Meanwhile, having been surrounded by a sack, Dimity found herself being dragged down stairs which would have been much too high for her to have walked down. They felt like tree roots as she bounced across them, but the smell alone would have helped her guess she had been taken underground.
“You are mine now!” roared whoever was dragging the bag. “Mine!”
“What do you want with me?” Dimity demanded.
“Oh, every ogre has to have a princess around the place,” the voice roared. “For weeping, sweeping, mopping, moping, crying, begging for mercy: things like that.”
A door slammed. Now Dimity was being dragged along a bumpy floor. Another door went bang, and the bag was tossed down to roll along a floor that was even bumpier. After a mere second of rest, the sack was jerked away, sending her facefirst onto the floor again.
The floor was dirt, as well as dirty. Dimity tried to push herself up, but was shoved back down again. The hand that pushed her was dirty, too. She looked over her shoulder along the dirty arm attached to the hand to see who this hand belonged to.
He was big, much taller than any of the three knights, or the purple dragon. Round red eyes burned in his face, above a nose that went in instead of out. Dripping fangs went right through his lower lip. Hair draggled from the back of his head, down a body that was pale and soggy. All he wore was a kind of raggy brown kilt.
He was even uglier than Sir Ceee, though it was close.
“Who are you?” Dimity inquired, while pulling herself a little farther along the floor, away from him.
“Gelvander,” said the ogre, thumping his chest with one fist. “And your name is ‘Mine”. You’re nobody else’s damsel now, with ball gowns and a feather bed. Do you good to sleep on cold rocks.”
The rocks sounded like a good idea. Dimity snatched up a couple and, rolling, flung them at the ogre, just to see how he felt about this. Gelvander dodged them, and snatched the princess up by one wrist.
“I shall dress you in greasy garments and feed you bits of bats,” he said. His breath smelled of unwashed socks.
“No, thank you,” said the princess, kicking in the direction of his third chin.
Gelvander had expected that, too, and the kick missed. With one deft flick of the wrist, he tossed the princess into a cage that was standing open, and slammed the door, just missing her fingers.
“Wait there.”
Dimity thought that was a silly thing to say, as she had heard a lock click when the door banged shut. “I’ll be back to explain your damsel duties after I see if those princes have defeated my dragon. I expect they have. He’s always been worthless. I’ll be back to see if you’re any better in a bit, damsel Mine.” He slammed the door on his way out of the room. A clump of dripping mold landed on the top of the cage with a sploooorp.
Dimity wasted no time. She rose to her feet and gave the cage door a quick kick, just to see how difficult this was going to be. The door didn’t budge.
“Nice joke on the ogre, giving him a damsel who’s going to fall apart if she doesn’t meet a prince soon,” she said, hands on hips. “But he probably wouldn’t laugh and I don’t think it’s that funny myself. I’d better just escape.”
Anyway, the cage did not appeal to her. The ogre appeared to have been using it as a trash bin. And such trash! Bones, rotting turnips, spoiling peaches: what Dimity liked least of all were the rusty bits of armor and tarnished hair ribbons.
Putting her hands through the bars of the door, she felt around until she had hold of the lock. It was the turning kind, which needed a combination to open, but Dimity didn’t believe this particular ogre could remember very many numbers.
“This would be tons easier if you took better care of your things,” she scolded him. The lock was rusty, and hard to turn. Bits of rust kept scratching her hands. Maybe the ogre, who was bigger and perhaps got regular naps, was unbothered by such things.
She heard a click, which cheered her up. But then she heard the boom of a slamming door.
Gelvander smashed into the room and gave the door a good kick behind him. “Give a dragon a comfy cage for a hundred years and what happens? He turns on you! Helping a prince! I hope he gets his brains boiled!”
Spotting the cage, he gave this a kick which sent it sailing along the floor. Dimity rolled back into the trash inside the car, and hit her head on one of the bars of the back wall.
“Keep thinking,” she told herself. “Ah!” She shoved one hand into a pocket.
Gelvander kicked the cage again, so hard Dimity thought it might roll right over. She wondered if that would help.
“Oh, please, please, please, don’t hurt me!” she cried. She hoped that sounded convincing: she’d never pleaded for mercy before.
“Hurt you?” roared the ogre. “Hurt you? Twit! What do you think I dragged you all this way for? Of course I’m going to hurt you!”
Dimity was crouching in the garbage, ready to run if he kicked the cage hard enough to break it apart. But Gelvander reached down to open the door. She bounced forward the second that was open, throwing her anti-monster charms right into the ogre’s face. She used the other hand, and both feet, to scramble along the floor to the exit.
She got halfway there. Then a large hand caught one ankle and lifted her into the air.
Her little silver hammer charm was stuck to Gelvander’s forehead, which was growing a red spot around it, and her golden arrow was caught among some scraggly hairs. He didn’t look especially impressed. He didn’t look especially happy, either.
“I thought I told you you were Mine,” he snarled, and shook her until her pencils fell out of her pockets. “Don’t you know I’m Gelvander the Grand, monarch of this haunted forest and terror to all who know me?”
“No, you didn’t introduce yourself thoroughly,” said the princes, who was able to brush the floor with one hand and grab a couple of pencils back.
The ogre shook her again. “I have powers that scare bears in their lairs! Wolves howl like owls! I’ll teach you a couple of things, you damsel, you!”
Gelvander carried Dimity out into a dim hallway; she was glad she’d tied her hair back before starting this adventure, since he probably would have stepped on it every chance he got. She was hauled into a damp, foggy room filled with orange light.
He dropped her onto the floor so he could slam this door, too. “Didn’t your mother teach you how to enter a room properly?” the princess demanded. She had had kind of a headache to start with, and all this banging of doors wasn’t helping, especially as he had dropped her on her head.
“Silence, damsel!” roared the ogre. “Do you know where you are?”
“How would I know that?” Looking around the room, Dimity found it was filled with row upon row of rough wooden tables. On each of these in turn were rows upon rows of pots and vases and jars. Out of each container grew a number of plants, some beautiful, some horrible.
“This is where I grow special flowers and trees for my forest,” Gelvander informed her. “My forest grows and grows, and one day will cover the earth! Every prince and princess, every damsel and grandam, will have to live in it and do my bidding. And here are flowers for you, oh damsel Mine!”
With one hand, he snatched up a pot of flowers. With the other, he caught up the same ankle he’d clutched before, and dragged the princess behind him into a small room just off his plant laboratory. Of course, he slammed this door shut before dropping the pot of flowers and the princess onto a high, hard table.
“Don’t move,” he warned Dimity. He reached up to a shelf on the wall and brought down two bottles. One held liquid. The other held cotton, which he took out and jammed into his long dirty ears.
“These flowers,” he said, shouting because he could no longer hear himself, “Are my Poppies of Horrible Nightmares. Sleeping Poppies just send people to sleep. These poppies will make you sleep and bring up every worst nightmare you have ever dreamed, and make them worse. The last damsel couldn’t say anything but ‘don’t” for two months after she woke up.”
Dimity looked at the thick green leaves with new interest. Gelvander opened the second bottle and shook a few drops onto the plant. “Sing, my poppies!”
Tiny red flowers appeared among the leaves. Perfume, sickeningly sweet, filled the air. A song whispered from among the new blossoms.
“Louder!” said Gelvander, letting a few more drops of plant food fall from the bottle.
The flowers expanded to the size of Dimity’s fists. The sweet scent grew thicker, and the song was louder. Some petals seemed to be moving like lips.
“That’s it, my poppies,” said the ogre. “Put the princess to sleep. Make her dream dreams that scream.”
He turned to Dimity, who was crushing her fists against her ears. The song was doing nothing at all to soothe her headache.
“Still awake?” he demanded. He poured plant food from the bottle onto the blossoms. “Louder, you wicked weeds! Sing louder!”
The flowers grew now to the size of Dimity’s head. She could definitely see several mouths singing on each flower, each with a pair of squinched-up eyes above these. The song continued the increase the size of her headache, no matter how hard she mashed her hands against her ears.
“You should be twitching in troubled sleep by now!” Gelvander roared, “Terrified by vast vicious visions! What’s wrong? Are these wicked things singing at all?”
He ripped the cotton from his ears. Wide red eyes opened wider, and then shut tight. Gelvander sat down hard on the bumpy floor.
“But wh….” He started to say, and he stretched out, eyes closed, lips trembling.
Dimity watched the ogre for a while, to make sure this wasn’t a trick. Then she reached to the bottle sitting near her and upended it, pouring every lost drop inside onto the poppies.
“Keep singing,” she whispered. The flowers, doubling in size art once and showing an inclination to double again, seemed to nod. She saw teeth in the mouths of the blossoms.
Sliding forward, the princess dropped from the table and started to tiptoe toward the big door. She heard the ogre roar again.
She looked behind her. “Stay away!” the sleeping ogre cried out to whatever he was dreaming. “Stay away!”
“Fine with me,” said Dimity, and hurried out of the room.
Blogsy Babbles 