The Chrestomanci Series: Entire Collection Books 1-7

“And because of eating those spells,” said Angelica, “the Montanas went quite disgusting and started eating their uncles and aunts when they died.”

“We do not!” said Tonino. “You eat babies.”

“How dare you!” said Angelica. “You eat cowpats for pizzas, and you can smell the Casa Montana right on the Corso.”

“The Casa Petrocchi smells all down the Via Sant’ Angelo,” said Tonino, “and you can hear the flies buzzing from the New Bridge. You have babies like kittens and—”

“That’s a lie!” shrieked Angelica. “You just put that about because you don’t want people to know that the Montanas never get married properly!”

“Yes we do!” bawled Tonino. “It’s you who don’t!”

“I like that!” yelled Angelica. “I’ll have you know, my brother got married, in church, just after Christmas. So there!”

“I don’t believe you,” said Tonino. “And my sister’s going to get married in Spring, so—”

“I was a bridesmaid!” screamed Angelica.

While they argued, the tray quietly floated off the table and vanished somewhere near the windows. Tonino and Angelica looked irritably round for it, extremely annoyed that they had once again missed noticing how it got in and out.

“Now look what you’ve done!” said Angelica.

“It’s your fault for telling lies about my family,” said Tonino.

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“If you’re not careful,” said Angelica, glowering under the bulge of her forehead, “I shall sing the first spell that comes into my head. And I hope it turns you into a slug.”

That was a threat indeed. Tonino quailed a little. But the honour of the Montanas was at stake. “Take back what you said about my family,” he said.

“Only if you take back what you said about mine,” said Angelica. “Swear by the Angel of Caprona that none of those dreadful lies are true. Look. I’ve got the Angel here. Come and swear.” Her pink finger jabbed down at the table top. She reminded Tonino of his school teacher on a bad day.

He left his creaking chair and leant over to see what she was pointing at. Angelica fussily dusted away a shower of yellow varnish to show him that she indeed had the Angel, scratched with the useless tap into the top of the table. It was quite a good drawing, considering that the tap was not a good gouge and had shown a tendency to slip about. But Tonino was not prepared to admire it. “You’ve forgotten the scroll,” he said.

Angelica jumped up, and her flimsy chair crashed over backwards. “That does it! You’ve asked for it!” She marched over to the empty space by the windows and took up a position of power. From there, with her hands raised, she looked at Tonino to see if he was going to relent. Tonino would have liked to relent. He did not want to be a slug. He sought about in his mind for some way of giving in which did not look like cowardice. But, as with everything, he was too slow. Angelica flounced round, so that her arms were no longer at quite the right angle.

“Right,” she said. “I shall make it a cancel-spell, to cancel you out.” And she began to sing.

Angelica’s voice was horrible, sharp and flat by turns, and wandering from key to key. Tonino would have liked to interrupt her, or at least distract her by making noises, but he did not quite dare. That might only make things worse.

He waited while Angelica squawked out a couple of verses of a spell which seemed to centre round the words turn the spell round, break the spell off. Since he was a boy and not a spell, Tonino rather hoped it would not do anything to him.

Angelica raised her arms higher for the third verse and changed key for the sixth time. “Turn the spell off, break the spell round—”

“That’s wrong,” said Tonino.

“Don’t you dare put me off!” snapped Angelica, and turned round to say it, which sent the angle of her arms more thoroughly wrong than ever. One hand was now pointing at a window. “I command the unbinding of that which was bound,” she sang, cross and shrill.

Tonino looked quickly down at himself, but he seemed to be still there, and the usual colour. He told himself that he had known all along that such a bungled spell could not possibly work.

There came a great creaking from the ceiling, just above the windows. The whole room swayed. Then, to Tonino’s amazement, the entire front wall of the room, windows and all, split away from the side walls and the ceiling, and fell outwards with a soft clatter – a curiously soft sound for the whole side of a house. A draught of musty-smelling air blew in through the open space.

Angelica was quite as astonished as Tonino. But that did not prevent her turning to him with a smug and triumphant smile. “See? My spells always work.”

“Let’s get out,” said Tonino. “Quick. Before somebody comes.”

They ran out across the painted panels between the windows, across the marks Tonino had made with the chair. They stepped down off the surprisingly clean, straight edge, where the wall had joined the ceiling, on to the terrace in front of the house. It appeared to be made of wood, not of stone as Tonino had expected. And beyond that—

They stopped, just in time, at the edge of a huge cliff. Both of them swayed forward, and caught at one another. The cliff went down sheer, into murky darkness. They could not see the bottom. Nor could they see much more when they looked straight ahead. There was a blaze of red-gold sunlight there, dazzling them.

“There’s still a spell on the view,” said Tonino.

“In that case,” said Angelica, “let’s just keep walking. There must be a road or a garden that we can’t see.”

There certainly should have been something of the kind, but it neither felt nor looked like that. Tonino was sure he could sense vast hollow spaces below the cliff. There were no city sounds, and only a strangely musty smell.

“Coward!” said Angelica.

“You go,” said Tonino.

“Only if you go too,” she said.

They hovered, glaring at one another. And, as they hovered, the blaze of sunlight was cut off by an immense black shape. “Naughty!” said a vast voice. “Bad children shall be punished.”

A force almost too strong to feel swept them away on to the fallen wall. The fallen wall rose briskly back into its place, sweeping Angelica and Tonino with it, helplessly sliding and rolling, until they thumped on to the painted carpet. By that time, Tonino was so breathless and dizzy that he hardly heard the wall snap back into place with a click.

After that, the dizziness grew worse. Tonino knew he was in the grip of another spell. He struggled against it furiously, but whoever was casting it was immensely strong. He felt surging and bumping. The light from the windows changed, and changed again. Almost he could have sworn, the room was being carried. It stopped with a jolt. He heard Angelica’s voice gabbling a prayer to Our Lady, and he did not blame her. Then there was a mystifying gap in what Tonino knew.

He came to himself because whoever was casting the spell wanted him to. Tonino was quite sure of that. The punishment would not be so much fun, unless Tonino knew about it.

He was in a confusion of light and noise – there was a huge blur of it to one side – and he was racing up and down a narrow wooden platform, dragging (of all things!) a string of sausages. He was wearing a bright red nightgown and there was a heaviness on the front of his face. Each time he reached one end of the wooden platform, he found a white cardboard dog there, with a frill round its neck. The dog’s cardboard mouth opened and shut. It was making feeble cardboard attempts to get the sausages.

The noise was terrific. Tonino seemed to be making some of it himself. “What a clever fellow! What a clever fellow!” he heard himself squawking, in a voice quite unlike his own. It was like the noise you make singing into paper over a comb. The rest of the noise was coming from the lighted space to one side. Vast voices were roaring and laughing, mixed with tinny music.

“This is a dream!” Tonino told himself. But he knew it was not. He had a fair idea what was happening, though his head still felt muzzy and his eyes were blurred. As he raced back down the little platform, he turned his bleary eyes inwards, towards the heaviness on his face. Sure enough, blurred and doubled, he could see a great red and pink nose there. He was Mr Punch.

Naturally, then, he tried to dig in his heels and stop racing up and down, and to lift his hand and wrench off the huge pink nose. He could not do either. More than that, whoever was making him be Mr Punch promptly took mean pleasure in making him run faster and whirl the sausages about harder.

“Oh, very good!” yelled someone from the lighted space.

Tonino thought he knew that voice. He sped toward the cardboard Dog Toby again, whirled the sausages away from its cardboard jaws and waited for his head and eyes to stop feeling so fuzzy. He was sure they would. The mean person wanted him conscious. “What a clever fellow!” he squawked. As he raced down the stage the other way, he snatched a look across his huge nose towards the lighted space, but it was a blur. So he snatched a look towards the other side.

He saw the wall of a golden villa there, with four long windows. Beside each window stood a little dark cypress tree. Now he knew why the strange room had seemed so shoddy. It was only meant as scenery. The door on the outside wall was painted on. Between the villa and the stage was a hole. The person who was working the puppets ought to have been down there, but Tonino could only see empty blackness. It was all being done by magic.

Just then he was distracted by a cardboard person diving upwards from the hole, squawking that Mr Punch had stolen his sausages. Tonino was forced to stand still and squawk back. He was glad of a rest by then. Meanwhile, the cardboard dog seized the sausages and dived out of sight with them. The audience clapped and shouted, “Look at Dog Toby!” The cardboard person sped past Tonino squawking that he would fetch the police.

Once again, Tonino tried to look out at the audience. This time, he could dimly see a brightly lit room and black bulky shapes sitting in chairs, but it was like trying to see something against the sun. His eyes watered. A tear ran down the pink beak on his face. And Tonino could feel that the mean person was delighted to see that. He thought Tonino was crying. Tonino was annoyed, but also rather pleased; it looked as if the person could be fooled by his own mean thoughts. He stared out, in spite of the dazzle, trying to see the mean person, but all he could clearly see was a carving up near the roof of the lighted room. It was the Angel of Caprona, one hand held out in blessing, the other holding the scroll.

Then he was jumped round to face Judy. On the other side of him, the wall had gone from the front of the villa. The scene was the room he knew only too well, with the chandelier artistically alight.