Mixed Magics: Four Tales of Chrestomanci (10 page)

By this time Carol’s smile was going broad and narrow like the streets of Dublin’s Fair City. She was almost caught off guard when Chrestomanci said, “And though you never appear in your dreams yourself, a number of characters do come in over and over again—in various disguises, of course. I make it about five or six main actors in all.”

This was getting far too close to the things Carol never told even Mama. Luckily some reporters had made the same observation. “This is the way dreams are,” she said. “And I am only the Seeing Eye.”

“As you told the
Manchester Guardian
,” Chrestomanci agreed, “if that is what they meant by ‘Oosung Oyo.’ I see that must have been a misprint now.” He was looking very vague, to Carol’s relief, and did not seem to notice her dismay. “Now,” he said, “I suggest the time has come for you to go to sleep and let me see what happened to send your hundredth dream so wrong that you refused to record it.”

“But nothing went wrong!” Carol protested. “I just didn’t dream.”

“So you say,” said Chrestomanci. “Close your eyes. Feel free to snore if you wish.”

“But—but I can’t just go to sleep in the middle of a visit!” Carol said. “And—and those children in the pool are making far too much noise.”

Chrestomanci put one hand casually down to the paving of the terrace. Carol saw his arm go up as if he were pulling something up out of the stones. The terrace went quiet. She could see the children splashing below, and their mouths opening and shutting, but not a sound came to her ears. “Have you run out of excuses now?” he asked.

“They’re not excuses. And how are you going to know whether I dream or not without a proper dream spool and a qualified dream wizard to read it?” Carol demanded.

“Oh, I daresay I can manage quite well without,” Chrestomanci remarked. Though he said it in a mild, sleepy sort of way, Carol suddenly remembered that he was a nine-lifed enchanter and more important than she was. She supposed he thought he was powerful enough on his own. Well, let him. She would humor him. Carol arranged her blue parasol to keep some of the sun off her and settled back in her deck chair, knowing nothing was going to happen. . .

. . . And she was at the fairground, where her ninety-ninth dream had left off. In front of her was a wide space of muddy grass, covered with bits of paper and other rubbish. She could see the Big Wheel in the distance behind some flapping tents and half-dismantled stalls and another tall thing that seemed to be most of the Helter-Skelter tower. The place seemed quite deserted.

“Well,
really
!” Carol said. “They still haven’t cleared anything up! What are Martha and Paul
thinking
of?”

As soon as she said that, she clapped her hands guiltily to her mouth and whirled around to make sure that Chrestomanci had not come stalking up behind her. But there was nothing behind her but more dreary, litter-covered grass. Good! Carol thought. I
knew
nobody could come behind the scenes in a Carol Oneir private dream unless I let them! She relaxed. She was boss here. This was part of the things she never even told Mama, though, for a moment, back on the terrace at Teignes, she had been afraid that Chrestomanci was on to her.

The fact was, as Chrestomanci had noticed, Carol did only have six main characters working for her. There was Francis, tall and fair and handsome, with a beautiful baritone voice, who did all the heroes. He always ended up marrying the gentle but spirited Lucy, who was fair, too, and very pretty. Then there was Melville, who was thin and dark, with an evil white face, who did all the villains. Melville was so good at being a Baddie that Carol often used him several times in one dream. But he was always the gentleman, which was why polite Mr. Mindelbaum had reminded Carol of Melville.

The other three were Bimbo, who was oldish and who did all the Wise Old Men, Pathetic Cripples, and Weak Tyrants; Martha, who was the Older Woman and did the Aunts, Mothers, and Wicked Queens, either straight wicked or with Hearts of Gold; and Paul, who was small and boyish-looking. Paul’s specialty was the Faithful Boy Assistant, though he did Second Baddie, too, and tended to get killed quite often in both kinds of parts. Paul and Martha, since they never had very big parts, were supposed to see that the cast of thousands cleared everything up between dreams.

Except that they hadn’t this time.

“Paul!” Carol shouted. “Martha! Where’s my cast of thousands?”

Nothing happened. Her voice just went rolling away into emptiness.

“Very well!” Carol called out. “I shall come and find you, and you won’t like it when I do!”

She set off, picking her way disgustedly through the rubbish, toward those flapping tents. It really was too bad of them, she thought, to let her down like this, when she had gone to all the trouble of making them up and giving them a hundred disguises, and had made them as famous as she was herself, in a way. As Carol thought this, her bare foot came down in a melted ice cream. She jumped back with a shudder and found she was, for some reason, wearing a bathing suit like the children in Chrestomanci’s pool.

“Oh, really!” she said crossly. She remembered now that her other attempt at a hundredth dream had gone like this, too, up to the point where she had scrapped it. Anyone would think this was the kind of dream ordinary people had. It wouldn’t even make a decent Hatband dream. This time, with a sternly controlled effort, she made herself wear her blue button boots and the blue dress with all its petticoats underneath. It was hotter like that, but it showed that she was in charge. And she marched on, until she came to the flapping tents.

Here it nearly came like a common dream again. Carol walked up and down among empty tents and collapsed stalls, under the great framework of the Big Wheel and repeatedly past the topless Helter-Skelter tower, past roundabout after empty roundabout, without seeing a soul.

It was only her stern annoyance that kept her going until she did see someone, and then she nearly went straight past him, thinking he was one of the dummies from the Waxworks Show. He was sitting on a box beside a painted organ from a roundabout, staring. Perhaps some of the cast of thousands did work as dummies when necessary, Carol thought. She had no idea really. But this one was fair, so that meant he was a Goodie and generally worked with Francis.

“Hey, you!” she said. “Where’s Francis?”

He gave her a dull, unfinished sort of look. “Rhubarb,” he said. “Abracadabra.”

“Yes, but you’re not doing a crowd scene now,” Carol told him. “I want to know where my Main Characters are.”

The man pointed vaguely beyond the Big Wheel. “In their quarters,” he said. “Committee meeting.” So Carol set off that way. She had barely gone two steps when the man called out from behind her. “Hey, you! Say thank you!”

How rude! thought Carol. She turned and glared at him. He was now drinking out of a very strong-smelling green bottle. “You’re drunk!” she said. “Where did you get that? I don’t allow real drink in my dreams.”

“Name’s Norman,” said the man. “Drowning sorrows.”

Carol saw that she was not going to get any sense out of him. So she said, “Thank you,” to stop him shouting after her again and went the way he had pointed. It led her among a huddle of gypsy caravans. Since these all had a blurred cardboard sort of look, Carol went straight past them, knowing they must belong to the cast of thousands. She knew the caravan she wanted would look properly clear and real. And it did. It was more like a tarry black shed on wheels than a caravan, but there was real black smoke pouring out of its rusty iron chimney.

Carol sniffed it. “Funny. It smells almost like toffee!” But she decided not to give her people any further warning. She marched up the black wooden ladder to the door and flung the door open.

Smoke and heat and the smell of drink and toffee rolled out at her. Her people were all inside, but instead of turning politely to receive their orders as they usually did, none of them at first took any notice of her at all. Francis was sitting at the table playing cards with Martha, Paul, and Bimbo by the light of candles stuck in green bottles. Glasses of strong-smelling drink stood at each of their elbows, but most of the drink smell, to Carol’s horror, was coming from the bottle Lucy was drinking out of. Beautiful, gentle Lucy was sitting on a bunk at the back, giggling and nursing a green bottle. As far as Carol could see in the poor light, Lucy’s face looked like a gnome’s, and her hair was what Mama would describe as “in tetters.” Melville was cooking at the stove near the door. Carol was ashamed to look at him. He was wearing a grubby white apron and smiling a dreamy smile as he stirred his saucepan. Anything less villainous was hard to imagine.

“And just what,” said Carol, “do you think you’re all doing?”

At that, Francis turned around enough for her to see that he had not shaved for days. “Shut that blesh door, can’ you!” he said irritably. It was possible he spoke that way because he had a large cigar between his teeth, but Carol feared it was more likely to be because Francis was drunk.

She shut the door and stood in front of it with her arms folded. “I want an explanation,” she said. “I’m waiting.”

Paul slapped down his cards and briskly pulled a pile of money toward himself. Then he took the cigar out of his boyish mouth to say, “And you can go on waiting, unless you’ve come to negotiate at last. We’re on strike.”

“On strike!” said Carol.

“On strike,” Paul said. “All of us. I brought the cast of thousands out straight after the last dream. We want better working conditions and a bigger slice of the cake.” He gave Carol a challenging and not very pleasant grin and put the cigar back in his mouth—a mouth that was not so boyish, now Carol looked at it closely. Paul was older than she had realized, with little cynical lines all over his face.

“Paul’s our shop steward,” Martha said. Martha, to Carol’s surprise, was quite young, with reddish hair and a sulky, righteous look. Her voice had a bit of a whine to it when she went on. “We have our rights, you know. The conditions the cast of thousands have to live in are appalling, and it’s one dream straight after another and no free time at all for any of us. And it’s not as if we get job satisfaction either. The rotten parts Paul and I do!”

“Measly walk-ons,” Paul said, busy dealing out cards. “One of the things we’re protesting is being killed almost every dream. The cast of thousands gets gunned down in every final scene, and not only do they get no compensation, they have to get straight up and fight all through the next dream.”

“ ’nd never allowsh ush any dthrink,” Bimbo put in. Carol could see he was very drunk. His nose was purple with it, and his white hair looked damp. “Got shick of colored water. Had to shteal fruit from Enshanted Garden dream to make firsht wine. Make whishky now. It’sh better.”

“It’s not as if you
paid
us anything,” Martha whined. “We have to take what reward we can get for our services.”

“Then where did you get all that money?” Carol demanded, pointing to the large heap in front of Paul.

“The Arabian treasure scene and so forth,” said Paul. “Pirates’ hoard. Most of it’s only painted paper.”

Francis suddenly said, in a loud, slurry voice, “I want recognition. I’ve been ninety-nine different heroes, but not a word of credit goes on any pillow or jar.” He banged the table. “Exploitation! That’s what it is!”

“Yes, we all want our names on the next dream,” Paul said. “Melville, give her our list of complaints, will you?”

“Melville’s our Strike Committee secretary,” said Martha.

Francis banged the table again and shouted,
“Melville!”
Then everyone else shouted, “
MELVILLE
!” until Melville finally turned around from the stove holding his saucepan in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other.

“I didn’t want to spoil my fudge,” Melville said apologetically. He handed the paper to Carol. “There, my dear. This wasn’t my idea, but I didn’t wish to let the others down.”

Carol, by this time, was backed against the door, more or less in tears. This dream seemed to be a nightmare. “Lucy!” she called out desperately. “Lucy, are you in this, too?”

“Don’t you disturb her,” said Martha, whom Carol was beginning to dislike very much. “Lucy’s suffered enough. She’s had her fill of parts that make her a plaything and property of men. Haven’t you, love?” she called to Lucy.

Lucy looked up. “Nobody understands,” she said, staring mournfully at the wall. “I hate Francis. And I always have to marry him and live hap-
hic
-hallipy ever after.”

This, not surprisingly, annoyed Francis. “And I hate
you
!” he bawled, jumping up as he shouted. The table went over with a crash, and the glasses, money, cards, and candles went with it. In the terrifying dark scramble that followed, the door somehow burst open behind Carol, and she got herself out through it as fast as she could. . .

. . . And found herself sitting on a deck chair on the sunny terrace again. She was holding a paper in one hand, and her parasol was rolling by her feet. To her annoyance, someone had spilled a long, sticky trickle of what seemed to be fudge all down her blue dress.

“
Tonino! Vieni qui!
” somebody called.

Carol looked up to find Chrestomanci trying to put together a broken deck chair in the midst of a crowd of people who were all pushing past him and hurrying away down the terrace steps. Carol could not think who the people were at first, until she caught a glimpse of Francis among them, and then Lucy, who had one hand clutched around her bottle and the other in the hand of Norman, the man Carol had first met sitting on a box. The rest of them must be the cast of thousands, she supposed. She was still trying to imagine what had happened when Chrestomanci dropped the broken deck chair and stopped the very last person to cross the terrace.

“Excuse me, sir,” Chrestomanci said. “Would you mind explaining a few things before you leave?”

It was Melville, still in his cook’s apron, waving smoke away from his saucepan with one long, villainous hand and peering down at his fudge with a very doleful look on his long, villainous face. “I think it’s spoiled,” he said. “You want to know what happened? Well, I think the cast of thousands started it, around the time Lucy fell in love with Norman, so it may have been Norman’s doing to begin with. Anyway, they began complaining that they never got a chance to be real people, and Paul heard them. Paul is very ambitious, you know, and he knew, as we all did, that Francis isn’t really cut out to be a hero—”