Howl's Moving Castle: Chapters 4–8

Her anger made her jump up in a salvo of cracks and creaks and hobble over to the unexpected window.

She shuddered at the pink-and-gray slime in it and the white slime dripping from the pump above it. Howl obviously did not care what squalor his servants lived in.

Sophie winced from the toilet, flinched at the color of the bath, recoiled from green weed growing in the shower, and quite easily avoided looking at her shriveled shape in the mirrors because the glass was plastered with blobs and runnels of nameless substances.

It contained a big stack of logs, and higgledy-piggledy heaps of what seemed to be scrap iron, wheels, buckets, metal sheeting, wire, mounded almost to the tops of the walls.

“I do,” said Sophie, and she added piously, “I can clean the dirt from this place even if I can’t clean you from your wickedness, young man.”

Behind him Sophie had glimpses of a coach waiting in a street full of sumptuous houses covered with painted carvings, and towers and spires and domes beyond that, of a splendor she had barely before imagined.

Sophie cackled to herself a little, quite unrepentant.

“Feckless spendthrift!” Calcifer crackled. “He’ll spend the King’s money faster than I burn a log. No sense.”

“Feckless spendthrift!” Calcifer crackled. “He’ll spend the King’s money faster than I burn a log. No sense.”

Probably he had a wicked affinity with spiders, Sophie thought.

Since nobody explained where Howl had gone, Sophie concluded he was off to hunt young girls again and got down to work with more righteous vigor than ever.

She was remorseless, but she lacked method. But there was this method to her remorselessness: she calculated that she could not clean this thoroughly without sooner or later coming across Howl’s hidden hoard of girls’ souls, or chewed hearts—or else something that explained Calcifer’s contract.

She took every one of them down, on the pretext of scrubbing the shelf, and spent most of a day carefully going through them to see if the ones labeled SKIN, EYES, and HAIR were in fact pieces of girl.

Sophie tied on her headcloth, rolled up her sleeves, and girded on her apron.

Sophie hobbled back indoors, rather chastened.

The shape of it should tell you a lot, whether it’s self-fulfilling, or self-discovering, or simple incantation, or mixed action and speech.

I can find out how to cure fowl pest and abate whooping cough, raise a wind and remove hairs from the face.

If you knew the trouble we’ve had because Howl will keep falling in love like this! We’ve had lawsuits, and suitors with swords, and mothers with rolling pins, and fathers and uncles with cudgels.

“Howl’s very fickle,” said Calcifer. “He’s only interested until the girl falls in love with him. Then he can’t be bothered with her.”

“You’d think he’d have the sense to give them a false name,” Sophie said scornfully.

“I think he’s tinting his hair. I hope you left the hair spells alone. For a plain man with mud-colored hair, he’s terribly vain about his looks.”

It seemed the usual flaxen color right to the roots.

Look at it! It’s ginger! I shall have to hide until it’s grown out!

The howls began as moaning horror, and went up to despairing brays, and then up again to screams of pain and terror.

Together, they trundled him into the bathroom.

Howl sipped the milk dolefully.

He smiled sunnily at Sophie and stepped out among the spires of Kingsbury.

But the smile had mollified her. “If that smile works on me, then it’s no wonder poor Martha doesn’t know her own mind!” she muttered.

“Can you pick up logs?” Sophie asked, intrigued in spite of her impatience.

A turnip face leered at her.

Sophie felt quite spry again by then.

“Steady, steady!” she gasped, giddily trying to hold the knife where it would not cut either of them.

“Calcifer agreed to speed up the castle because of a scarecrow? Dear Sophie, do please tell me how you bully a fire demon into being that obliging. I’d dearly love to know!”

But he was sounding me out about his brother, quite ominously. Apparently they had a good old argument before Prince Justin stormed off, and people are talking.

“You mean you jilted the Witch of the Waste?”

Sophie landed in the heather and took a look round to get her bearings.

Zip! Zip! This time Sophie visited in rapid succession the Market Square of Market Chipping and the front lawn of a very grand mansion.

Then the dog set off loping round one corner of the house.

Howl was kneeling on one knee in the grass at her feet, holding one of her hands and looking noble and ardent.

The dog gave her a woeful look over its shoulder and crawled dismally indoors through the porch.