The Ogre of Oglefort

CHAPTER 2 Finding a Familiar

The news that the Hag’s familiar had gone on strike spread through the community of Unusual Creatures like wildfire. Gladys had never been popular, and now everyone was bitter and angry that the toad had deserted her mistress just before an important meeting.

The Hag’s friends did their best to help. The fishmonger, whose mother had been a selkie (one of those people that is a seal by day and a human at night) took her into the shop and offered her the pick of his fish. Not the dead fish on the slab, of course — a dead familiar would be very little use — but the live ones in a tank that he kept for customers who liked their fish to be absolutely fresh.

“There’s a nice flounder there,” he said.

But though flounders are interesting because they are related to the famous fish who reared out of the sea and granted wishes, the Hag was doubtful.

“It’s really kind of you,” she said. “But fish are so difficult to transport.”

Two witches who worked as nannies, wheeling babies through the park, took her to Kensington Gardens because they had seen a Tufted Duck on the pond that they thought might be trained to be magical, but when they got up to it they saw at once that it wouldn’t do. It was sitting on a clutch of eggs and looking broody, and one thing that familiars never do is sit on nests and breed.

The next day the Hag took a bus to Trafalgar Square, where she remembered having seen a pigeon with a mad gleam in its eyes. The Square was absolutely crammed with pigeons in those days, but though she paced backward and forward among the birds for a whole hour, she couldn’t see that particular bird again.

“We’d better try the zoo,” said the troll. So on his afternoon off from the hospital they took the bus to Regent’s Park.

For someone looking for a familiar, the zoo is a kind of paradise. There were lynxes and pumas and jaguars that seemed perfect, but the Hag knew that they would not be happy in the backyard of 26 Whipple Road, and though she was annoyed with Gladys, the Hag did not want her to be eaten.

There were cages of aye-ayes and lemurs and meerkats with huge eyes full of sorrow and strangeness, and there was a darkened room full of vampire bats and kiwis.

“A vampire bat would be wonderful,” said the Hag, and she imagined herself sweeping into the meeting with the bloodsucking creature dribbling on her shoulder.

But even in the zoo everything was not quite right. Not one of the creatures she saw really met her eye. The harpy eagles seemed to be half asleep; the serpents lay under their sunlamps and wouldn’t move.

“Oh what is the matter with the world?” cried the Hag when she got home again. “It’s as though nobody cares anymore. When I was young, any animal worth its salt would have been proud to serve a hag or a wizard or a witch.”

They were sitting sadly at the kitchen table when there was a knock at the door and Mrs. Brainsweller came to borrow some sugar.

“I’ve had so many funerals this week I hardly know which way up I am,” she said, “and it’s made me all behind with the shopping.”

Mrs. Brainsweller was a banshee — one of those tall, thin feys who wail when people die, and they are very much in demand at funerals. She could also levitate, that is to say she could float up to the ceiling and lie on her back looking down on the room, so she was a person who missed very little.

“You look a bit down in the mouth,” she said when the Hag had fetched the sugar. So they told her what had happened at the zoo.

Mrs. Brainsweller hit her forehead. “Of course, I should have thought of it sooner,” she said. “Bri-Bri will make you a familiar. There’s nothing he couldn’t do if he tried.”

The troll and the Hag looked at each other. Making familiars can be done, but it is very difficult magic indeed.

Bri-Bri was the banshee’s only son. He was a wizard, a small man with thin arms and legs and an absolutely enormous head almost entirely filled with brains. His name was Dr. Brian Brainsweller and there was nothing he hadn’t learned. He had learned spells for turning cows blue and spells for turning sausages into boxing gloves and spells for making scrambled eggs come out of people’s ears, and he had seven university degrees: one in necromancy, one in soothsaying, one in alchemy, and four in wizardry.

But he didn’t have any degrees in Everyday Life. Though he was thirty-four years old he was not good at tying his shoelaces or putting on his pajamas the right way around, and he would have eaten furniture polish if you had put it before him on a plate.

Fortunately this didn’t happen because Dr. Brainsweller lived with his mother.

“What are you doing, Bri-Bri?” she would cry as he came down to breakfast with both his legs in one trouser leg, or tried to go to bed in the bath.

It was Mrs. Brainsweller who had seen to it that Brian took all his wizardry exams, and stopped him when he wanted to do ordinary things like riding a bicycle or eating an ice cream, because she knew that if you want to get to the top in anything you must work at it all the time.

The Brainswellers lived two doors down from the Hag’s boardinghouse, and Brian had a workshop in the garden where he spent the day boiling things and stirring things and shaking things. Though he was shy, the wizard was a kind man, and he listened carefully, pushing his huge spectacles up and down, while the Hag and the troll explained what they wanted.

“Your mother thought you might make me a familiar,” said the Hag. “It could be something quite simple — a spotted salamander perhaps?”

Dr. Brainsweller looked worried.

“Oh dear,” he said. “Of course if Mummy thinks… But I tried once and… well, come and look.”

He led them to a cupboard and pulled out a plate with something on it. It looked like a very troubled banana which had died in its sleep.

After that, the Hag lost heart completely. When she got back to her kitchen at Number 26, she found it full of friends who had come from all over the town to drink tea and tell her how sorry they were to hear of her trouble. A retired River Spirit, a man who now worked for the Water Board, offered to climb into the drains and look for an animal that had been flushed down: perhaps a water snake or a small alligator which someone had got for Christmas and didn’t want anymore. But the Hag said it was now clear to her that she wasn’t meant to have a familiar, and that the Powers-That-Be intended her to be shamed at the meeting, if indeed she went to the meeting at all.

And when all her visitors had gone, she put on her hat and smeared some white toothpaste on her blue tooth and left the house. She wanted to put magic and strangeness behind her and talk to someone who belonged to a different world. Someone completely ordinary, and friendly — and young!