Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron

by Jonathan Strahan

  The nurse worries her bottom lip. “This is so against the rules,” she says, “but I make exceptions for miracles.” She presses the buzzer over the door. Goneril slips through the crack. The nurse and I follow.

  But she’s already found him. The nurse and I hurry to the bed, where a man covered in bandages and hooked up to tubes and wires is smiling and weakly petting Goneril, who stands over him, licking his face with gusto. Her tail is wagging so fast it’s a blur, and I watch in amazement as her glamour knits itself back up. In a few moments, it’s so thick on her that I can’t see the old white dog at all anymore.

  Master! Goneril cries in ecstasy. Master! I found you! I found you!

  “My sweet Goneril,” says the man. He’s middle-aged, with soft brown eyes and a gentle smile. “Yes, you found me. Good girl. Good, good girl.”

  The nurse checks the man’s vitals, then departs, muttering something about protocol and pulling a tissue out of the pocket of her scrubs.

  The man looks up at me. “Thank you for bringing her back to me, young lady.” He has an odd accent. I can’t quite place it.

  Her name is Malou. Goneril curls up against her master. Her snout is spread into a wide doggy smile, her pink tongue lolling out as she looks at me. She’s been trying to help me find a witch to mend my spells. Of course I told her all I needed was you.

  He raises his eyebrows. “You told her?”

  Yes. She didn’t believe me, though. She’s very stubborn, Master. Oh, and she tried to feed me something called kibble. Goneril grimaces.

  “You have a way with dogs, do you?” he asks me.

  “Yes, but not usually so much as with yours,” I admit.

  “So you do understand her.” He strokes his dog, and color seems to return to his face as I watch. “That’s … unusual.”

  “So’s your dog.”

  He nods, his hands buried deep in Goneril’s fur. They both look blissful. Maybe it isn’t just about him keeping Goneril healthy. Maybe the magic works both ways.

  I should go. After all, I’ve left Jeremy alone in the parking lot. I’m beginning to back away when Goneril pipes up again.

  And she fixed my glamour some, Master. She’s really good. Her tail flops on the bedcovers.

  “She did?” The man’s eyes go wide. Strange lights seem to dance inside them. Must be the painkillers. Or something. “Please, Malou, wait.”

  I stop.

  His stare is unnerving. He doesn’t look like a man who belongs in a hospital bed. “You swear you have no … experience?”

  “With magic?” I laugh. “No, sir.”

  “Then it’s quite extraordinary, what you did. To manipulate another’s spells is very advanced magic.”

  I shrug, sheepish. “I was just trying to help the dog. I’m no witch.”

  “I’m not so sure about that, my dear.” The witch holds tight to his beautiful familiar and studies my face. “Tell me about your family.”

  PAYMENT DUE

  FRANCES HARDINGE

  WHEN I GOT home from school, I saw a strange man walking out through our front door, and Gran waving to him as he went.

  “Who was that?” I asked as I pulled off my wet coat. Gran needs watching. She picks up strays the way a spike heel gathers dead leaves.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. He was sent by a bailiff company, because of that disagreement over the Maitlands and Corn bill. But I explained that it was all a silly misunderstanding.”

  “He’s a bailiff? And you let him in the house?” I dropped my bag and stared at her. “Gran—bailiffs are like vampires! They can’t come in unless you invite them, but if you do they can come back whenever they like!” It’s the sort of thing you think everybody knows. But Gran didn’t, and I realized that there was no reason why she would know.

  “It’s all right, Caroline,” Gran assured me as she carried on grating carrot. “I only let him in to use the toilet. It doesn’t count.”

  Of course the first thing I did was look around, and I soon found the blue and white official papers he had dropped on the living room table on the way from the bathroom.

  “Gran!”

  The toilet story had just been a line to get inside the house. I felt a wash of heat pass over my skin as I read through a scrawled list of Gran’s best and oldest furniture, her books, her clunky old record player, all “impounded.”

  It’s like a supernatural power. Once a bailiff gets inside the house, he can just walk around, deciding what things cost, and once he has jotted them down he has a right to them. His eye slides over things and they magically become his. DVD collection? His. Hat stand? His. You have five days to pay the debt, and if you don’t the bailiffs are allowed to come back to collect “their” possessions, by whatever means necessary.

  “Well, I won’t have the money in five days,” declared Gran, as if that settled everything. “They’ll just have to wait three weeks until I can pay them.”

  They didn’t wait. Of course they didn’t. About a week later the bailiffs turned up with a van. I was away at school at the time, or things could have gone very differently. As it was, they knocked and demanded to be let in. Gran refused and kept the door on the chain, so they burst it open. When she protested and tried to block their way in the hall, they pushed past her.

  They pushed past my Gran.

  Gran has thick hair that has flopped over her face her whole life, and still does in a gray bushy way. She knows everything about world politics and organizes letter campaigns about rain forests and herds people into sponsored walks to save the local youth center or whatever. She seems so with it and sharp, and you have conversations that just steam along like she’s your own age, right until you hit the great big surprising icebergs of things she doesn’t know.

  And she’s a soft touch. She’s the one who gets phoned in the early hours because somebody needs to hide from their boozed-up husband. You know the sort of person I mean? The sort who doesn’t flinch when she suddenly gets a teenage bundle of pain and problems beyond imagining unexpectedly dropped on her doorstep, but just starts redecorating and reorganizing her life, and acting like she’s been given the best present in the world. That’s who they pushed aside.

  The worst part was the brave face she tried to put on it when I got back to find the door busted, furniture missing, and lots of Gran’s things thrown on the floor. Her sniffle was just a cold, she told me as she carried on making casserole.

  “At least they didn’t take this,” she kept saying as she bustled around the kitchen, refusing to make eye contact. “Or that. And I’d have been sorry to see the blender go.” Past the bushy hair I could see tears making silver snails’ trails down her nose. She couldn’t keep up the pretense, of course, and finally broke down, admitting the worst of it all.

  “They took the photo.”

  I knew instantly which photo she meant. My mother hated being photographed, but I had managed to snap her once, when her arms were too full of groceries for her to duck away. It was one of the last and best ever taken of her, before illness left too deep a mark. Naturally, Gran had put it in the most expensive frame she owned and placed it in the middle of the mantelpiece, where it had caught the bailiff’s eye. The photo had been taken with an old film camera. The negatives had been lost while I was moving in.

  “I wish, I just wish I had noticed them taking it,” Gran kept saying. “Fancy me not noticing! I know it’s stupid, but I keep playing the scene over and over in my head, the way it should have gone. If I had only known, I could have run after them, and said they could keep the frame, but just asked for the photo.…”

  I’m going into a lot of detail, aren’t I? Laying on the misery good and thick. The truth is, I’m making excuses for myself. I want you to know how I felt, so you understand everything that happened later.

  Tidying up was horrible. The things left scattered around looked and felt like litter. Somehow I kept seeing our house through their eyes. All the dents were just dents, without their humorous or p
oignant histories. Years had ground our memories and handprints deeply and darkly into the varnish of everything, but suddenly it all just looked grimy.

  Two weeks later, when Gran had more money, we phoned the bailiffs and tried to buy back some of her things. They just kept telling us that “things have progressed beyond that point.”

  A week after that, I confronted the bailiff who had tricked my Gran, in a minimart. He probably should have wondered how I managed to find him. He was middle-aged and balding, with a bland, reasonable sort of face and drizzle-colored eyes. I could see why Gran had trusted him. He didn’t look interesting enough to be dangerous.

  I wasn’t hysterical, even though he kept moving along the aisle and picking up canned vegetables while I was talking. I asked him (really politely by my standards) if he could let us know where my Gran’s things had been sold, so that we could try to track them down.

  When at last he turned to face me, he wasn’t rude. Worse, he had an expression like a shop’s “closed” sign, the sort people wear when they walk past beggars.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, in a tone that snipped the conversation short. “It’s too late. They’re gone.” He turned and walked away. And that was it.

  No, that was not it. That was very far from it, as you have probably guessed by now. I didn’t try to go after him, but then I didn’t have to. I knew that something else would be following him, just half a street behind, something with silver eyes and wings that flickered like old film.

  At dusk I was waiting on my bedroom windowsill. It’s a good, broad sill that used to hold flowerpots, and it vibrates when the trains roar past behind the house. I love sitting on it after dark with my legs dangling off the edge, when the streetlights are toasting the underbelly of the sky and the air tastes amber. I am on a level with the bats’ ballet and the ranks of neatly folded roofs.

  Just when sunset had faded to a pale crease behind the tenement buildings, Nab fluttered down to perch beside me, and regarded me with eyes like tiny buttons made of sky.

  “Did you follow him?”

  Nab looked at me pointedly until I gave him a peanut, then nodded. Or rather, gave the jackdaw shrug-hop motion that means the same as a nod.

  Nab is always my first choice for spy jobs. He’s smart for a bird. Believe me, if you want a sensible conversation with something winged, pick a corvid—rooks, crows, ravens, daws. I prefer jackdaws myself. Rooks give in to peer pressure, crows try to backstab you, and ravens are a bit obvious, which is a problem if one of them is coming to your window every other evening.

  “So—where’s his house?”

  “Pointy-tree house next to the big roar, just past the great reek. Next to the bongbong tower.”

  You get used to dawspeak after a while. A house with a spiky tree, next to the railway, beside the clock tower and the other side of the sewage plant, I guessed.

  “What does it look like? Any easy way in?”

  Nab put his head on its side. If he could, he would have pursed his beak and drawn in his breath through the teeth he didn’t have. “Watched it for a long time. Tricky. Doors full of clicks. Windows full of clicks. Garden guarded. Guarded by pet sun. Wakes up when anything goes in the garden. Also guarded by a Teeth.”

  “A Teeth? What kind of Teeth? Dog? Cat?” I sighed inwardly as Nab hopped and chirped nervously. “Quiet Teeth? Loud barky Teeth? Climbing-trees Teeth?” I never said he was smart. I just said he was smart for a bird.

  It turned out that he had been scared half-witted by a quiet, climbing-trees Teeth. A cat, in short. A thought instantly occurred.

  “Does it have its own door?”

  Yes, apparently it did. But it was a magic door. Other Teeth who tried to enter just banged their heads against it and were turned away. Only the Teeth who belonged there could enter.

  “Sounds like a magnetic collar,” I muttered. I knew that a lot of people had cat flaps that locked automatically to keep out strays, and gave their cats special collars that would trigger the opening mechanism.

  I had been hoping my bailiff owned a dog. Dogs are easy to fool. If a cat was involved, it looked like I would have to make a deal.

  An hour later I was sitting in the courtyard of the clock tower, on a bench covered in plaques to the dead and scrawls of the living. Beyond the nearest fence I could see a holly tree, probably the “pointy tree” Nab had mentioned. Behind the ranks of houses lay the hidden embankment, and from time to time unseen trains bulleted past, ripping sudden, roaring holes in the cloth of night. All that divided me from the bailiff’s garden was an inch of wood, but I knew better than to scramble over the fence. The “pet sun” that Nab had mentioned was probably a motion detector that would turn on a light in the garden.

  Instead I sat there on the bench, kicking my heels and smelling like mice. Occasionally, just for a change, I smelled of live mackerel asphyxiating on a quay, or wounded chaffinch. Sure enough, after about half an hour of this there was a soft scuffle against the nearest wooden panel, and a shape appeared on the fence.

  “Sorry,” I said, “but I needed to talk to you.”

  She didn’t believe I had spoken at first, any more than people will usually believe it when a cat speaks to them. For a good few seconds she kept looking to and fro, her eyes moonish, searching for the imaginary mice. She only gave it up when I brought out a tuna sandwich and laid it on the bench next to me, at which point she deigned to come and eat out its innards.

  “Well?” Cats don’t speak the way we do, so talking with their mouths full isn’t a problem. She was a large white creature, covered in black and tan blotches like palm prints. One of them covered the right-hand side of her face and made it look like she was peeping slyly out from under a lopsided cap.

  “You want a holiday? I want to switch with you for one day.”

  She chewed on that thought and a medium slice of Hovis for a few seconds.

  “You get to sleep in my bed and eat my food—off the plates on the table,” I went on. “You can open doors. Fridges. Cans. All those other cats will be smaller than you for a whole day.”

  “And …?” She knew there was more to it.

  “Three conditions. One: you don’t do anything to hurt my gran or her house. Two: you meet me here this time tomorrow night and hand back the body. Three: I get to borrow your magic collar.”

  “What’s in it for you?” She was still suspicious.

  “Revenge.”

  “Oh. How dull. All right, then.”

  We moved into the shadow of the clock tower. I reached up to my forehead, gripped nothing, and drew a line down from my top to my feet, unzipping as I went. The cat pulled itself up onto its hind legs and did the same, using a delicate claw. We stepped out of ourselves, and our skins tumbled to the floor.

  I never like looking down when I do this kind of thing. My discarded self looks so strange and molten lying there, its hands all flabby and flat like rubber gloves, the face saggy and gaping with empty eye sockets. The cat’s dropped skin resembled an abandoned glove puppet. And standing over them were … well, let’s just say that we didn’t look like a skinned cat and human. In fact, it was hardly possible to tell the difference between us.

  We exchanged some details. I told her a little about myself, where to find my house and school.

  “This time tomorrow night, then,” I said firmly as we stepped across to each other’s skins and put them on. “High moon.” I had deliberately left the clothes on my skin, since I know that cats are rubbish with buttons even when they have thumbs.

  I watched Fake Me wander away, occasionally dropping to all fours or pausing in wonder to watch its own fingers waggle. I took a moment or two to get a feel for my borrowed body, then took a leap at the fence and only slightly messed it up.

  Don’t do any of this at home, kids. My mother would have thrown a fit. It was one of the many important rules she hammered into my head when I was younger. Don’t swap bodies with animals you don’t know. It’s dangerous enough even if you
do know them. And don’t swap bodies with anything unless there’s a grown-up present. I had left Gran a note in the tea caddy, but that hardly counted.

  You’re always taking a risk swapping with carnivores. They’re killers, and you can’t afford to forget that. House pets are usually overfed and out of practice, but you can never be sure. Herbivores bring their own set of problems. They will probably spend their time in your body twitching, terrified and crazy, and they have lousy road sense. And with birds there’s always a danger that they’ll panic and try to fly away.

  With the second try I got over the fence and padded to the back door amid the glow of the automated light. The collar was heavy round my neck, and I could feel the rub where the cat had been trying to lever it off. The grass was thick, close, and full of living scents. My mouth tasted of tuna, and tuna tasted amazing.

  The collar was my magic invitation. The cat flap opened when I pushed it with my head, and I entered warmth. I was inside. From the next room I could hear the buzz and warble of the TV. I peered around the corner of the door and saw the bailiff perched on the edge of the sofa, eating what looked like a meat pie with canned carrots. I pulled back and started searching the house.

  He was the only one living there, I was sure of that. All the rooms smelled male. Two pairs of boots on the rack, both man-sized. One toothbrush. A little cairn of crushed beer cans in his recycling box. His furniture was a bit of a jumble and I wondered, with a growling sense of resentment in my stomach, if he had bought them cheap from goods seized during his work.

  Do you know what a cat is doing when it comes and rubs its head against you, eyes half closed as if in bliss? It isn’t overwhelmed with love for you. It has a scent gland just under its jaw, so it’s marking you as its property. When you’re not looking it does the same to the furniture and everything else that stays still. It really is happy, but with the joy of making things belong to it.

  While the bailiff spooned gravy into his mouth, I was running around his house, rubbing my head against this, that, everything, my eyes half closed, my whiskers sleeked back. This bookcase? Mine. This table? Mine. This pretty horrible DVD stand? Mine. Thus I ran around, using a cat’s trick to mark things more deeply than any real cat ever could.