Dimity was discovering that there were many things in this castle which, if they were not as bad as the ogre, were quite bad enough.
Her plan had been to break the glass in the greenhouse windows and escape back into the forest. This plan was based on complete ignorance of ogre greenhouses. As the greenhouses was deep underground, the light to make plants grow came not from the sun but from round orange rocks which gave not only light but also a hideous odor. Several plants hissed at her as she made her way back through the greenhouse carrying one of these rocks, and she narrowly missed being bitten by a long, notched vine. She stepped out of the greenhouse sighing with relief and went along a corridor looking for a door or tunnel that would take her out of the deep, dark castle.
The job was not an easy one. The halls were cluttered with garbage, mushrooms grew along the baseboards and crumbling fungus dropped crackling from the picture moulding. Anything Dimity touched fell apart, or simply fell. She stumbled along in the smelly light of the orange rock for yards before she found any doors at all, and these looked as uninviting as the rest, with grime on the door panels and goo on the knobs.
Rusty hinges groaned as she opened this door and that, but none was the door she wanted. Many opened onto little closets where things which seemed all eyes and teeth leapt at her, snapping and howling. Luckily, these were guard animals, chained in their niches. Dimity had only to jump back and slam the door. Bits of fungus flopped to the floor when she did this. She got into the habit of running her fingers through her hir to keep it clean as she moved along.
Other doors opened onto dark, damp rooms where she found only more garbage, and more doors which in turn led to more hallways filled with doors. Making matters worse were the stairs which Gelvander had placed every which where, always in the darkest places where you wouldn’t expect them, or even notice them until it was too late. Dimity walked down and down and down one flight of stairs until she checked the wall and realized she wasn’t going anywhere. The stairs were set into a wheel that just kept going around.
“Why didn’t I ever think to ask someone who you get out of an ogre’s castle?” she demanded, backing away from the wheel and stumbling in a pile of loose gravel. “Too late now. I don’t suppose he has a library where I could look it up.”
The hallway ahead of her looked a lot like the hallway behind her. “Maybe there’s a secret passage,” she said, and started to bang on the wall.
She coughed and gasped as dirt and fungus tumbled around her. Then a part of the wall ahead of her fell with a crash. Running to check, she found this was actually a grimy mirror that had hung on the wall. “I wonder if it’s bad luck all the same if the mirror was cracked to start with. All his mirrors seem to be cracked. Maybe he looked at…well, moons and roses!”
A small door showed in the wall right where the mirror had hung. Dimity yanked it open, and coughed.
This room was filled with smoky fog. At the far end, she saw more doors. With one hand over her mouth and nose, she stepped inside, trying to avoid the mounds of mulch and debris.
Behind the first door she found only mushrooms, glowing with a light so bright it hurt her eyes. “Growmf,” said one mushroom, as she slammed the door. She had to cough again.
The second door opened onto a closet almost entirely filled with trash. She recognized a hairbrush in the pile, and reached for it. It wouldn’t be much of a weapon, but it was something.
“Yick,” she said. The hairbrush melted in her hand, smearing it with purple ooze. That hand stuck to the knob of the third door.
Shaking it free, she looked up to find she’d opened the door to another hallway. “Do these all look the same?” she demanded. “Or does going through these rooms just bring me back to the first one, so I’m walking in circles? He could have numbered the doors, or something, so I’d know. He had no consideration for people trying to escape!” She coughed again.
She tripped over a pile of rotting cabbage, and she grabbed the door with her sticky hand. She did not fall down, at least. With broken furniture and pottery scattered everywhere, the ogre’s castle was a terrible place to fall.
Her headache got worse every time she coughed, and she had fallen down twelve times since leaving the greenhouse, what with the uncertain light from the rock she carried, and the hidden stairs. Each time it had seemed harder to get up again than the last. Little white lights twinkled inside her eyes every time she hit the ground.
When she felt brave again, she let go of the doorframe and walked on. The first door she came to this time was locked.
“There’s something different,” she said. “That means I haven’t been down this way yet. Why didn’t I think to steal the ogre’s keys?”
She looked behind her. It would be a long walk back to the greenhouse even if she could remember which doors she’d opened. Looking back, she failed to see three little stairs. She tumbled headlong onto the floor.
“All these stairs go DOWN!” she said, hammering on the floor with her gooey fist. “I want to go up! Oh, org!”
Her fist and forearm were dripping with grimy mud. Raising her head and her lightstone, she saw that the floor before her was all muddy. She frowned.
“This is worse,” she said. “So there must be something good down this hall. Something he wanted to keep people away from.”
The mud was shallow where she started, but getting through the hall was long, hard work as the mud deepened. It was nearly to her knees after a while. She tried to remember whether she’d ever read about biting animals that lived in mud.
But the mud began to shoal, and it was not long before she was happy to be treading on plain dirt and garbage again. A few tattered leaves were stuck to her boots. When she lifted one to check these leaves, she set the other foot down on a rock.
“Ouch!” she cried, grabbing that foot. As she did so, she realized she had not only stepped out of the mud, but also out of her boots, which were in the deep mud somewhere behind her. She turned around, and her muddy stockings slid under her. She sat down hard.
“What is wrong with me?” She rubbed her forehead, smudging the dust on her face with mud and bits of leaf. I am so…so lame! I need a nap!”
She pushed herself onto her knees, understanding. That was exactly the problem: she needed sleep. The fairy had said only that she would not die until a year after the curse took effect; the fairy never said she wouldn’t get tired. What if she grew so tired that next time she fell, she couldn’t get up? She could be inches from a door to outside and too weak to walk through. She might lie there in front of the door for the rest of her year, and no one would ever know. She’d become just another piece of trash on Gelvander’s floor.
She glared at a stopped and broken clock in a heap of trash. “I am NOT going to die!” she shouted at it. “I am going to get a good night’s sleep!”
Dimity walked on her knees to the nearest doorknob, and clutched at it to pull herself to her feet. When the door came open before she expected, it didn’t matter that she sat down again. The smell would have knocked her over in any case.
This room was smokier and foggier than any she’d seen so far, but Dimity recognized familiar shapes. Squinting into the smoke, she whispered, “A kitchen!” Rising, she stepped inside, one hand holding her lightstone, the other holding her nose.
Water bubbled in a sink, but it was green, with white things floating in it. Dimity was not at all curious about what might be inside the cabinets and cupboards. What she wanted was a stove, but she didn’t find one.
“I could’ve climbed up the chimney,” she muttered. “Maybe he eats things raw. Maybe he lets the smoke go just anywhere.”
There were no doors in any of the walls, so she turned to go. “Do I have to walk back through the mud and everything find some…ow!”
She had stubbed her toes on something hard. Grabbing her foot, she got mud all over that hand and sat down again. Besides being painful, stubbing her toes reminded her of how this whole stupid adventure started.
“Sometimes I wish I never even HAD any toes!” She stood up again and kicked at what was in her way, naturally stubbing several more toes in the process. She found herself glaring at knobs and handles on a small metal door set low in the wall.
Her mouth shrank into a little circle. She forgot the stench of the kitchen and the pain in her feet.
They had little doors like this back home. When Cook or somebody spilled flour or sliced pears on the floor, they just opened the nearest little door and swept the spilth through it into a garbage pan set just below. A little back hall behind the kitchen walls made it possible for a servant to go around once a day and collect all the little pans into a bigger one to be taken to the trash outside.
Outside. Dimity put her lightstone through the door, glanced behind her to make sure no one was sneaking up, and crawled through. She hoped she wouldn’t fall into a big box of garbage. She didn’t think she would: all the garbage was in here.
There wasn’t room for her to reach back and shut the little door. The tunnel here was too tight for her to turn around; in fact, the only way for her to check behind her was to put her head between her arms and look back between her legs. Dirt stuck to her arms as she crawled, but it was only dirt, without mold or garbage. And the tunnel was slanting up, up, up!
She couldn’t see the door now, when she looked back, but she did see light ahead of her. She felt like singing. Then the light flickered.
Coming up toward the light, and found it came from another small door, set in the side of the tunnel. Dimity had nearly reached it when it opened, allowing a large beetle to poke its head through the doorway.
“Eegh!” said Dimity.
“Yick!” said the beetle. “Here comes another one!”
Dozens of big blue beetles spilled out of a lighted room, climbing up on one another and crowding toward Dimity’s face. Dimity stayed where she was. She was NOT going to back up into the kitchen again.
“A human!” snarled one beetle.
“They’re always coming to poke up our house just when we have it nice!” said another. “Why doesn’t Gelvander send his servants to bother the roaches for a change?”
“I’m not Gelvander’s servant” Dimity told them. “I’m a princess!”
The beetles squealed with laughter, rattling their pincers. The biggest one rose on its hind legs and trundled right up to Dimity’s nose. “Kiss me, kid! If I turn into a prince, I’ll split my kingdom with you!”
The beetles laughed some more, but one in the back shouted, “Kill her! We don’t want those things in our house!”
“I don’t want in your house!” Dimity shouted. “I just want to get out!”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said one of the beetles. “That’s what they all say.”
“Please,” she said, “Just tell me how to get out. I won’t bother you!”
“Well….” The biggest beetle turned around to tell the others, “Everybody get out of her way!”
The crowd bustled back through the little door, blocking out most of the light. The lead beetle said, “Now, Princess, just keep going straight ahead. When you come to a crossways, you turn left. That’ll take you to an opening. And if we see you coming back this way, we WILL kiss you, and in a way you won’t care for.”
He shook his pincers at her. “I won’t, Dimity promised. “Thank you so much.”
The beetle scudded back into the little doorway. Dimity crawled right past, not even looking into the house lest the beetles change their minds.
The tunnel was smaller here. Dimity pulled herself forward on elbows and knees until she reached the cross tunnel the beetle had told her about. She had to twist sideways ad nearly turn upside-down to get around the corner.
But once she was completely into the left fork of the tunnel, the walls were farther apart, and the whole passage grew larger. Dimity crawled faster and faster. Too fast: she pitched forward, having forgotten to be careful about where she was headed, and landed on solid rock.
“Quick now!” someone shouted behind her. “Close the tunnel! Close the tunnel!”
She looked up to find beetles kicking dirt into the opening she’d fallen through. One beetle scrambled down onto the rock, grabbed the lightstone from where it had fallen, and scrambled back up with it.
“No no!” she shouted. She could reach the opening, and grabbed at the pile of dirt.
Something pinched her fingers. “No no!” she said again. “Don’t leave me here in the…in the dark?”
She stopped digging and looked around her. The cave she was in now was dark, but it wasn’t ALL dark. A tiny light showed in the ceiling. Just as the beetles had said, there WAS an opening. If it hadn’t been in the ceiling, way out of reach, it was probably big enough for her to fit one finger through. But it was an opening, and Dimity was sure that light was sunlight.
“All right.” She brushed the dirt from her clothes. “All right. You didn’t lie, anyhow. I’ll show YOU!”
She walked slowly around the cave, peering into the shadows to make sure she was alone. The walls were rocky, and the shadows were uneven. Finding some spot big enough for her hands, and then her feet, she started to pull herself up.
The higher she went, the slower she went. More dirt and less solid rock was ready in the higher places. She found herself pulling her way up by grabbing tree roots, which made her hopeful. She was panting for breath, and nearly slipped loose, but never quite fell. Finally, she was bumping her head on the ceiling of the cave. Bracing her feet and knees, clinging to a rough root, she reached one hand up toward the little opening, and scratched at it.
Dirt fell in her face. So did more sunshine.
In a hurry, she had not noticed any sounds except those of dirt and little rocks falling to the floor. Now she heard little thuds, as if something, surely a shovel, was digging from the other side. A whole chunk of the ceiling broke away, sending a shower of dirt around her, part of it down her collar. Dimity started to yell, but had to stop and cough. She felt both hands start to slip.
She grabbed the first thing she saw above her. Dirty hands reached down to grab hers. Then, in the blinding patch of sunlight, the face of an ogre scowled down at her.
Dimity stared, and no strength to take any more. She fainted.
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