Stopping for a Spell (6 page)

“Can't you stop him? He's spoiling the
game
!” children kept complaining.

Luckily Chair Person kept drifting off to the table to steal buns or help himself to a pint or so of Coke. After a while Auntie Christa stopped rounding him up back into the games. It was easier without him.

But Simon and Marcia were getting worried. They were being kept so busy helping with teams and fetching things and watching in case people cheated that they had no time at all to get near the conjuring set. They watched the other prizes go. The green teddy went first, then the broken train, and then other things, until half the pile was gone.

Then at last Auntie Christa said the next game was Musical Chairs. “Simon and Marcia will work the record player, and I'll be the judge,” she said. “All of you bring one chair each into the middle.
And
you!” she said, grabbing Chair Person away from where he was trying to eat a jelly. “This is a game even you can play.”

“Good,” Simon whispered as he and Marcia went over to the old, old record player. “We can look in the box while the music's going.”

Marcia picked up an old scratched record and set it on the turntable. “I thought we were never going to get a chance!” she said. “We can give them a good long go with the music first time.” She carefully lowered the lopsided stylus. The record began:

Here we go gathering
click
in May
,

Click
in May, nuts in
click…

and all the children danced cautiously around the chairs, with Chair Person prancing in their midst, waving his arms like a lobster.

Simon and Marcia ran to the table and pulled the conjuring box out from under the other prizes. The crystal ball was still leaking. There was quite a damp patch on the tablecloth. But the wand was lying on top, when they opened the box, still wrapped in flags. Simon snatched it up. Marcia ran back and lifted the stylus off the record. There was a stampede for chairs.

Chair Person, of course, was the one without a chair. Simon had expected that. He followed Chair Person and gave him a smart tap with the wand as Chair Person blundered up the line of sitting children. But the wand did not seem to work. Chair Person pushed the smallest girl off the end chair and sat in it himself.

“I saw that! You were out!” Auntie Christa shouted, pointing at him.

Chair Person sat where he was. “I—er, hn hm—appear to be sitting in a chair,” he said. “That was the snuffle rule as I understand it.”

Auntie Christa glared. “Start the game again,” she said.

Simon tapped Chair Person on the head with the wand before everyone got up, but that did not seem to work either. “What shall we
do
?” he whispered to Marcia, as they hurried back to the record player.

“Try it without the flags,” Marcia whispered back. She lowered the stylus again.

“
Here we go gathering
click
in May
,” the record began as Simon dashed over to the table, unwrapping the string of flags from the wand as he went. He was just putting the flags back in the box, when the table gave a sort of wriggle and stamped one of its legs.

Simon beckoned Marcia madly. The box must have been standing on the table for quite a long time. The stuff from the crystal ball had leaked down into the table and spread along the tablecloth to the food. The tablecloth was rippling itself, in a sly, lazy way. As Marcia arrived, one of the jellies spilled its way up to the edge of its cardboard bowl and peeped timidly out.

“It's
all
getting lively,” Simon said.

“We'd better take the crystal ball to the toilet and drain it away,” Marcia said.

“No!” said Simon. “Think what might happen if the toilet gets lively! Think of something else.”

“Why should
I
always have to be the one to think?” Marcia snapped. “Get an idea for yourself for once!” She knew this was unfair, but by this time she was in as bad a fuss as Mum.

Here the record got as far as “
Who shall we
click
to
click
him away?
” and stuck. “
Who shall we
click,
who shall we
click…”

Marcia raced for the record and took it off. Simon raced among the stampede toward Chair Person and hit him with the unwrapped wand. Again nothing happened. Chair Person pushed a boy with a leg brace off the end chair and sat down. Auntie Christa said angrily, “This is
too
bad! Start the game again.”

Marcia put the stylus down on the beginning of the record a third time. “I'd better stay and do this,” she said. “You go and search the box—quickly, before we get landed with Table Person and Jelly Person as well!”

Simon sped to the table and started taking things out of the conjuring box—first the flags, then the dripping hat with the crystal ball in it. After that came a toy rabbit, which was perhaps meant to be lively when it was fetched out of the hat. Yet, for some reason, it was just a toy. None of the things in the box was more than just wet. Simon took out a sopping leather wallet, three soaking packs of cards, and a dripping bundle of colored handkerchiefs. They were all just ordinary. That meant that there
had
to be a way of stopping things getting lively, but search as he would, Simon could not find it.

As he searched, the cracked music stopped and started and the table stamped one leg after another in time to it. Simon glanced at the game. Chair Person had found another way to cheat. He simply sat in his chair the whole time.

“I'm counting you out,” Auntie Christa kept saying. And Chair Person went on sitting there with his smashed-hedgehog chin pointing obstinately to the ceiling.

Next time Simon looked, there were only two chairs left beside Chair Person's and three children. “We'll have tea after this game,” Auntie Christa called as Marcia started the music again.

Help! thought Simon. The wobbling, climbing jelly was half out of its bowl, waving little feelers. Simon turned the whole box out onto the jigging table. All sorts of things fell out. But there was nothing he could see that looked useful—except perhaps a small wet pillbox. There was a typed label on its lid that said “DISAPPEARING BOX.” Simon hurriedly opened it.

It was empty inside, so very empty that he could not see the bottom. Simon put it down on the table and stared into it, puzzled.

Just then the table got livelier than ever from all the liquid Simon had emptied out of the conjuring box. It started to dance properly. The tablecloth got quite lively, too, and stretched itself in a long, lazy ripple. The two things together rolled the hat with the crystal in it across the tiny, empty pillbox.

There was a soft WHOP. The hat and the crystal were sucked into the box. And they were gone. Just like that. Simon stared.

The table was still dancing and the tablecloth was still rippling. One by one, and very quickly, the other things from the conjuring box were rolled and jigged across the tiny pillbox.
WHOP
went the rabbit,
WHOP
the wand,
WHOP-WHOP
the string of flags, and then all the other things
WHOP WHOP WHOP
, and they were all gone, too. The big box that had held the things tipped over and made a bigger
WHOP
. And that was gone as well, before Simon could move. After that the other prizes started to vanish
WHOP WHOP WHOP
. This seemed to interest the tablecloth. It put out a long, exploring corner toward the pillbox.

At that Simon came to his senses. He pushed the corner aside and rammed the lid on the pillbox before the tablecloth had a chance to vanish, too.

As soon as the lid was on, the pillbox was not there anymore. There was not even a whisper of a
WHOP
as it went. It was just gone. And the tablecloth was just a tablecloth, lying half wrapped across the few prizes left. And the table stood still and was just a table. The jelly slid back into its bowl. Its feelers were gone, and it was just a jelly.

The music stopped, too. Auntie Christa called out, “Well done, Philippa! You've won again! Come and choose a prize, dear.”

“It's not fair!” somebody complained. “Philippa's won
everything
!”

Marcia came racing over to Simon as he tried to straighten the tablecloth. “Look, look! You
did
it! Look!”

Simon turned around in a dazed way. There were still two chairs standing in the middle of the hall after the game. One of them was an old shabby striped armchair. Simon was sure that was not right. “Who put—?” he began. Then he noticed that the chair was striped in sky blue, orange, and purple. Its stuffing was leaking in a sort of fuzz from its sideways top cushion. It had stains on both arms and on the seat. Chair Person was a chair again. The only odd thing out was that the chair was wearing football socks and shiny shoes on its two front legs.

“I'm not sure if it was the wand or the pillbox,” Simon said.

They pushed the armchair over against the wall while everyone was crowding around the food.

“I don't think I could bear to have it on our bonfire after this,” Marcia said. “It wouldn't seem quite kind.”

“If we take its shoes and socks off,” Simon said, “we could leave it here. People will probably think it belongs to the hall.”

“Yes, it would be quite useful here,” Marcia agreed.

Later on, after the children had gone and Auntie Christa had locked up the hall, saying over her shoulder, “Tell your mother and father that I'm not on speaking terms with either of them!” Simon and Marcia walked slowly home.

Simon asked, “Do you think he knew we were going to put him on our bonfire? Was he having his revenge on us?”

“He may have been,” said Marcia. “He never talked about the bonfire, did he? But what was to stop him just
asking
us not to when he was a Person?”

“No,” said Simon. “He didn't have to set the house on fire. I suppose that shows the kind of Person he was.”

The Four Grannies

1

Erg Gets an Idea

Erg's dad and Emily's mum found they had to go away to a conference for four days, leaving Erg and Emily at home.

“I want a house to come back to,” said Erg's dad, thinking of the time Erg had borrowed the front door to make an underground fort in the garden.