Eva Ibbotson - The Ogre of Oglefort

The Hag came forward and put the rose in Mirella’s hand.

Mirella stood as though she was made of stone. If she was frightened she didn’t show it. In a few minutes — a few seconds even — she would be flying over the heads of everyone. She looked around to see how she would get away afterward, and Ivo came up to her and said, “I’ve left the window open — the round one above the banners,” and she whispered her thanks.

The ogre began to pass his hands back and forth over Mirella’s head.

In the Hall everyone held their breath.

Everyone except Charlie.

The little white dog had been watching, his piebald ears pricked as the ogre bent over Mirella. Now for some reason he left Ivo, leaped onto the platform, and ran up to Mirella, yapping excitedly, and began to wag his tail and lick her feet.

Mirella bent down to him. “It’s all right, Charlie,” she said. “Lie down. Be quiet.” And to Ivo she said, “Call him off, can’t you?”

“No, I can’t,” said Ivo. “He has a perfect right to say good-bye. He wants you to stroke him.”

“I know perfectly well what he wants,” snapped Mirella.

She had never touched Charlie before. Now as she felt his rough coat under her hand, his warm tongue licking her bare leg, something extraordinary happened to her. It was as though the scales fell from her eyes. She saw the Hag, so old and weary, who had trekked miles believing Mirella to be in danger. She saw the other rescuers — the troll and the wizard — and Ivo, who had thought she might be his friend. Above all, she saw the living, warm, excited little dog.

And suddenly a feeling flooded through her — of thankfulness for being alive, of joy in the world. She looked up at the window through which in a few moments she would fly out and away forever and felt panic, thinking of the loneliness that would follow.

But she had to go through with it now. She had suffered so much to get here, she had been so obstinate and determined — she couldn’t now change her mind. She closed her eyes and lifted her head as the ogre’s hand came down toward her.

The hand never reached her. The ogre gave a terrible cry, took two tottering paces forward, and fell to the ground with a crash that echoed through the Hall.

Everyone rushed forward, but the ogre could not move; he only pointed with his great arm to the doorway, where a figure as large and hideous as he was himself was standing, wreathed in a ghostly mist.

“Germania,” whispered the ogre — and fainted.

The ogre had bruised his forehead badly when he fainted at the sight of his wife. The Hag had found the foot water which the Norns had given them, and it helped a little, but not very much.

“They must have been the wrong kind of feet,” said Ivo, who was beginning to have a very low opinion of the Norns.

But it was not the bruise that was worrying them; it was the ogre’s state of mind. He had decided that Germania’s ghost had appeared to him because the ogress wanted him to join her in her bone-covered mound.

“She has been hovering over me ever since she passed on,” said the ogre. “I have felt her hover. A heavy hover, because she’s a big woman. So I have to die,” added the ogre. “I have to die quickly so that she doesn’t get impatient.”

The ogre having a breakdown had been bad, but the ogre deciding to die was worse.

“I can’t stop eating at once, but I shall stop eating slowly, so every day you must weigh my food and take off an ounce. And I must decide which pajamas to wear for the funeral and whom to invite. My three aunts, of course, and they’ll have to bring Clarence.”

“Who’s Clarence?” asked Ivo — but the ogre only shook his head and sighed.

“But you can’t do this,” said the Hag. “You’ve got a castle to care for — look at all the land out there and the gardens and the lake. What’s going to happen to it?”

“I shall make a will,” said the ogre. “Perhaps my Aunt-with-the-Eyes should have it — she’s the eldest. Or the Aunt-with-the-Nose. Obviously I can’t leave it to Clarence. It’ll probably take a few weeks for me to be properly dead — I’ll have decided by then.” He waved a lordly hand. “And you can look after everything till then, can’t you?”

The rescuers looked at each other. They thought that the ogre was getting a bit above himself.

“I have a house in London, you know,” said the Hag.

“And I have a job,” said the troll.

“My mother is waiting for me,” said the wizard.

But the truth was that 26 Whipple Road did not look very inviting from a distance. Mr. Prendergast would be all right, and after the way Gladys had behaved the Hag did not feel that she had to hurry back to her toad. And there was going to be a terrible row about Ivo whenever they got back. Nor did Ulf long to go back to pushing trolleys down hospital corridors. The ogre might be taking a lot for granted, but actually no one was in a hurry to return.

“We’ll look after things for a while,” said Ulf, “but you must give up the idea of dying. It’s a really silly idea.”

But the ogre just closed his eyes and said Germania was waiting for him. “You’ll have to make the mound bigger so we can both get in. And I’ll need someone to write things down as they occur to me. I think my mauve pajamas would be best for the funeral, but mauve’s rather a sad color. I don’t want to depress people.”

The ogre had been dragged back to his bed, still muttering his wife’s name, and was now in a deep sleep, and Mirella had joined the others in the kitchen. She was no longer the sulky, obstinate girl who had shut herself in the tower but had straightaway helped the Hag to prepare the lunch, and now she and Ivo were doing the washing up.

“I know how to get rid of the people in the dungeon,” said Mirella.

“How?” asked Ivo. “How can you get rid of them?”

“I’ll show you,” said Mirella. “Come with me.”

With Charlie running at their heels, they made their way across the courtyard and knocked on the door of the dungeon.

“Have you brought us some lunch?” asked Mrs. Hummock.

“No,” said Mirella. “But we have some news from the ogre.”

The sulky pair came hurrying up to her.

“He’s going to change us then?” asked Mr. Hummock.

“At last, at last!” said his wife, clapping her hands. “I knew he’d come around.”

Mirella put up her hand. “Well, yes — but there’s something he’d like you to do first.”

“And what is that?” asked Mr. Hummock.

“Well, you see, the ogre is feeling very weak. That was why he hasn’t changed you up to now. But he feels sure that if he had one particular thing to drink — and lots of it — he’d get better very quickly.”

“And what is that?” asked Mrs. Hummock.

Mirella paused. Then she said dramatically: “Blood!”

There was a moment of silence.

Then: “What kind of blood?” asked the headmistress.

“Human blood. It must be human blood and he needs lots of it. Not just a few pints like one gives in a hospital, but buckets of it. He says if you’d all allow yourselves to be completely drained, he could drink enough blood from you to get up his strength for the changing. Of course you’d be almost dead — just white wraiths, really — but it wouldn’t matter because the next moment you’d be whatever you want to be. It hurts rather, as you’d expect — there’s a special syringe that goes into you and it just sucks and sucks — you can see your muscles turning paler and paler and your skin going blue, but the ogre is sure you won’t mind. He’s sending someone down first thing tomorrow morning to do it. You’ll need a good knife to make a cut in the flesh for the nozzle to go in and—”