LITMIR.BIZ

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fled, without more ado, red in the face with the shame of being caught talking to a Montana. Paolo hung on. It seemed to him that he ought to report that Tonino was missing.

      “I said move along!” repeated the Chief of Police, and he pulled down his jacket with a most threatening jerk.

      Paolo’s nerve broke. After all, an ordinary policeman was not going to be much help against an enchanter. He ran.

      He ran all the way to the Casa Montana. The fog and the wetness did not extend beyond the Corso. As soon as he turned into a side road, Paolo found himself in the bleak shadows and low red sun of a winter evening. It was like being shot back into another world – a world where things happened as they should, where one’s father did not turn into a mad elephant, where, above all, one’s sister did not turn out to be a Petrocchi.

      Paolo’s face fired with shame as he ran. Of all the awful things to happen!

      The Casa Montana came in sight, with the familiar Angel safely over the gate. Paolo shot in under it, and ran into his father. Antonio was standing under the archway, panting as if he too had run all the way home.

      “Who!? Oh, Paolo,” said Antonio. “Stay where you are.”

      “Why?” asked Paolo. He wanted to get in, where it was safe, and perhaps eat a large lump of bread and honey. He was surprised his father did not feel the same. Antonio looked tired out, and his clothes were torn and muddy rags. The arm he stretched out to keep Paolo in the gateway was half bare and covered with scratches. Paolo was going to protest, when he saw that something was indeed wrong. Most of the cats were in the gateway too, crouching around with their ears flattened. Benvenuto was patrolling the entrance to the yard, like a lean brown ferret. Paolo could hear him growling.

      Antonio’s scratched hand took Paolo by the shoulder and pulled him forward so that he could see into the yard. “Look.”

      Paolo found himself blinking at foot-high letters, which seemed to hang in the air in the middle of the yard. In the fading light, they were glowing an unpleasant, sick yellow.

      STOP ALL SPELLS OR YOUR CHILD SUFFERS.

      CASA PETROCCHI

      The name was in sicker and brighter letters. They were meant to make no mistake about who had sent the message.

      After what Renata had said, Paolo knew it was wrong. “It wasn’t the Petrocchis,” he said. “It’s that enchanter Chrestomanci told us about.”

      “Yes, to be sure,” said Antonio.

      Paolo looked up at him and saw that his father did not believe him – probably had not even attended to him. “But it’s true!” he said. “He wants us to stop making war-spells.”

      Antonio sighed, and drew himself together to explain to Paolo. “Paolo,” he said, “nobody but Chrestomanci believes in this enchanter. In magic, as in everything else, the simplest explanation is always best. In other words, why invent an unknown enchanter, when you have a known enemy with known reasons for hating you? Why shouldn’t it be the Petrocchis?”

      Paolo wanted to protest, but he was still too embarrassed about Renata to say that Angelica Petrocchi was missing too. He was struggling to find something that he could say, which might convince his father, when a square of light sprang up in the gallery as a door there opened.

      “Rosa!” shouted Antonio. His voice cracked with anxiety.

      The shape of Rosa appeared in the light, carrying Cousin Claudia’s baby. The light itself was so orange and so bright, beside the sick glow of the letters floating in the yard, that Paolo was flooded with relief.

      Behind Rosa, there was Marco, carrying another little one.

      “Praised be!” said Antonio. He shouted, “Are you all right, Rosa? How did those words come here?”

      “We don’t know,” Rosa called back. “They just appeared. We’ve been trying to get rid of them, but we can’t.”

      Marco leant over the rails and called, “It’s not true, Antonio. The Petrocchis wouldn’t do a thing like this.”

      Antonio called back, “Don’t go around saying that, Marco.” He said it so forbiddingly that Paolo knew nothing he said was going to be believed. If he had had a chance of convincing Antonio, he had now lost it.

      

      When Tonino came to his senses – at, incidentally, the precise moment when the enchanted book began to shrivel away – he had, at first, a nightmare feeling that he was shut in a cardboard box. He rolled his head sideways on his arms. He seemed to be lying on his face on a hard but faintly furry floor. In the far distance, he could blurrily see someone else, leaning up against a wall like a doll, but he felt too queer to be very interested in that. He rolled his head round the other way and saw the panels of a wall quite near. That told him he was in a fairly long room. He rolled his head to stare down at the furry floor. It was patterned, in a pattern too big for his eyes to grasp, and he supposed it was a carpet of some kind. He shut his blurry eyes and tried to think what had happened.

      He remembered going down near the New Bridge. He had been full of excitement. He had read a book which he thought was telling him how to save Caprona. He knew he had to find an alleyway with a peeling blue house at the end of it. It seemed a bit silly now. Tonino knew things never happened the way they did in books. Even then, he had been rather amazed to find that there was an alleyway with, really and truly, a peeling blue house at the end of it. And, to his huge excitement, there was a scrap of paper fluttering down at his feet. The book was coming true. Tonino had bent down and picked up the paper.

      And, after that, he had known nothing till this moment.

      That was really true. Tonino took himself through what had happened several times, but each time his memories stopped in exactly the same place – with himself picking up the scrap of paper. After that, it was all a vague sense of nightmare. By this time, he was fairly sure he had been the victim of a spell. He began to feel ashamed of himself. So he sat up.

      He saw at once why he had seemed to dream he was shut up in a cardboard box. The room he was in was long and low, almost exactly the shape of a shoebox. The walls and ceiling were painted cream-colour – a sort of whitish cardboard-colour, in fact – but they seemed to be wood, because there were carvings picked out in gold paint on them. There was a crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling, although the light came from four long windows in one of the longer walls; a rich carpet on the floor, and a very elegant dining-table and chairs by the wall opposite the windows. There were two silver candlesticks on the table. Altogether the place was extremely elegant – and wrong, somehow.

      Tonino sat trying to puzzle out just what was wrong. The room was awfully bare. But that was not quite it. There was something strange about the daylight coming through the four long windows, as if the sun was somehow further away than it should be. But that was not quite it either. Tonino’s eyes went to the four bands of too-faded sunlight falling through the windows on to the carpet, and then travelled along the carpet. At the end, he came to the person leaning up against the wall. It was Angelica Petrocchi, who had been at the Palace. Her eyes were closed beneath her bulge of forehead, and she looked ill. So she had been caught too.

      Tonino looked back at the carpet. That was an odd thing. It was not really a carpet. It had been painted on the slightly furry substance of the floor. Tonino could see the brush-strokes in the sprawling pattern. And the reason he had thought the pattern was too big, was because it was too big. It was the wrong size for the rest of the room.

      More puzzled than ever, Tonino struggled to his feet. He felt a little wobbly, so he put a hand on the gilded panels of the wall to steady himself. That felt furry too, except where it

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