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Carol Oneir was the world’s youngest best-selling dreamer. The newspapers called her the Infant Genius. Her photograph appeared regularly in all the daily papers and monthly magazines, either sitting alone in an armchair looking soulful or nestling lovingly against her mama.

Mama was very proud of Carol. So were Carol’s publishers, Wizard Reverie Ltd. They marketed her product in big bright blue genie jars tied with cherry-colored satin ribbon; but you could also buy the Carol Oneir Omnibus Pillow, bright pink and heart-shaped, Carol’s Dreamie Comics, the Carol Oneir Dream Hatband, the Carol Oneir Charm Bracelet, and half a hundred other spin-offs.

Carol had discovered at the age of seven that she was one of those lucky people who can control what they dream about, and then loosen the dream in their minds so that a competent wizard can spin it off and bottle it for other people to enjoy. Carol loved dreaming. She had made no less than ninety-nine full-length dreams. She loved all the attention she got and all the expensive things her mama was able to buy for her. So it was a terrible blow to her when she lay down one night to start dreaming her hundredth dream and nothing happened at all.

It was a terrible blow to Mama, too, who had just ordered a champagne breakfast to celebrate Carol’s Dream Century. Wizard Reverie Ltd. was just as upset as Mama. Its nice Mr. Ploys got up in the middle of the night and came down to Surrey by the milk train. He soothed Mama, and he soothed Carol, and he persuaded Carol to lie down and try to dream again. But Carol still could not dream. She tried every day for the following week, but she had no dreams at all, not even the kinds of dreams ordinary people have.

The only person who took it calmly was Dad. He went fishing as soon as the crisis started. Mr. Ploys and Mama took Carol to all the best doctors, in case Carol was overtired or ill. But she wasn’t. So Mama took Carol up to Harley Street to consult Herman Mindelbaum, the famous mind wizard. But Mr. Mindelbaum could find nothing wrong either. He said Carol’s mind was in perfect order and that her self-confidence was rather surprisingly high, considering.

In the car going home, Mama wept and Carol sobbed. Mr. Ploys said frantically, “Whatever happens, we mustn’t let a hint of this get to the newspapers!” But of course it was too late. Next day the papers all had headlines saying CAROL ONEIR SEES MIND SPECIALIST and IS CAROL ALL DREAMED OUT? Mama burst into tears again, and Carol could not eat any breakfast.

Dad came home from fishing later that day to find reporters sitting in rows on the front steps. He prodded his way politely through them with his fishing rod, saying, “There is nothing to get excited about. My daughter is just very tired, and we’re taking her to Switzerland for a rest.” When he finally got indoors, he said, “We’re in luck. I’ve managed to arrange for Carol to see an expert.”

“Don’t be silly, dear. We saw Mr. Mindelbaum yesterday,” Mama sobbed.

“I know, dear. But I said an expert, not a specialist,” said Dad. “You see, I used to be at school with Chrestomanci—once, long ago, when we were both younger than Carol. In fact, he lost his first life because I hit him around the head with a cricket bat. Now, of course, being a nine-lifed enchanter, he’s a great deal more important than Carol is, and I had a lot of trouble getting hold of him. I was afraid he wouldn’t want to remember me, but he did. He said he’d see Carol. The snag is, he’s on holiday in the South of France, and he doesn’t want the resort filling with newspapermen—”

“I’ll see to all that,” Mr. Ploys cried joyfully. “Chrestomanci! Mr. Oneir, I’m awed. I’m struck dumb!”

Two days later Carol and her parents and Mr. Ploys boarded first-class sleepers in Calais on the Swiss Orient Express. The reporters boarded it, too, in second-class sleepers and third-class seats, and they were joined by French and German reporters standing in the corridors. The crowded train rattled away through France until, in the middle of the night, it came to Strasbourg, where a lot of shunting always went on. Carol’s sleeper, with Carol and her parents asleep in it, was shunted off and hitched to the back of the Riviera Golden Arrow, and the Swiss Orient went on to Zurich without her.

Mr. Ploys went to Switzerland with it. He told Carol that, although he was really a dream wizard, he had skill enough to keep the reporters thinking Carol was still on the train. “If Chrestomanci wants to be private,” he said, “it could cost me my job if I let one of these near him.”

By the time the reporters discovered the deception, Carol and her parents had arrived in the seaside resort of Teignes on the French Riviera. There Dad—not without one or two wistful looks at the casino—unpacked his rods and went fishing. Mama and Carol took a horse-drawn cab up the hill to the private villa where Chrestomanci was staying.

They dressed in their best for the appointment. Neither of them had met anyone before who was more important than Carol. Carol wore ruched blue satin the same color as her genie bottles, with no less than three hand-embroidered lace petticoats underneath it. She had on matching button boots and a blue ribbon in her carefully curled hair, and she carried a blue satin parasol. She also wore her diamond heart pendant, her brooch that said CAROL in diamonds, her two sapphire bracelets, and all six of her gold bangles. Her blue satin bag had diamond clasps in the shape of two C’s. Mama was even more magnificent in a cherry-colored Paris gown, a pink hat, and all her emeralds.

They were shown up to a terrace by a rather plain lady who, as Mama whispered to Carol behind her fan, was really rather overdressed for a servant. Carol envied Mama her fan.

There were so many stairs to the terrace that she was too hot to speak when they got there. She let Mama exclaim at the wonderful view. You could see the sea and the beach and look into the streets of Teignes from here. As Mama said, the casino looked charming and the golf links so peaceful. On the other side, the villa had its own private swimming pool. This was full of splashing, screaming children, and to Carol’s mind, it rather spoiled the view.

Chrestomanci was sitting reading in a deck chair. He looked up and blinked a little as they came. Then he seemed to remember who they were and stood up with great politeness to shake hands. He was wearing a beautifully tailored natural silk suit. Carol saw at a glance that it had cost at least as much as Mama’s Paris gown. But her first thought on seeing Chrestomanci was, Oh, my! He’s twice as good-looking as Francis! She pushed that thought down quickly and trod it under. It belonged to the thoughts she never even told Mama. But it meant that she rather despised Chrestomanci for being quite so tall and for having hair so black and such flashing dark eyes. She knew he was going to be no more help than Mr. Mindelbaum, and Mr. Mindelbaum had reminded her of Melville.

Mama meanwhile was holding Chrestomanci’s hand between both of hers and saying, “Oh, sir! This is so good of you to interrupt your holiday on our account! But when even Mr. Mindelbaum couldn’t find out what’s stopping her dreams—”

“Not at all,” Chrestomanci said, wrestling for his hand rather. “To be frank, I was intrigued by a case even Mindelbaum couldn’t fathom.” He signaled to the serving lady who had brought them to the terrace. “Millie, do you think you could take Mrs. . . . er . . . O’Dear downstairs while I talk to Carol?”

“There’s no need for that, sir,” Mama said, smiling. “I always go everywhere with my darling. Carol knows I’ll sit quite quietly and not interrupt.”

“No wonder Mindelbaum got nowhere,” Chrestomanci murmured.

Then—Carol, who prided herself on being very observant, was never quite sure how it happened—Mama was suddenly not on the terrace anymore. Carol herself was sitting in a deck chair facing Chrestomanci in his deck chair, listening to Mama’s voice floating up from below somewhere. “I never let Carol go anywhere alone. She’s my one ewe lamb. . . .”

Chrestomanci leaned back comfortably and crossed his elegant legs. “Now,” he said, “be kind enough to tell me exactly what you do when you make a dream.”

This was something Carol had done hundreds of times by now. She smiled graciously and began, “I get a feeling in my head first, which means a dream is ready to happen. Dreams come when they will, you know, and there is no stopping them or putting them off. So I tell Mama, and we go up to my boudoir, where she helps me to get settled on the special couch Mr. Ploys had made for me. Then Mama sets the spin-off spool turning and tiptoes away, and I drop off to sleep to the sound of it gently humming and whirling. Then the dream takes me. . . .”

Chrestomanci did not take notes like Mr. Mindelbaum and the reporters. He did not nod at her encouragingly the way Mr. Mindelbaum had. He simply stared vaguely out to sea. Carol thought that the least he might do was to tell those children in the pool to keep quiet. The screaming and splashing were so loud that she almost had to shout. Carol thought he was being very inconsiderate, but she kept on.

“I have learned not to be frightened and to go where the dream takes me. It is like a voyage of discovery—”

“When is this?” Chrestomanci interrupted in an offhand sort of way. “Does this dreaming happen at night?”

“It can happen at any time,” said Carol. “If a dream is ready, I can go to my couch and sleep during the day.”

“How very useful,” murmured Chrestomanci. “So you can put up your hand in a dull lesson and say, ‘Please can I be excused to go and dream?’ Do they let you go home?”

“I ought to have explained,” Carol said, keeping her dignity with an effort, “that Mama arranges lessons for me at home so that I can dream anytime I need to. It’s like a voyage of discovery, sometimes in caves underground, sometimes in palaces in the clouds—”

“Yes. And how long do you dream for? Six hours? Ten minutes?” Chrestomanci interrupted again.

“About half an hour,” said Carol. “Sometimes in the clouds or maybe in the southern seas. I never know where I will go or whom I will meet on my journey—”

“Do you finish a whole dream in half an hour?” Chrestomanci interrupted yet again.

“Of course not. Some of my dreams last for more than three hours,” Carol said. “As for the people I meet, they are strange and wonderful—”

“So you dream in half-hour stretches,” said Chrestomanci. “And I suppose you have to take a dream up again exactly where you 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 just didn’t dream.”

“So you say,” said Chrestomanci. “Close your eyes. Feel free to snore if you wish.”

“But—but I can’t just go to sleep in the middle of a visit!” Carol said. “And—and those children in the pool are making far too much noise.”

Chrestomanci put one hand casually down to the paving of the terrace. Carol saw his arm go up as if he were pulling something up out of the stones. The terrace went quiet. She could see the children splashing below, and their mouths opening and shutting, but not a sound came to her ears. “Have you run out of excuses now?” he asked.

“They’re not excuses. And how are you going to know whether I dream or not without a proper dream spool and a qualified dream wizard to read it?” Carol demanded.

“Oh, I daresay I can manage quite well without,” Chrestomanci remarked. Though he said it in a mild, sleepy sort of way, Carol suddenly remembered that he was a nine-lifed enchanter and more important than she was. She supposed he thought he was powerful enough on his own. Well, let him. She would humor him. Carol arranged her blue parasol to keep some of the sun off her and settled back in her deck chair, knowing nothing was going to happen. . .

 

. . . And she was at the fairground, where her ninety-ninth dream had left off. In front of her was a wide space of muddy grass, covered with bits of paper and other rubbish. She could see the Big Wheel in the distance behind some flapping tents and half-dismantled stalls and another tall thing that seemed to be most of the Helter-Skelter tower. The place seemed quite deserted.

“Well, really!” Carol said. “They still haven’t cleared anything up! What are Martha and Paul thinking of?”

As soon as she said that, she clapped her hands guiltily to her mouth and whirled around to make sure that Chrestomanci had not come stalking up behind her. But there was nothing behind her but more dreary, litter-covered grass. Good! Carol thought. I knew nobody could come behind the scenes in a Carol Oneir private dream unless I let them! She relaxed. She was boss here. This was part of the things she never even told Mama, though, for a moment, back on the terrace at Teignes, she had been afraid that Chrestomanci was on to her.

The fact was, as Chrestomanci had noticed, Carol did only have six main characters working for her. There was Francis, tall and fair and handsome, with a beautiful baritone voice, who did all the heroes. He always ended up marrying the gentle but spirited Lucy, who was fair, too, and very pretty. Then there was Melville, who was thin and dark, with an evil white face, who did all the villains. Melville was so good at being a Baddie that Carol often used him several times in one dream. But he was always the gentleman, which was why polite Mr. Mindelbaum had reminded Carol of Melville.

The other three were Bimbo, who was oldish and who did all the Wise Old Men, Pathetic Cripples, and Weak Tyrants; Martha, who was the Older Woman and did the Aunts, Mothers, and Wicked Queens, either straight wicked or with Hearts of Gold; and Paul, who was small and boyish-looking. Paul’s specialty was the Faithful Boy Assistant, though he did Second Baddie, too, and tended to get killed quite often in both kinds of parts. Paul and Martha, since they never had very big parts, were supposed to see that the cast of thousands cleared everything up between dreams.

Except that they hadn’t this time.

“Paul!” Carol shouted. “Martha! Where’s my cast of thousands?”

Nothing happened. Her voice just went rolling away into emptiness.

“Very well!” Carol called out. “I shall come and find you, and you won’t like it when I do!”

She set off, picking her way disgustedly through the rubbish, toward those flapping tents. It really was too bad of them, she thought, to let her down like this, when she had gone to all the trouble of making them up and giving them a hundred disguises, and had made them as famous as she was herself, in a way. As Carol thought this, her bare foot came down in a melted ice cream. She jumped back with a shudder and found she was, for some reason, wearing a bathing suit like the children in Chrestomanci’s pool.

“Oh, really!” she said crossly. She remembered now that her other attempt at a hundredth dream had gone like this, too, up to the point where she had scrapped it. Anyone would think this was the kind of dream ordinary people had. It wouldn’t even make a decent Hatband dream. This time, with a sternly controlled effort, she made herself wear her blue button boots and the blue dress with all its petticoats underneath. It was hotter like that, but it showed that she was in charge. And she marched on, until she came to the flapping tents.

Here it nearly came like a common dream again. Carol walked up and down among empty tents and collapsed stalls, under the great framework of the Big Wheel and repeatedly past the topless Helter-Skelter tower, past roundabout after empty roundabout, without seeing a soul.

It was only her stern annoyance that kept her going until she did see someone, and then she nearly went straight past him, thinking he was one of the dummies from the Waxworks Show. He was sitting on a box beside a painted organ from a roundabout, staring. Perhaps some of the cast of thousands did work as dummies when necessary, Carol thought. She had no idea really. But this one was fair, so that meant he was a Goodie and generally worked with Francis.

“Hey, you!” she said. “Where’s Francis?”

He gave her a dull, unfinished sort of look. “Rhubarb,” he said. “Abracadabra.”

“Yes, but you’re not doing a crowd scene now,” Carol told him. “I want to know where my Main Characters are.”

The man pointed vaguely beyond the Big Wheel. “In their quarters,” he said. “Committee meeting.” So Carol set off that way. She had barely gone two steps when the man called out from behind her. “Hey, you! Say thank you!”

How rude! thought Carol. She turned and glared at him. He was now drinking out of a very strong-smelling green bottle. “You’re drunk!” she said. “Where did you get that? I don’t allow real drink in my dreams.”

“Name’s Norman,” said the man. “Drowning sorrows.”

Carol saw that she was not going to get any sense out of him. So she said, “Thank you,” to stop him shouting after her again and went the way he had pointed. It led her among a huddle of gypsy caravans. Since these all had a blurred cardboard sort of look, Carol went straight past them, knowing they must belong to the cast of thousands. She knew the caravan she wanted would look properly clear and real. And it did. It was more like a tarry black shed on wheels than a caravan, but there was real black smoke pouring out of its rusty iron chimney.

Carol sniffed it. “Funny. It smells almost like toffee!” But she decided not to give her people any further warning. She marched up the black wooden ladder to the door and flung the door open.

Smoke and heat and the smell of drink and toffee rolled out at her. Her people were all inside, but instead of turning politely to receive their orders as they usually did, none of them at first took any notice of her at all. Francis was sitting at the table playing cards with Martha, Paul, and Bimbo by the light of candles stuck in green bottles. Glasses of strong-smelling drink stood at each of their elbows, but most of the drink smell, to Carol’s horror, was coming from the bottle Lucy was drinking out of. Beautiful, gentle Lucy was sitting on a bunk at the back, giggling and nursing a green bottle. As far as Carol could see in the poor light, Lucy’s face looked like a gnome’s, and her hair was what Mama would describe as “in tetters.” Melville was cooking at the stove near the door. Carol was ashamed to look at him. He was wearing a grubby white apron and smiling a dreamy smile as he stirred his saucepan. Anything less villainous was hard to imagine.

“And just what,” said Carol, “do you think you’re all doing?”

At that, Francis turned around enough for her to see that he had not shaved for days. “Shut that blesh door, can’ you!” he said irritably. It was possible he spoke that way because he had a large cigar between his teeth, but Carol feared it was more likely to be because Francis was drunk.

She shut the door and stood in front of it with her arms folded. “I want an explanation,” she said. “I’m waiting.”

Paul slapped down his cards and briskly pulled a pile of money toward himself. Then he took the cigar out of his boyish mouth to say, “And you can go on waiting, unless you’ve come to negotiate at last. We’re on strike.”

“On strike!” said Carol.

“On strike,” Paul said. “All of us. I brought the cast of thousands out straight after the last dream. We want better working conditions and a bigger slice of the cake.” He gave Carol a challenging and not very pleasant grin and put the cigar back in his mouth—a mouth that was not so boyish, now Carol looked at it closely. Paul was older than she had realized, with little cynical lines all over his face.

“Paul’s our shop steward,” Martha said. Martha, to Carol’s surprise, was quite young, with reddish hair and a sulky, righteous look. Her voice had a bit of a whine to it when she went on. “We have our rights, you know. The conditions the cast of thousands have to live in are appalling, and it’s one dream straight after another and no free time at all for any of us. And it’s not as if we get job satisfaction either. The rotten parts Paul and I do!”

“Measly walk-ons,” Paul said, busy dealing out cards. “One of the things we’re protesting is being killed almost every dream. The cast of thousands gets gunned down in every final scene, and not only do they get no compensation, they have to get straight up and fight all through the next dream.”

“ ’nd never allowsh ush any dthrink,” Bimbo put in. Carol could see he was very drunk. His nose was purple with it, and his white hair looked damp. “Got shick of colored water. Had to shteal fruit from Enshanted Garden dream to make firsht wine. Make whishky now. It’sh better.”

“It’s not as if you paid us anything,” Martha whined. “We have to take what reward we can get for our services.”

“Then where did you get all that money?” Carol demanded, pointing to the large heap in front of Paul.

“The Arabian treasure scene and so forth,” said Paul. “Pirates’ hoard. Most of it’s only painted paper.”

Francis suddenly said, in a loud, slurry voice, “I want recognition. I’ve been ninety-nine different heroes, but not a word of credit goes on any pillow or jar.” He banged the table. “Exploitation! That’s what it is!”

“Yes, we all want our names on the next dream,” Paul said. “Melville, give her our list of complaints, will you?”

“Melville’s our Strike Committee secretary,” said Martha.

Francis banged the table again and shouted, “Melville!” Then everyone else shouted, “MELVILLE!” until Melville finally turned around from the stove holding his saucepan in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other.

“I didn’t want to spoil my fudge,” Melville said apologetically. He handed the paper to Carol. “There, my dear. This wasn’t my idea, but I didn’t wish to let the others down.”

Carol, by this time, was backed against the door, more or less in tears. This dream seemed to be a nightmare. “Lucy!” she called out desperately. “Lucy, are you in this, too?”

“Don’t you disturb her,” said Martha, whom Carol was beginning to dislike very much. “Lucy’s suffered enough. She’s had her fill of parts that make her a plaything and property of men. Haven’t you, love?” she called to Lucy.

Lucy looked up. “Nobody understands,” she said, staring mournfully at the wall. “I hate Francis. And I always have to marry him and live hap-hic-hallipy ever after.”

This, not surprisingly, annoyed Francis. “And I hate you!” he bawled, jumping up as he shouted. The table went over with a crash, and the glasses, money, cards, and candles went with it. In the terrifying dark scramble that followed, the door somehow burst open behind Carol, and she got herself out through it as fast as she could. . .

 

. . . And found herself sitting on a deck chair on the sunny terrace again. She was holding a paper in one hand, and her parasol was rolling by her feet. To her annoyance, someone had spilled a long, sticky trickle of what seemed to be fudge all down her blue dress.

“Tonino! Vieni qui!” somebody called.

Carol looked up to find Chrestomanci trying to put together a broken deck chair in the midst of a crowd of people who were all pushing past him and hurrying away down the terrace steps. Carol could not think who the people were at first, until she caught a glimpse of Francis among them, and then Lucy, who had one hand clutched around her bottle and the other in the hand of Norman, the man Carol had first met sitting on a box. The rest of them must be the cast of thousands, she supposed. She was still trying to imagine what had happened when Chrestomanci dropped the broken deck chair and stopped the very last person to cross the terrace.

“Excuse me, sir,” Chrestomanci said. “Would you mind explaining a few things before you leave?”

It was Melville, still in his cook’s apron, waving smoke away from his saucepan with one long, villainous hand and peering down at his fudge with a very doleful look on his long, villainous face. “I think it’s spoiled,” he said. “You want to know what happened? Well, I think the cast of thousands started it, around the time Lucy fell in love with Norman, so it may have been Norman’s doing to begin with. Anyway, they began complaining that they never got a chance to be real people, and Paul heard them. Paul is very ambitious, you know, and he knew, as we all did, that Francis isn’t really cut out to be a hero—”

“No, indeed. He has a weak chin,” Chrestomanci agreed.

Carol gasped and was just about to make a protest—which would have been a rather tearful one at that moment—when she recalled that Francis’s bristly chin had indeed looked rather small and wobbly under that cigar.

“Oh, you shouldn’t judge by chins,” said Melville. “Look at mine—and I’m no more a villain than Francis is a hero. But Francis has his petulant side, and Paul played on that, with the help of Bimbo and his whisky, and Lucy was with Paul anyway because she hated being forced to wear frilly dresses and simper at Francis. She and Norman want to take up farming. And Martha, who is a very frivolous girl to my mind, came in with them because she cannot abide having to clear up the scenery at such short notice. So then they all came to me.”

“And you held out?” asked Chrestomanci.

“All through The Cripple of Monte Christo and The Arabian Knight,” Melville admitted, ambling across the terrace to park his saucepan on the balustrade. “I am fond of Carol, you see, and I am quite ready to be three villains at once for her if that is what she wants. But when she started on the Fairground dream straight after The Tyrant of London Town, I had to admit that we were all being thoroughly overworked. None of us got any time to be ourselves. Dear me,” he added. “I think the cast of thousands is preparing to paint the town red.”

Chrestomanci came and leaned on the balustrade to see. “I fear so,” he said. “What do you think makes Carol work you all so hard? Ambition?”

There was now such a noise coming from the town that Carol could not resist getting up to look, too. Large numbers of the cast of thousands had made straight for the beach. They were joyously racing into the water, pulling little wheeled bathing huts after them, or simply casting their clothes away and plunging in. This was causing quite an outcry from the regular holidaymakers. More outcries came from the main square below the casino, where the cast of thousands had flooded into all the elegant cafés, shouting for ice cream, wine, and frogs’ legs.

“It looks rather fun,” said Melville. “No, not ambition exactly, sir. Say rather that Carol was caught up in success, and her mama was caught up with her. It is not easy to stop something when one’s mama expects one to go on and on.”

A horse-drawn cab was now galloping along the main street, pursued by shouting, scrambling, excited people. Pursuing these was a little posse of gendarmes. This seemed to be because the white-bearded person in the cab was throwing handfuls of jewels in all directions in the most abandoned way. Arabian jewels and pirates’ treasure mostly, Carol thought. She wondered if they would turn out to be glass or real jewels.

“Poor Bimbo,” said Melville. “He sees himself as a sort of kingly Santa Claus these days. He has played those parts too often. I think he should retire.”

“And what a pity your mama told your cab to wait,” Chrestomanci said to Carol. “Isn’t that Francis, Martha, and Paul there? Just going into the casino.”

They were, too. Carol saw them waltzing arm in arm up the marble steps, three people obviously going on a spree.

“Paul,” said Melville, “tells me he has a system to break the bank.”

“A fairly common delusion,” said Chrestomanci.

“But he can’t!” said Carol. “He hasn’t got any real money!” She chanced to look down as she spoke. Her diamond pendant was gone. So was her diamond brooch. Her sapphire bangles and every one of her gold ones were missing. Even the clasps of her handbag had been torn off. “They robbed me!” she cried out.

“That would be Martha,” Melville said sadly. “Remember she picked pockets in The Tyrant of London Town.”

“It sounds as if you owed them quite a sum in wages,” Chrestomanci said.

“But what shall I do?” Carol wailed. “How am I going to get everyone back?”

Melville looked worried for her. It came out as a villainous grimace, but Carol understood perfectly. Melville was sweet.

Chrestomanci just looked surprised and a little bored. “You mean you want all these people back?” he said.

Carol opened her mouth to say yes, of course she did! But she did not say it. They were having such fun. Bimbo was having the time of his life, galloping through the streets, throwing jewels. The people in the sea were a happy, splashing mass, and waiters were hurrying about down in the square, taking orders and slapping down plates and glasses in front of the cast of thousands in the cafés. Carol just hoped they were using real money. If she turned her head, she could see that some of the cast of thousands had now got as far as the golf course, where most of them seemed to be under the impression that golf was a team game that you played rather like hockey.

“While Carol makes up her mind,” said Chrestomanci, “what, Melville, is your personal opinion of her dreams? As one who has an inside view?”

Melville pulled his mustache unhappily. “I was afraid you were going to ask me that,” he said. “She has tremendous talent, of course, or she couldn’t do it at all, but I do sometimes feel that she—well—she repeats herself. Put it like this: I think maybe Carol doesn’t give herself a chance to be herself any more than she gives us.”

Melville, Carol realized, was the only one of her people she really liked. She was heartily sick of all the others. Though she had not admitted it, they had bored her for years, but she had never had time to think of anyone more interesting because she had always been so busy getting on with the next dream. Suppose she gave them all the sack? But wouldn’t that hurt Melville’s feelings?

“Melville,” she said anxiously, “do you enjoy being villains?”

“My dear,” said Melville, “it’s up to you entirely, but I confess that sometimes I would like to try being someone . . . well . . . not black-hearted. Say, gray-hearted, and a little more complicated.”

This was difficult. “If I did that,” Carol said, thinking about it, “I’d have to stop dreaming for a while and spend a time—maybe a long time—sort of getting a new outlook on people. Would you mind waiting? It might take over a year.”

“Not at all,” said Melville. “Just call me when you need me.” And he bent over and kissed Carol’s hand, in his best and most villainous manner. . .

*  *  *

. . . And Carol was once again sitting up in her deck chair. This time, however, she was rubbing her eyes, and the terrace was empty except for Chrestomanci, holding a broken deck chair, and talking in what seemed to be Italian to a skinny little boy. The boy seemed to have come up from the bathing pool. He was wearing bathing trunks and dripping water all over the paving.

“Oh!” said Carol. “So it was only a dream really!” She noticed she must have dropped her parasol while she was asleep and reached to pick it up. Someone seemed to have trodden on it. And there was a long trickle of fudge on her dress. Then of course she looked for her brooch, her pendant, and her bangles. They were gone. Someone had torn her dress pulling the brooch off. Her eyes leaped to the balustrade and found a small burned saucepan standing on it.

At that, Carol jumped and ran to the balustrade, hoping to see Melville on his way down the stairs from the terrace. The stairs were empty. But she was in time to see Bimbo’s cab, surrounded by gendarmes and stopped at the end of the parade. Bimbo did not seem to be in it. It looked as if he had worked the disappearing act she had invented for him in The Cripple of Monte Christo.

Down on the beach, crowds of the cast of thousands were coming out of the sea and lying down to sunbathe, or politely borrowing beach balls from the other holidaymakers. She could hardly tell them from the regular tourists, in fact. Out on the golf links, the cast of thousands there was being sorted out by a man in a red blazer and lined up to practice tee shots. Carol looked at the casino then, but there was no sign of Paul or Martha or Francis. Around the square, however, there was singing coming from the crowded cafés—steady, swelling singing, for of course there were several massed choirs among the cast of thousands. Carol turned and looked accusingly at Chrestomanci.

Chrestomanci broke off his Italian conversation in order to bring the small boy over by one wet, skinny shoulder. “Tonino here,” he said, “is a rather unusual magician. He reinforces other people’s magic. When I saw the way your thoughts were going, I thought we’d better have him up to back up your decision. I suspected you might do something like this. That’s why I didn’t want any reporters. Wouldn’t you like to come down to the pool now? I’m sure Janet can lend you a swimsuit and probably a clean dress as well.”

“Well . . . thank you . . . yes, please . . . but . . .” Carol began, when the small boy pointed to something behind her.

“I speak English,” he said. “You dropped your paper.”

Carol dived around and picked it up. In beautiful sloping writing, it said:

 

Carol Oneir hereby releases Francis, Lucy, Martha, Paul, and Bimbo from all further professional duties and gives the cast of thousands leave of indefinite absence. I am taking a holiday with your kind permission, and I remain

    Your servant,

        Melville

 

“Oh, good!” said Carol. “Oh, dear! What shall I do about Mr. Ploys? And how shall I break it to Mama?”

“I can speak to Ploys,” said Chrestomanci, “but your mama is strictly your problem, though your father, when he gets back from the casin—er, fishing—will certainly back you up.”

Dad did back Carol up some hours later, and Mama was slightly easier to deal with than usual anyway, because she was so confused at the way she had mistaken Chrestomanci’s wife for a servant. By that time, however, the main thing Carol wanted to tell Dad was that she had been pushed off the diving board sixteen times and had learned to swim two strokes—well, almost.