Charmain sighed and edged back indoors, until she could lean over the sink and throw the window open too. This helped enormously. Two lines of bubbles now sailed out of the house, faster than before, and made rainbows in the yard. The kitchen emptied rapidly. It was soon clear enough for Charmain to see that there were now four bags of laundry leaning beside the sink, in place of last night's two.
[309] "Bother that!" Charmain said. "Great-Uncle William, how do I get breakfast?"
[310] It was good to hear Great-Uncle William's voice among the bubbles. "Just tap the side of the fireplace and say 'Breakfast, please,' my dear."
[311] Charmain rushed hungrily over there at once. She gave the soapy paintwork there an impatient tap. "Breakfast, please."
[312] Then found she was having to back away from a floating tray, nudging at the glasses dangling on her chest. In the center of this tray was a sizzling plate of bacon and eggs, and crammed in around it were a coffee pot, a cup, a rack of toast, jam, butter, milk, a bowl of stewed plums, and cutlery in a starched napkin.
[313] "Oh, lovely!" she said, and before it could all get too soapy, she seized the tray and carried it away into the living room. To her surprise, there was no sign of the afternoon tea feast that she and Peter had had last night, and the trolley was neatly back in its corner; but the room was very musty and there were quite a few escaped bubbles coasting around in it. Charmain went on and out through the front door. She remembered that, while she was picking the pink and blue petals for the spell from The Boke of Palimpsest, she had noticed a garden table and bench outside the study window. She carried the tray round the corner of the house to look for it.
[314] She found it, in the place where the morning sun was strongest, and above it, over the pink-and-blue bush, the study window, even though there was no space in the house for the study to be. Magic is interesting, she thought as she set the tray on the table. Though the bushes around her were still dripping from the overnight rain, the bench and the table were dry. Charmain sat down and consumed the most enjoyable breakfast she had ever had, warm in the sun and feeling lazy, luxurious, and extremely grown up. The only thing missing is a chocolate croissant, like Dad makes, she thought, sitting back to sip her coffee. I must tell Great-Uncle William when he comes back.
[315] She had an idea that Great-Uncle William must have sat here often, enjoying his breakfast. The blooms on the hydrangeas around her were the finest in the garden, as if for his special pleasure. Each bush had more than one color of flowers. The one in front of her had white flowers and pale pink and mauve. The next one over started blue on the left side and shaded over into a deep sea green on the right. Charmain was feeling rather pleased that she had not allowed the kobold to cut these bushes down, when Peter stuck his head out through the study window. This rather destroyed Charmain's pleasure.
[316] "Hey, where did you get that breakfast?" Peter demanded.
[317] Charmain explained, and he put his head inside and went away. Charmain stayed where she was, expecting Peter to arrive any moment and hoping that he wouldn't. But nothing happened. After basking in the sun a while longer, Charmain thought she would find a book to read. She carried the tray indoors and through to the kitchen first, congratulating herself on being so tidy and efficient. Peter had obviously been there, because he had shut the back door, leaving only the window open, so that the room was once more filled with bubbles, floating gently toward the window and then streaming swiftly out of it. Among these bubbles loomed the great white shape of Waif. As Charmain arrived, Waif stretched out her huge frayed tail and wagged it sharply against the mantelpiece. A very small dog dish, piled with the amount of food suitable for a very small dog, landed among the bubbles by her enormous front paws.
Waif surveyed it sadly, lowered her vast head, and slurped up the dog food in one mouthful.
[318] "Oh, poor Waif!" Charmain said.
[319] Waif looked up and saw her. Her huge tail began to wag, thrumming against the fireplace. A new tiny dog dish appeared with each wag. In seconds, Waif was surrounded in little dog dishes, spread all over the floor.
[320] "Don't overdo it, Waif," Charmain said, edging among the dishes. She put the tray down on one of the two new laundry bags and said to Waif, "I'll be in the study looking for a book, if you want me," and edged her way back there. Waif ate busily and took no notice.
[321] Peter was in the study. His finished breakfast tray was on the floor beside the desk and Peter himself was in the chair, busily leafing through one of the large leather books from the row at the back of the desk. He looked far more respectable today. Now that his hair was dry, it was in neat tawny curls and he was wearing what was obviously his second suit, which was of good green tweed. It was crumpled from his knapsack and had one or two round wet patches on it where bubbles had burst, but Charmain found that she quite approved of it. As Charmain came in, he slammed the book shut with a sigh and pushed it back in its place. Charmain noticed that he had a piece of green string tied round his left thumb. So that's how he managed to get in here, she thought.
[322] "I can't make head or tail of these," he said to her. "It must be in here somewhere, but I can't find it."
[323] "What are you trying to find?" Charmain asked.
[324] "You said something last night about a lubbock," Peter said, "and I realized that I didn't really know what they are. I'm trying to look them up. Or do you know all about them?"
[325] "Not really—except that they're very frightening," Charmain confessed. "I'd like to find out about them too. How do we?"
[326] Peter pointed his thumb with the green string round it at the row of books. "These. I know these are a wizards' encyclopedia, but you have to know the sort of thing you're looking for before you can even find the right volume to look in."
[327] Charmain pulled her glasses up and bent to look at the books. Each one was called Res Magica in gold, with a number under that and then a title. Volume 3, she read, Giroloptica; Volume 5, Panacticon; then down at the other end, Volume 19, Advanced Seminal; Volume 27, Terrestrial Oneiromancy; Volume 28, Cosmic Oneiromancy. "I see your problem," she said.
[328] "I'm going through them in order now," Peter said. "I've just done Five. It's all spells I can't make head or tail of." He pulled out Volume 6, which was labeled simply Hex, and opened it. "You do the next one," he said.
[329] Charmain shrugged and pulled forward Volume 7. It was called, not very helpfully, Potentes. She took it over to the windowsill, where there was space and light, and opened it not far from the beginning. As soon as she did, she knew it was the one. "Demon: powerful and sometimes dangerous being," she read, "often confused with an Elemental qv," and leafing on a few pages, "Deviclass="underline" a creature of hell…." After that she was at "Elfgift: contains powers gifted by Elves qv for the safety of a realm…," and then, a wad of pages later, "Incubus: specialized Devil qv, inimical mostly to women…." She turned the pages over very slowly and carefully after that, and twenty pages on, she found it.
[330] "Lubbock. Got it!" she said.
[331] "Great!" Peter slammed Hex shut. "This one's nearly all diagrams. What does it say?" He came and leaned on the windowsill beside Charmain and they both read the entry.
[332] "LUBBOCK: a creature fortunately rare. A lubbock is a purple-hued insectile being of any size from grasshopper to larger than human. It is very dangerous, though nowadays luckily only to be encountered in wild or uninhabited areas.
A lubbock will attack any human it sees, either with its pincer-like appendages or its formidable proboscis. For ten months of the year, it will merely tear the human to pieces for food, but in the months of July and August it comes into its breeding season and is then especially dangerous; for in those months it will lie in wait for human travelers and, having caught one, it will lay its eggs in that human's body. The eggs hatch after twelve months, whereupon the first hatched will eat the rest, and this single new lubbock will then carve its way out of its human host. A male human will die. A female human will give birth in the normal fashion, and the offspring so born will be a LUBBOCKIN (see below). The human female then usually dies."