The Ogre Downstairs

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “I found the cake!” Gwinny said, pointing triumphantly. “It’s here, in your wastepaper basket. Somebody threw it away.”

  She prayed that the Ogre would not come and look. Luckily, he was far too sleepy, and he could see from her sudden cheerfulness that she was speaking the truth. He sat heavily down on the bed. “Thank heaven for that! Now come over here, Gwinny, and tell me what made you decide to poison me.”

  Gwinny began to cry again at this, and she approached very reluctantly indeed. It was some time before she was perched on the bed also, as far away from the Ogre as she could be. It was difficult to explain, too. “Well,” she began, at last. “You’re so horrible, you see.”

  “I am?” said the Ogre dismally. “A promising beginning. Go on.”

  Gwinny twiddled her toes for encouragement, and went on. “Always fussing about noise and never letting anyone do anything and making everyone afraid of you. But I’d sort of got used to that. But then you hit Johnny and hit him, and hit Malcolm so that he was ill. And you got rid of Mummy and told lies about it, and Johnny thinks you buried her at the end of the garden, and Douglas almost agreed, but I think you must have done it farther afield than that. Now you’re going to get rid of Johnny and Caspar too—”

  “Only send them to school,” the Ogre protested, sounding rather depressed.

  “But they go to school anyway,” Gwinny pointed out. “You just want them out of the way because they disturb you a lot. And Douglas would rather live with you than go to boarding school, so you can see what it’s like. But it was mostly because of what you did to Mummy and Malcolm that I decided to put you down.”

  This finished what Gwinny had to say, so she stopped. A silence followed. Gwinny could not help looking nervously sideways at the Ogre. She expected to see his face distorted with rage, but in fact he just looked tired and gloomy and seemed to be deep in thought. She sat twiddling her toes until the Ogre asked, rather cautiously, “Are you going to have another shot at putting me down?”

  “No. It’s too wicked,” Gwinny said sadly. “I found out it was when I saw you groaning.”

  The Ogre seemed relieved. “You know,” he said, “Sally said that if you kids chose to murder me she wouldn’t blame you, but I didn’t think she meant it literally.”

  “She didn’t tell me to,” Gwinny said. “I thought of it myself.”

  “I know that,” said the Ogre. “You don’t really think I murdered Sally, do you?”

  Gwinny hooked one big toe behind the other and considered. “Not quite,” she said. “Douglas said people didn’t – but there was a murder on the news last week, so you could have done. Why did you tell lies, if you didn’t?”

  “Well, you don’t expect me to tell you children all about something that was private between Sally and me, do you?” the Ogre retorted. “Sally’s left. That’s all you need to know.”

  “No, it isn’t!” Gwinny said passionately, with tears quivering out of her eyes again. “If Mummy’s gone, it’s private between us too!”

  There was another short silence, while the Ogre considered this. “I suppose you have a point,” he admitted. “All right. I don’t know where Sally’s gone. I spent most of today trying to find out. We had a terrific quarrel, which started about the bathwater and went on to other things, and Sally left about three o’clock on Thursday morning. Does that satisfy you?”

  “Yes,” said Gwinny. “No. Isn’t she coming back?”

  The Ogre sighed. “Only to collect you five children. She’d have taken you then, except you were asleep at the time. Now she’s trying to find somewhere for you all to live – I think. And I must say, if you can think I—” The Ogre seemed to come to the end of what he had to say too. There was a pause, in which Gwinny, somewhat comforted by the thought that Sally might be coming back to fetch her, sniffed and tried to stop crying.

  Then the Ogre said, as if he had made up his mind about something, “Look here, Gwinny, I seem to remember you used to like me at the beginning. Tell me truthfully – haven’t you let Caspar and Johnny influence you? Don’t you think you may have let them build me up in your mind as a – as a sort of ogre?”

  This was not easy. Gwinny went rather pink at the way he put it. “A bit of both,” she admitted. “I mean, I was angry about Malcolm too.”

  “Now Sally talked about Malcolm,” the Ogre said thoughtfully.

  “Malcolm’s nice,” said Gwinny.

  “He’s a complete mystery to me,” the Ogre said frankly. “All right – I’ll do my best to understand Malcolm, if you can promise me to give up poisoning for good. What do you say?”

  “Yes,” said Gwinny.

  “Good. And,” continued the Ogre, as if he were not so certain of what came next, “it might be possible to be friends again, don’t you think? If we were, we’d have a much better chance of persuading Sally to come back.”

  “Do you want Mummy back?” Gwinny asked, in some surprise.

  “Of course I do!” said the Ogre, equally surprised that she should ask.

  Gwinny began to cry again. The Ogre was being so kind that she was ashamed. She was overwhelmed with her wickedness in trying to poison him, worse than when she had thought he was dying, and far more than she would have been if he had been angry and fierce. “I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “I’ll be nice to you now. I promise I’ll try.”

  “And I’ll try too,” said the Ogre. “Look, I think you’re tired – and I know I am. Suppose you come back to bed?”

  Gwinny nodded and slid to the floor. “But Caspar and Johnny—” she said.

  “Don’t worry about them,” the Ogre said cheerfully. “When Sally hears they’re going to school and not at home to wear her out, she’ll be all the readier to come back.”

  Gwinny was dubious about this, but she was too tired to argue. Now that the Ogre had talked of being tired, she found her head was nodding forward.

  “Come on,” said the Ogre and picked her up. Gwinny had not been carried for years. She had thought she was too old. But it was such a pleasantly trouble-free way of going upstairs that, far from protesting, she fell asleep on the way. She woke up a little when the dustballs scuttered, because the Ogre said, “We seem to have mice.”

  “Not quite mice,” Gwinny said as she was put on her bed, and went to sleep without hearing the Ogre’s answer.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Caspar was mildly surprised next morning when Johnny was not there. But he supposed Johnny must have got up early for some reason, and simply got on with the oddly difficult task of dressing with one finger-joint invisible. As long as he did not look what he was doing, it was all right. But, whenever he actually watched his fingers working on buttons and shoelaces, he miscalculated. His eyes kept telling him he lacked the usual length of finger and he kept believing them. It gave him an unusual, angry, frustrated feeling.

  He met Malcolm on the landing when he had at last finished. “Are you all right?” Caspar asked.

  Malcolm nodded – he looked unusually jolly – and they went downstairs together. “Johnny left me a note,” Malcolm said. “He’s gone to school already.”

  “He must be mad!” said Caspar.

  On the lower landing, Douglas was just going into the bathroom with a dirty shirt. The Ogre, looking half-asleep and more than usually terrifying, came stumbling out of his room and caught him at it. “What do you think you’re doing with that?” he said.

  “Putting it to be washed,” Douglas said, evidently wondering if the Ogre was mad.

  “Take it upstairs and put it on again,” growled the Ogre. “How the devil do you think things are going to get washed with Sally not here? By magic?”

  “I’ve already put on a clean one,” Douglas said patiently. “I’ll be late if I have to change.”

  “Then don’t dare do it again!” said the Ogre. “No one is to change anything until they’ve worn it at least a week.” He went stumping away downstairs. Douglas turned to Malcolm and Caspar, and to Gwinny who was yawning
her way downstairs behind them, and expressively tapped his forehead.

  In the kitchen, there were the remains of Johnny’s breakfast. His schoolbag and coat were missing too. Caspar did not realise that anything was wrong until someone asked him at lunch-time where Johnny was. After that, he could hardly wait to get home and see what Johnny was up to.

  Douglas, Malcolm and Gwinny seemed in the same hurry to get home. They all four entered the fuggy and depressing house at the same moment. The hall was alive with little grey fluffy things, which scuttered and squeaked and ran from their feet. They could see dustballs climbing chairs in the sitting room and running round on the dining room table. There seemed more of them in the dining room than anywhere else.

  “Oh dear!” said Malcolm.

  “Your dustballs seem to have taken over where our toffee bars left off,” said Caspar. “Why are they all over the place like this?”

  Douglas marched over to the dining room, sending dustballs scurrying in droves from under his feet. “Somebody’s been feeding them,” he said. They crowded behind him at the dining room door. On the dining room floor were a dozen or so bowls and plates, each with a few cornflakes still in them. From the rate the dustballs were eating the cornflakes, it was easy to see that they had not been put down so very long ago.

  “I bet it was Johnny,” said Gwinny.

  Caspar was astonished by the vast numbers of the dustballs. “You never had all this lot in your room, did you?”

  “We did,” said Malcolm. “We had them the day the Ogre tried to smoke his pipe. But they were smaller then. Do you think if we put the cornflakes out in the garden and opened the back door, they’d all go outside?”

  They tried it. But the dustballs evidently did not like the cold air outside. A few came to the back door and no further. Most of them came only to the middle of the kitchen.

  “Hopeless,” said Douglas. “Leave them. I’ll ring up a ratcatcher. Caspar, are all of Sally’s friends in that address book by the telephone?”

  “I think so. Why?” asked Caspar.

  “I thought I’d have a go at finding her,” said Douglas. “She must be somewhere, and one of them might know. I thought I’d ring—”

  The telephone rang at that moment. Both Caspar and Douglas ran to answer it, both thinking it might be Sally. Douglas won, by pushing Caspar at the last moment, and picked up the receiver. An agitated voice quacked.

  “Yes, Mrs Anderson,” said Douglas. It was Granny. Caspar hopped from one foot to the other. He could tell by the way Granny’s voice quacked on and on that Sally certainly had not gone to Granny’s and Granny was worried stiff by this time. “No – you see, Mrs Anderson—” Douglas said several times, but he could not get another word in for quite a while. At last he said loudly, “No. It’s quite all right. I’d fetch her, only she’s out shopping at the moment. Caspar got the wrong end of the stick. It’s next week she’s coming.” Then he let Granny quack about how relieved she was and rang off.

  “That was brilliant!” said Caspar, genuinely admiring.

  “Except that now we’ve got to find Sally,” said Douglas, picking up the address book. A dustball leapt off it and ran away across the hall. “And a ratcatcher,” said Douglas. “We’d better call them rats, hadn’t we?”

  Gwinny, meanwhile, inspired by her new friendship with the Ogre, was doing what she had hurried home to do. She collected all the dirty clothes from the bathroom and took them to the kitchen. There, she sorted them carefully and put them into the washing machine with soap powder. It was only when she turned to the controls of the machine to switch it on that she realised she had not the faintest idea how it worked. Still, she was determined to be a help to the Ogre, so she hunted for the instructions on the shelf above the washing machine. The vacuum cleaner lived on this shelf. Gwinny found instructions for it. She found a cookery-book and Johnny’s schoolbag hidden there. But when she finally laid hands on the booklet that went with the washing machine, it seemed to be written in Spanish. She gave up and yelled for Caspar.

  Caspar came, but was quite as ignorant. He took hold of a knob and tried turning it. It came off in his hand.

  Gwinny snatched it and crammed it back on. “Now look what you’ve done! Go and get me Malcolm. He’ll find out. Or Johnny. Johnny knows how to work it. Where is Johnny anyway?”

  “Somewhere about,” said Caspar, and went upstairs to find Malcolm. “Gwinny can’t work the washing machine,” he told Malcolm. “Can you?”

  “I expect I can find out,” said Malcolm. He left off carefully heating Noct. Vest., which was what he had hurried home to do, and went downstairs to try.

  Caspar, at last, went into his room. And he stopped just inside the door, appalled. Johnny’s bed was torn asunder. Its sheets trailed on the floor, and, in the middle of the bottom sheet, was a large pool of blood. The carving knife lay across Johnny’s pillow, also covered with blood. And, on the wall above the bed, a desperate hand appeared to have clawed five long streaks of blood. Below that, the same hand had written, also in blood, the word OGRE, and the E of it fell away into a trail – as if the writer of it had been at his last gasp. Johnny had been both artistic and thorough. Caspar felt a little sick. If he had not known Johnny had been feeding dustballs half an hour ago, he might have thought Johnny had indeed met with a singularly gruesome end.

  As it was, he tumbled to what had happened. Feeling rather glad that the Ogre had not come in yet, Caspar laughed – somewhat hysterically – and went downstairs to fetch Douglas. The Ogre came in at the moment he reached the hall, and Douglas hurriedly put the phone down.

  “Mice!” said the Ogre, staring at the scampering dustballs.

  “I’ve just rung up for a ratcatcher,” said Douglas

  “Good,” said the Ogre. “Though I should think the Pied Piper would be more use. Where’s Gwinny?”

  “In the kitchen,” said Caspar, and signalled Douglas frantically to come upstairs.

  Douglas turned quite pale when he saw Johnny’s bed. “Where did he get all that blood from?” he said. “And where is he?”

  “Invisible,” said Caspar. “And I think the blood’s off that meat in the bottom of the fridge. It has that same sort of niff.”

  Douglas drew a deep breath, perhaps to smell the blood, perhaps because he was feeling sick. “Let’s get rid of it anyway,” he said. “Or the Ogre might really murder him.”

  Caspar, glad to find Douglas exactly agreed with his own feelings, went and dragged at the gory sheets, while Douglas heaved the blankets clear.

  Behind them, Johnny’s voice said peremptorily, “Leave it alone!”

  They spun round and faced the empty room.

  “You’re not to touch it!” Johnny said out of thin air. “What do you think I did it for? Ring up the police and get him arrested. Go on.”

  “Don’t be a silly little twit!” Douglas said scornfully. “They’ll know it’s only animal’s blood. If you wanted to do it properly, you should have used your own blood.”

  There was a hurt silence from the empty part of the room. Douglas and Caspar dragged the sheets from the bed, took off the pillowcase and picked up the grisly knife. Then Johnny spoke again:

  “All right, you rotten spoilsports! I’m going to try Plan B. I wish I’d tried that first now.”

  “Get that blood off the wall before you start, then,” said Douglas.

  “Do it yourself, if you want it off,” Johnny retorted. Douglas dived for where his voice came from, but missed him completely. And, as Johnny made no further sound, neither of them could tell whether he was still in the room or not.

  “This is going to be real fun and games,” Douglas said, as they trailed the gory sheets downstairs. “What do you think Plan B is?”

  Caspar had no idea. But he felt he would not put anything past Johnny. He was out to get the Ogre and, as he was invisible, get him he surely would. If the Ogre had been anyone else, Caspar would have felt sorry for him.

  The Ogre himself was
in the kitchen translating the book of instructions for Malcolm, while Malcolm tried to make the washing machine work. They had managed to get it to fill itself with water, but nothing else, and they refused to let Caspar put the sheets in it. So Douglas wrapped them in a bundle, blood-side inwards, and dumped them in a corner to wait. They tried to warn Gwinny not to unwrap them, but she was gazing enchanted at a doll’s house kitchen the Ogre had bought her and would not listen.

  “My people will love this!” was all she would say.

  Feeling extremely harassed, Douglas and Caspar fetched the fateful bucket again, to clean the blood off the wall.

  “Is Johnny at it again?” said the Ogre, hearing it clanking. “Try pressing the third from the left, Malcolm.”

  When Douglas and Caspar came down again, the washing machine was working. The Ogre, Malcolm and Gwinny were all admiring it. An hour later, they were not admiring it so much. An hour later still, they were not admiring it at all and wondering how to stop it. By this time, it had washed and rinsed and washed again, on Malcolm’s reckoning, seventeen whole times, and seemed set to go on all night. Caspar, who was feeling rather hungry by then, went to the larder and looked for food. All he could find was baked beans.

  “I say,” Douglas said to him, under the noise of rinsing and spinning, “does Johnny know how that thing works?”

  “Yes,” said Caspar, “now I come to think of it.”

  “Then I think he’s sitting on top of it pressing switches down,” said Douglas.

  They both went to see if this was true. At the same moment, the Ogre lost patience with the washing machine and tore its plug out of the wall. The turning and rinsing stopped, to the relief of everyone. Then the Ogre, in spite of Malcolm and Gwinny loudly telling him not to, rashly bent down to open the front.

  This was the moment Johnny had been waiting for. Everyone except the Ogre saw the vacuum cleaner lurch up from the shelf over the washing machine. They saw it whirl round on its hose and come whistling down towards the Ogre’s head. Without a word, Gwinny, Malcolm and Caspar threw themselves sideways at the Ogre, and Douglas hurled himself at the space beneath the vacuum cleaner. The vacuum cleaner crashed to the floor. Everyone, with the Ogre underneath and Caspar on top, toppled into a spout of cold water and washing and lay for a moment weltering. Nobody knew where Johnny was. But the vacuum cleaner ended up under the kitchen table, a most peculiar shape.