The Ogre of Oglefort

“Tired,” said Gladys.

“What do you mean, tired,” said the Hag crossly. “I’m tired. Everyone’s tired. London’s full of people who are tired. They got tired in the war when their houses were bombed and food was rationed and all that, and they’ve been tired ever since. But we have to do our work.”

Gladys did not shake her head. Even toads who are familiars find it difficult to do that because their necks are so thick. All she did was repeat the same word.

“Tired,” she said.

Gladys had never been a nice toad, but this didn’t matter. Familiars aren’t meant to be nice, they are meant to be powerful. Now she turned her back on the Hag and began to crawl toward her stone.

“Are you telling me you aren’t coming to the meeting?” cried the Hag.

Gladys did not answer, but her back end looked obstinate and nasty.

“But I can’t go to the meeting without a familiar; it’s impossible. I should feel undressed. I should feel stripped and naked!”

The troll shook his head. “It’s a bad business,” he said, “but it’s no good forcing her. She was always a bad-tempered animal. Goodness knows what she might get up to if you dragged her to the meeting against her will.”

“Yes, but what am I going to do?” cried the Hag.

“Could you perhaps get another familiar?” suggested Mr. Prendergast. Being a completely ordinary person who worked in a bank made him see things simply. “There’s a whole week to go.”

“A week’s nothing,” cried the poor Hag. “Oh, why is everything against me? Nothing’s gone right since I left the Dribble!”

The other lodgers came out then and stood round, looking worried. Once the Hag got upset she was apt to go downhill very fast and remember sad things like that she was an orphan. People are often orphans when they are eighty-two, but it is true that when you have no mother or father you can feel very lonely at any age.

But she was a brave person and soon pulled herself together—and the next day the hunt for a new familiar began.

CHAPTER2FINDING A FAMILIAR

The news that the Hag’s familiar had gone on strike spread through the community of Unusual Creatures like wildfire. Gladys had never been popular, and now everyone was bitter and angry that the toad had deserted her mistress just before an important meeting.

The Hag’s friends did their best to help. The fishmonger, whose mother had been a selkie (one of those people that is a seal by day and a human at night) took her into the shop and offered her the pick of his fish. Not the dead fish on the slab, of course—a dead familiar would be very little use—but the live ones in a tank that he kept for customers who liked their fish to be absolutely fresh.

“There’s a nice flounder there,” he said.

But though flounders are interesting because they are related to the famous fish who reared out of the sea and granted wishes, the Hag was doubtful.

“It’s really kind of you,” she said. “But fish are so difficult to transport.”

Two witches who worked as nannies, wheeling babies through the park, took her to Kensington Gardens because they had seen a Tufted Duck on the pond that they thought might be trained to be magical, but when they got up to it they saw at once that it wouldn’t do. It was sitting on a clutch of eggs and looking broody, and one thing that familiars never do is sit on nests and breed.

The next day the Hag took a bus to Trafalgar Square, where she remembered having seen a pigeon with a mad gleam in its eyes. The Square was absolutely crammed with pigeons in those days, but though she paced backward and forward among the birds for a whole hour, she couldn’t see that particular bird again.

“We’d better try the zoo,” said the troll. So on his afternoon off from the hospital they took the bus to Regent’s Park.

For someone looking for a familiar, the zoo is a kind of paradise. There were lynxes and pumas and jaguars that seemed perfect, but the Hag knew that they would not be happy in the backyard of 26 Whipple Road, and though she was annoyed with Gladys, the Hag did not want her to be eaten.

There were cages of aye-ayes and lemurs and meerkats with huge eyes full of sorrow and strangeness, and there was a darkened room full of vampire bats and kiwis.

“A vampire bat would be wonderful,” said the Hag, and she imagined herself sweeping into the meeting with the bloodsucking creature dribbling on her shoulder.

But even in the zoo everything was not quite right. Not one of the creatures she saw really met her eye. The harpy eagles seemed to be half asleep; the serpents lay under their sunlamps and wouldn’t move.

“Oh what is the matter with the world?” cried the Hag when she got home again. “It’s as though nobody cares anymore. When I was young, any animal worth its salt would have been proud to serve a hag or a wizard or a witch.”

They were sitting sadly at the kitchen table when there was a knock at the door and Mrs. Brainsweller came to borrow some sugar.