

The dog came inside the shop. He sat up and stretched his paws out stiffly in front of him. Sophie realized he was trying to turn into a man. Poor creature. She tried to be nice to him because he was, after all, worse off than she was.

“Try harder,” she said. “Put your back into it. You can be a man if you want.”

The dog stretched and straightened his back, and strained and strained. And just as Sophie was sure he was going to have to give up or topple over backward, he managed to rise to his hind legs and heave himself up into a distraught, ginger-haired man.

“I envy—Howl,” he panted. “Does that—so easily. I was—dog in the hedge—you helped. Told Lettie—I knew you—I’d keep watch. I was—here before in—” He began to double up again into a dog and howled with annoyance. “With Witch in shop!” he wailed, and fell forward onto his hands, growing a great deal of gray and white hair as he did so.

Sophie stared at the large, shaggy dog that now stood there. “You were with the Witch!” she said. She remembered now. The anxious ginger-haired man who had stared at her in horror. “Then you know who I am and you know I’m under a spell. Does Lettie know too?”

The huge, shaggy head nodded.

“And she called you Gaston,” Sophie remembered. “Oh, my friend, she has made it hard for you! Fancy having all that hair in this weather! You’d better go somewhere cool.”

The dog nodded again and shambled miserably into the yard.

“But why did Lettie send you?” Sophie wondered. She felt thoroughly put out and disturbed by this discovery. She went up the stairs and through the broom cupboard to talk to Calcifer.