The Ogre of Oglefort

They peered at the screen again and the picture changed . . . flickered . . . and then stopped in a walled garden with beautiful flowers and grass. The Princess Mirella was bending very carefully over a deep red rose, smelling the blossom just as a princess should. Her hair was combed and she looked very happy.

The Norns smiled. They didn’t often smile, and the effort cracked the sides of their mouths but it didn’t matter. The princess was safe, all was well, and they could sleep—not just for weeks or for months, but for years and years and years.

Their eyes were closing when they remembered the ghosts. They had not given them their reward for killing the ogre. With a great effort they got back on their knees and waved their withered arms.

And in the train, the specters sat up and gasped with amazement. The train had reached one of their usual stations on the dreary circle line, but it did not go on to the next station, and the next, around and around and around.

No, it took off on a completely different route. It went whizzing off on a branch line that they had never seen, and then a junction, before it changed direction once again. New stations, new junctions, new tunnels—even a viaduct—unfolded before the specters’ amazed eyes, as they were rewarded for something they had definitely not done.

“Perhaps we should become better ghosts?” suggested the Man with the Umbrella. “Less beastly and so on.”

But no one thought this was a good idea.

“We’re used to being horrible and vile,” said the Aunt Pusher. “Anything else would unsettle us.” And they went on staring at this new world that had unfolded before their evil eyes.

But the Norns by now were fast asleep, and as they slept the floor of the cave sank slowly down and down, ever deeper into the Underworld, and the nurses and the harpies sank down with them, because their work was done—and in Aldington Crescent underground station, all was silence and all was peace.

CHAPTER27GLADYS AGAIN

Good heavens,” said Mirella, looking out of the kitchen window. “Who on earth is that?”

A man in a gray business suit was coming slowly over the drawbridge, looking about him nervously.

Ivo stared. “I think it’s Mr. Prendergast,” he said, “the Hag’s lodger in London,” and ran out to meet him.

Ivo was right. Without a single magic bone in his body, and without the help of the Norns, Mr. Prendergast had managed to make his way to Oglefort because he had something he wanted to give the Hag. It was a wooden box, and when the Hag opened it, she found a very small urn filled with ashes.

“It’s Gladys,” said Mr. Prendergast simply. “She passed away peacefully in her sleep, so I had her cremated, and I thought she would like to come to you.”

Everyone was very touched, and the children suggested there should be a proper ceremony and a scattering of the ashes, perhaps near Germania’s mound, for company. But the Hag shook her head.

“We began together in a Dribble, Gladys and I,” she said, looking down at the little urn in her hand, “and she shall end in one.”

So that afternoon she went alone with her toad to her favorite place in the world, and sat on the stone in the middle of the marsh, and though she was sad, her sadness was mixed with relief—because she could now forgive Gladys completely for having said she was too tired to come to the meeting. Gladys must have been much nearer the end of her life than the Hag had realized, and had every right to be tired. And really nothing but good had come out of it all because they had found Ivo, and there couldn’t be anything better in the world than that.

Mr. Prendergast had brought news, too, about the wizard’s mother. Mrs. Brainsweller had got a very important job, organizing all the Banshee choirs which went to wail at places where something bad had happened. This meant traveling all over the country and she had decided to leave her son to get on with his own life.

“I did my best for him,” she had told Mr. Prendergast. “But he was never properly grateful—and really when I saw him making a salad I realized I was just wasting my time.”

This news was a tremendous relief to the wizard, and to the two spiders who had been watching over him, and that night he cooked a wonderful festive meal for everyone, using produce from the garden, and they drank to Gladys’s memory and toasted “absent friends.”

When it was clear that the aunts were gone for good, the ogre had asked the troll to take care of the castle till he returned, but this time Ulf had been firm.

“We’ll stay but only if you leave the castle to us when you go and join Germania in her mound. We have the children’s future to think of.”