The Ogre Downstairs

Caspar found the clock, which had got buried under a pile of comics. “Ten fifteen.”

“Oh good,” said Johnny. “I banged my head ten times on the pillow.” And he fell to shaking Gwinny. “Come on. Time to go.”

They bustled quietly about, getting into warm clothes and putting pillows in their beds. Ten minutes later, they were standing beside the open window, feeling very excited indeed and a little inclined to giggle. Johnny carefully fetched out the almost full tube of chemical and solemnly passed it to Gwinny. Gwinny rolled up the leg of Johnny’s old trousers, which she was wearing for warmth, poured the liquid carefully on to her palm and rubbed it hard on her shin.

“Ooh! It’s cold!” she said.

Johnny was just in time to take the test tube out of her hand as she floated up past him. While he was rubbing the liquid on his leg, Gwinny drummed the ceiling gently with her heels. “I’d forgotten what a lovely feeling it was,” she said.

Caspar was looking up at her when Johnny soared away to join her. He missed his chance of taking the tube and had to climb on the cupboard to take it from Johnny’s hand. It all seemed so silly and exciting that they both began laughing.

“Are you boys in bed?” called Sally from below.

“Yes. Just going to sleep,” they lied at the tops of their voices. Caspar, still crouching on top of the cupboard, rolled up his trouser-leg. He was quaking so with laughter that he poured far more liquid on to his palm than he intended. He splashed the whole ice-cold handful on his leg and, when the delicious lightness spread through him and he too floated up to the ceiling, he found he was holding a nearly empty test tube, with about a quarter of an inch of liquid left in the bottom.

“What shall I do with this?” he said.

“Balance it on the lightshade,” suggested Gwinny.

“We ought to put out the light too,” said Johnny.

Caspar, intoxicated with the splendid new feeling of being light as air, swam himself over to the middle of the room and balanced the test tube on the lampshade. It was better than swimming. One kick took him yards, with no effort at all. The difficulty came when he tried to reach the light switch. Like Gwinny before, he seemed far heavier upwards than he ever was downwards. He tried jumping off the ceiling in a sort of dive towards the switch, but, no matter how hard he pushed off with his feet, his hand never came within a foot of the switch.

“Why not take the bulb out?” said Johnny, impatient to be off.

So Caspar swam back, put his gloves on, and very carefully took the bulb out without disturbing the test tube. But as soon as the room went dark, he had no idea where it was any more. He felt his glove brush the shade and the shade tip. Then there was a bump and a slight bursting noise from the floor.

“The tube’s fallen off,” he said.

“Well, we’d used most of it anyway,” said Gwinny. “Do come on.”

Caspar put the light bulb in his pocket and swam towards the window. The dark shape of Gwinny first, then Johnny, blotted out the window and soared away upwards, as Johnny had done before. There was quite a brisk wind. When Caspar swooped deliciously up past the wall, the gutter and the glistening roof, he found himself being carried over the roof of the next house towards the centre of town. Johnny was floating against the orange glare of the city lights about ten yards ahead, and Gwinny ten yards beyond that and a few feet higher up because she was lighter. The sight gave Caspar a strange, frosty, excited feeling, as if splendid things were about to happen. Being a good swimmer, he caught the other two up easily.

“How lovely to look down on roofs!” Gwinny said. And indeed it was. The streetlights and a good round moon made it all very easy to see. Roofs had all sorts of queer shapes that they would not have expected from the ground. They could look through skylights and see people moving about inside, and television aerials looked surprisingly big when you were beside them.

Another surprising thing was the way bent streets looked straight, and streets they had thought were straight had unexpected little twiddles or long curves to them. They swam themselves merrily over the neighbourhood, above wires, roads, gardens, houses and a park, until they all found that they had no idea where they were.

“Why does it all look so different?” Johnny said crossly.

“The wind’s blown us off course,” said Caspar. “We’d better find a road we know and follow that, or we’ll get lost.”

The brightest orange glare seemed now to be away to the right. They swam in that direction, across the wind. It was much harder going. Before long, Gwinny was complaining loudly of being tired.

“Do shut up,” Caspar called up at her. “Suppose someone hears you and tells the police.” He was fairly tired himself by this time. The feeling of frosty excitement he had first had seemed entirely to have gone. He was hot and worried. The only thing that stopped him suggesting that they go home was that it seemed so tame. But the fact was that one empty dark street is much like another, and merely flying across them stops being fun after a while.

“Let’s rest,” said Johnny.

They anchored themselves to a convenient television aerial and floated, panting. Beneath them, on a corner, was a pub with people noisily coming out of it.