Diana Wynne Jones - The Lives of Christopher Chant (The Chronicles of Chrestomanci)

IT WAS YEARS before Christopher told anyone about his dreams.

CHRISTOPHER WAS CALLED to Mamas dressing room that afternoon.

CHRISTOPHER THOUGHT he would never live through the time until tomorrow night.

BY THE NEXT MORNING, Christopher was heartily sick of the smell...

IT WAS EARLY MORNING. Christopher realized that what had woken him...

FROM THEN ON, Uncle Ralph arranged a new experiment every week.

THE NEXT MORNING Matron noticed Christopher stumbling about...

FOR THE REST of the Spring term, Christopher went regularly to the Anywheres...

CHRISTOPHER WENT BACK to school the next day. He was rather afraid that Mama...

FOR THE NEXT three weeks, Dr. Pawson kept Christopher so hard at work...

FOR THE FIRST WEEK, Christopher could think of nothing else but how much...

THEY SAID he had broken his neck this time. Miss Rosalie told him that the spells...

THAT NIGHT Christopher went around the corner between his trunk and the fireplace...

AGAIN there was nothing wrong with Christopher when he woke up.

THE GODDESS was in her bedroom-place, sitting cross-legged on the white cushions...

GABRIEL HAD HIS ELBOWS on the arms of the chair and his long, knob-knuckled hands...

HOW DID YOU GET HERE? Christopher said.

GABRIEL DE WITT and his assistants left promptly at ten.

THE NEXT TWENTY-FOUR HOURS were the busiest Christopher had ever spent.

HERE WAS the perfect excuse to stop looking for Gabriel.

THE PAIN STOPPED the instant the Gate shut. Tacroy lowered Christopher...

E-book Extras:

An Interview

I T WAS YEARS before Christopher told anyone about his dreams. This was because he mostly lived in the nurseries at the top of the big London house, and the nursery maids who looked after him changed every few months.

He scarcely saw his parents. When Christopher was small, he was terrified that he would meet Papa out walking in the Park one day and not recognize him. He used to kneel down and look through the banisters on the rare days when Papa came home from the City before bedtime, hoping to fix Papas face in his mind. All he got was a foreshortened view of a figure in a frock coat with a great deal of well-combed black whisker, handing a tall black hat to the footman, and then a view of a very neat white parting in black hair, as Papa marched rapidly under the stairway and out of sight. Beyond knowing that Papa was taller than most footmen, Christopher knew little else.

Some evenings, Mama was on the stairs to meet Papa, blocking Christophers view with wide silk skirts and a multitude of frills and draperies. Remind your master, she would say icily to the footman, that there is a Reception in this house tonight and that he is required for once in his life to act as host.

Papa, hidden behind Mamas wide clothing, would reply in a deep gloomy voice, Tell Madam I have a great deal of work brought home from the office tonight. Tell her she should have warned me in advance.

Inform your master, Mama would reply to the footman, that if Id warned him, he would have found an excuse not to be here. Point out to him that it is my money that finances his business and that I shall remove it if he does not do this small thing for me.

Then Papa would sigh. Tell Madam I am going up to dress, he would say. Under protest. Ask her to stand aside from the stairs.

Mama never did stand aside, to Christophers disappointment. She always gathered up her skirts and sailed upstairs ahead of Papa, to make sure Papa did as she wanted. Mama had huge lustrous eyes, a perfect figure and piles of glossy black curls. The nursery maids told Christopher Mama was a Beauty. At this stage in his life, Christopher thought everyones parents were like this; but he did wish Mama would give him a view of Papa just once.

He thought everyone had the kind of dreams he had, too. He did not think they were worth mentioning. The dreams always began the same way. Christopher got out of bed and walked around the corner of the night nursery wallthe part with the fireplace, which jutted outonto a rocky path high on the side of a valley. The valley was green and steep, with a stream rushing from waterfall to waterfall down the middle, but Christopher never felt there was much point in following the stream down the valley. Instead he went up the path, around a large rock, into the part he always thought of as The Place Between. Christopher thought it was probably a leftover piece of the world, from before somebody came along and made the world properly. Formless slopes of rock towered and slanted in all directions. Some of it was hard and steep, some of it piled and rubbly, and none of it had much shape. Nor did it have much colormost of it was the ugly brown you get from mixing every color in a paintbox. There was always a formless wet mist hanging around this place, adding to the vagueness of everything. You could never see the sky. In fact, Christopher sometimes thought there might not be a sky: he had an idea that the formless rock went on and on in a great arch overheadbut when he thought about it, that did not seem possible.

Christopher always knew in his dream that you could get to Almost Anywhere from The Place Between. He called it Almost Anywhere because there was one place that did not want you to go to it. It was quite near, but he always found himself avoiding it. He set off sliding, scrambling, edging across bulging wet rock, and climbing up or down, until he found another valley and another path. There were hundreds of them. He called them the Anywheres.

The Anywheres were mostly quite different from London. They were hotter or colder, with strange trees and stranger houses. Sometimes the people in them looked ordinary, sometimes their skin was bluish or reddish and their eyes were peculiar, but they were always very kind to Christopher. He had a new adventure every time he went on a dream. In the active adventures people helped him escape through cellars of odd buildings, or he helped them in wars, or in rounding up dangerous animals. In the calm adventures, he got new things to eat and people gave him toys. He lost most of the toys as he was scrambling back home over the rocks, but he did manage to bring back the shiny shell necklace the silly ladies gave him, because he could hang it around his neck.

He went to the Anywhere with the silly ladies several times. It had blue sea and white sand, perfect for digging and building in. There were ordinary people in it, but Christopher only saw them in the distance. The silly ladies came and sat on rocks out of the sea and giggled at him while he made sand castles.