The Ogre Downstairs (13 page)

Malcolm was still asleep, and the pencils were still standing guard on his pillow. Gwinny was alarmed at how pale his face was. She stood and looked at him for a while, and, the longer she looked, the more angry and motherly she felt about him. “But it’s no good telling the Ogre,” she thought. “He won’t care.” Besides, it was the Ogre who had made Malcolm ill by hitting him last night. He must have hit him awfully hard, Gwinny thought. Johnny had cried his eyes out. She stared at Malcolm’s pale face, quite forgetting the damage he and Johnny had done between them, and the list of the Ogre’s crimes grew longer in her head. After hitting the boys, the Ogre had done something dreadful to Sally – something so dreadful that he dared not tell them the truth. He was going to send Caspar and Johnny to a horrible school – Gwinny knew it must be horrible, since Douglas preferred to stay at home with the Ogre rather than be sent there. And now the Ogre did not care that Malcolm was ill.

It seemed to Gwinny that it was high time someone put the Ogre down, before he did anything else.

She squared her shoulders and went over to the chemistry set. The chemicals with the most poisonous names seemed to be
Noct. Vest
., a nasty spiky name, and
Petr. Philos
., which sounded like the noise you made being sick. Gwinny took two fresh test tubes and carefully poured two-thirds of each chemical into them.
After that, with great consideration, she sharpened a heap of pencil shavings on to Malcolm’s pillow, so that his pencils should not disturb him by asking for food in the night. Then she took her test tubes and the spirit lamp away upstairs.

There was a scampering of dustballs as she opened her door. Gwinny was no longer afraid of them – as she had been when Malcolm first made them – but there were such a lot of them that they were a dreadful nuisance. They ran everywhere and ate her people’s food. Her people had taken all her pins and needles to use as weapons against them. The doll’s house was in a state of siege this evening. The people would not let her open it, even when she had shooed the dustballs away. In the end, she had to hand them their baked beans on a teaspoon through their bedroom window.

“Oh dear!” Gwinny said. “I wish I had some rat poison.”

This caused her to look at her two test tubes again.
Petr. Philos
. had turned out to be little pieces of stone, rather like road chippings. She decided, on second thoughts, not to use it, in case the Ogre noticed it crunching in his teeth. So she took just
Noct. Vest
. downstairs with her.

Half an hour later, the smell of baking drew Douglas from the sitting room, where he was working in order not to disturb Malcolm, and Caspar from upstairs. Johnny was very busy with crucibles and would not leave them.

“Those look good!” Caspar exclaimed, as Gwinny carefully turned out twelve warm golden buns on to a
wire tray. He seized one and crammed it whole into his mouth. Douglas seized two and did the same.

Gwinny smiled as she went to the oven again. That meant her baking was sure to tempt the Ogre. Very carefully, she fetched out the thirteenth cake.

Douglas looked at it over her shoulder. “What’s that?” he asked, with his mouth full.

“It’s not for you,” Gwinny said firmly.

“I should hope not!” said Douglas.

This cake was not golden, but grey. It had a hard, rocky look, and its surface glittered in an odd way. Gwinny had tried to make it look more edible by planting a cherry not quite in the middle.

Caspar looked at it critically. “If I were you,” he said, “I should give that to the O—”

The Ogre, also attracted by the smell, came in at that moment. Gwinny, rather pink in the face, hastily put the grey cake back in the oven and shut the door on it. She had no wish to do her deed in public.

“Congratulations, Gwinny,” said the Ogre with his mouth full, and went out again.

Douglas and Caspar stared outraged at the one bun remaining.

“He ate
eight
!” said Caspar.

“Isn’t that typical?” said Douglas, but Gwinny only smiled.

As Caspar went back into his room, Johnny gave a cry of triumph and held up a piece of filter paper with a hole in the middle.

“Got it! It’s when you heat it up and let it go cool again.”

“Got what?” said Caspar.

“Ahah!” said Johnny. “Just try putting your finger through the hole in this paper, then you’ll see.”

He held the paper out in both hands towards Caspar. Caspar obligingly knelt down beside Johnny and put out a finger. To his surprise, his finger did not go straight through the hole. It met, instead, something which felt exactly like damp filter paper. Almost unable to believe it, Caspar carefully ran his finger all over the blank space. It was astonishing. He could see Johnny’s sweater through the space, but the hole was blocked with invisible, pulpy filter paper.

“Good lord!” he said. “It’s invisible!” He took his finger away and found that the tip of it had gone slightly blurry. As he looked, the whole top joint blurred and then vanished. It had gone so completely that Caspar could not help taking a quick look down at his finger from top view. He had half-expected to see a cross-section of bone and flesh. But it simply looked pink. Gingerly, he touched the space where the missing top joint should have been. And he could feel it still there.

“I wish you hadn’t done that!” Johnny said crossly.

“Why?” said Caspar, who was beginning to feel rather pleased with it.

“Because the Ogre’s bound to notice.”

“The Ogre wouldn’t notice if I stuck it in his eye,” said Caspar. “And do let’s think about where Mum’s gone now. She must be somewhere.”

But Johnny did not seem to want to discuss Sally. “It’s the Ogre’s fault,” he said. “And he’ll pay for it. You wait.” Then somewhat to Caspar’s surprise, he packed up his chemistry set and went to bed.

Since Caspar was also rather tired, he too went to bed early, and then lay awake a long time wondering where Sally was, why she had gone and why the Ogre would not tell them. Then, he thought of sixteen totally unlikely ways of finding her. And, finally, he began dismally wondering whether boarding school was as dreadful as he feared. The only comfort he could see was that Malcolm had survived one. And that was not very comforting.

A
s soon as he was quite sure that Caspar was asleep at last, Johnny got up again and dressed. Stealthily, in the dark, he felt about and found the test tube he had put out ready. Carefully, quietly, feeling his way by the wall, he crept downstairs to the bathroom. Only when he had the door safely locked did he dare turn on a light. He sighed with relief then, and turned on the hot tap to its smallest, quietest trickle. As soon as it was running properly hot, he put the plug in the bath and began shaking the powder from the test tube into the hot trickle until he had about four inches of clear, steaming, lilac-coloured liquid. Then he turned the tap off and sat down on the clothes basket to wait for the liquid to cool.
He was determined to do this properly, and he knew it was going to be a long job.

Gwinny, meanwhile, tossed and turned in her bed. The scutterings of the dustballs kept waking her up, and in between she had terrible dreams. The first time she woke up she told herself she did not repent of her crime – not in the least. All she had done, after all, was to rid the world of an Ogre, quickly and quite kindly. The others would say she had done right. And they might even wish they had thought of it too.

The second time she woke up, the cistern in the loft was making a great deal of noise, almost more than the dustballs. This was Johnny’s doing, but Gwinny thought it must be the Ogre having a bath. And that meant the Ogre had not gone to bed yet and not yet eaten the cake. Gwinny knew she would have to lie and listen for the dreadful moment when he did. She had left the cake on his bedside table, with a doily under it to make it look prettier, and she had sort of made his bed, to give him the idea she was looking after him now that Sally was gone. But, in the dark, with the cistern running and the dustballs scuffling, Gwinny began to think that this had been deceitful of her. She had no business to let the Ogre think she liked him enough to make his bed and give him cakes. But she had to admit she could hardly have got him to eat the grey cake any other way. So she covered her head with the bedclothes, in order not to hear when he came out of the bathroom, and fell asleep.

The third time she woke up, the dustballs were running about in droves, squeaking. And Gwinny started up, with the most vivid memory of all the things she had
put in the grey cake. They were more than even an Ogre’s stomach could bear. Gwinny could see, before her in the dark, a vision of the Ogre clutching his stomach and rolling in agony. It was awful. In her efforts to finish him off quickly, she had been most horribly unkind. She knew it now. She just had to get up and see if he was dead yet – and if he was not, she would have to wake Douglas and ask him to put the Ogre out of his misery.

Gwinny did not like the dark, particularly not with a corpse in the house. She switched on lights as she crept downstairs, until she came to the door of the Ogre’s bedroom. She did not quite like to turn on the light in the room itself, so she pushed the door wide open to let the light from the landing shine in.

As she did so, the Ogre gave the most dreadful, rattling groan.

Gwinny stopped in the doorway, appalled. She could see the Ogre quite clearly. He was lying on his back, not moving. But his mouth was open and, as Gwinny peered forward, out of it came another rattling groan. Just to make quite sure, Gwinny crept into the room. The cake was gone, right enough. The doily was still there, but the Ogre had eaten the cake, thinking Gwinny was being kind, and now he was dying in his sleep. It was terrible. He groaned for a third time.

“Oh, wake up! Wake up!” Gwinny said frantically. Now she knew what she had done, she wanted to stop it at once. But she dared not touch the Ogre in case she finished him off completely. She dared not call Douglas. And when the Ogre groaned yet again, she dared do nothing except wonder how she came to be so wicked.
“Oh dear!” Gwinny said, hovering round the edge of the bed. “Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh dear!”

The Ogre shut his mouth on another groan, rolled over and switched on the bedside light. “Oh, it’s you!” he said crossly. “What on earth are you doing at this time of night?”

Gwinny stared at him, confounded. He was blinking and tousled, and clearly in none too good a temper, but he seemed nothing like dead. Perhaps the poison took a long time to work after all. “Do you think you could make yourself go sick?” Gwinny said earnestly.

“No, I could not,” said the Ogre. “Whatever for?”

“Because you may not know it, but you’re awfully ill,” said Gwinny. “You were making the most terrible groans in your sleep just now.”

The Ogre sighed. “Groans?” he said. “Oh, I shall never understand children! Go back to bed, Gwinny. I was only snoring. I’m not in the least ill.”

“Yes, you
are
!” Gwinny said, wringing her hands. “You ate my cake and you’re going to
die
!”

A shade of alarm entered the Ogre’s sleepy face. “I ate eight,” he said. Then a reassuring thought struck him. “And Douglas and Caspar ate the rest, but they’re all right, aren’t they?”

“Not those, stupid!” Gwinny said. “My special grey cake that I put beside your bed to poison you!” The Ogre looked completely blank. Feeling she was never going to convince him, Gwinny pointed to the empty doily. “You must have eaten it. It’s gone. It was on that. And you’re going to die and I don’t want you to!” she said, bursting into tears.

The Ogre, looking exceedingly alarmed, got hastily out of bed. “What did you put in this grey cake, Gwinny?” But now Gwinny had started crying she was quite unable to stop. The Ogre had to take hold of her and shake her slightly, and ask her again, before she could answer.

“I put,” she sobbed, “I put
Noct. Vest
. out of Malcolm’s chemistry set.”

“Well, that’s supposed to be non-toxic,” said the Ogre. “Maybe there’s no harm done.”

“But I put six of Mummy’s sleeping-pills squashed-up in it,” continued Gwinny, “and detergent and the bottle from the cupboard that says
Poison
and some firelighter and ammonia, and then I rolled it on the floor to get germs and spat on it for more germs, and instead of sugar on the outside I put the burning kind of soda. And I think it ended up awfully poisonous.”

By the end of this list, the Ogre’s face was almost as grey as the cake had been. “My God!” he said faintly. “I think it did!” But as Gwinny burst into renewed sobs, he said, “And I haven’t eaten it. Gwinny, are you listening? I’ve not seen it. It certainly wasn’t here when I came to bed. Are you sure you put it here, really?”

“Of course I did!” wept Gwinny. “You must have seen it.”

“No, I haven’t,” insisted the Ogre. “So you see what that means, don’t you? Someone else in the house must have eaten it.”

This possibility had never occurred to Gwinny. She cried harder than ever. “Not Caspar or Douglas,” she said. “They didn’t like the looks of it.”

“That leaves Malcolm and Johnny,” the Ogre said anxiously. “Oh lord! Malcolm didn’t have any supper, did he?”

“Oh no!” wept Gwinny, quite horrified at the idea. “He was asleep!”

“And what’s to prevent him waking up hungry?” asked the Ogre. “Gwinny, don’t you understand—?” He stopped and listened. Gwinny heard faint sounds from the bathroom. It sounded to her like the water running out of the bath and someone at the same time quietly easing back the bolt. “I think your victim may be in the bathroom at the moment,” said the Ogre. “Wait here.” He got up and went out to the landing. Gwinny, most anxious, followed him as far as the doorway. The Ogre waited for whoever it was to open the bathroom door. When no one did, he opened it himself.

The bathroom was in darkness. The Ogre, as puzzled as Gwinny was, leaned inside and switched on the light.

“No one here,” said the Ogre, scratching his head a little. He went into the bathroom to make sure.

As soon as he moved from the doorway, Gwinny heard someone come through it. Someone crossed the landing – she felt the wind they made and the slight warmth of them – and hurried with quiet, invisible footsteps upstairs. After that, the Ogre might be puzzled enough to lie down and look under the bath, but Gwinny knew that either Johnny or Malcolm had found out how to make himself invisible. Struck by a sudden, beautiful hope, she scampered back to the Ogre’s bedside. She put out her hand and felt the doily. And never had she been more relieved in her life. The cake was there. Hard as
rock and gritty as granite, it was there under her fingers. She had simply made it invisible somehow.

Heartily thankful, Gwinny put out both hands to it and picked it up. It was heavy as a stone. She hurried with it to the wastepaper basket and opened her hands above it. The invisible cake fell with a thump that rocked the wastepaper basket and scattered toffee wrappers. Gwinny was rubbing her hands on her nightdress to get rid of the invisible soda, when the Ogre came back, looking extremely sleepy and thoroughly puzzled.

“I could have sworn—” he said.

“I found the cake!” Gwinny said, pointing triumphantly. “It’s here, in your wastepaper basket. Somebody threw it away.”

She prayed that the Ogre would not come and look. Luckily, he was far too sleepy, and he could see from her sudden cheerfulness that she was speaking the truth. He sat heavily down on the bed. “Thank heaven for that! Now come over here, Gwinny, and tell me what made you decide to poison me.”

Gwinny began to cry again at this, and she approached very reluctantly indeed. It was some time before she was perched on the bed also, as far away from the Ogre as she could be. It was difficult to explain, too. “Well,” she began, at last. “You’re so horrible, you see.”

“I am?” said the Ogre dismally. “A promising beginning. Go on.”

Gwinny twiddled her toes for encouragement, and went on. “Always fussing about noise and never letting anyone do anything and making everyone afraid of you. But I’d sort of got used to that. But then you hit Johnny
and hit him, and hit Malcolm so that he was ill. And you got rid of Mummy and told lies about it, and Johnny thinks you buried her at the end of the garden, and Douglas almost agreed, but I think you must have done it farther afield than that. Now you’re going to get rid of Johnny and Caspar too—”

“Only send them to school,” the Ogre protested, sounding rather depressed.

“But they go to school anyway,” Gwinny pointed out. “You just want them out of the way because they disturb you a lot. And Douglas would rather live with you than go to boarding school, so you can see what it’s like. But it was mostly because of what you did to Mummy and Malcolm that I decided to put you down.”

This finished what Gwinny had to say, so she stopped. A silence followed. Gwinny could not help looking nervously sideways at the Ogre. She expected to see his face distorted with rage, but in fact he just looked tired and gloomy and seemed to be deep in thought. She sat twiddling her toes until the Ogre asked, rather cautiously, “Are you going to have another shot at putting me down?”

“No. It’s too wicked,” Gwinny said sadly. “I found out it was when I saw you groaning.”

The Ogre seemed relieved. “You know,” he said, “Sally said that if you kids chose to murder me she wouldn’t blame you, but I didn’t think she meant it literally.”

“She didn’t tell me to,” Gwinny said. “I thought of it myself.”

“I know that,” said the Ogre. “You don’t really think I murdered Sally, do you?”

Gwinny hooked one big toe behind the other and considered. “Not quite,” she said. “Douglas said people didn’t – but there was a murder on the news last week, so you could have done. Why did you tell lies, if you didn’t?”

“Well, you don’t expect me to tell you children all about something that was private between Sally and me, do you?” the Ogre retorted. “Sally’s left. That’s all you need to know.”

“No, it
isn’t
!” Gwinny said passionately, with tears quivering out of her eyes again. “If Mummy’s gone, it’s private between
us
too!”

There was another short silence, while the Ogre considered this. “I suppose you have a point,” he admitted. “All right. I don’t know where Sally’s gone. I spent most of today trying to find out. We had a terrific quarrel, which started about the bathwater and went on to other things, and Sally left about three o’clock on Thursday morning. Does that satisfy you?”

“Yes,” said Gwinny. “No. Isn’t she coming back?”

The Ogre sighed. “Only to collect you five children. She’d have taken you then, except you were asleep at the time. Now she’s trying to find somewhere for you all to live – I think. And I must say, if you can think I—” The Ogre seemed to come to the end of what he had to say too. There was a pause, in which Gwinny, somewhat comforted by the thought that Sally might be coming back to fetch her, sniffed and tried to stop crying.

Then the Ogre said, as if he had made up his mind about something, “Look here, Gwinny, I seem to remember you used to like me at the beginning. Tell me
truthfully – haven’t you let Caspar and Johnny influence you? Don’t you think you may have let them build me up in your mind as a – as a sort of ogre?”

This was not easy. Gwinny went rather pink at the way he put it. “A bit of both,” she admitted. “I mean, I was angry about Malcolm too.”

“Now Sally talked about Malcolm,” the Ogre said thoughtfully.

“Malcolm’s nice,” said Gwinny.

“He’s a complete mystery to me,” the Ogre said frankly. “All right – I’ll do my best to understand Malcolm, if you can promise me to give up poisoning for good. What do you say?”

“Yes,” said Gwinny.

“Good. And,” continued the Ogre, as if he were not so certain of what came next, “it might be possible to be friends again, don’t you think? If we were, we’d have a much better chance of persuading Sally to come back.”

“Do you want Mummy back?” Gwinny asked, in some surprise.

“Of course I do!” said the Ogre, equally surprised that she should ask.

Gwinny began to cry again. The Ogre was being so kind that she was ashamed. She was overwhelmed with her wickedness in trying to poison him, worse than when she had thought he was dying, and far more than she would have been if he had been angry and fierce. “I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “I’ll be nice to you now. I promise I’ll try.”