The Night of Wishes

  “It would be nice,” croaked Jacob peevishly, “but there’s no way.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, who do you think is going to ring the bells?”

  “Who? Why, you, of course! You simply fly up to the steeple now and ring them. Child’s play.”

  “That’s what you think!” croaked the raven. “Child’s play, he says! Maybe for giant children. Have you ever seen church bells up close, my fuzzy feline?”

  “No.”

  “That’s what I thought! Because they’re as big and heavy as a truck. You don’t think that a raven can swing a truck, do you, especially one with rawmatism?”

  “Aren’t there smaller bells as well? Any bell would do.”

  “Listen, Morris. Even the smallest one is still as heavy as a wine barrel.”

  “Then we’ll just have to try it together, Jacob. We’re bound to succeed together. Come on! What are you waiting for?”

  “Where do you think you’re going, you crazy cat?”

  “We must get into the steeple, where the bell ropes are. If we both pull on them with all our might, it is sure to work.”

  Inflamed by his enthusiasm for great deeds, Morris ran off in search of an entrance to the interior of the cathedral steeple. Jacob fluttered behind him, cursing and swearing all the while, and tried to make him understand that nowadays the bells are no longer rung anywhere by hand with ropes, but rather with electric motors by the push of a button.

  “So much the better,” said Morris. “Then all we have to do is find the button.”

  Yet this hope proved futile. The only door leading into the cathedral was locked. The little cat hung on to the great iron door handle and pulled—in vain!

  “There you go, what did I tell you?” said the raven. “Give it up, kitty. No way means no way.”

  “There is a way!” said Morris, fierce with determination. He looked up the side of the cathedral. “If we can’t go in, we’ll go up.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” screeched Jacob in horror. “You’re not thinking of climbing up this cathedral from the outside, are you? With this wind? You must be off your rocker!”

  “Do you have a better idea?” asked Morris.

  “I know one thing,” answered the raven, “that’s the craziest, plucking thing I ever heard. And don’t you think for a minute that I’m going to go along with it.”

  “Then I’ll have to do it alone,” said Morris.

  The huge bowl of Cold Fire had meanwhile been filled to the brim. The liquid it contained was now of a violet hue. Although it was a mixture of the most bizarre ingredients, it was still far from being a Notion Potion. For this to occur, it first had to be magicalized; in other words, it had to go through an entire series of processes which would render it capable of receiving the true, dark powers of magic within its bosom.

  This was the more scientific part of the undertaking and, as such, was Beelzebub Preposteror’s department. His money-witching auntie could hand him what he needed, but that was about it.

  The text they were dealing with was written in the technical language of lab sorcerers, and even Tyrannia could barely make head or tail of it. It read as follows:

  Add some cathotymic flotion

  To catafalcious polyglom,

  Let it float in circular motion

  In a dramolized an-atom.

  Filter shlemielized ectoplasm

  Into schizothalmic myrrh.

  Burps of antigaseous spasms

  Rise in alco-hymns and -hers.

  Well-azipherized snorkels

  Freeze to cheese in thermostations,

  Chemically based on human morels

  Of unflaxen proclamations.

  Hapless, hopless malt debates

  If it passed the litmus test,

  Whilst the sclerosis inflates

  At a hundred-proof behest;

  If the dose be not too spunky

  From defective criminoil,

  Then the complex remains flunky,

  As unstable alcohoil.

  And so if the brain should bubble

  From this diabolic mix,

  Chimera saws can nip the trouble

  In the bud of sado-tricks.

  This achieved, there builds a varnish

  Of galaxyparallaxy wax,

  Which should alchemically tarnish

  All asdrubal to the minimax.

  And it went on like that for quite a while.

  Preposteror had switched on all his magic computers, which were linked up to the hellish computer center, which was feeding them the necessary data. They were running at full steam—if one may speak of electronic machines in such terms—chirping, squeaking, rattling, flickering, and spitting out formulas and diagrams which told the sorcerer what to do next with the liquid in the bowl.

  At one point, for example, he had to construct an antigravity field in order to achieve total weightlessness. In this way, he was able to lift the entire brew out of its container. The liquid floated in the center of the room like a big, slightly wobbly ball, and Preposteror was thus able to shoot it full of perversion particles, which would not have penetrated the bowl of Cold Fire.

  However, he and his aunt were also afflicted by weightlessness during this phase, which made their work considerably more difficult. He was floating upside down under the ceiling of the laboratory while Tyrannia rotated horizontally on her own axis through the air. Still, he managed to turn off the antigravity generator with a lucky shot—which sent the ball of liquid splashing back into its container. Auntie Tye and he, however, crashed painfully back down to the floor.

  But such occurrences are almost unavoidable with so risky an experiment and hardly dampened their fiery ardor.

  Yet, shortly thereafter, an unforeseeable incident took place which was pretty frightening, even for the sorcerer and the witch; the liquid in the bowl suddenly came alive.

  There exist one-celled creatures called amoebas, which are normally so tiny that they can be seen only under a microscope. In this case, however, the entire contents of the tureen metamorphosed into a single, giant amoeba, which left its container and crawled across the floor of the laboratory in one big, gelatinous puddle. The aunt and her nephew retreated before it and ultimately fled in different directions. At which point the giant cell split in two, one part slithering after each of them with the apparent intent of gobbling them up. Only with cunning and great effort were the sorcerer and the witch able to entice the two parts back into the bowl, where they immediately attacked one another in a frenzy of hunger and ate each other up. Then they were merely liquid again and the danger was over.

  At last the process of magicalization was finished. The substance in the container looked as shiny and opaque as mercury. It was now ready to receive each and every magic power; in this case, the secret power of making all wishes come true.

  Morris had jumped onto a low canopy above the side entrance, from there onto the larger canopy above the main portal, and then scrambled onto a pointy little tower full of stone knobs, from the tip of which he executed a daring leap onto a ledge. He came within a hair of slipping off, for it was covered with snow and ice, yet he just about managed to keep his balance.

  The raven fluttered up to him. “That’s enough!” he said hoarsely. “Come down from there right now, do you hear me! You’ll break every bone in your body. You’re much too fat and out of shape for this sort of thing.”

  But the cat climbed on.

  “Caw!” screamed Jacob furiously. “I could tear out my last feathers for not keeping my beak shut. Don’t you have even an ounce of brains in that stupid cat’s head of yours? I’m telling you there’s no point. Those bells up there are much too heavy even for the two of us together.”

  “We’ll see about that” was the little cat’s undeterred reply.

  He climbed on and on. The higher he got, the more relentlessly the storm raged about him.

  He had already passed the large rose window above the mai
n portal when he felt his strength suddenly draining away. Everything was turning in his head. He hadn’t been in particularly good shape to begin with, but now his sojourn in the toxic-waste barrel was also beginning to make itself felt.

  When he jumped over to a gargoyle portraying a grinning, pointy-eared devil, he started slipping slowly but surely. He would most certainly have fallen to the depths below—deadly even for an experienced cat—if Jacob hadn’t come fluttering over and grabbed him by the tail at the last minute.

  Panting and shivering, the little cat pressed against the wall to shield himself from the icy wind and tried to warm his numbed paws.

  The raven perched in front of him.

  “All right!” he said. “Now, all kidding aside. Even if you manage to get all the way up to the bells—and you never ever will—there’s still no point. Why don’t you use your brains for once in your life, pal! Let’s just suppose that we really did manage to ring the bells—which, as I already said, is completely impossible—then your Maestro and my madam would naturally hear them as well. And if they hear them, then they’re going to know right away that the reverse effect of their hooch has been canceled. So what? They can easily do without that now. The only reason they needed it was to fool us. But if we’re not longer around, then there’s no need for a reverse effect, is there? Then they can make evil wishes to their heart’s content, which can literally come true. They don’t have to watch their step because we’re not there to bother them anymore. Or did you imagine you could climb all the way down the cathedral, run all the way back, and still be in time for the party later on? What were you thinking of, anyway? Do you know how you’re going to end up? ‘End’ is the word indeed! You’re going to come to a miserable end—and for nothing and for no good reason. And that will be the end of it.”

  But Morris wasn’t listening. The raven’s voice somehow made its way to his ears as from a great distance, but he felt much too sick and exhausted to follow such complicated trains of thought. He knew only one thing: it was just as far to the top now as it was to the bottom, and he wanted to go to the top because he had set his mind on it—whether it made sense or not. His whiskers were frosted over with ice and the bracing wind brought tears to his eyes, but he continued climbing.

  “Hey!” the raven called bitterly after him. “I’ll tell you one thing, I’m not helping you anymore from now on. If you want to kill yourself, then do it alone. I’ve got no use for heroes, I’ve got rawmatism, and I’m fed up with your stubbornness, just so that you know. I’m getting out of here, do you hear me. I’m beating it. I’m already gone! Toodle-oo! Aloha! Farewell! Adieu, comrade!”

  At that very moment he saw that the little cat was swinging in the air, clinging to a gutter by only his front paws. He fluttered up, fought his way over to him through the stormy wind, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck with his beak, and pulled and tugged him into the gutter with his last ounce of strength.

  “Well, I’ll be stuffed!” he gasped. “I must have fallen out of the nest as an egg and landed on my head, no doubt about it.”

  Now he as well could feel his strength draining away. The poisonous contents of the barrel had also affected him. He felt as sick as a dog.

  “I’m not budging from here,” he snapped. “I’m staying put, I am. The world can come to an end as far as I care. I’ve had it. If I try to fly one more time, I’ll go down like a stone.”

  He peered over the edge of the gutter. Way down below glittered the lights of the town.

  Tyrannia took over the next phase of the operation—since the instructions stating how to force the power of wish fulfillment into the potion were written in gibberwitch. This is a Mix-Up Language which, in spite of the fact that it consists of our normal vocabulary, makes use of it in a completely topsy-turvy way. None of the words mean what they usually mean. Globe, for example, means boy, barrel means girl, bursting at the seams means taking a walk, suitcase means garden, plucking means seeing, gulp means dog, swift means colorful, bluntly means suddenly. Therefore, the sentence “A boy and a girl were taking a walk in the garden when they suddenly saw a colorful dog” would read thus in gibberwitch: “A globe and a barrel were bursting at the seams in a suitcase, when they bluntly plucked a swift gulp.”

  Tyrannia was fluent in gibberwitch. Without her knowledge the text of the formula made no sense whatsoever and no outsider would have interpreted it as anything other than sheer madness:

  If you’re the boss,

  Take hobgoblin floss,

  Spun from three fairies so hostile;

  Puffin a glass

  The billowing gas

  Through two ecstatical nostrils!

  If lumps are pumped

  In humps and in clumps,

  While they be crumpled in plaster,

  Puddles will fall

  Like oats from a stall

  Onto the tie of the master.

  If corks are torqued

  By porky forks

  In troubly twilight quagmires,

  Then pickles stick

  To nickels thick

  With ticking ticker-tape wires.

  If boring actors

  With green benefactors

  Should wash down their dumplings with rye,

  Then foreign dishes

  More dish than delicious

  Set off the alarm in your thigh.

  The entire passage was nearly five times as long, but this sample will have to suffice here.

  After Tyrannia had translated everything, all the lights in the laboratory were turned off. Aunt and nephew stood in complete darkness and started conjuring for all they were worth. Apparitions emerged pell-mell from the darkness, shoved each other aside, and disappeared again as if in a feverish delirium.

  Whirlwinds of fire formed in the air, turning and hissing and piling up into a kind of wind spout, which shrank and shrank until it reached the size of a little worm and was snapped up by a beak without a bird; a gray cloud floated in, with the skeleton of a dog hanging out of it by the tail; the skeleton bones changed into glowing snakes, entwined themselves like a ball of wool, and rolled across the floor; a horse’s head with empty eye sockets bared its teeth and whinnied a frightful laugh; rats with tiny human faces danced ring-around-the-rosy around the bowl; a gigantic blue bedbug ridden by the witch had a kind of race with a big yellow scorpion of the same size, upon which crouched the sorcerer; a myriad of rosy-red leeches dripped from the ceiling; a black egg as tall as a man burst open, releasing many small black hands, which hopped about like spiders; an hourglass appeared, in which the grains of sand trickled from bottom to top; a burning fish swam around in the darkness; a tiny robot on a tricycle drove his lance into a stone pigeon, which then disintegrated into ashes; a giant, bald-headed character with a bare chest squeezed himself together like an accordion . . .

  And so it went on, the apparitions coming faster and faster and all disappearing eventually into the giant bowl, its liquid bubbling and hissing every time as if a red-hot iron rod had been thrust into it.

  After one final raging whirlwind of indistinguishable images, the whole affair ended with a kind of explosion, which lit up the Notion Potion orange-red in its bowl of Cold Fire. Preposteror turned the lights back on.

  He and his aunt were completely exhausted at first after their shared exertions. They had to perk themselves up by taking special magic power pills just to make it through the last and most difficult part of the preparation. But they could not allow themselves a rest now, for time was marching mercilessly on.

  There was absolutely no way of carrying out this fourth and last part of the procedure in our world, within that which we call time and space. It was necessary to enter the Fourth Dimension. And that is why even the instructions were written in the Exorbitanian language, which there is positively no possibility of translating, since it expresses exclusively things and processes of the Fourth Dimension, which do not exist in our world.

  This last and greatest effort wa
s imperative in order to provide the potion with the reverse effect, which caused the opposite of all the wishes that one made to come true.

  The instructions read as follows:

  Hackamordax furycrass,

  Zuckez crackabula:

  Weirdafitz drac hornahiss

  Liezabum paloola!

  Piesypoisy shrillercry

  Spitsnok angerufus.

  Flopanorgy killereye

  Badskin, crax o’lufus.

  Ragemon us flackatass,

  Crunchor, me molarens,

  Gruselfoam sogrimmy grass—

  Lookaboo zooharems.

  Gurgoil choke ta bellyburst

  Puckaduck spitootin,

  Crankacralla scritchascratch

  Blossomo—zashootin!

  Nutwhat gulp Drambarrelous?

  Hick gigantomula:

  Hackamordax furycrass,

  Liezabum paloola!

  At first neither Preposteror nor Tyrannia could decipher this part of the formula. But they knew that one can speak and understand Exorbitanian only in the Fourth Dimension and so they had no choice but to enter therein without wasting another minute.

  Now, the Fourth Dimension is not somewhere else, far away, but rather, right here where we are—we just can’t perceive it, because neither our eyes nor our ears are properly equipped.

  Aunt Tye herself would not have known what to do, but Beelzebub Preposteror knew a method of jumping from one dimension into another.

  He went and got a syringe and a small strangely shaped bottle wherein sloshed a colorless liquid. It was labeled:

  Lucifer’s

  Somersault

  Dimensionale

  “You have to inject it directly into the blood,” he explained.

  Tyrannia nodded appreciatively. “I can see that I didn’t send you to college in vain, after all, Bubby. Do you have any experience with the stuff?”