by Holly Grant
Three matches later, she had excavated enough of the queenlies to glimpse what lay below. Was this simply a fantasy door, spun from the dreams cottoning her mind? Or did a hatch exist at the base of the Be-Careful-What-You-Wish-For Well in waking life, too?
She twisted the handle and the door swung down, sluicing coins into the earth’s dark belly. This belly, Anastasia saw, was crowded with furniture, rising like shipwreck skeletons adrift a shallow sea brimming with coins and small glass bottles. She knelt, her gaze creeping over the glow-mossed walls. Someone hummed within the shadowy cellar, but a tangle of cobwebs drooping from an unlit chandelier blocked her view. Ollie and Quentin slithered into the secret chamber, and after a moment’s hesitation, Anastasia leapt down to the cushion of a soggy chair.
Three scraggy women huddled around a fireplace at the far end of the parlor. Their tangled white hair hid their faces; the skirts of their tattered dresses dragged in the water flooding their strange home. Over their gowns they wore chain-mail tunics, and these tunics jingled dainty accompaniment to their whispers.
“The wolfsbane,” muttered one, twisting from the hearth to dig through the jumbled bottles. Anastasia gasped and shrank against the moldy chair even as she realized the old woman couldn’t possibly spy her—for she had no eyes. She didn’t even have empty sockets where her eyes should have been! Her forehead simply slid down into her cheeks, behind the little spectacles perched on her nose. As the other two ladies stooped to claw through the bottles, Anastasia saw that they, too, were eyeless, and she also glimpsed what lay behind them in the fireplace: there, amongst the flames, gleamed a silver cauldron.
Witches.
“Here it is!” The tallest hag held up a vial. She unstopped it and emptied it into the kettle, and the concoction inside sputtered and popped.
“Fizz, my lovely! Fizz, you wonderful stuff!” screeched a hag with bottles braided into her hair. They began chanting:
Gurgling! Gurgling!
Toiling! Boiling!
That is how we ferment wishes!
That is how we help the half-wits!
We love to get them what they covet!
We grant their wish ’cause they deserve it!
Ignore their screams when they receive it!
Will it be nasty? Oh, believe it!
And they shrieked with laughter.
Anastasia struggled to convince herself that she wasn’t really in a witch’s parlor, that the nasty scene was just a nightmare cooked up by her addled brain. But what if she never woke up? What if Calixto’s evil bedbugs had swarmed her ears, too, dooming her to hide in a horrible witch lair until she died? She trembled, imagining her life ebbing away without s’mores or waffles, or Penny or Baldwin, or Pippistrella or Gus or the Shadowboys—
The Shadowboys! Anastasia peeled herself from the chair to seek the Drybreads. She found them stooping in a corner, their shadowy hands swiveling the vials to reveal their labels: SNOW DAY (little white crystals); CASTLE IN THE SKY (corked, cottony fluff); UNICORN (a long, silvery horn tucked in a jeweled casket).
A tiny flask bobbed to the surface, glimmering in the murky parlor like a single, bottled star. Anastasia plucked it from the water. The tag dangling from its neck read: COMACURE. The glow inside was lovely and sunny. She pulled the cork and light dazzled her eyeballs as though someone had shoved two sparklers up her nostrils.
“Anastasia!” Gus hauled her from the Canopy in a tight hug. “I wasn’t sure whether you’d ever wake up! I’ve never been so frightened in my life.”
“Am I pasty and pale?” she croaked. “Did any bedbugs hop into my ears?”
“No,” Ollie said. “You’re normal and freckly, and the bedbugs left you alone.”
Anastasia shifted to look at her cousin. A diadem of perspiration glittered across the sleeping beauty’s lofty coconut: Saskia even sweated like a princess.
“You were talking in your sleep,” Quentin said. “Something about wishes?”
Anastasia cupped her hands and huffed warm air onto them, and then she told them about the eerie cellar-parlor and the three weird women brewing wishes within it. “I think—I think they were witches.”
“Witches!” the Dreadfuls chorused.
“But do witches brew wishes?” Ollie asked.
“It was something magical,” Anastasia said. “Besides, who else would hole up in a secret room, mixing potions?”
Gus’s eyebrows hopped halfway to his snakes. “What about the Wish Hags?”
“Wish Hags?”
“Don’t you remember? Marm Pettifog mentioned them in her lecture about ‘anti-magic hysteria’ after the First Declaration of Perpetual War.”
“That’s right….” Anastasia strained her memory. “She yelled at me for not paying attention. The hags aren’t witches, but they’re good at brewing potions, right?”
Gus nodded. “And they’re troglobites. Creatures that live their entire lives in cave darkness. And lots of troglobites don’t have eyes.”
“Nobody’s seen the Wish Hags for centuries,” Quentin said. “Do you really think they’re down at the bottom of the well, twisting up wishes?”
Gus pondered. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? They disappeared during the eighteenth-century Cavelands ‘witch-sympathizer’ trials. They’re hiding.” He turned to Anastasia, perplexed. “But why would you dream about them?”
“Well,” she said, “there was a bottle.” She told them about the Comacure.
“Magic potion to cure a magic coma,” Quentin said. “That makes sense.”
Saskia let out a scream.
“We have to get that potion,” Anastasia cried.
“Maybe we should wait for the queen to get back,” Ollie dithered. “Or at least Baldwin and Penny.”
Anastasia shook her head. “What if the nightmares scare Saskia into a heart attack?”
“And the bedbugs are supposed to munch her thoughts until they’re gone,” Quentin said. “We might not have much time. Saskia isn’t really a brainy type—no offense.”
Anastasia considered. If Saskia’s mind were the hourglass measuring the moments to her doom, and her thoughts the sand—well, Quentin was right. They needed to act quickly.
“But how will we get down the well?” Gus demanded. “What if the rope breaks when we ride the bucket down? That pulley system is half-rotted.”
“But we have to try,” Anastasia said. “Or, at least I do. We only monkeyed with Calixto’s magic bed to find my dad and grandpa. Besides, I had the dream, so I’ll recognize the bottle.”
“But how will you get back out?” Gus asked. “What if the Wish Hags chase you? Cranking you back up in the bucket will take forever. And if the rope breaks, you’ll be stuck down there. With three angry hags.”
“Scree-peep!” Pippistrella added.
Anastasia swallowed. “But I have to try.”
“No, you don’t,” Quentin spoke up. “Ollie and I will go.”
“We will?” Ollie squeaked.
“Ollie and I can umbrate and zip down to the bottom of the well. We’ll change back into boy form and open the door. Then we’ll sneak into the parlor—”
“In our birthday suits?” Ollie cried.
Quentin sighed. “Gus and Anastasia can throw our underpants down for us.”
“Ugh.” Anastasia shuddered.
“We nick the Comacure and put it in the bucket, and then we umbrate and flit back up to the top of the well,” Quentin concluded. “It shouldn’t be too hard.”
“That’s a magnificent idea!” Gus said.
“I don’t really like the bit about wandering into a hag lair in my underpants,” Ollie protested.
“Sometimes, Ollie, one must sacrifice for the greater good,” Quentin declared. “Now, let’s go steal a gondola.”
“Are you sure you know how to get to Dark-o’-the-Moon Common?” Crouched in their pirated gondola, Anastasia consulted her pocket watch. Her party started in two hours. She wasn’t worried about missing birthday jol
lifications, of course; she just wanted to rouse Saskia from her deathly slumber before Wiggy returned to the palace.
Quentin unknotted the rope tethering the helm. “Sure. Remember, our uncle Zed is a gondolier. We’ve been all over the canals.” He sat down and grabbed his borrowed paddles. “Ready, all! Row!”
They churned their wooden blades. The lagoon let out a sob.
“I know just how you feel,” Ollie told it.
“If anyone asks,” Gus said, “we’ll just tell them you’re taking a birthday pleasure row, Anastasia.”
“In someone else’s boat,” Anastasia groaned.
“Harder on starboard,” Quentin commanded, and they angled left into one of the tunnels.
“Who knew our rowing lessons would come in so handy?” Gus said.
“Should we sing a sea shanty?” Ollie asked. “I once saw a movie about Vikings, and they sang songs to help them row better.”
“No singing, Ollie,” Anastasia said. “We don’t want anyone to notice us.”
“Harder on port!” Quentin charged. “There it is! Dark-o’-the-Moon Common!”
The deserted square appeared at the opposite shore of Dark-o’-the-Moon Lagoon. “Where is everybody?” Anastasia asked.
“It’s an official Nowhere Special holiday, silly,” Ollie said. “Princess Anastasia’s birthday!”
“Oh!”
“That’s good for us,” Gus said. “Nobody to interfere with Operation Wish Theft.”
They pulled in their oars as Quentin docked the gondola, and then they raced to the well. Anastasia leaned over its edge, straining to see the glint of coins or hear the tweedle of chanting hags, but the well was silent and dark. She swiveled her gaze back to the Shadowboys, standing beside her pale-faced and wide-eyed.
“I can still ride the bucket down,” she offered.
“Too risky,” Quentin said. “Don’t worry about us. Shadowfolk can get in and out of sticky situations.”
“Except when I got that sticky toffee pudding in my hair,” Ollie said. “Mom had to cut it out with scissors. I had a bald spot for weeks!”
Gus rotated the crank, unspooling the rope and sending the old pail down. When the cord was completely unfurled, he nodded.
“I’ll tug on the rope after we put the potion into the bucket,” Quentin said. “You start pulling it up.”
“All right,” Anastasia said. “Pinky clasp for bravery.” She extended her hand with the pinky crooked and Gus curled his little finger around hers, and then Quentin’s and Ollie’s. Pippistrella grasped the salute with her batty thumb.
“May the League of Beastly Dreadfuls triumph again in the face of danger,” Ollie intoned. “And don’t forget to throw down our underwear.”
Then Quentin’s and Ollie’s pinkies slipped from the clinch and their clothes rustled to the cobblestones.
“Good luck!” Anastasia whispered as the Drybreads’ silhouettes vanished into the well.
“I don’t really fancy touching someone else’s underpants.” Gus stared at the Shadowboys’ discarded clothes. “But I guess we all have to be brave today.” He plucked at the waistbands of the boys’ breeches, extracting two pairs of plaid skivvies, and flung them into the well. Anastasia watched as the undies sailed down to meet their owners.
“I wish we could metamorphose,” Gus mumbled. “Then we could go with them. I feel like a real jellyfish staying up here.”
“Jellyfish sting,” Anastasia said, but she knew what he meant. The prospect of venturing into the hags’ secret parlor was terrible, but it was far worse to stay behind while Ollie and Quentin sallied forth.
“Do you think they’ve opened the door yet?” Gus asked.
Anastasia bit her lip. “I don’t know.”
“I hope it’s really there.” Gus’s fingers tightened around the rope. “We don’t know how accurate your dream was.”
“If there isn’t a door, then Ollie and Q can come back up and we’ll go home,” Anastasia reasoned.
But the Shadowboys did not reappear to declare the bottom of the well doorless. The minutes ticked by.
“What’s taking them so long?” Gus agonized.
“In my dream, there were hundreds of bottles crammed in that parlor,” Anastasia said. “It would take a while to sort through them.”
“What do you think the Wish Hags will do if they catch them?” Gus asked.
“I don’t know.” Anastasia squirmed.
“I wonder if—” Gus cut off as the rope began to quiver. “They’re out!” He seized the crank just as two shadowy forms spilled from the well and onto the cobbles.
“Hurry!” Ollie panted. “They’re coming after us!”
“What?” Anastasia cried.
“We knocked over a table on our way out,” Quentin said. “A whole tea set went shattering into the mess of bottles.”
“Do you think they realized someone was down there with them?” Gus asked, churning the crank like a frenzied organ-grinder. “Maybe they all thought the other one bumped it.”
“Well,” Quentin admitted, “I might have said a bad word.”
Shrieking piped up the well. “Thief! THIEF!”
“Sounds like they figured it out,” Anastasia said.
“Capture them!”
“Kill them!”
“Boil their bones!”
“Sauté their tonsils!”
“Soufflé their brains!”
“They certainly know a lot about cooking,” Ollie noted.
The bucket rattled to the top, a slender vial glowing sunnily in its wooden belly. Anastasia snatched it out and thrust it into her pocket.
“Grab our clothes!” Quentin urged. “Let’s make like a trombone and slide out of here!”
“What?” Gus cried.
“FRICASSEE THEIR EYEBALLS!” screamed the hags.
“In simple language,” Quentin said, “run!”
27
The Dreamdoodle
FOR YOUR SAKE, dear Reader, I hope you will never spend your birthday worrying that you have provoked a trio of Morfolk-guts-hating magical hags. This was how Anastasia passed the journey back to the palace, and very unpleasant it was. While Ollie and Quentin shimmied into their breeches at the back of the gondola, she pondered sautéed tonsils. Amidst the Dreadfuls’ terror-stricken row through the tangled canal system, she imagined souffléd eyeballs. Even as they leapt from the hijacked boat and clambered back into the palace and raced through the halls to the darkened Cavern of Dreams, she wondered just how long it might take to properly boil bones.
“The antibiotic!” Ollie crashed into her reverie. “Get the antibiotic!”
“It’s antidote, you pudding,” Quentin corrected him.
Anastasia fumbled for the golden vial. “How do you think it works? Are we supposed to pour it down Saskia’s throat or put it in her ears?”
Gus scrutinized the comatose princess. “Well, the bedbugs are in her ears.”
Anastasia pulled out the stopper, and little bits of gold sizzled from the bottle’s rim like the twinkles that toot from the rump of a shooting star.
“Ooooooh!” Ollie breathed. “Pretty!”
“Thieves! Grime-livered pirates!”
Anastasia whirled. “Oh, biscuit crumbs!”
The sinister Wish Hags hovered at the verge of the darkened dream dell. This specter was in itself enough to jellify the giblets of a battle-hardened warlord; and yet behind the hags there loomed something even worse—yes, something more fearsome by far.
“What is that?” Gus gasped.
“Meet our little pet, Borg!” the hags shrilled.
“Little?” Quentin echoed.
Borg was anything but little. He was perhaps ten feet tall, with gangling arms and gargantuan hands. The hem of his long black coat now whispered against the forest floor as he paced betwixt the hags, much like an impatient vulture. The avian affinity didn’t end there: although a wide-brimmed hat shadowed Borg’s eyes, the curve of his great, sharp bone-white beak
was clearer than a sickle moon at midnight.
Anastasia, who as a rule loved all animals great and small, swiftly made an exception. The sight of this claw-faced man-bird scared her witless.
“Borg doesn’t take kindly to nasty, rotten thieves who steal our wish-goop!” the bespectacled hag screaked.
“W-wish-goop?” Anastasia stuttered, corking the vial and closing her hand around it. “What wish-goop?”
“Don’t play dumb, Morfling,” the tallest hag hissed. “We know some sticky-fingers here took a vial of our special Hag Brew.”
“She’s got it right now,” said the hag with bottles in her hair. “I can hear her crooked little heart beating. Thumpity-bumpity-bump. Are you frightened, little thief? Thumpity-thumpity. A thief’s heart always beats like that.”
The hags edged closer, chanting, “Thumpity. Thumpity. Bumpity.”
“Get back, you rotten prunes!” Ollie hollered.
The old women screeched with laughter, their chain mail jingling. The tall hag withdrew a small black bottle from the folds of her dress. “A wish, a wish! I have a wish! A wish to catch a thief therewith!” She lobbed the flasket against the Canopy, where it exploded into cloud of smoke.
One moment Anastasia’s galoshes were firmly grounded; the next they flailed several feet above Calixto’s bedeviled bed. Her rib cage twanged between Borg’s awful meat hooks. How had the monstrous man-bird crossed the vale so swiftly? The hags’ powerful brew must have sped him there. Pippistrella squeaked and battered Borg’s hat with her wings, but he didn’t even seem to notice her.
“Now, Borg: get our goop back!” the hags enjoined.
“Let her go!” Gus shouted, balling his hands into fists and dashing forward.
“Away, away, you thoughtless knave!” A bottle of brew sailed through the air and crashed against his leg. Gus catapulted into the prickly hug of a pine tree, where he lolled like a puppet with snipped strings.
