Mixed Magics: Four Tales of Chrestomanci by Diana Wynne Jones Page A

left it at the end of the half hour before.”
    “Obviously,” said Carol. “People must have told you: I can control my dreams. And I do my best work in regular half-hour stints. I wish you wouldn’t keep interrupting when I’m doing my best to tell you!”
    Chrestomanci turned his face from the sea and looked at her. He seemed surprised. “My dear young lady, you are not doing your best to tell me. I do read the papers, you know. You are giving me precisely the same flannel you gave the Times and the Croydon Gazette and the People’s Monthly and doubtless poor Mindelbaum as well. You are telling me your dreams come unbidden—but you have one for half an hour every day—and that you never know where you’ll go in them or what will happen—but you can control your dreams perfectly. That can’t all be true, can it?”
    Carol slid the bangles up and down her arm and tried to keep her temper. It was difficult to do when the sun was so hot and the noise coming from that pool so loud. She thought seriously of demoting Melville and making Chrestomanci into the villain in her next dream—until she remembered that there might not be a next dream unless Chrestomanci helped her. “I don’t understand,” she said.
    “Let’s talk about the dreams themselves then,” said Chrestomanci. He pointed down the terrace steps to the blue, blue water of the pool. “There you see my ward, Janet. She’s the fair-haired girl the others are just pushing off the diving board. She loves your dreams. She has all ninety-nine of them, though I am afraid Julia and the boys are very contemptuous about it. They say your dreams are slush and all exactly the same.”
    Naturally Carol was deeply hurt that anyone could call her dreams slush, but she knew better than to say so. She smiled graciously down at the large splash that was all she could see of Janet.
    “Janet is hoping to meet you later,” said Chrestomanci. Carol’s smile broadened. She loved meeting admirers. “When I heard you were coming,” Chrestomanci said, “I borrowed Janet’s latest Omnibus Pillow.” Carol’s smile narrowed a bit. Chrestomanci did not seem the kind of person who would enjoy her dreams at all.
    “I enjoyed it rather,” Chrestomanci confessed. Carol’s smile widened. Well! “But Julia and the boys are right, you know,” Chrestomanci went on. “Your happy endings are pretty slushy, and the same sort of things happen in all of them.” Carol’s smile narrowed again distinctly at this. “But they’re terribly lively,” Chrestomanci said. “There’s so much action and so many people. I like all those crowds—what your blurbs call your ‘cast of thousands’—but I must confess I don’t find your settings very convincing. That Arabian setting in the ninety-sixth dream was awful, even making allowances for how young you are. On the other hand, your fairground in the latest dream seemed to show the makings of a real gift.”
    By this time Carol’s smile was going broad and narrow like the streets of Dublin’s Fair City. She was almost caught off guard when Chrestomanci said, “And though you never appear in your dreams yourself, a number of characters do come in over and over again—in various disguises, of course. I make it about five or six main actors in all.”
    This was getting far too close to the things Carol never told even Mama. Luckily some reporters had made the same observation. “This is the way dreams are,” she said. “And I am only the Seeing Eye.”
    “As you told the Manchester Guardian ,” Chrestomanci agreed, “if that is what they meant by ‘Oosung Oyo.’ I see that must have been a misprint now.” He was looking very vague, to Carol’s relief, and did not seem to notice her dismay. “Now,” he said, “I suggest the time has come for you to go to sleep and let me see what happened to send your hundredth dream so wrong that you refused to record it.”
    “But nothing went wrong!” Carol protested. “I