The Magic Place Read online




  To Mary

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One: Pepper

  Chapter Two: The Cat and the Coal Bucket

  Chapter Three: Aunt Vermilia’s Blunderbuss

  Chapter Four: A Charming Couple

  Chapter Five: Clementine’s Room

  Chapter Six: The Discovery and the Dream

  Chapter Seven: Breakfast

  Chapter Eight: Alone

  Chapter Nine: The Rabbit

  Chapter Ten: The Window

  Chapter Eleven: What Clementine Saw

  Chapter Twelve: In the Street Below

  Chapter Thirteen: The Young Man in the Green Coat

  Chapter Fourteen: A Sticky Situation

  Chapter Fifteen: Working and Shopping

  Chapter Sixteen: Miracle and Disaster

  Chapter Seventeen: A Misadventure for Aunt Vermilia

  Chapter Eighteen: A Weird and Wild Sound

  Chapter Nineteen: Between the Smoke and the Chimneys

  Chapter Twenty: The Chase!

  Chapter Twenty-One: A Monster Revealed

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Like a Giant Black Spider

  Chapter Twenty-Three: An Empty Cellar

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Up the Chimney

  Chapter Twenty-Five: The Great Horde Arrives

  Chapter Twenty-Six: An Explosion

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Battle of Blackstone Street

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Besieged

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Escape

  Chapter Thirty: Falling

  Chapter Thirty-One: Inside Number Ten

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Among the Chimneys

  Chapter Thirty-Three: But However Did Those Two Villains Escape From That House?

  Chapter Thirty-Four: One Last Kick

  Chapter Thirty-Five: The Moon and the Stars

  Chapter Thirty-Six: The Magic Place

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: All for Nothing

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: Sooty Black from Head to Toe

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: The Artist

  Chapter Forty: William’s Story

  Chapter Forty-One: Home

  Chapter Forty-Two: The Imp

  Chapter Forty-Three: Into a Sack

  Chapter Forty-Four: Gone!

  Chapter Forty-Five: Another Dream

  Chapter Forty-Six: The Station

  Chapter Forty-Seven: On the Platform

  Chapter Forty-Eight: Dogs Again

  Chapter Forty-Nine: A Jammed Door

  Chapter Fifty: In the Trunk

  Chapter Fifty-One: An Ear Stretched

  Chapter Fifty-Two: A Little Later …

  Chapter Fifty-Three: Somewhere Wide and Windy, Far, Far Away

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Pepper

  In the middle of a Great Black City of smoke and soot and grime there once lived a girl called Clementine.

  Here is a picture of the Great Black City and down there under that bridge, at the far end of that dark narrow street, is the house where Clementine lives. Do you see it?

  Clementine was an orphan and she lived in that tall narrow house with her Aunt and Uncle Grimble and a large white cat called Gilbert. He was a rather special cat – in fact, he was an extraordinary cat, as we shall discover – and if you look again at the first picture you might spot him down under the bridge, as he walks along the road to that house down at the end. Let’s follow him.

  Outside the house he has stopped, and he peers into a dirty little window at the bottom of the wall, just above the pavement. What does he see?

  He sees Clementine, sitting on the edge of her bed (for the dark and dingy cellar beyond that window is actually her bedroom). She has scruffy short hair and wears a raggedy dress and shoes that are pretty much worn out.

  And now she jumps up! She can hear the heavy clump of her aunt’s footsteps descending the cellar stairs, and then the jingle of a large bunch of keys, as if a gaoler were lifting them from a belt. A key is slotted into the lock. The door handle begins to turn …

  Clementine bites her lip. She lives in mortal fear of her terrible aunt …

  Aunt Vermilia always wore black. And because of her poor eyesight she wore spectacles with such thick lenses her eyes looked enormous and appeared to jump out of her head. Clementine thought she looked like a large, fat beetle. Her Uncle Rufus had a very large mouth and lots of teeth, and Clementine thought he looked rather like a crocodile.

  Would you like an aunt and uncle like these two?

  No, neither would I.

  And though looks can sometimes be deceptive, in this case they’re not. These two were fiends. They were about as wicked and cruel as you could get. Uncle Rufus would sometimes beat Clementine with his heavy walking stick, while Aunt Vermilia often caught her by the ears and shook her head so violently it was a wonder her ears didn’t come off! They were certainly stretched. At least, they looked stretched. Anyway, stretched or not, it was a horrible thing to do. Grabbing someone by the ear was about the meanest, cruellest thing Aunt Vermilia could think of doing to anyone – which just shows you what sort of person she was! And Clementine certainly didn’t deserve it; she was not a naughty child. Not really. No more naughty than any child ought to be.

  Though she did once ‘accidentally’ sprinkle a little pepper on their porridge.

  Quite a lot of pepper actually.

  But my goodness, they deserved it!

  She was punished, of course. But then Clementine was always punished – whether she did anything bad or not. The slightest mistake would provoke an alarming outburst. Like accidentally dropping a single pea. And since it was she who did all the chores around the house – the cooking, the cleaning and all the washing up – she was bound to make the odd mistake.

  She was even punished for things that were not her fault. If anything went missing in that house – or was broken or cracked or spilt or torn or spoilt – it was always blamed on Clementine (though it was very rarely her fault) and she was always punished.

  Is it any wonder that she bit her lip in trepidation at the sound of her aunt’s footsteps descending the cellar stairs?

  And is it any wonder that she was sometimes driven to play little tricks on her wicked aunt and uncle? If she was going to be punished anyway, she thought, she may as well do something worth being punished for! And jolly good luck to her, I say.

  I wonder why Clementine’s Aunt and Uncle were so nasty? Perhaps they had had a horrible time when they were young?

  ‘Little monster!’ her Aunt Vermilia would scream. Or, ‘Ogre!’ Or, ‘Vile little beast!’ And her Uncle Rufus would growl, ‘Devil!’, ‘Demon!’ and ‘Rogue!’

  All words that suited them far more than they suited Clementine. They hardly ever called her by her name. And when they did, they never called her Clementine. Do you know what they called her? They called her Oiya, which wasn’t really a name at all, but came from them shouting, ‘Oi, you!’ whenever they wanted her. I suspect they didn’t even know her real name was Clementine, which was odd.

  But then neither did Clementine, which was odder.

  Chapter Two

  The Cat and the Coal Bucket

  Gilbert was Aunt Vermilia’s cat, in as much as any cat can have an owner. She never called him Gilbert though; she called him Giblets, which she and Uncle Rufus thought was absolutely hilarious and they would laugh loudly every time they said it.

  Why Aunt Vermilia owned a cat, I don’t know. She seemed to have no interest in pets and Clementine never once saw her stroke Gilbert. Indeed, she really seemed to hate the cat and would often try to kick it. She always missed, thankfully. Gilbert was by no means stupid and kept well out of her way. However, there was one occasion when s
he did almost catch him, and that was when this story really begins …

  It was late one Sunday afternoon and Clementine was finishing off the washing up from lunch, while Uncle Rufus sat at the kitchen table counting his money. He was grinning widely. He loved counting his money. Every Sunday afternoon, and most evenings too, he would empty his pockets of coins and count them all, piling them up into towers and chuckling to himself as the piles grew taller. Clementine wondered why Uncle Rufus’s pockets were always so full of coins, but she never dared to ask.

  The last pile was almost complete when Uncle Rufus and Clementine were both startled by a loud noise. It sounded rather as though a rhinoceros was charging down the hallway towards the kitchen. The house began to shake.

  It wasn’t a rhinoceros; it was Aunt Vermilia in her hob-nailed boots (she always wore hob-nailed boots). She’d spotted Gilbert sitting with his back to her by the kitchen doorway and, hiking up her skirts, had set off at a gallop, charging down the hall at a terrifying speed. Then, swinging back her boot, she’d given the cat an almighty wallop!

  She’d missed (of course). Gilbert had jumped out of the way at the last possible moment, and she’d kicked the coal bucket instead (as you can see), which Gilbert had been sitting in front of.

  By the time Uncle Rufus turned to see if it was a rhinoceros, Aunt Vermilia was hopping about with her face screwed up into a most peculiar expression.

  (I imagine kicking a bucket-full of coal hurts quite a lot, even if you are wearing hob-nailed boots.)

  ‘Vermilia, my dear, what are you doing?’ he enquired, rather surprised. ‘Are you dancing a jig?’

  She wasn’t, of course, and that instant she began to howl.

  All this time (about two and a half seconds actually) the coal bucket was flying through the air, up near the kitchen ceiling.

  You can guess what happened next, can’t you?

  Exactly! The bucket landed on Uncle Rufus’s head!

  And there it stuck.

  No matter how hard he pushed and pulled, he could not get it off. He began to bellow, commanding Aunt Vermilia to come and help him, but his voice – coming from inside the bucket – sounded like a muffled trombone. Aunt Vermilia couldn’t understand a word he was saying. Not that she was listening. She wasn’t. After hopping about unstably for several moments, she’d toppled over and was rolling about the kitchen floor, waving her arms and legs in the air and looking exactly like a large beetle, upside down and trying to right itself.

  ‘Waaaaa! Waaaaa!’ she howled as she rolled.

  ‘Vvvooommmlllaaa!’ bellowed Uncle Rufus from inside the coal bucket. And also, ‘Gooommmmtthoommmmvvvooo

  mmmgggmmmfffmmmooofffeeeddd!’

  (Which I think was: Vermilia! Get this thing off my head!)

  Not being able see anything, Uncle Rufus had lost all sense of direction. He thrashed about, bumping into things and knocking things over. Chairs and jugs and vases – and then a whole dresser full of crockery – crashed to the floor. And still he bellowed: ‘Vvvooommlllaaa! Vvvooommlllaaa!’

  Plates and bowls and cups were cracked and smashed and crunched into tiny little pieces beneath Uncle Rufus’s large feet, until at last he stepped on a greasy dish, skidded, and fell right on top of Aunt Vermilia. And there they both lay, amid the wreckage of the kitchen, kicking and bawling and howling and shrieking.

  And though one really should never laugh at another’s misfortune, Clementine, standing at the sink, couldn’t help but smile at what she saw.

  Chapter Three

  Aunt Vermilia’s Blunderbuss

  ‘You vicious little savage!’ screamed Aunt Vermilia the moment Clementine had heaved her up from the floor. And, ‘Nasty little thug!’ roared Uncle Rufus as soon as she’d pulled the coal bucket from his head (which was by no means easy).

  Clementine couldn’t believe it.

  ‘What did I do?’ she protested. ‘I didn’t kick the coal bucket!’

  Which was perfectly true. And neither had she crunched the plates and smashed the cups and sent all Uncle Rufus’s money rolling about the kitchen floor. And it wasn’t her who had knocked off Aunt Vermilia’s spectacles either, and then trodden on them so that now they were quite bent and missing one of the lenses altogether. None of it was Clementine’s fault.

  Except that it was, apparently.

  ‘You evil little hooligan!’ snarled her aunt, grabbing her by the ear. ‘You left that bucket there on purpose, didn’t you?’

  Unfortunately, this was also perfectly true – Clementine had left the bucket there on purpose. But only because she’d not wanted to disturb her aunt (never a good idea), who was having a nap in the sitting room, where Clementine had been told to make a fire. It was no good arguing though. It never was.

  Suddenly Aunt Vermilia let go of Clementine’s ear and began to scream with rage.

  Gilbert had reappeared at the kitchen door. And he was looking rather pleased with himself.

  Aunt Vermilia’s cheek began to twitch and she gradually turned a deep purplish colour and looked as though she might explode. She lunged at Gilbert, arms outstretched, flying across the room like a diving rugby player. Gilbert was gone in a flash and Aunt Vermilia crashed to the floor, sprawled among the fragmented kitchenware, hands grasping at the empty air.

  ‘Rufus!’ she barked, when Uncle Rufus had helped her up and dusted the broken crockery from her skirts. ‘Fetch my blunderbuss!’

  ‘Blunderbuss, my dear?’ queried Uncle Rufus with a frown.

  ‘I’m done with kicking, Rufus! I’m going to blast the mangy fleabag to smithereens!’

  Uncle Rufus beamed. ‘What a jolly idea!’ he exclaimed. ‘Blasting sounds like tremendous fun!’

  And off he went to fetch the blunderbuss.

  Do you know what a blunderbuss is? I’m sure you’ve probably guessed. It is a gun. A very old-fashioned gun with a barrel a bit like the end of a trumpet. It fires lead pellets – lots of them, all at once. And because of the trumpet-like barrel the pellets are spread over a much larger area than the target of a single bullet. This means that someone with a poor aim still has a fairly good chance of hitting something. Aunt Vermilia’s aim was very poor, and even with the blunderbuss she rarely hit anything. At least, not the thing she was aiming at, which was usually pigeons – shot at from an upstairs window.

  Clementine jumped at the report of the blunderbuss. She held her breath and listened. From somewhere upstairs came the voice of her aunt.

  ‘Got him, Rufus! I got the vermin, didn’t I?’

  Clementine bit her lip. She hoped her aunt hadn’t got him.

  ‘No my dear, you didn’t!’ came the voice of Uncle Rufus, slightly peeved.

  ‘That was the white porclain pot with the aspidistra. Do be careful where you shoot!’

  Clementine smiled, and resumed her sweeping, picking up coins and coals from the floor as she swept.

  Another shot. And then her aunt again. ‘Got him that time, Rufus! Cheeky blighter was lying on our bed!’

  ‘He wasn’t, Vermilia!’ Uncle Rufus sounded quite angry now. ‘That was the white shirt I’d laid out to wear in the morning!’

  The explosions continued throughout the evening, and each time Clementine held her breath, hoping that Gilbert hadn’t been blasted. She needn’t have worried. Gilbert was a very clever cat (he was, as I’ve said, an extraordinary cat) and Aunt Vermilia never came anywhere near to blasting him. She blasted quite a lot of other things though. She blasted cushions and armchairs and fluffy white slippers and when, late in the evening, she blasted the chamber pot, which had not yet been emptied, Uncle Rufus cried, ‘Vermilia! Stop! I think it is time that I had a go. Your aim is clearly a little off tonight – must be the missing lens from your glasses.’

  Aunt Vermilia, however, was enjoying herself far too much to let Uncle Rufus take the blunderbuss. Anything white-ish and vaguely cat-shaped (which meant quite a lot of things), she blasted. And she wasn’t all that bothered that she hadn’t so f
ar managed to blast the cat – blasting was fun! Her amusement was finally halted when Uncle Rufus hid the box of blunderbuss pellets. And she was just demanding that he return them, and threatening to clobber him with the butt of her weapon if he didn’t, when there came a loud and urgent knocking at the front door.

  Chapter Four

  A Charming Couple

  Activities at Number Ten Blackstone Street had been a little too lively that evening to pretend that no one was in, as the Grimbles sometimes did when people came knocking, so Uncle Rufus and Aunt Vermilia went downstairs to see who it was. Uncle Rufus locked Clementine in the kitchen, while Aunt Vermilia hid her blunderbuss, before unlocking and opening the front door.

  Standing on the step was Mrs Noodle, who lived at Number Eleven. She was clutching the lead of her small dog – a miniature poodle – and she looked very agitated.

  This is what she saw when Aunt Vermilia opened the door that evening …

  And when Uncle Rufus appeared at Aunt Vermilia’s shoulder, this is what he looked like …

  ‘Whatever is going on?’ cried Mrs Noodle. ‘You’ve not had a gas explosion, have you, Mrs Grimble?’

  ‘Gas?’ replied Aunt Vermilia. ‘Why, no. Whatever do you mean, Mrs Noodle?’