The Ogre Downstairs

After what seemed half an hour, they heard Johnny pounding upstairs again. Caspar was too relieved to worry about the noise he was making. He just listened to Johnny pounding closer and closer and prayed for him to hurry. As Johnny’s feet crossed the landing below, a confused noise broke out on the same level. Johnny had started on the last flight of stairs, when Douglas erupted into another shattering roar.

“What the blazes are you doing? There’s water pouring through our ceiling!”

Johnny did not answer. They heard his feet climbing faster. Then came the feet of Douglas, pounding behind. Behind that again were other feet. Caspar and Gwinny could only wait helplessly, until the door at last crashed open and Johnny staggered in, red-faced and almost too breathless to move, with water slopping over his shoes out of the bucket.

“Throw it,” Caspar said urgently.

Johnny croaked for breath, heaved up the bucket and poured the water over Gwinny, drenching Caspar again in the process. It did the trick. Gwinny dropped like a stone and landed on Caspar. There was a short time when Caspar could not see much and was almost as breathless as Johnny. When he recovered sufficiently to sit up, Douglas was standing behind Johnny, looking as if he had frozen in the middle of shouting something, and behind him were the Ogre and their mother.

“Johnny!” said Sally. “Whatever possessed you?”

“Take him downstairs, Douglas,” said the Ogre, “and make him clear it up. These two can clear up here.”

“Come on,” Douglas said coldly. Johnny departed without a word. There really was nothing to say.

An hour later, when Gwinny had been put to bed in a clean nightdress and everywhere wet mopped dry, Caspar and Johnny went rather timidly into their room expecting to see the carpet, where the rest of the chemicals had gone, floating against the ceiling – or at least ballooning up in the middle. But the only sign of the spill was a large purple stain and a considerable remnant of bad smell. Much relieved, Caspar opened the window.

“It must only work on people,” Johnny said thoughtfully.

“We’d better clear it up,” said Caspar.

Johnny sighed, but he obediently trudged off to the bathroom for soap and water. He returned, still thoughtful, and remained so all the time he was rubbing the carpet with the Ogre’s face flannel. The stain came off fairly easily and dyed the flannel deep mauve.

“Couldn’t you have used yours or mine?” said Caspar.

“I did. Douglas made me use them on their room,” said Johnny. “Listen. Gwinny got an awful lot of that stuff on her, didn’t she? Suppose you use less, so you weren’t quite so light, wouldn’t you be like flying?”

“Hey!” said Caspar, sitting up in bed. Since he had had to change all his clothes, it had seemed the simplest place to be. “That’s an idea! What did you put in it?”

“I can’t remember,” said Johnny. “But I’m darned well going to find out.”

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_ad5d5492-5b7e-578e-8bba-336873f6364d)

In the days that followed, Johnny experimented. He made black mixtures, green mixtures and red ones. He made little smells, big smells, and smells grandiose and appalling. These met with the smells coming from Malcolm’s efforts and mingled with them, until Sally said that their landing seemed like a plague spot to her. But whatever smell or colour Johnny made, he was no nearer finding the right mixture. He went on doggedly. He remembered that Gwinny had put pipe ash in the mixture, so he always made that one of the ingredients.

“Who is it keeps taking my pipes?” demanded the Ogre, and received no answer. And in spite of running this constant risk, Johnny’s efforts were not rewarded. Nevertheless, he persevered. It was his nature to be dogged, and Caspar and Gwinny were thankful for it; for, as Gwinny said, the idea of being really able to fly made it easier to bear the awfulness of everything else.

Each day seemed to bring fresh trials. First there was the trouble over the purple face flannel, and then the affair of the muddy sweater on the roof, mysteriously found wrapped round the chimney. The Ogre, as a matter of course, blamed Caspar, and when Caspar protested his innocence, he blamed Johnny. And twice Caspar forgot that the Ogre was at home and played Indigo Rubber – the third time, the noise came from Douglas, but Douglas said nothing and let Caspar take the blame.

Then the weather turned cold. The house had very old central heating, which seemed too weak to heat all four floors properly. The bathroom, and the bedroom shared by Sally and the Ogre, were warm enough, but upwards from there it grew steadily colder. Gwinny’s room got so cold that she took to sneaking down to her mother’s room and curling up on the big soft bed to read. Unfortunately, she left a toffee bar on the Ogre’s pillow one evening, and the boys were blamed again. It took all Gwinny’s courage to own up, and the Ogre was in no way impressed by her heroism. However, he did find her an old electric heater, which he installed in her room with instructions not to waste electricity.

“We don’t need to be pampered,” Malcolm said odiously. “You should see what it’s like at a boarding school before you complain here.”

“Quait,” said Caspar. “Full of frosty little snobs like you. Why don’t you go back there where you belong?”

“I wish I could,” Malcolm retorted, with real feeling. “Anything would be better than having to share this pigsty with you.”

Nearly a week passed. One afternoon, Caspar was as usual hurrying home in order not to have to walk back with Malcolm, when he discovered himself to be in a silly kind of mood. He knew he was going to have to act the goat somehow. He decided to do it in the Ogre’s study, if possible, because it was the warmest room in the house and also possessed a nice glossy parquet floor, ideal for sliding on. As soon as he got home, he hurried to the study and cautiously opened its door.

The Ogre was not there, but Johnny was. He was rather gloomily turning ash out of the Ogre’s pipes into a tin for further experiments.

“How’s it going?” Caspar asked, slinging his bag into the Ogre’s chair and sitting on the Ogre’s desk to take his shoes off.

Johnny jumped. The Ogre’s inkwell fell over, and Johnny watched the ink spreading with even deeper gloom. “He’ll know it’s me,” he said. “He always thinks it’s me anyway.”

“Unless he thinks it’s me,” said Caspar, casting his shoes to the floor. “Wipe it up, you fool. But is the Great Caspar daunted by the Ogre? Yes, he is rather. And the ink is running off the desk into his shoes.”

Johnny, knowing he would get no sense out of Caspar in this mood, picked up the Ogre’s blotting paper and put it in the pool of ink. The blotting paper at once became bright blue and sodden, but there seemed just as much ink as before.

Gwinny came in, hearing their voices. “There’s ink running off on to the floor,” she said.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” said Johnny, wondering how one small inkwell always contained such floods of ink.

“I’ll do the floor,” said Gwinny. “Can’t you help, Caspar?”

“No,” said Caspar, gliding smoothly in his socks across the floor. He did not see why he should be deprived of his pleasure because of Johnny’s clumsiness.

“Well, we think you’re mean,” said Gwinny, fetching a newspaper from the rack and laying it under the streams of ink.

“The Great Caspar,” said Caspar, “is extremely generous.”

“Take no notice,” said Johnny. “And pass me a newspaper.”

Caspar continued to slide. “The Great Caspar,” he said kindly, “will slide for your entertainment while you work, lady and gentleman. He has slid before all the crowned heads of Europe, and will now perform, solely for your benefit, the famous hexagonal turn. Not only has it taken him years to perfect but—”

“Oh shut up!” said Johnny, desperately wiping.

“—it is also very hazardous,” said Caspar. “Behold, the hazardous hexagon!” Upon this, Caspar spun himself round and attempted to jump while he did it. While he was in the air, he saw the Ogre in the doorway, lost his balance and ended sitting in a pool of ink. From this position, he looked up into the dour face of the Ogre. His own face was vivid red, and he hoped most earnestly that the Ogre had not heard his boastful fooling.

The Ogre had heard. “The Great Caspar,” the Ogre said, “appears to have some difficulty with the hexagonal turn. Get up! AND GET OUT!”

To complete Caspar’s humiliation, Malcolm appeared in the doorway, snorting with laughter. “What is a hexagonal turn?” he said.

The Ogre’s roar had fetched Sally too. “Oh just look at this mess!” she cried. “Those trousers are ruined, Caspar. Don’t any of you have the slightest consideration? Ink all over poor Jack’s study!”

It was the last straw, being blamed for falling in the ink. Caspar, with difficulty, climbed to his feet. “Poor Jack!” he said, with his voice shaking with rage, and fear at his own daring. “It’s always poor flipping Jack! What about poor us for a change?”

The hurt, harrowed look on Sally’s face deepened. The Ogre’s face became savage and he moved towards Caspar with haste and purpose. Caspar did not wait to discover what the purpose was. With all the speed his slippery socks would allow, he dodged the Ogre, dived between Malcolm and Sally and fled upstairs.

There he changed into jeans, muttering. His face was red, his eyes stung with misery and he could not stop himself making shamed, angry noises. “I wish I was dead!” he said, and surged towards the window, wondering whether he dared throw himself out. His progress scattered construction kits and hurled paper about. He knocked against a corner of the chemistry box. It shunted into its lid, which Johnny had left lying beside it, and a tube of some white chemical lying on the lid rolled across it and spilt a little white powder on Caspar’s sock as he passed.

Caspar found himself reaching the window in two graceful slow-motion bounds, rather like a ballet dancer’s, except that his socks barely met the floor as he passed. And when he was by the window, instead of stopping in the usual way, his feet again left the floor in a long, slow, drifting bounce. Hardly had he realised what was happening, than he was down again, quite in the usual way, with a heavy bump, on top of what felt like a drawing pin.

He was so excited that he hardly noticed it. He simply pulled off his sock, and the drawing pin with it, and waded back with one bare foot to the chemistry set. The little tube of chemical was trembling on the edge of the lid and white powder was filtering down from it on to the carpet. Caspar’s hands shook rather as he picked it up. He planted its stopper firmly in, and then turned it over to read the label. It read Vol. pulv., which left Caspar none the wiser. But the really annoying thing was that the little tube was barely half full. Either most of it had gone the night Gwinny took to the ceiling, or Johnny had unwittingly used it up since in other mixtures that destroyed its potency. Wondering just how potent the powder was, Caspar carefully put his bare foot on the place where the tube had spilt. When nothing happened, he trod harder and screwed his foot around.

He was rewarded with a delicious feeling of lightness. A moment later, his feet left the ground and he was hanging in the air about eighteen inches above the littered floor. He was not very light. He gave a scrambling sort of jump to see if he could go any higher, and all that happened was that he bounced sluggishly over towards the window. It was such a splendid feeling that he bounced himself again and went jogging slowly towards Johnny’s bed.

“Yippee!” he said, and began to laugh.