Mixed Magics (UK)

by Diana Wynne Jones

  In the car going home, Mama wept and Carol sobbed. Mr Ploys said frantically, “Whatever happens, we mustn’t let a hint of this get to the newspapers!” But of course it was too late. Next day the papers all had headlines saying CAROL ONEIR SEES MIND SPECIALIST and IS CAROL ALL DREAMED OUT? Mama burst into tears again, and Carol could not eat any breakfast.

  Dad came home from fishing later that day to find reporters sitting in rows on the front steps. He prodded his way politely through them with his fishing rod, saying, “There is nothing to get excited about. My daughter is just very tired, and we’re taking her to Switzerland for a rest.” When he finally got indoors, he said, “We’re in luck. I’ve managed to arrange for Carol to see an expert.”

  “Don’t be silly, dear. We saw Mr Mindelbaum yesterday,” Mama sobbed.

  “I know, dear. But I said an expert, not a specialist,” said Dad. “You see, I used to be at school with Chrestomanci – once, long ago, when we were both younger than Carol. In fact, he lost his first life because I hit him round the head with a cricket bat. Now, of course, being a nine-lifed enchanter, he’s a great deal more important than Carol is, and I had a lot of trouble getting hold of him. I was afraid he wouldn’t want to remember me, but he did. He said he’d see Carol. The snag is, he’s on holiday in the South of France and he doesn’t want the resort filling with newspapermen—”

  “I’ll see to all that,” Mr Ploys cried joyfully. “Chrestomanci! Mr Oneir, I’m awed. I’m struck dumb!”

  Two days later, Carol and her parents and Mr Ploys boarded first class sleepers in Calais on the Swiss Orient Express. The reporters boarded it too, in second class sleepers and third class seats, and they were joined by French and German reporters standing in the corridors. The crowded train rattled away through France until, in the middle of the night, it came to Strasbourg, where a lot of shunting always went on. Carol’s sleeper, with Carol and her parents asleep in it, was shunted off and hitched to the back of the Riviera Golden Arrow, and the Swiss Orient went on to Zurich without her.

  Mr Ploys went to Switzerland with it. He told Carol that, although he was really a dream wizard, he had skill enough to keep the reporters thinking Carol was still on the train. “If Chrestomanci wants to be private,” he said, “it could cost me my job if I let one of these near him.”

  By the time the reporters discovered the deception, Carol and her parents had arrived in the seaside resort of Teignes on the French Riviera. There Dad – not without one or two wistful looks at the casino – unpacked his rods and went fishing. Mama and Carol took a horse-drawn cab up the hill to the private villa where Chrestomanci was staying.

  They dressed in their best for the appointment. Neither of them had met anyone before who was more important than Carol. Carol wore ruched blue satin the same colour as her genie bottles, with no less than three hand-embroidered lace petticoats underneath it. She had on matching button boots and a blue ribbon in her carefully curled hair, and she carried a blue satin parasol. She also wore her diamond heart pendant, her brooch that said CAROL in diamonds, her two sapphire bracelets, and all six of her gold bangles. Her blue satin bag had diamond clasps in the shape of two Cs. Mama was even more magnificent in a cherry-coloured Paris gown, a pink hat, and all her emeralds.

  They were shown up to a terrace by a rather plain lady who, as Mama whispered to Carol behind her fan, was really rather overdressed for a servant. Carol envied Mama her fan.

  There were so many stairs to the terrace that she was too hot to speak when they got there. She let Mama exclaim at the wonderful view. You could see the sea and the beach, and look into the streets of Teignes from here. As Mama said, the casino looked charming and the golf links so peaceful. On the other side, the villa had its own private swimming pool. This was full of splashing, screaming children, and, to Carol’s mind, it rather spoiled the view.

  Chrestomanci was sitting reading in a deck chair. He looked up and blinked a little as they came. Then he seemed to remember who they were and stood up with great politeness to shake hands. He was wearing a beautifully tailored natural-silk suit. Carol saw at a glance that it had cost at least as much as Mama’s Paris gown. But her first thought on seeing Chrestomanci was, Oh my! He’s twice as good-looking as Francis! She pushed that thought down quickly and trod it under. It belonged to the thoughts she never even told Mama. But it meant that she rather despised Chrestomanci for being quite so tall and for having hair so black and such flashing dark eyes. She knew he was going to be no more help than Mr Mindelbaum, and Mr Mindelbaum had reminded her of Melville.

  Mama meanwhile was holding Chrestomanci’s hand between both of hers and saying, “Oh, sir! This is so good of you to interrupt your holiday on our account! But when even Mr Mindelbaum couldn’t find out what’s stopping her dreams—”

  “Not at all,” Chrestomanci said, wrestling for his hand rather. “To be frank, I was intrigued by a case even Mindelbaum couldn’t fathom.” He signalled to the serving lady who had brought them to the terrace. “Millie, do you think you could take Mrs… er… O’Dear downstairs while I talk to Carol?”

  “There’s no need for that, sir,” Mama said, smiling. “I always go everywhere with my darling. Carol knows I’ll sit quite quietly and not interrupt.”

  “No wonder Mindelbaum got nowhere,” Chrestomanci murmured.

  Then – Carol, who prided herself on being very observant, was never quite sure how it happened – Mama was suddenly not on the terrace any more. Carol herself was sitting in a deck chair facing Chrestomanci in his deck chair, listening to Mama’s voice floating up from below somewhere. “I never let Carol go anywhere alone. She’s my one ewe lamb…”

  Chrestomanci leaned back comfortably and crossed his elegant legs. “Now,” he said, “be kind enough to tell me exactly what you do when you make a dream.”

  This was something Carol had done hundreds of times by now. She smiled graciously and began, “I get a feeling in my head first, which means a dream is ready to happen. Dreams come when they will, you know, and there is no stopping them or putting them off. So I tell Mama, and we go up to my boudoir, where she helps me to get settled on the special couch Mr Ploys had made for me. Then Mama sets the spin-off spool turning and tiptoes away, and I drop off to sleep to the sound of it gently humming and whirling. Then the dream takes me…”

  Chrestomanci did not take notes like Mr Mindelbaum and the reporters. He did not nod at her encouragingly the way Mr Mindelbaum had. He simply stared vaguely out to sea. Carol thought that the least he might do was to tell those children in the pool to keep quiet. The screaming and splashing was so loud that she almost had to shout. Carol thought he was being very inconsiderate, but she kept on.

  “I have learned not to be frightened and to go where the dream takes me. It is like a voyage of discovery—”

  “When is this?” Chrestomanci interrupted in an off-hand sort of way. “Does this dreaming happen at night?”

  “It can happen at any time,” said Carol. “If a dream is ready, I can go to my couch and sleep during the day.”

  “How very useful,” murmured Chrestomanci. “So you can put up your hand in a dull lesson and say ‘Please can I be excused to go and dream?’ Do they let you go home?”

  “I ought to have explained,” Carol said, keeping her dignity with an effort, “that Mama arranges lessons for me at home so that I can dream any time I need to. It’s like a voyage of discovery, sometimes in caves underground, sometimes in palaces in the clouds—”

  “Yes. And how long do you dream for? Six hours? Ten minutes?” Chrestomanci interrupted again.

  “About half an hour,” said Carol. “Sometimes in the clouds, or maybe in the southern seas. I never know where I will go or whom I will meet on my journey—”

  “Do you finish a whole dream in half an hour?” Chrestomanci interrupted yet again.

  “Of course not. Some of my dreams last for more than three hours,” Carol said. “As for the people I meet, they are strange and wo
nderful—”

  “So you dream in half-hour stretches,” said Chrestomanci. “And I suppose you have to take a dream up again exactly where you left it at the end of the half hour before.”

  “Obviously,” said Carol. “People must have told you – I can control my dreams. And I do my best work in regular half-hour stints. I wish you wouldn’t keep interrupting, when I’m doing my best to tell you!”

  Chrestomanci turned his face from the sea and looked at her. He seemed surprised. “My dear young lady, you are not doing your best to tell me. I do read the papers, you know. You are giving me precisely the same flannel you gave The Times and the Croydon Gazette and the People’s Monthly, and doubtless poor Mindelbaum as well. You are telling me your dreams come unbidden – but you have one for half an hour every day – and that you never know where you’ll go in them or what will happen – but you can control your dreams perfectly. That can’t all be true, can it?”

  Carol slid the bangles up and down her arm and tried to keep her temper. It was difficult to do when the sun was so hot and the noise coming from that pool so loud. She thought seriously of demoting Melville and making Chrestomanci into the villain in her next dream – until she remembered that there might not be a next dream unless Chrestomanci helped her. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Let’s talk about the dreams themselves then,” said Chrestomanci. He pointed down the terrace steps to the blue, blue water of the pool. “There you see my ward, Janet. She’s the fair-haired girl the others are just pushing off the diving board. She loves your dreams. She has all ninety-nine of them – though I am afraid Julia and the boys are very contemptuous about it. They say your dreams are slush and all exactly the same.”

  Naturally Carol was deeply hurt that anyone could call her dreams slush, but she knew better than to say so. She smiled graciously down at the large splash which was all she could see of Janet.

  “Janet is hoping to meet you later,” said Chrestomanci. Carol’s smile broadened. She loved meeting admirers. “When I heard you were coming,” Chrestomanci said, “I borrowed Janet’s latest Omnibus Pillow.” Carol’s smile narrowed a bit. Chrestomanci did not seem the kind of person who would enjoy her dreams at all.

  “I enjoyed it rather,” Chrestomanci confessed. Carol’s smile widened. Well! “But Julia and the boys are right, you know,” Chrestomanci went on. “Your happy endings are pretty slushy, and the same sort of things happen in all of them.” Carol’s smile narrowed again distinctly at this. “But they’re terribly lively,” Chrestomanci said. “There’s so much action and so many people. I like all those crowds – what your blurbs call your ‘cast of thousands’ – but I must confess I don’t find your settings very convincing. That Arabian setting in the ninety-sixth dream was awful, even making allowances for how young you are. On the other hand, your fairground in the latest dream seemed to show the makings of a real gift.”

  By this time, Carol’s smile was going broad and narrow like the streets of Dublin’s Fair City. She was almost caught off guard when Chrestomanci said, “And though you never appear in your dreams yourself, a number of characters do come in over and over again – in various disguises of course. I make it about five or six main actors in all.”

  This was getting far too close to the things Carol never told even Mama. Luckily some reporters had made the same observation. “This is the way dreams are,” she said. “And I am only the Seeing Eye.”

  “As you told the Manchester Guardian,” Chrestomanci agreed, “if that is what they meant by ‘Oosung Oyo’. I see that must have been a misprint now.” He was looking very vague, to Carol’s relief, and did not seem to notice her dismay. “Now,” he said, “I suggest the time has come for you to go to sleep and let me see what happened to send your hundredth dream so wrong that you refused to record it.”

  “But nothing went wrong!” Carol protested. “I just didn’t dream.”

  “So you say,” said Chrestomanci. “Close your eyes. Feel free to snore if you wish.”

  “But… but I can’t just go to sleep in the middle of a visit!” Carol said. “And… and those children in the pool are making far too much noise.”

  Chrestomanci put one hand casually down to the paving of the terrace. Carol saw his arm go up as if he were pulling something up out of the stones. The terrace went quiet. She could see the children splashing below, and their mouths opening and shutting, but not a sound came to her ears. “Have you run out of excuses now?” he asked.

  “They’re not excuses. And how are you going to know whether I dream or not without a proper dream-spool and a qualified dream-wizard to read it?” Carol demanded.

  “Oh, I daresay I can manage quite well without,” Chrestomanci remarked. Though he said it in a mild, sleepy sort of way, Carol suddenly remembered that he was a nine-lifed enchanter, and more important than she was. She supposed he thought he was powerful enough on his own. Well, let him. She would humour him. Carol arranged her blue parasol to keep some of the sun off her and settled back in her deck chair, knowing nothing was going to happen…

  …And she was at the fairground, where her ninety-ninth dream had left off. In front of her was a wide space of muddy grass, covered with bits of paper and other rubbish. She could see the Big Wheel in the distance behind some flapping tents and half-dismantled stalls, and another tall thing that seemed to be most of the Helter Skelter tower. The place seemed quite deserted.

  “Well really!” Carol said. “They still haven’t cleared anything up! What are Martha and Paul thinking of?”

  As soon as she said that, she clapped her hands guiltily to her mouth and whirled round to make sure that Chrestomanci had not come stalking up behind her. But there was nothing behind her but more dreary, litter-covered grass. Good! Carol thought. I knew nobody could come behind the scenes in a Carol Oneir private dream unless I let them! She relaxed. She was boss here. This was part of the things she never even told Mama – though, for a moment, back on the terrace at Teignes, she had been afraid that Chrestomanci was on to her.

  The fact was, as Chrestomanci had noticed, Carol did only have six main characters working for her. There was Francis, tall and fair and handsome, with a beautiful baritone voice, who did all the heroes. He always ended up marrying the gentle but spirited Lucy, who was fair too and very pretty. Then there was Melville, who was thin and dark, with an evil white face, who did all the villains. Melville was so good at being a Baddie that Carol often used him several times in one dream. But he was always the gentleman, which was why polite Mr Mindelbaum had reminded Carol of Melville.

  The other three were Bimbo, who was oldish and who did all the Wise Old Men, Pathetic Cripples, and Weak Tyrants; Martha, who was the Older Woman and did the Aunts, Mothers, and Wicked Queens, either straight wicked or with Hearts of Gold; and Paul, who was small and boyish looking. Paul’s speciality was the Faithful Boy Assistant, though he did Second Baddie too and tended to get killed quite often in both kinds of parts. Paul and Martha, since they never had very big parts, were supposed to see that the cast of thousands cleared everything up between dreams.

  Except that they hadn’t this time.

  “Paul!” Carol shouted. “Martha! Where’s my cast of thousands?”

  Nothing happened. Her voice just went rolling away into emptiness.

  “Very well!” Carol called out. “I shall come and find you, and you won’t like it when I do!”

  She set off, picking her way disgustedly through the rubbish, toward those flapping tents. It really was too bad of them, she thought, to let her down like this, when she had gone to all the trouble of making them up and giving them a hundred disguises, and had made them as famous as she was herself, in a way. As Carol thought this, her bare foot came down in a melted ice cream. She jumped back with a shudder and found she was, for some reason, wearing a bathing suit like the children in Chrestomanci’s pool.

  “Oh really!” she said crossly. She remembered now that her other attempt at a hundredth d
ream had gone like this too, up to the point where she had scrapped it. Anyone would think this was the kind of dream ordinary people had. It wouldn’t even make a decent Hatband dream. This time, with a sternly controlled effort, she made herself wear her blue button boots and the blue dress with all its petticoats underneath. It was hotter like that, but it showed that she was in charge. And she marched on, until she came to the flapping tents.

  Here it nearly came like a common dream again. Carol walked up and down among empty tents and collapsed stalls, under the great framework of the Big Wheel and repeatedly past the topless Helter Skelter tower, past roundabout after empty roundabout, without seeing a soul.

  It was only her stern annoyance that kept her going until she did see someone, and then she nearly went straight past him, thinking he was one of the dummies from the Waxworks Show. He was sitting on a box beside a painted organ from a roundabout, staring. Perhaps some of the cast of thousands did work as dummies when necessary, Carol thought. She had no idea really. But this one was fair, so that meant he was a Goodie and generally worked with Francis.

  “Hey, you!” she said. “Where’s Francis?”

  He gave her a dull, unfinished sort of look. “Rhubarb,” he said. “Abracadabra.”

  “Yes, but you’re not doing a crowd scene now,” Carol told him. “I want to know where my Main Characters are.”

  The man pointed vaguely beyond the Big Wheel. “In their quarters,” he said. “Committee meeting.” So Carol set off that way. She had barely gone two steps when the man called out from behind her. “Hey you! Say thank you!”

  How rude! thought Carol. She turned and glared at him. He was now drinking out of a very strong-smelling green bottle. “You’re drunk!” she said. “Where did you get that? I don’t allow real drink in my dreams.”

  “Name’s Norman,” said the man. “Drowning sorrows.”