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In Which the Nature of Demons is Illuminated
Characters: Sophie, Howl (with established Howl/Sophie), Calcifer
Word count: ~7000
Warnings: None
Notes: Gift for
Howl paced up and down the kitchen gesticulating wildly. It was all very theatrical. “I told you 'don't do anything I wouldn't do!'” he said. “And I would say I've been pretty clear about the sorts of things I don't do!”
It wasn't that Sophie disliked theater, but she'd seen this particular production too many times to count. He had interrupted her reading, coming in like that. “But how was I supposed to know you meant it that way? You don't make any distinction between things you won't do because you're cowardly, or because you're spiteful, or because they're really dangerous. Don't you dare lecture me, Howl Pendragon.”
“They were simple instructions,” Howl groused. “Other people would be content with that, and just have a quiet day, dispense some powders and potions and close up early for lunch. But oh, no, not our Mrs. Nose.”
“Which you should have known when you put me in charge,” she said, slamming her book on the table and glaring at him over it, “Mr. Nose. Anyway, with as much hot water as you go through in a week, I'd have expected you to be sympathetic.”
“Oh, that's fine,” said Howl, much aggrieved. “You reap all the benefits of my intensive personal maintenance and then turn around and call me vain.”
“I didn't call you that,” said Sophie.
Calcifer piped up, “But if the cap fits...” Sophie nodded agreement.
Howl threw his hands up. “Beset on all sides! Have it your own way, then, I suppose we must all become plumbers.” Then he stopped, his eyes narrowing in thought. “Why are we yelling at me when Sophie is the one who put a street underwater?”
What had happened was this: a woman named Annette had come to the shop saying her taps were always stuck, and she'd had a man out to look at it and fix it in the conventional way, but this had failed three times, and although he took her money readily enough the plumber was starting to roll his eyes at her and smilingly say things about not being able to reproduce the problem. So Sophie had sent her home with an unsticking powder and, as best as anyone could figure out, the spigot had twisted off in her hand and the previously stuck tap had proceeded to gush water at extraordinarily high volumes for the next sixteen hours. There had been talk of gondola races before Sophie had gone back, walloped the offending valve with a wrench, and told it that it should be ashamed of itself. Now no water would come out of it at all, although Annette had an interesting new duck pond in her front garden.
“Not that anyone asked,” said Calcifer, “but the water level in the reservoir hasn't gone down at all.”
“Then where did all that come from?” said Howl, and although part of Sophie still wanted a proper fight about this, another part was grateful Calcifer had steered him to more important matters.
“I suppose you'll have to go look.”
Howl rolled his eyes skyward. “Why don't you two do it? If Sophie decides the neighborhood needs another wetting, you can always hide in a galosh.”
“It's your business, and your reputation,” Sophie said, “but if you don't care about that -”
Howl was looking abstracted. “It is 'galosh,' right? That's a word? One galosh, two galoshes?”
Calcifer said, “I really think this is serious enough to look into, Howl.”
“Easily done. I'm sure we own a dictionary” - he gestured toward the bookshelf, its entropic jumble once again starting to overcome Sophie's best attempts at a sorting system - “somewhere.”
“And it's also my reputation,” said Sophie, remembering to be annoyed again, “which I am just now building, and I really don't appreciate being left out to dry.” That had been an unlucky word choice. She suppressed the urge to wince. “You're coming with us. Calcifer can tell me what he makes of the whole mess, and meanwhile you, sir, are going to do your usual weird slithery thing at this woman until she stops being angry with us. That's barely even work.”
“'Barely even' -!” Howl cried, indignant. “I was right. You really haven't a clue.”
It was Howl, in the end, who wore galoshes, although he'd enchanted them to look all of one piece with his terribly fashionable shoes. He was so terribly fashionable overall that it had taken forty-five minutes to leave even after he'd agreed that he was leaving. Sophie had just put boots on and sat by the front door, meaningfully, for the duration. It wasn't even that wet anymore, just puddles here and there. Howl picked his way around the worst of them without ever looking at the street. Sophie clomped along ignoring them. Calcifer hovered behind, out of splashing distance.
“You're back,” said Annette, who stood out on her front steps, tearing chunks off a cabbage and throwing them, in a desultory fashion, toward all the ducks.
“Yes,” said Sophie. “Yours is such an interesting case that I've brought my -” She had forgotten she wasn't an old lady anymore, and nearly said “nephew,” and then frowned back at Howl wondering what on earth she was supposed to be calling him. He'd probably put a different story around in every town. She found she didn't want to say “husband”; she had only vague ideas yet of what kind of wife she wanted to be, but she thought, surely not that kind. Not the kind of flighty thing who causes problems and trusts the man of the house to put it all right.
He did tend to put things right, eventually, and with a lot of badgering, but it was a matter of principle. She finally gave him a nod and said, “Well, I brought the wizard.”
Howl raised his eyebrows at her sarcastically, but before he could do much worse, Annette looked toward him, and he put on one of those obliging smiles that worked best before you got to know him. Sophie was curious how this would go – the woman was in her late thirties, which was the bracket Howl seemed to have the most trouble winning over. Older than him, so not so easily dazzled, but not yet old enough to think “what a nice young man!”
“I do apologize,” he said. “In a matter like this, nine times out of ten a little straightforward hedge witchery does the job. I'm afraid you have the bad luck to be exceptional. But this is our third trip out here, and as you must know, three is an important number in magic. We can't possibly fail to – fix your faucet” - only a slight hesitation betrayed his distaste - “this time around.”
“The plumber was here three times, too,” said Annette.
“Well, three is not an important number to pipe fittings.”
Sophie and Calcifer went around the back of the house and into the wash house. It was just as well it was the laundry and not the kitchen tap that had gone bad; she would have felt a little more self-conscious about inviting herself into somebody's house proper. Though she still would have done it.
The laundry still smelled of mildew; the windows let in good sunlight, but not enough of it. Sophie propped open the door, to let the place air out some, and rolled up her sleeves.
“There's something big here,” said Calcifer, with a worried greenish flicker. Sophie gave him a sharp look. He might complain about damp at times, but it wasn't a threat to him; a twenty-pound tomcat hissed at a teacup poodle not from real fear but ancestral enmity. Of course, if it were a hunting dog, or quite a lot of water...
“Well, what is it?” said Sophie, poking about among the big wooden laundry tubs and fighting an urge to give the place a good scrub.
“Which tap was the problem? No – don't tell me.” He was hovering between a pipe for cold water and a pipe for hot. After a moment's thought he moved to the hot one, on the left. “This one.”
“That's right.” She walked over, squinting at the offending tap. “It's not very wide. How big can this thing be?”
“How big am I?” said Calcifer, which was an interesting philosophical question, but, for the matter at hand, mostly useless.
“Should I just reach in? I don't think my hand will fit.” Then she looked back at Calcifer. Perhaps it hadn't been a useless question after all. “Just how big are you?” He shrank back, his eyes blazing huge and orange. “Calcifer, what in the world do you think is in that pipe?”
“Can't you feel it?” said Calcifer, and he sounded so miserable that she decided not to goad him after all. She couldn't feel anything unusual – just the damp – but Calcifer wouldn't lie.
“All right, then how's this?” She leaned over the hot-water spigot. “Spit it out, whatever it is. Then you can get back to doing your job, and doing it nicely, and we'll never have to have this conversation again.” Then she gave it a tremendous twist, throwing her whole weight behind the motion, and then, for several seconds, nothing happened at all.
Then there was a rushing gurgling sound as of water trying to escape, and Calcifer withdrew all the way to the far window. Then the bend in the pipe began to swell as if something were about to burst out, and Sophie wondered if she ought to protect her head. The rushing sound grew louder and louder and then something went thwack against the floor and the water all came pouring out, exactly like last time.
Sophie made a frantic grab at the spigot and twisted it closed. “Good job, good job,” she told it, as the water slowed to a trickle and then stopped.
On the floor under the tap, in the middle of a puddle of water, was a black velvety thing about the size of a fist. It didn't have much of a shape, and it was hard to guess what it was made of. But oddly, it didn't seem to be wet. She peered down at it. “Is this the thing you were worried about?”
“Yes,” said Calcifer, in a tight voice, flat up against the windowpane.
“What do we do with it?”
“I don't know.”
“Then I'll take it to -”
“Howl won't know either.”
“What is it?” said Sophie, frowning. If this was something neither Calcifer nor Howl was prepared to cope with, she thought, then in the first place it really wasn't her fault that the powder had gone awry. In the second place, it must call for drastic measures indeed.
Calcifer said, at last, “It's hungry.” He looked terribly pale and small.
“Well, it can't stay here.”
“It can't stay anywhere,” Calcifer began to say, as Sophie wrapped it in a handkerchief and dropped it into her pocket. “What are you thinking?”
“No matter what it is, it's safer at home under the care of three magical people than it is here. Don't you think? And we can do some research. If you don't know how to get rid of it, and it's not in any of Howl's books, maybe it'll be in Suliman's. Or someone else's.” Calcifer did not look reassured. She smiled at him, what she thought was comfortingly. She didn't generally smile on purpose and so couldn't be sure. “Calcifer, I may be new to this magic business, but have I ever let you down?”
“Well -”
“Tell me everything you know about it, when we get home, and I'll give you half the bacon.”
“This is too important a matter for me to be bribed,” said Calcifer, although a whitish flicker along his outer edge betrayed real interest in the prospect. “I would have told you anyway, but since you're offering – half of all the bacon?”
“And two eggs.”
“Oh, all right,” said Calcifer, with rather less than his usual enthusiasm around fatty breakfast foods. “But keep that well wrapped up.”
Sophie confirmed that the tap was working as it ought again, sprinkled drying power around the splashes from earlier, and went out front again, shutting the door behind her.
Howl must have been having a rough time of it with the client; Sophie could think of only two or three times he'd looked happier to see her. “There, you see,” he said, waving grandiosely in her direction. “All sorted out?”
“The water works again, and we've got the thing that was blocking it.” To Annette she said, “You shouldn't need a plumber for years.”
“I should hope not.”
“What was it?” said Howl.
Calcifer had gone into hiding, and didn't seem likely to explain anything before he'd had his spirits bolstered with sufficient hot grease. Sophie shot dubious sidelong glances at Annette, trying to signal to Howl that perhaps this should be discussed privately, without, at the same time, signaling that she didn't know the answer. From his puzzled expression, she was not getting that look quite right.
“Well?” he said.
“See what you make of this,” she said at last, giving him the handkerchief.
Bemused, he accepted it and peeled back the cloth folds covering the object. When he saw it he looked surprised, but not, unlike Calcifer, the least bit frightened. “Now this is a rarity. How did your laundry come by one of these?” he asked Annette, who scowled and did not answer. Sophie couldn't really blame her for not caring about the novelty. “This is,” he began to say, and poked its surface with one finger, and then something went wrong.
There was a flash – not of light, but a flash of dark, as if for a half instant by this pond it was the middle of a moonless night. Over the next few seconds light began to trickle back in, but when it had reached about a twilight dimness, there it stopped.
“Home,” Calcifer's voice cracked out, like a log splitting open in a bonfire. “Get home. Now.”
He sounded near her ear, but she couldn't see him.
She could barely make out Howl, folding the handkerchief back up and shoving it down his shirt, before he grabbed her hand. “You heard him,” he said, and took off.
Sophie stumbled after him, with her free hand clamping her hat to her head. Around them all the streets were just as dim, all blurry and gray, like a charcoal drawing you'd accidentally dragged your sleeve over. “What did you do?” she shouted at Howl.
“I just touched it!” Howl shouted back.
“Why?” Calcifer roared.
Howl threw a look of alarmed confusion over his shoulder at Sophie. She shook her head helplessly. “I don't know! He's been cagey about it this whole time!”
“Splendid,” said Howl, his eyes going flat, and they ran the rest of the way home.
It was strange – in this light, his eyes were gray, too.
“Right,” said Calcifer, the moment they were back in the castle, “put that thing on the table and don't unwrap it again. And neither of you set one foot outside until I get back.”
It was gray indoors, too. Lighting any number of lamps did nothing to push that strange fog aside. Calcifer, contracted to a tiny anxious point of light, peered into each of their faces for confirmation they understood, and then zipped out a window.
Gingerly, Howl fished the parcel out of his shirt and placed it in the center of the table. “So it's not a mermaid's purse, I suppose.”
“I suppose not.” Sophie hung up her hat. “Could you sense anything, when you touched it?”
Howl frowned, contemplating the finger that had touched the dark surface. “It was cold. And I got the fleeting impression that – that thing hated me. But I had no other warning it was going to do... whatever it did.”
“What did it do?”
Calcifer popped back through the window. “All the color's been sucked out of the world, to a radius of a quarter-mile around that thing.”
“Around the castle?” said Howl, frowning. “Or around all the doors, too?”
“Yes,” said Calcifer.
Howl said, cleverly, “Ah.”
Calcifer flared up again. “For as long as we've worked together, I thought you had better sense than to go around poking unknown magical substances at random. Even Sophie didn't -”
“That's the thing,” said Howl, holding up a hand. “It's not unknown at all, is it, Calcifer? Not to you.” He looked at the bundle on the table. “I think that's an old chum of yours.”
Calcifer shrank. It was unsettling to see a fire with no color, Sophie thought, and the more so when that fire was your friend.
“Should I get the bacon?” Sophie said, and Howl looked at her as if she'd said something absurd.
Calcifer flickered, a dingy smear in the air. “Howl,” he said, “you've never asked about my life before I met you. And you didn't try to cheat me, either, when you saw me falling. I was frightened, and I think I would have settled for worse terms than you gave me. I always appreciated your forbearance.”
Howl nodded once, solemnly, in acknowledgment of his excellent qualities. But Sophie wondered if he'd forborne on purpose or just been too wrapped up in himself to bother imposing. He'd still had his heart, at the outset, but she was skeptical he'd ever gotten much use out of it.
Calcifer sighed, his outline wavering. “It wasn't by choice, you know. Falling. Sometimes you get knocked loose from the firmament – and it shouldn't have even been my turn, I'm not very old as stars go – and then the world is rushing up at you faster than you can think.” And then, in a softer voice, like the hiss of steam over dying embers, he said, “Almost. You have just a split second to make a choice.” He flickered in the direction of the black thing. “Some try to hold on.”
“And that turns you into one of these?” said Sophie, leaning down over it.
Calcifer bobbed in the air, in a sort of nod. “I suppose, if I'm a fire demon, you can call that a void demon. It was a falling star like me, but it held on so hard it turned inside-out. And now all it knows is how to grab things, and hold on. It doesn't let go.”
Howl sat down, looking at their gray surroundings. “And it's eating the light?”
“Yes,” said Calcifer. “You and I were partners for so long that, to other demons, your magic will always feel a little like mine. That's why it woke up when you touched it. It resents us, I think.” In a lower voice: “Or I would, at least.”
Sophie said, “Wait. You said it doesn't let go – but it must. For one thing, it's here now and not still in the sky. And for another, it spat all that water all over the street.” Howl raised his eyebrows in question. Sophie put her hands on her hips. “Remember? Calcifer, you said yourself, the water didn't come out of the reservoir. Where else could it have come from? This demon was sitting inside the pipe. I think it picked water up from someplace else and let it go here.”
Howl jotted down a note to himself: Ask Neil about quantum whatsit? Sophie wished he would be serious.
On an experimental basis, Sophie leaned over the table and told the demon, “You'd better give back all the colors, or you won't like what I'll do.”
“Don't threaten it,” said Calcifer, aghast.
“Oh, and I expect you two have ten more effective enchantments to try,” said Sophie.
Calcifer sizzled indignantly. Howl shrugged. “Admit it, Calcifer. If anyone could brute-force a black hole, it would be Sophie.” After a pause, the flames at Calcifer's base curled upward slightly before receding, suggesting a pair of shrugging shoulders to match Howl's. Howl went on, thoughtful: “Left to its own devices, what's it going to do?”
“It'll keep sucking up everything it can. Light first, and then matter.”
“Can we starve it out?”
“What, wall out all the light? Keep it suspended in some dark place with nothing to grab until it gives up?” Calcifer thought about this, zipping around the perimeter of the room as if considering what defenses would have to be put in place. Sophie thought of the castle under a dome of endless night, and did not care for the thought. “I'm not sure. It's not as if it needs to eat things. It's not really alive.”
“I say we at least try it.” Howl rubbed at the bridge of his nose. He looked tired and frustrated, and all the grayness made his features stand out sharper somehow. “We can't have this thing running rampant, either way, and that's a fair start on keeping it contained.”
“What kind of circle do you have in mind?” said Calcifer, sounding dubious.
“Well, we'd have to buttress it, obviously.” Howl got up and, with one arm, began sweeping books off the shelf into the crook of his other elbow. “I hate doing things that have stakes.”
“You also hate doing things that don't,” said Sophie. “Like household magic. Sometimes I think you hate doing things, period.”
He paused in ransacking the shelf to give her an impatient look. “Yes. Obviously. Look, could you go get some chalk and mark off where the color ends? We may be at this a while, and I want to see if the boundary moves.”
The boundary moved. Over the next three days Howl and Calcifer threw everything they had at the void demon, and in the mornings and evenings Sophie would go out and walk until she saw color again and mark the spot, and nothing stopped the spreading gray. They had a black dome on the table centered over the demon, like a big stone mixing bowl turned upside down, with circles and symbols scrawled on the table all around it. Periodically Howl would add more symbols, or try poking a stick or a crystal or a many-faceted glass prism in through the top of the dome. But Sophie never saw any change, and Calcifer would hiss out a sigh, and Howl would slump irritably over the table, still careful no part of him went into the dome.
But the boundary still moved. In Market Chipping everyone steered clear of the flower shop, and all the way down to the lens grinder's at the end of the block; Sophie's old neighbors were locking doors and windows and finding relatives to stay with in the country. Outside the mansion in the valley, the garden walk was pale as the moon. And with the doorknob turned purple-down, the countryside rolled away under the moving castle in unchanging gray ribbons of hill under a flat gray sky, grayer than the worst clouds of winter. Calcifer's concentration was too occupied to keep the castle moving full speed, but he kept it chugging along through the hills just fast enough to keep the gray border away from human habitation.
“Is it unhealthy?” said Sophie. “Are people hurt by having no color?”
“Who knows,” said Calcifer.
“They might panic,” said Howl, “and I'm sure that's not healthy.” He did not look especially well himself.
Sophie frowned at the door. There was one way she hadn't opened it yet.
“Don't,” said Howl, as if he'd sensed her thoughts. “It won't be any different, and I cannot express how little interest I have in explaining any of this to Megan.”
“Then how are we going to fix it?” she said.
He raked a hand through his hair. He ought to be happy, she thought; with no way to tell colors apart, he had no need to fret about keeping it dyed just the right shade. He said dolefully, “I could change my name again.”
Sophie looked out the moving castle door again. They were drifting toward the fields of flowers Sophie had first started cutting for their shop. She could still smell that lush fragrance wafting in as the castle meandered toward all that green. Even when the wall of gray that surrounded the castle began sweeping over the riverbank with its heavy purple blooms, the scent stayed just as strong – but it didn't feel right. She shut the door.
“Sophie,” said Calcifer, carefully, “you might think about leaving.”
She turned slowly to face him. “Excuse me? I'm sure I can't have heard that right.”
Howl cleared his throat. “He said we might think about leaving.”
“No,” said Sophie, narrowing her eyes. “He didn't say 'we,' he said I should leave.” She flicked a glare toward Howl. “And don't tell me you agree with him?”
They looked oddly alike, the pair of them, sort of elongated and flimsy. These three days they'd been doing strange desperate magic to no avail, and never troubled to tell her anything about it. She had done the polite thing and not asked, much, while they were concentrating so intently. She had made sure enough food was laid out and she'd dealt with the few brave souls who still came to the mansion in its cloak of hazy gray to ask for odd charms, so nothing could distract them from the problem. They knew more than she did. They'd worked hand in glove for years and there was no time, rationally speaking, to bring her up to speed. But – she lived here, too. She was magic, too. It would be nice to at least be consulted, and it wasn't at all right to try throwing her out.
Howl said nothing, but shrugged and looked at the floor. That wasn't right, either. He should be arguing. What had this demon done? Was it sucking the fire out of him, too?
“Well,” she huffed, as if he actually had made a retort, because it was better to pretend he had. “You're wrong, and I won't do it. If you think you don't need me here, or if you think you have any right to send me away –"
Howl and Calcifer exchanged glances. Oh, lovely, had they discussed this? Sophie felt her hands ball into fists. Howl said, "We think you may be safer –"
"At your own expense? Who are you, to talk like that? Surely not the Wizard Howl I know. Surely you're not telling someone else to slither out even before you do it yourself." She rounded on Calcifer again. “And you,” she began, but it didn't seem fair to hold over his head the thousand years she'd given him, so she just glowered.
Howl held up his hands. “In my defense, the stern talking-to was Calcifer's idea. I was all for getting you out of here with trickery and deceit. No discussion required.” He produced, improbably, an envelope addressed in Fanny's handwriting. “A letter from your stepmother, for instance -”
“How is that a defense?” Sophie shouted at him.
(“It really isn't,” said Calcifer.
“You could pretend to side with me sometimes,” said Howl.)
“I know this thing is powerful. And I know it's frightened you both.” She looked at the black dome on the table, and tried not to notice if the darkness was starting to ooze around the edges, slipping out of its proper bounds and blurring the symbols meant to keep it contained. “But I'm the one who found it and brought it here, so it's my responsibility. Maybe I don't know enough to be properly intimidated by it, but all the deference and respect in the world hasn't gotten you two anywhere. You look a mess, and we're ruining all those flowers.”
Calcifer said, “It's not all on you, Sophie. Howl is the one who woke it up.”
“All right, all right,” said Howl, plainly hoping everyone had forgotten that.
“I was able to break your contract,” said Sophie, “so we know I'm not powerless in the face of demonkind. And now it's threatening my home. I have as much right to be here as anyone, and...” She pointed at the bowl of shadows. It seemed to respond, its surface rippling like a black opal under light. “And I demand a crack at that thing.”
“Sorry,” said Calcifer.
“What exactly do you mean to do?” said Howl, as if Calcifer's apology counted for both of them and he didn't need to repeat it. He was lounging back in his chair now with an insufferably skeptical look on his face. Sophie wondered why she did not spend more time throwing things at him.
“Calcifer, how did you say it happened? When this demon became a demon.”
Howl sighed enormously and rolled his eyes. “An encouraging first step.”
Sophie didn't look. “Be quiet, Howl.”
Calcifer, flickering low in thought, said, “It was pulled toward the earth, but it kept holding on to the heavens and didn't let go. Then, when it couldn't take the strain anymore, poof.”
Sophie frowned. “That's not how you explained it before. You said something about...”
Howl said, suddenly, “It turned inside-out. Sophie -”
“Then I know what to do,” said Sophie.
“Sophie,” said Howl again, as if he knew what she was going to propose, and hated it already. “At least try a hat block first.” It sounded like he'd guessed right.
“Oh, fine.” They still had a few millinery tools in the shed behind the flower shop, almost for nostalgia's sake. “Neither of you do anything strange. I mean it. I'll be back.” She heard Howl and Calcifer conferring between themselves as she went out back, into the half of the yard that was still the same she'd grown up in, but she decided not to bother about it. When she did come back, with three hat blocks of varying sizes so no one could accuse her of making this trial half-heartedly, they were still in the same positions she'd left them, except that Calcifer looked smaller and more worried.
“You can take that bowl off of it now,” she said, businesslike, setting the hat blocks side by side along the end of the table.
“We can expand it,” said Calcifer.
“If that makes you feel better.”
“The moving castle,” Howl mused, “shrouded in a dome of endless night. It has a certain flair to it. We'll look even less approachable, but any fool who does approach will have certain expectations.” He got up, absently, still thinking about the aesthetics of the whole thing, and began drawing chalk lines out from the circle around the void demon, along the floor, and partway up the walls. Calcifer bustled about after him, to the extent a small colorless flame in the middle of the air could bustle, checking his work. When this was done, they both stopped and looked at her.
She had expected Howl to be more cheerful, now that there was a plan and he wasn't on the hook. But he was just as ghastly pale as he'd been all along, and his mouth was drawn tight, and there was a crease between his brows. He didn't look like a man who'd had a weight off his mind at all. “You won't reconsider?” he said.
She shook her head. “No, Howl. I won't budge.”
He sighed. “Make sure you don't.”
Sophie checked the laces on her boots. Stay firm, she thought as she touched each knot, and let magic trickle all the way down to the thick rubber soles. Stand fast. Then she picked up one of the hat blocks and nodded to Howl.
He clicked his fingers.
The black wall over the demon came rushing out toward her, and then it was beyond her, and then she was standing in the dark. She was holding a hat block, and she could remember, by feel, where the other two were.
She could just see Calcifer hovering in the emptiness behind her, and barely made out Howl's profile by the light Calcifer cast. She nodded to them to show she was all right. She couldn't see anything else; it occurred to her that she might be doing something rash.
Oh, well. Surely you had to take initiative at some point. She held the hat block out in front of her and walked toward the table, where she remembered seeing the dense matte darkness of the demon. Before long she felt what she expected – something beginning to pull on her. But it pulled strongest on the block, the thing closest to it. Slowly as she advanced, she peeled her pinky fingers back from the surface of the block, loosening her grip. She had to let the demon get just enough of a hold on it, just enough that it would think it could beat her.
The demon reached out, and it was exactly the feeling of leaning over a well, staring down, not knowing if you would fall into water or into the center of the earth.
Nonsense, Sophie told herself. There ought to be a lot of water in there, it's already proved that.
But she'd been distracted long enough; the demon tugged on the hat block and it flew out of her hands. Good thing she'd brought three. She backed up to the end of the table and took the next block, this one a little larger. She just had to get the demon all wrapped around this, and then hold on. If she could take it by surprise, and pull back harder than it did, it should snap back on itself. If it was inside-out, it could be flipped rightside-in. Like a hat, when you were done stitching in the lining. The way you sewed almost anything, really.
This time she was more prepared for the pull. Rather than taking a finger off the block, she inched her fingertips slowly back along it, away from the weird clammy touch of the dead star. If she just held on by the back third – no, the balance was all wrong, it started to tip forward in her hands and the demon engulfed it. It zoomed away and vanished into the black.
Well, that was fine. That was why she had one more. She would get it right this time; three was a good number. She was starting to lose track of where the table was, but she backed off one last time, feeling her way along the edge to where she had left the last hat block. It should be right about here, she thought, reaching out, just as something hard and wooden went whooshing past into the demon's clutches, cracking sharply against her knuckles. She flinched back with a cry of dismay and shook out her smarting hand.
“Sophie?” said Howl, somewhere behind her. “What's wrong? I can't see you. Any light I conjure goes out in an instant -” And there was a rapid flicker behind her as he tried again anyway, and again, until Calcifer hissed at him to stop feeding the demon.
“It's all right,” Sophie called back. “I can handle it. You two stay where you are.” It was strange; listening dispassionately to their voices in the dark, she thought she sounded less afraid than Howl did. Even though she was closer to the demon, and she only had one thing left to throw at it.
Then again, if Howl hadn't suggested the hat blocks, she would have done exactly this from the start. She strode forward, empty-handed, right to the point where she'd felt the demon take hold before. And there she stopped.
Its cold empty feeling brushed her face. She felt as if she were standing on a cliff, a strong wind pushing her toward the pitiful little thing in the center of the room. Her braid flipped forward over her shoulder, and then her hair began to slide out of it, streaming out in front of her. She blew the strands away from her mouth and kept her feet planted. “Yes, grab on,” she told the demon. “You go right ahead.” It tugged at her sleeves. She started to tip forward at the waist, but she gritted her teeth and leaned back against the pressure. It was awful, pushing and pulling all ways at once. Her feet wanted to slide forward across the floor. She gripped at the insides of her boots with her toes and reminded herself of all the magic she'd just put into them, and stopped feeling the push as strongly.
“Grab whatever you can,” she said. “I don't mind. Eventually you'll have to get used to me. Because I'm staying right here.”
The demon gave another tug, as if she'd rattled it, and now it had something to prove. Her hair was all blowing loose and her skirt stuck to the backs of her legs, and she thought she must look quite silly if there had been any light.
But, almost, there was light, a sort of smothered bluish glow -
It was working, and the surprise almost broke Sophie's concentration. She almost lifted a foot to turn and look back at Howl and Calcifer, but stopped herself in time – if she wavered now, she'd never get this much ground back. It'd pull her in. She thought heavy thoughts. She imagined herself carrying bags of lead. She thought of carrying the whole castle, like Calcifer did every day. She faced the demon again, and as it made one last desperate pull, she said: “I'm not going anywhere.”
There was a pop. The darkness blew away from her in shreds.
Over the center of the table hovered something like a fire demon. Something like Calcifer, only dazed and weak and put together wrong, a jumble of red and orange flames at odd angles, in some places almost brown. Sometimes an eye was visible – only one eye, but it looked so confused and hurt, she wondered if it even knew all the trouble it had caused. It hadn't wanted to die, that was all. It hadn't wanted to leave home and take its chances with a contract like Calcifer or Miss Angorian had made. And it had ended up like this.
“Sophie,” Calcifer said warningly as she approached it, although he sounded terribly far away.
Sophie cupped her hands underneath the thing. Its one wild fiery eye rolled this way and that, like it was thinking about fleeing. “Take your time,” she said.
It looked at her. And then, with the sound of a candle blowing out, it was gone.
Sophie leaned against the table, suddenly lightheaded. “Where did it go?” she asked, for anyone who might feel inclined to answer.
“I don't feel it nearby,” said Calcifer. “I can go search.” He didn't sound as if he meant that; he sounded content to call this done with and sit in the grate doing nothing strenuous for the next few days. Sophie reminded herself that she did owe him that bacon.
“It's all right,” she said, and then some entirely different force had grabbed her hands and was spinning her around the room. “Howl,” she started to protest, because she was feeling a bit wobbly and didn't especially need the excitement – but he was beaming into her face with a sort of astonished joy, and his eyes were glinting greenly in that way that she loved.
Green. With a start she looked down at his sleeve. “I'd forgotten how loud that suit was,” she said, half dazed, and he laughed and spun her around again and kissed her.
“Don't think I've forgiven you,” he said, although he was grinning still. “You meddled around with plumbing and made a mess and got me yelled at.”
“And you almost fed the whole neighborhood to a monster from the sky.” She got a hand free and poked him in the chest. “Three neighborhoods.”
“And you turn around and go halfway down the thing's throat just to prove a point.”
“And you forged a letter from my family?” said Sophie, who was still not clear on that point.
“Yes, to stop you leaping in and doing something stupid. I thought it was noble of me.”
“Well, the stupid thing worked, so you know. I'd like to hear how you were planning to save us if you'd really sent me away.” She glared up at him. “Go on.”
“Sophie, you're a treasure,” he said, which meant he had no idea.
“Not to interrupt anything,” said Calcifer, “but just now the sun is setting over that lake Sophie invented.”
“By all means” - Howl threw an arm around her shoulders and started steering her toward the door, yellow blob down - “let's go admire the colors.”
Sophie let herself be hustled along, this once, but as the door shut behind them she said, “You still haven't told me what you have against plumbing.”
Calcifer said, “It's more what plumbers have against him.”
“She didn't ask you,” said Howl.
“It's a short story really,” said Calcifer, with obvious pleasure, “and it begins and ends with green slime down all the drains.”
“Traitor!” said Howl.
“It's not like that's surprising,” said Sophie. “Not to anyone who really knows you.” Though it was amusing to think about. She imagined serious men in coveralls coming to frown at him while he moped around over this or that romantic failure. But she tried not to laugh at him too hard, right now, because then he'd make a whole production of that, too.
Behind them the setting sun smeared the sky into oranges and purples, and above that a still cool blue, where the first evening stars were beginning to rise.