19: In which Sophie expresses her feelings with weed-killer
Howl opened the door toward the end of the afternoon and sauntered in, whistling. He seemed to have got over the mandrake root. It did not make Sophie feel any better to find he had not gone to Wales after all. She gave him her very fiercest glare.
“Merciful heavens!” Howl said. “I think that turned me to stone! What’s the matter?”
Sophie only snarled, “What suit are you wearing?”
Howl looked down at his black garments. “Does it matter?”
“Yes!” growled Sophie. “And don’t give me that about being in mourning! Which one is it really?”
Howl shrugged and held up one trailing sleeve as if he were not sure which it was. He stared at it, looking puzzled. The black color of it ran downward from his shoulder into the pointed, hanging tip. His shoulder and the top of his sleeve grew brown, then gray, while the pointed tip turned inkier and inkier, until Howl was wearing a back suit with one blue-and-silver sleeve whose end seemed to have been dipped in tar. “That one,” he said, and let the black spread back up to his shoulder again.
Sophie was somehow more annoyed than ever. She gave a wordless grump of rage.
“Sophie!” Howl said in his most laughing, pleading way.
The dog-man pushed open the yard door and shambled in. He never would let Howl talk to Sophie for long.
Howl stared at it. “You’ve got an Old English sheepdog now,” he said, as if he was glad of the distraction. “Two dogs are going to take a lot of feeding.”
“There’s only one dog,” Sophie said crossly. “He’s under a spell.”
“He is?” said Howl, and he set off toward the dog with a speed that showed he was quite glad to get away from Sophie. This of course was the last thing the dog-man wanted. He backed away. Howl pounced, and caught him by two handfuls of shaggy hair before he could reach the door. “So he is!” he said, and knelt down to look into what could be seen of the sheepdog’s eyes. “Sophie,” he said, “what do you mean by not telling me about this? This dog is a man! And he’s in a terrible state!” Howl whirled round on one knee, still holding the dog. Sophie looked into Howl’s glass-marble glare and realized that Howl was angry now, really angry.
Good. Sophie felt like a fight. “You could have noticed for yourself,” she said, glaring back, daring Howl to do his worst with green slime. “Anyway, the dog didn’t want-”
Howl was too angry to listen. He jumped up and hauled the dog across the tiles. “And so I would have done, if I hadn’t had things on my mind,” he said. “Come on. I want you in front of Calcifer.” The dog braced all four shaggy feet. Howl lugged at it, braced and sliding. “Michael!” he yelled.
There was a particular sound to that yell which brought Michael running.
“And did you know this dog was really a man?” Howl asked as he and Michael dragged the reluctant mountain of a dog up the stairs.
“He’s not, is he? Michael asked, shocked and surprised.
“Then I let you off and just blame Sophie,” Howl said, hauling the dog through the broom cupboard. “Anything like this is always Sophie! But you knew, didn’t you Calcifer?” he said as the two of them dragged the dog in front of the hearth.
Calcifer retreated until he was bent backward against the chimney. “You never asked,” he said.
“Do I have to ask you?” Howl said. “All right, I should have noticed myself! But you disgust me, Calcifer! Compared with the way the Witch treats her demon, you live a revoltingly easy life, and all I ask in return is that you tell me things I need to know. This is twice you’ve let me down! Now help me get this creature to its own shape this minute!”
Calcifer was an unusually sickly shade of blue. “All right,” he said sulkily.
The dog-man tried to get away, but Howl got his shoulder under its chest and shoved, so that it went up onto its hind legs, willy-nilly. Then he and Michael held it there. “What’s the silly creature holding out for?” Howl panted. “This feels like one of the Witch of the Waste’s again, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. There are several layers of it,” said Calcifer.
“Let’s get the dog part off anyway,” said Howl.
Calcifer surged to a deep, roaring blue. Sophie, watching prudently from the door of the broom cupboard, saw the shaggy dog shape fade away inside the man shape. It faded to dog again, then back to man, blurred, then hardened. Finally, Howl and Michael were each holding the arm of a ginger-haired man in a crumpled brown suit. Sophie was not surprised she had not recognized him. Apart from his anxious look, his face was almost totally lacking in personality.
“Now, who are you, my friend?” Howl asked him.
The man put his hands up and shakily felt his face. “I-I’m not sure.”
Calcifer said, “The most recent name he answered to was Percival.”
The man looked at Calcifer as if he wished Calcifer did not know this. “Did I?” he said.
“Then we’ll call you Percival for now,” Howl said. He turned the ex-dog round and sat him in the chair. “Sit there and take it easy, and tell us what you do remember. By the feel of you, the Witch had you for some time.”
“Yes,” said Percival, rubbing his face again. “She took my head off. I-I remember being on a shelf, looking at the rest of me.”
Michael was astonished. “But you’d be dead!” he protested.
“Not necessarily,” said Howl. “You haven’t gotten to that sort of witchcraft yet, but I could take any piece of you I wanted and leave the rest of you alive, if I went about it the right way.” He frowned at the ex-dog. “But I’m not sure the Witch put this one back together properly.”
Calcifer, who was obviously trying to prove that he was working hard for Howl, said, “This man is incomplete, and he has parts from some other man.”
Percival looked more distraught than ever.
“Don’t alarm him, Calcifer,” Howl said. “He must feel bad enough anyway. Do you know why the Witch took your head off, my friend?” he asked Percival.
“No,” said Percival. “I don’t remember anything.”
Michael was suddenly seized with the most exciting idea. He leaned over Percival and asked, “Did you ever answer to the name of Justin-or Your Royal Highness?”
Sophie snorted again. She knew this was ridiculous even before Percival said, “No, the Witch called me Gaston, but that isn’t my name.”
“Don’t crowd him, Michael,” said Howl. “And don’t make Sophie snort again. In the mood she’s in, she’ll bring down the castle next time.”
Though that seemed to mean Howl was no longer angry, Sophie found she was angrier than ever. She stumped off into the shop, where she banged about, shutting the shop and putting things away for the night. She went to look at her daffodils. Something had gone horribly wrong with them. They were wet brown things trailing out of a bucket full of the poisonous-smelling liquid she had ever come across.
“Oh, confound it all!” Sophie yelled.
“What’s all this, now?” said Howl, arriving in the shop. He bent over the bucket and sniffed. “You seem to have some rather efficient week-killer here. How about trying it on those weeds on the drive of the mansion?”
“I will,” said Sophie. “I feel like killing something!” She slammed around until she had found a watering can, and stumped through into the castle with the can and the bucket, where she hurled open the door, orange-down, onto the mansion drive. Percival looked up anxiously. They had given him the guitar, rather as you gave a baby a rattle, and he was sitting making horrible twangings.
“You go with her, Percival,” Howl said. “The mood she’s in she’ll be killing all the trees too.”
So Percival laid down the guitar and took the bucket carefully out of Sophie’s hand. Sophie stumped out into a golden summer evening at the end of the valley. Everyone had been much too busy up to now to pay much attention to the mansion. It was much grander than Sophie had realized. It had a weedy terrace with statues along the edge, and steps down to the drive. When Sophie looked back-on the pretext of telling Percival to hurry up-she saw the house was very big, with more statues along the roof, and rows of windows. But it was derelict. Green mildew ran down the peeling wall from every window. Many of the windows were broken, and the shutters that should have folded against the walls beside them were gray and blistered and hanging sideways.
“Huh!” said Sophie. “I think the least Howl could do is to make the place look a bit more lived in. But no! He’s far too busy gadding off to Wales! Don’t just stand there, Percival! Pour some of that stuff into the can and then come along behind me.
Percival meekly did as she said. He was no fun at all to bully. Sophie suspected that was why Howl had sent him with her. She snorted, and took her anger out on the weeds. Whatever the stuff was that killed the daffodils, it was strong. The weeds in the drive died as soon as it touched them. So did the grass at the sides of the drive, until Sophie calmed down a little, the evening calmed her. The fresh air was blowing off the distant hills, and clumps of trees planted at the sides of the drive rustled majestically in it.
Sophie weed-killed her way down a quarter of the drive. “You remember a great deal more than you let on,” she accused Percival while he refilled her can. “What did the Witch really want with you? Why did she bring you into the shop with her that time?”
“She wanted to find out about Howl,” Percival said.
“Howl?” said Sophie. “But you didn’t know him, did you?”
“No, but I must have known something. It had to do with the curse she’d put on him,” Percival explained, “but I’ve no idea what it was. She took it, you see, after we came to the shop. I feel bad about that. I was trying to stop her knowing, because a curse is an evil thing, and I did it by thinking about Lettie. Lettie was just in my head. I don’t know how I knew her, because Lettie said she’d never seen me when I went to Upper Folding. But I knew all about her-enough so that when the Witch made me tell her about Lettie, I said she kept a hat shop in Market Chipping. So the Witch went there to teach us both a lesson. And you were there. She thought you were Lettie. I was horrified, because I didn’t know Lettie had a sister.”
Sophie picked up the can and weed-killed generously, wishing the weeds were the Witch. “And she turned you into a dog straight after that?”
“Just outside the town,” said Percival. “As soon as I’d let her know what she wanted, she opened the carriage door and said, ‘Off you run. I’ll call you when I need you.’ And I ran, because I could feel some sort of spell following me. It caught up with me just as I’d got to a farm, and the people there saw me change into a dog and thought I was a werewolf and tried to kill me. I had to bite one to get away. But I couldn’t get rid of the stick, and it stuck in the hedge when I tried to get through.”
Sophie weed-killed her way down anther curve of the drive as she listened. “Then you went to Mrs. Fairfax’s?”
“Yes, I was looking for Lettie. They were both very kind to me,” Percival said, “even though they’d never seen me before. And Wizard Howl kept visiting to court Lettie. Lettie didn’t want him, and she asked me to bite him to get rid of him, until Howl suddenly began asking her about you and-”
Sophie narrowly missed weed-killing her shoes. Since the gravel was smoking where the stuff met it, this was probably just as well. “What?”
“He said, ‘I know someone called Sophie who looks a little like you.’ And Lettie said, ‘That’s my sister,’ without thinking,” Percival said. “And she got terribly worried then, particularly as Howl went on asking about her sister. Lettie said she could have bitten her tongue off. The day you came there, she was being nice to Howl in order to find out how he knew you. Howl said you were an old woman. And Mrs. Fairfax said she’d seen you. Lettie cried and cried. She said, ‘Something terrible has happened to Sophie! And the worst of it is she’ll think she’s safe from Howl. Sophie’s too kind herself to see how heartless Howl is!’ And she was so upset that I managed to turn into a man long enough to say I’d go and keep an eye on you.”
Sophie spread weed-killer in a great, smoking arc. “Bother Lettie! It’s very kind of her and I love her dearly for it. I’ve been quite as worried about her. But I do not need a watch dog!”
“Yes you do,” said Percival. “Or you did. I arrived far too late.”
Sophie swung round, weed-killer and all. Percival had to leap into the grass and run for his life behind the nearest tree. The grass died in a long brown swathe behind him as he ran. “Curse everyone!” Sophie cried out. “I’ve done with the lot of you!” She dumped the smoking watering can in the middle of the drive and marched off through the weeds toward the stone gateway. “Too late!” she muttered as she marched. “What nonsense! Howl’s not only heartless, he’s impossible! Besides,” she added, “I am an old woman.”
But she could not deny that something had been wrong ever since the moving castle moved, or even before that. And it seemed to tie up with the way Sophie seemed to mysteriously unable to face either of her sisters.
“And all the things I told the King are true!” she went on. She was going to match seven leagues on her own two feet and not come back. Show everyone! Who cared that poor Mrs. Pentstemmon had relied on Sophie to stop Howl from going to the bad! Sophie was a failure anyway. It came of being the eldest. And Mrs. Pentstemmon had thought Sophie was Howl’s loving old mother anyway. Hadn’t she? Or had she? Uneasily, Sophie realized that a lady whose trained eye could detect a charm sewn into a suit could surely even more easily detect the stronger magic of the Witch’s spell.
“Oh, confound that gray-and-scarlet suit!” Sophie said. “I refuse to believe that I was the one that got caught with it!” The trouble was the blue-and-silver suit seemed to have worked just the same. She stumped a few steps further. “Anyway,” she said with great relief, “Howl doesn’t like me!”
This reassuring thought would have been enough to keep Sophie walking all night, had not a sudden familiar uneasiness swept over her. Her ears had caught a distant tock, tock, tock. She looked sharply under the low sun. And there, on the road which wound away behind the stone gate, was a distant figure with outstretched arms, hopping, hopping.
Sophie picked up her skirts, whirled around, and sped back the way she had come. Dust and gravel flew up round her in clouds. Percival was standing forlornly in the drive beside the bucket and the watering can. Sophie seized him and dragged him behind the nearest tree.
“Is something wrong?” he said.
“Quiet! It’s that dratted scarecrow again,” Sophie gasped. She shut her eyes. “We’re not here,” she said. “You can’t find us. Go away. Go away fast, fast, fast!”
“But why?-” said Percival.
“Shut up! Not here, not here, not here!” Sophie said desperately. She opened one eye. The scarecrow, almost between the gateposts, was standing still, swaying uncertainly. “That’s right,” said Sophie. “We’re not here. Go away fast. Twice as fast, three times as fast, ten times as fast. Go away!”
And the scarecrow hesitantly swayed round on its stick and began to hop back up the road. After the first few hops it was going in giant leaps, faster and faster, just as Sophie had told it to. Sophie hardly breathed, and did not let go of Percival’s sleeve until the scarecrow was out of sight.
“What’s wrong with it?” said Percival. “Why didn’t you want it?”
Sophie shuddered. Since the scarecrow was out on the road, she did not dare leave now. She picked up the watering can and stumped back to the mansion. A fluttering caught her eye as she went. She looked up at the building. The flutter was from long white curtains blowing from an open French window beyond the statues of the terrace. The statues were now clean white stone, and she could see curtains at most of the windows, and glass too. The shutters were now folded properly beside them, newly painted white. Not a green stain nor a blister marked the new creamy plaster of the house front. The front door was a masterpiece of black paint and gold scrollwork, centering on a gilded lion with a ring in its mouth for a doorknocker.
“Huh!” said Sophie.
She resisted the temptation to go in through the open window and explore. That was what Howl wanted her to do. She marched straight to the front door, seized the golden doorknob, and threw the door open with a crash. Howl and Michael were at the bench hastily dismantling a spell. Part of it must have been to change the mansion, but the rest, as Sophie well knew, had to be a listening-in spell of some kind. As Sophie stormed in, both their faces shot nervously round toward her. Calcifer instantly plunged down under his logs.
“Keep behind me, Michael,” said Howl.
“Eavesdropper!” Sophie shouted. “Snooper!”
“What’s wrong?” Howl said. “Do you want the shutters black and gold too?”
“You barefaced-” Sophie stuttered. “That wasn’t the only thing you heard! You-you-How long have you known I was-I am-?”
“Under a spell?” said Howl. “Well, now-”
“I told him,” Michael said, looking nervously round Howl. “My Lettie-”
“You!” Sophie shrieked.
“The other Lettie let the cat out of the bag too,” Howl said quickly. “You know she did. And Mrs. Fairfax talked a great deal that day. There was a time when everyone seemed to be telling me. Even Calcifer did-when I asked him. But did you honestly think I don’t know my own business well enough not to spot a strong spell like that when I see it? I had several goes at taking it off you when you weren’t looking. But nothing seems to work. I took you to Mrs. Pentstemmon, hoping she could do something, but she evidently couldn’t. I came to the conclusion that you liked being in disguise.”
“Disguise!” Sophie yelled.
Howl laughed at her. “It must be, since you’re doing it yourself,” he said. “What a strange family you are! Is your name really Lettie too?”
This was too much for Sophie. Percival edged nervously in just then, carrying the half-full bucket of weed-killer. Sophie dropped her can, seized the bucket from him, and threw it at Howl. Howl ducked. Michael dodged the bucket. The weed-killer went up in a sheet of sizzling green flame from floor to ceiling. The bucket clanged into the sink, where all the remaining flowers died instantly.
“Ow!” said Calcifer from under his logs. “That was strong.”
Howl carefully picked the skull out from under the smoking brown remains of the flowers and dried it on one of his sleeves. “Of course it was strong,” he said. “Sophie never does things by halves.” The skull, as Howl wiped it, became bright new white, and the sleeve he was using developed a faded blue-and-silver patch. Howl set the skull on the bench and looked at his sleeve ruefully.
Sophie had half a mind to stump straight out of the castle again, and away down the drive. But there was that scarecrow. She settled for stumping to the chair instead, where she sat and fell into a deep sulk. I’m not going to speak to any of them! she thought.
“Sophie,” Howl said, “I did my best. Haven’t you noticed that your aches and pains have been better lately? Or do you enjoy having those too?” Sophie did not answer. Howl gave her up and turned to Percival. “I’m glad to see you have some brain after all,” he said. “You had me worried.”
“I really don’t remember very much,” Percival said. But he stopped behaving like a half-wit. He picked the guitar up and tuned it. He had it sounding much nicer in seconds.
“My sorrow revealed,” Howl said pathetically. I was born an unmusical Welshman. Did you tell Sophie all of it? Or do you really know what the Witch was trying to find out?”
“She wanted to know about Wales,” said Percival.
“I thought that was it,” Howl said soberly. “Ah, well.” He went away into the bathroom, where he was gone for the next two hours. During that time Percival played a number of tunes on the guitar in a slow, thoughtful way, as if he was teaching himself how to, while Michael crawled about the floor with a smoking rag, trying to get rid of the weed-killer. Sophie sat in the chair and said not a word. Calcifer kept bobbing up and peeping at her, and going down again under his logs.
Howl came out of the bathroom with his suit glossy black, his hair glossy white, in a cloud of steam smelling of gentians. “I may be back quite late,” he said to Michael. “It’s going to be Midsummer Day after midnight, and the Witch may well try something. So keep all the defenses up, and remember all I told you, please.”
“All right,” Michael said, putting the steaming remains of the rag in the sink.
Howl turned to Percival. “I think I know what’s happened to you,” he said. “It’s going to be a fair job sorting you out, but I’ll have a go tomorrow after I get back.” Howl went to the door and stopped with this hand still on the knob. “Sophie, are you still not talking to me?” he asked miserably.
Sophie knew Howl could sound unhappy in heaven if it suited him. And he had just used her to get information out of Percival. “No!” she snarled.
Howl sighed and went out. Sophie looked up and saw that the knob was pointing black-down. That does it! she thought. I don’t care if it is Midsummer Day tomorrow! I’m leaving.