Stopping for a Spell (2 page)

“Oh, good!” Auntie Christa said merrily. She rummaged in the box again. “Look, here's the conjurer's wand,” she said, bringing out a short white stick wrapped in a string of little flags. “Let's magic the nasty wet away so that I can sit down again.” She tapped the puddle in the chair with the stick. “There!”

“The puddle hasn't gone,” said Dad.

“I thought you were going to throw the hideous old thing away anyway,” Auntie Christa said crossly. “You should be quite ashamed to invite people for a coffee morning and ask them to sit in a chair like this!”

“Then perhaps,” Dad said politely, “you'd like to help us carry the chair outside to the garden shed?”

“I'd love to, of course,” Auntie Christa said, hurriedly putting the hat and the stick back into the box and collecting her bags, “but I must dash. I have to speak to the Vicar before I see about the music. I'll see you all at the Caring Society party the day after tomorrow at four-thirty sharp. Don't forget!”

This was a thing Simon and Marcia had often noticed about Auntie Christa. Though she was always busy, it was always other people who did the hard work.

2

Something in the Garden Shed

Now Mum had told Auntie Christa they were going to throw the chair away, she wanted to do it at once.

“We'll go and get another one tomorrow after work,” she told Dad. “A nice blue, I think, to go with the curtains. And let's get this one out of the way now. I'm sick of the sight of it.”

It took all four of them to carry the chair through the kitchen to the back door, and they knocked most of the kitchen chairs over doing it. For the next half hour they thought they were not going to get it through the back door. It stuck, whichever way they tipped it. Simon was quite upset. It was almost as if the chair was trying to stop them throwing it away. But they got it into the garden in the end. Somehow, as they staggered across the lawn with it, they knocked the top off Mum's new sundial and flattened a rosebush. Then they had to stand it sideways in order to wedge it inside the shed.

“There,” Dad said, slamming the shed door and dusting his hands. “That's out of the way until Guy Fawkes Day.”

He was wrong, of course.

The next day Simon and Marcia had to collect the key from next door and let themselves into the house, because Mum had gone straight from work to meet Dad and buy a new chair. They felt very gloomy being in the empty house. The living room looked queer with an empty space where the chair had been. And both of them kept remembering that they would have to spend Saturday helping in Auntie Christa's schemes.

“Handing around cakes might be fun,” Simon said doubtfully.

“But helping with the party won't be,” said Marcia. “We'll have to do all the work. Why couldn't one of us have guessed what was in that box?”

“What
are
Caring Society children, anyway?” asked Simon.

“I
think
,” said Marcia, “that they
may
be the ones who have to let themselves into their houses with a key after school.”

They looked at one another. “Do you think we count?” said Simon. “Enough to win a prize, anyway. I wouldn't mind winning that conjuring set. It was a real top hat, even if the crystal ball did leak.”

Here they both began to notice a distant thumping noise from somewhere out in the garden. It suddenly felt unsafe being alone in the house.

“It's only next door hanging up pictures again,” Marcia said bravely.

But when they went rather timidly to listen at the back door, the noise was definitely coming from the garden shed.

“It's next door's dog got shut in the shed again,” Simon said. It was his turn to be brave. Marcia was scared of next door's dog. She hung back while Simon marched over the lawn and tugged and pulled until he got the shed door open.

It was not a dog. There was a person standing inside the shed. The person stood and stared at them with his little head on one side. His little fat arms waved about as if he was not sure what to do with them. He breathed in heavy snorts and gasps as if he was not sure how to breathe.

“Er, hn hm,” he said as if he was not sure how to speak either. “I appear to have been shut in your shed.”

“Oh—
sorry
!” Simon said, wondering how it had happened.

The person bowed, in a crawlingly humble way. “I—hn hm—am the one who is snuffle sorry,” he said. “I have made—hn hm—you come all the way here to let me out.” He walked out of the shed, swaying and bowing from foot to foot.

Simon backed away, wondering if the person walked like that because he had no shoes on. He was a solid, plump person with wide, hairy legs. He was wearing a most peculiar striped one-piece suit that only came to his knees.

Marcia backed away behind Simon, staring at the person's stripy arms. He waved them in a feeble way as he walked. There was a blot of ink on one arm and what looked like a coffee stain on the other. Marcia's eyes went to the person's plump striped stomach. As he came out into the light, she could see that the stripes were sky blue, orange, and purple. There was a damp patch down the middle and a dark, sticky place that could have been ketchup, once. Her eyes went up to his sideways face. There was a beard on the person's chin that looked rather as if someone had smashed a hedgehog on it.

“Who
are
you?” she said.

The person stood still. His arms waved like seaweed in a current. “Er, hn hm, I am Chair Person,” he said. His sideways face looked pleased and rather smug about it.

Marcia and Simon, of course, both felt awful about it. He was the armchair. They had put him in the shed ready to go on the bonfire. Now he was alive. They hoped very much that Chair Person did not know that they had meant to burn him.

“Won't you come inside?” Simon said politely.

“That is
very
kind of you,” Chair Person said, crawlingly humble again. “I—hn hm snuffle—hope that won't be too much trouble.”

“Not at all!” they both said heartily.

They went toward the house. Crossing the lawn was quite difficult because Chair Person did not seem to have learned to walk straight yet, and he talked all the time. “I believe I am—hn hm—Chair Person,” he said, crashing into what was left of the sundial and knocking it down, “because I think I am. Snuffle. Oh dear, I appear to have destroyed your stone pillar.”

“Not to worry,” Marcia said kindly. “It was broken last night when we—I mean, it was broken anyway.”

“Then—hn hm—as I was saying,” Chair Person said, veering the other way, “that this is what snuffle wise men say. A person who thinks is a Person.” He cannoned into the apple tree. Most of the apples Dad had meant to pick that weekend came showering and bouncing down onto the grass. “Oh, dear,” said Chair Person. “I appear to have loosened your fruit.”

“That's all right,” Simon and Marcia said politely. But since Chair Person, in spite of seeming so humble, did not seem very sorry about the apples and just went on talking and weaving about, they each took hold of one of his waving arms and guided him to the back door.

“Only the finest snuffle apples,” said Chair Person as he bashed into both sides of the back door, “from the finest—hn hm—orchards go into Kaplan's Peasant Pies. This is one of many snuffle facts I know. Er, hm, very few people have watched as much television as I have,” he added, knocking over the nearest kitchen chair.

Marcia picked the chair up, thinking of the many, many times she had gone out of the living room and forgotten to turn the television off. Chair Person, when he was an armchair, must have watched hours of commercials and hundreds of films.

Simon turned Chair Person around and sat him in the kitchen chair. Chair Person went very humble and grateful. “You are—hn hm—treating me with such kindness,” he said, “and I am going to cause you a lot of snuffle trouble. I appear to need something to eat. I am not sure what to do about it. Do I—hn hm—eat
you
?”

“We'll find you something to eat,” Simon said quickly.

“Eating people is wrong,” Marcia explained.

They hurried to find some food. A tin of spaghetti seemed easiest, because they both knew how to do that. Simon opened the tin and Marcia put it in a saucepan with the gas very high to get the spaghetti hot as soon as possible. Both of them cast nervous looks at Chair Person in case he tried to eat one of them. But Chair Person sat where he was, waving his arms gently. “Hn hm, Spiggley's tasty snacks,” he said. “Sunshine poured from a tin.” When Marcia put the steaming plateful in front of him and Simon laid a spoon and a fork on either side of it, Chair Person went on sitting and staring.

“You can eat it,” Simon said kindly.

“Er, hn hm,” Chair Person said. “But this is not a complete meal. I shall have to trouble you for a napkin and salt and pepper. And I think people usually snuffle eat by candlelight with soft music in the background.”

They hurried to find him the salt, the pepper mill, and a paper towel. Simon fetched the radio and turned it on. It was playing country and western, but Simon turned it down very low and hoped it would do. He felt so sorry for Chair Person that he wanted to please him. Marcia ran upstairs and found the candlesticks from Mum's dressing table and two red candles from last Christmas. She felt so guilty about Chair Person that she wanted to please him as much as Simon did.

Chair Person was very humble and grateful. While he told them how kind they were being, he picked up the pepper mill and began solemnly grinding pepper over the spaghetti. “Er, hn hm, with respect to you two fine kind people,” he said as he ground, “eating people is a time-honored custom.”

Simon and Marcia quickly got to the other side of the table. But Chair Person only took up the fork and raked the spaghetti into a new heap, and ground more pepper over that. “There were tribes in South snuffle America,” he said, “who believed it was quite correct to—hn hm—eat their grandparents. I have a question. Is Spiggley's another word for spaghetti?”

“No,” said Marcia. “It's a name.”

Chair Person raked the spaghetti into a different-shaped heap and went on grinding pepper over it. “When the snuffle grandparents were dead,” he said, “they cooked the grandparents and the whole tribe had a feast.”

Marcia remembered seeing something like this on television. “I watched that program, too,” she said.

“You—hn hm—will not know this,” Chair Person said, raking the spaghetti into another new shape and grinding another cloud of pepper over it. “Only the sons and daughters of the dead men were allowed to eat the brains.” This time he spread the spaghetti flat and ground pepper very carefully over every part of it. “This was so that snuffle the wisdom of the dead man could be passed on to his family,” he said.

By this time the spaghetti was gray. Simon and Marcia could not take their eyes off it. It must have been hot as fire by then. They kept expecting Chair Person to sneeze, since he seemed to have trouble breathing anyway, but he just went on grinding pepper and explaining about cannibals.

Simon wondered if Chair Person perhaps did not know how to eat. “You're supposed to put the spaghetti in your mouth,” he said.