Unexpected Magic by Diana Wynne Jones Page A

cottage is still standing empty except for peacocks, but some of the peacocks seem to have lost interest and wandered away. Since then there have been outbreaks of peacocks here and there all around the edges of London. This is because Daniel Emanuel has forgotten about them. He has started school now and has other things to think of.

The Master
    T his is the trouble with being a newly qualified vet. The call came at 5:50 A.M . I thought it was a man’s voice, though it was high for a man, and I didn’t quite catch the name—Harry Sanovit? Harrison Ovett? Anyway, he said it was urgent.
    Accordingly, I found myself on the edge of a plain, facing a dark fir forest. It was about midmorning. The fir trees stood dark and evenly spaced, exhaling their crackling gummy scent, with vistas of trodden-looking pine needles beneath them. A wolf-wood, I thought. I was sure that thought was right. The spacing of the trees was so regular that it suggested an artificial pinewood in the zoo, and there was a kind of humming, far down at the edges of the senses, as if machinery was at work sustaining a man-made environment here. The division between trees and plain was so sharp that I had some doubts that I would be able to enter the wood.
    But I stepped inside with no difficulty. Under the trees it was cooler, more strongly scented, and full of an odd kind of depression, which made me sure that there was some sort of danger here. I walked on the carpet of needles cautiously, relaxed but intensely afraid. There seemed to be some kind of path winding between the straight boles, and I followed it into the heart of the wood. After a few turns, flies buzzed around something just off the path. Danger ! pricked out all over my skin like sweat, but I went and looked all the same.
    It was a young woman about my own age. From the flies and the freshness, I would have said she had been killed only hours ago. Her throat had been torn out. The expression on her half-averted face was of sheer terror. She had glorious red hair and was wearing what looked, improbably, to be evening dress.
    I backed away, swallowing. As I backed, something came up beside me. I whirled around with a croak of terror.
    â€œNo need to fear,” he said. “I am only the fool.”
    He was very tall and thin and ungainly. His feet were in big laced boots, jigging a silent, ingratiating dance on the pine needles, and the rest of his clothes were a dull brown and close-fitting. His huge hands came out to me placatingly. “I am Egbert,” he said. “You may call me Eggs. You will take no harm if you stay with me.” His eyes slid off mine apologetically, round and blue-gray. He grinned all over his small, inane face. Under his close crop of straw-fair hair, his face was indeed that of a near idiot. He did not seem to notice the woman’s corpse at all, even though he seemed to know I was full of horror.
    â€œWhat’s going on here?” I asked him helplessly. “I’m a vet not a—not a—mortician. What animal needs me?”
    He smiled seraphically at nothing over my left shoulder. “I am only Eggs, Lady. I don’t not know nothing. What you need to do is call the Master. Then you will know.”
    â€œSo where is the Master?” I said.
    He looked baffled by this question. “Hereabouts,” he suggested. He gave another beguiling smile, over my right shoulder this time, panting slightly. “He will come if you call him right. Will I show you the house, Lady? There are rare sights there.”
    â€œYes, if you like,” I said. Anything to get away from whatever had killed that girl. Besides, I trusted him somehow. When he had said I would take no harm if I was with him, it had been said in a way I believed.
    He turned and cavorted up the path ahead of me, skipping soundlessly on his great feet, waving great, gangling arms, clumsily tripping over a tree root and, even more clumsily, just saving himself.