Drowned Ammet

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “Great,” I said. Mum’s books are full of things like that. I’m never sure what they mean. That time I thought a disempowered broodmare was some sort of weak nightmare, and I went away thinking of all her other books, called things like Exploited for Dreams and Disabled Eunuchs. Uncle Alfred had a whole table of them down in the shop. One of my jobs was to dust them, but he almost never sold any, no matter how enticingly I piled them up.

  I did lots of jobs in the shop, unpacking books, arranging them, dusting them, and cleaning the floor on the days Mrs. Potts’s nerves wouldn’t let her come. Mrs. Potts’s nerves were always bad on the days after she had tried to tidy Uncle Alfred’s workroom. The shop, and the whole house, used to echo then with shouts of “I told you just the floor, woman! You’ve ruined that experiment! And you’re lucky not to be a goldfish! Touch it again and you’ll be a goldfish!”

  But Mrs. Potts, at least once a month, just could not resist stacking everything in neat piles and dusting the chalk marks off the workbench. Then Uncle Alfred would rush up the stairs shouting and the next day Mrs. Potts’s nerves kept her at home and I would have to clean the shop floor. As a reward for this, I was allowed to read any books I wanted from the children’s shelves.

  To be brutally frank with you—which is Uncle Alfred’s favorite phrase—this reward meant nothing to me until about the time I heard about karma and Fate and started wondering what pulling the possibilities meant. Up to then I preferred doing risky things. Or I mostly wanted to go and see friends in the part of town where televisions worked. Reading was even harder work than cleaning the floor. But suddenly one day I discovered the Peter Jenkins books. You must know them: Peter Jenkins and the Thin Teacher, Peter Jenkins and the Headmaster’s Secret, and all the others. They’re great. Our shop had a whole row of them, at least twenty, and I set out to read them all.

  Well, I had already read about six, and those all kept harking back to another one called Peter Jenkins and the Football Formula that sounded really exciting. So that was the one I wanted to read next.

  I finished the floor as quickly as I could. Then, on my way to dust Mum’s books, I stopped by the children’s shelves and looked urgently along the row of shiny red and brown Peter Jenkins books for Peter Jenkins and the Football Formula. The trouble is, all those books look the same. I ran my finger along the row, thinking I’d find the book about seventh along. I knew I’d seen it there. But it wasn’t. The one in about the right place was called Peter Jenkins and the Magic Golfer. I ran my finger right along to the end, and it still wasn’t there, and The Headmaster’s Secret didn’t seem to be there either. Instead, there were three copies of one called Peter Jenkins and the Hidden Horror, which I’d never seen before. I took one of those out and flipped through it, and it was almost the same as The Headmaster’s Secret, but not quite—vampire bats instead of a zombie in the cupboard, things like that—and I put it back feeling puzzled and really frustrated.

  In the end I took one at random before I went on to dust Mum’s books. And Mum’s books were different—just slightly—too. They looked the same, with FRANCONIA GRANT in big yellow letters on them, but some of the titles were different. The fat one that used to be called Women in Crisis was still fat, but it was now called The Case for Females, and the thin, floppy one was called Mother Wit, instead of Do We Use Intuition? like I remembered.

  Just then I heard Uncle Alfred galloping downstairs, whistling, on his way to open the shop. “Hey, Uncle Alfred!” I called out. “Have you sold all the Peter Jenkins and the Football Formulas?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said, rushing into the shop with his worried look. He hurried along to the children’s shelves, muttering about having to reorder as he changed his glasses over. He peered through them at the row of Peter Jenkins books. He bent to look at the books below and stood on tiptoe to look at the shelves above. Then he backed away looking so angry that I thought Mrs. Potts must have tidied the books, too. “Would you look at that!” he said disgustedly. “That’s a third of them different! It’s criminal. They went for a big working without even considering the side effects! Go outside and see if the street’s still the same, Conrad.”

  I went to the shop door, but as far as I could see, nothing… Oh! The postbox down the road was now bright blue.

  “You see!” said my uncle when I told him. “You see what they’re like! All sorts of details will be different now—valuable details—but what do they care? All they think of is money!”

  “Who?” I asked. I couldn’t see how anyone could make money by changing books.

  He pointed up and sideways with his thumb. “Them. Those bent aristocrats up at Stallery, to be brutally frank with you, Con. They make their money by pulling the possibilities about. They look, and if they see they could get a bigger profit from one of their companies if just one or two things were a little different, then they twist and twitch and pull those one or two things. It doesn’t matter to them that other things change as well. Oh no. And this time they’ve overdone it. Greedy. Wicked. People are going to notice and object if they go on doing this.” He took his glasses off and cleaned them. Beads of angry sweat stood on his forehead. “There’ll be trouble,” he said. “Or so I hope.”

  So this was what pulling the possibilities meant. “How do they change things?” I asked.

  “By very powerful magic,” said my uncle. “More powerful than you or I can imagine, Conrad. Make no mistake, Count Rudolf and his family are very dangerous people.”

  When I finally went up to my room to read my Peter Jenkins book, I looked out of my window first. Because I was at the very top of our house, I could see Stallery as just a glint and a flashing in the place where green hills folded into rocky mountain. I found it hard to believe that anyone in that high, twinkling place could have the power to change a lot of books and the color of the postboxes down here in Stallchester. I still didn’t understand why anyone should want to.

  “It’s because if you change to a new set of things that might be going to happen,” Anthea explained, looking up from her books, “you change everything just a little. This time,” she added, ruefully turning the pages of her notes, “they seem to have done a big jump and made a big difference. I’ve got notes here on two books that don’t seem to exist anymore. No wonder Uncle Alfred’s annoyed.”

  We got used to the changes by next day. Sometimes it was hard to remember that postboxes used to be red. Uncle Alfred said that we only remembered anyway because we lived in that part of Stallchester. “To be brutally frank with you,” he said, “half Stallchester thinks postboxes were always blue. So does the rest of the country. The King probably calls them royal blue. Mind games, that’s what it is. Diabolical greed.”

  This happened in the glad old days when Anthea was at home. I think Mum and Uncle Alfred thought Anthea would always be at home. That summer Mum said as usual, “Anthea, don’t forget that Conrad needs new school clothes for next term,” and Uncle Alfred was full of plans for expanding the shop once Anthea had left school and could work there full time.

  “If I clear out the boxroom opposite my workroom,” he would say, “we can put the office in there. Then we can put books where the office is—maybe build out into the yard.”

  Anthea never said much in reply to these plans. She was very quiet and tense for the next month or so. Then she seemed to cheer up. She worked in the shop quite happily all the rest of the summer, and in the early autumn she took me to buy new clothes just as she had done last year, except that she bought things for herself at the same time. Then, after I had been back at school a month, she left.

  She came down to breakfast carrying a small suitcase. “I’m off,” she said. “I start at university tomorrow. I’m catching the nine-twenty to Ludwich, so I’ll say good-bye now and get something to eat on the train.”

  “University!” Mum exclaimed. “But you’re not clever enough!”

  “You can’t,” said Uncle Alfred. “There’s the shop—and you don’t have
any money.”

  “I took an exam,” Anthea said, “and I won a scholarship. That gives me enough money if I’m careful.”

  “But you can’t!” they both said together. Mum added, “Who’s going to look after Conrad?” and Uncle Alfred said, “Look here, my girl, I was relying on you for the shop.”

  “Working for nothing. I know,” Anthea said. “Well, I’m sorry to spoil your plans for me, but I do have a life of my own, you know, and I’ve made arrangements for myself because I knew you’d both stop me if I told you. I’ve looked after all three of you for years. But now Conrad’s old enough to look after himself, I’m going to go and get a life.”

  And she went, leaving us all staring. She didn’t come back. She knew Uncle Alfred, you see. Uncle Alfred spent a lot of time in his workroom setting up spells to make sure that when Anthea came home at the end of the university semester she would find herself having to stay with us for good. Anthea guessed he would. She simply sent a postcard to say she was staying with friends and never came near us. She sent me cards and presents for my birthdays, but she never came back to Stallchester for years.

  About the Author

  DIANA WYNNE JONES wrote more than forty award-winning books of fantasy for young readers. For her body of work, she was awarded the British Fantasy Society’s Karl Edward Wagner Award for having made a significant impact on fantasy and the World Fantasy Society Lifetime Achievement Award.

  www.dianawynnejones.com.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors and artists.

  Other Works

  Also by

  DIANA WYNNE JONES

  Archer’s Goon

  Aunt Maria

  Believing Is Seeing: Seven Stories

  Castle in the Air

  The Dalemark Quartet, Volume 2

  Dark Lord of Derkholm

  Dogsbody

  Eight Days of Luke

  Fire and Hemlock

  Hexwood

  Hidden Turnings: A Collection of Stories Through Time and Space

  The Homeward Bounders

  Howl’s Moving Castle

  The Merlin Conspiracy

  The Ogre Downstairs

  Power of Three

  Stopping for a Spell

  A Tale of Time City

  The Time of the Ghost

  Unexpected Magic: Collected Stories

  Warlock at the Wheel and Other Stories

  Wild Robert

  Witch’s Business

  Year of the Griffin

  Yes, Dear

  THE WORLDS OF CHRESTOMANCI

  Book 1: Charmed Life

  Book 2: The Lives of Christopher Chant

  Book 3: The Magicians of Caprona

  Book 4: Witch Week

  Book 5: Conrad’s Fate

  Mixed Magics: Four Tales of Chrestomanci

  The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume I

  (Contains books 1 and 2)

  The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume II

  (Contains books 3 and 4)

  Credits

  Cover art © 2005 by Dan Craig

  Cover design by Christopher Stengel

  Cover © 2005 by HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  Map by David Cuzic

  Copyright

  Drowned Ammet copyright © 1977 by Diana Wynne Jones

  First published in Great Britain in 1977 by Macmillan London Ltd.

  Published in 1993 by Mandarin, an imprint of Reed Consumer Books Ltd.

  First published in the United States in 1978 by Atheneum.

  Published in 1995 by Greenwillow Books.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © JANUARY 2012 ISBN 9780062200792

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  Also by Diana Wynne Jones

  The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume I and Volume II

  The Chrestomanci oversees the magic in all the worlds. Omnibus editions of the first four novels featuring Diana Wynne Jones’s most beloved characters. Contains Charmed Life, The Lives of Christopher Chant, Witch Week, and The Magicians of Caprona.

  Conrad’s Fate

  With the help of Christopher Chant, can Conrad figure out who is pulling the possibilities and putting his world at risk … and also stay ahead of his dark fate? A Chrestomanci Book.

  The Dalemark Quartet, Volume 1 and Volume 2

  Omnibus editions of all four books in the thrilling fantasy epic, The Dalemark Quartet: Cart and Cwidder, Drowned Ammet, The Spellcoats, and The Crown of Dalemark.

  Dark Lord of Derkholm

  When Derk is chosen to play Dark Lord, he is forced by the sinister Mr. Chesney to turn his country estate into a castle lit by baleful fires, manifest himself as a nine-foot-tall shadow, and lead his minions in a battle against the forces of good.

  Year of the Griffin

  At Wizard’s University, Wizard Derk’s griffin daughter Elda and her fellow first-year students encounter tyrannical tutors, boring lectures, and truly terrible refectory food.

  Dogsbody

  Sirius, immortal Lord of the Dog Star, is outraged when he is falsely accused of murder and banished to Earth. There he must live—and die—in the body of a dog unless he can retrieve a mysterious celestial weapon and thereby clear his name.

  Fire and Hemlock

  Polly tries to reconcile her two sets of memories and discover the truth behind her friendship with musician Tom Lynn in time to save him.

  www.harperteen.com • www.dianawynnejones.com

  Hexwood

  Through her window, Ann watches person after person disappear through the gate of Hexwood Farm. Then strangeness spreads from Earth right out to the center of the galaxy.

  The Homeward Bounders

  After Jamie discovers that mysterious beings are manipulating worlds in an elaborate game, they send him bouncing from world to world—until he tries to use their own rules to defeat them.

  Howl’s Moving Castle

  When the Witch of the Waste turns Sophie into an old woman, Sophie finds refuge in the floating castle of a mysterious man. People and things are never quite what they seem in this entrancing fantasy.

  Castle in the Air

  Abdullah was content with his daydreams until the day a stranger sold him a magic carpet. This fast-paced fantasy is full of djinns, wizards, a floating castle, kidnapped princesses, and two puzzling prophecies.

  The Merlin Conspiracy

  Roddy, Nick, and Grundo come together from different worlds in an attempt to unseat the false Merlin of Blest, who threatens the very structure of all worlds.

  A Tale of Time City

  A girl evacuated from London during the Blitz is kidnapped to Time City in the far distant future, where she must help save both Time City and all of human history.

  The Time of the Ghost

  A nameless protagonist doesn’t know why she’s invisibly floating through the buildings and grounds of a half-remembered boarding school. Then, to her horror, she encounters the ancient evil that four peculiar sisters have unwittingly woken—and learns she is the sisters’ only hope against a deadly danger.

  Unexpected Magic: Collected Stories

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