For the next day or so, Earwig went about quietly finding out all she could about Thirteen Lime Avenue. It was a very strange place. For a start, there seemed no way to get out at the front. There was no front door on the inside. The place where it should have been was just bare wall. Earwig could see the neat front garden out of the window in her little bare bedroom, but when she tried to open the window, she found there was no way to open it. It was just glass built into the wall.

Earwig decided to see that as one more challenge and find another way out. She could get into the back garden easily enough. It was through a door in the kitchen, and it was a riot of weeds. Bella Yaga was always sending Earwig out there to pick nettles or briony berries or deadly nightshade. Every time, Earwig pushed her way through head-high nettles and thistles to a new place in the tangle of giant brambles around the edge, but all that happened was that she got scratched and stung.

“You won’t get out that way!” Bella Yaga said, laughing meanly.

“Why not?” said Earwig.

“Because the Mandrake’s got his demons guarding it, of course,” Bella Yaga said.

Earwig nodded. That made another challenge. She began to see that she would have to make the Mandrake do what she wanted, too, and that would not be easy to do without disturbing him.

She went on exploring. The bungalow was much bigger inside than it had looked from the outside and there was a lot of it to explore. The door next to Earwig’s room led to the bathroom. It was ordinary, like the kitchen. Earwig soon found that she was the only person who bothered to wash in it, or clean her teeth. As soon as she was sure, she took the bathroom over and pinned her snapshots of Custard and Mrs. Briggs to the cupboard door.

The door beyond the bathroom went into a huge room full of the kind of leather books the Mandrake read at supper. The door at the end of the hall, beside the kitchen door, opened into a dark place with a concrete floor that smelled—well, as if something had died in there. Earwig took a deep breath, held her nose, and tiptoed to the door at the other end. The place beyond there looked like a church, but there was a car—a little Citroën—parked in the middle between the pillars. There was no door to anywhere else from there. Earwig supposed it must be the garage. She backed out, rather annoyed.

Apart from these rooms and Bella Yaga’s workroom, the kitchen was the only other room Earwig could find. When she went in there her first morning, she was surprised again at how ordinary it was. Thomas was sitting in the sun on the windowsill, with his front paws tucked under him, just like a normal cat. Bella Yaga was frying bacon and eggs at the stove.

“Watch carefully,” Bella Yaga said to Earwig. “I shall expect you to cook breakfast in the future.”

“Yes,” said Earwig. “Where do you sleep? I can’t find a door to your bedroom.”

“Mind your own business,” said Bella Yaga.

“What will you do to me if I don’t?” Earwig asked.

She could tell that Bella Yaga had not expected that question. She looked rather taken aback and answered with the same threat she used on Thomas. “I shall give you worms.” Then she seemed to feel she had better scare Earwig properly. She added, “Great big blue and purple wriggly worms. So take care, my girl!”

Earwig did not take care. She was quiet and dutiful in the workroom all day. Bella Yaga set her to chopping nettles, mashing poison berries, and slicing snakeskins into thin, thin strips. In the afternoons there were always things to count, grains of salt or newts’ eyes. Earwig was annoyed again. In the first two days she only managed to look at the book of spells four times, and the only spell that seemed remotely useful was one headed “To Sharpen the Eyes at Night.” While Earwig wondered how she might use that one, she kept a careful eye on what Bella Yaga did with the things Earwig had chopped and sliced for her. It looked interesting—and easy. Some of the things were boiled in the cauldron and then whipped into lotions with an old, rattly electric mixer. Others were carefully wrapped in small bundles inside a deadly nightshade leaf, which Bella Yaga then tied in special knots with the strips of snakeskin. Earwig would have liked to try doing that, too.

“The only thing wrong with magic is that it smells so awful,” Earwig said to herself when she was in her own room at night. She sighed. Even the idea of doing a real spell herself did not quite make up for not living at St. Morwald’s. She missed Custard quite dreadfully. And she was not used to sleeping alone at night. At St. Morwald’s there had been dormitories with rows of beds. But the thing she missed most was not being able to go to the cook and ask for what she wanted for supper. “I used to be just like the Mandrake, I suppose.” Earwig sighed. “Only he has demons to get him what he wants, lucky thing!”

The only thing that stopped her being really miserable was the cat, Thomas. Somehow he pushed her door open—though Earwig knew she had shut it tightly—and jumped on her bed, where he sat on her feet and purred. Earwig stroked him. His fur was soft and plushy and quite clean, in spite of having been behind the cauldron all day. His purring, rumbling through her toes, was so comforting that Earwig talked to him a lot. Several times she made a mistake and called him Custard. That cheered her up so much that she got out her drawing things and made a very unkind drawing of Bella Yaga. She put in Bella Yaga’s odd eyes and blue hair and purple lipstick, and she made her ribby face as ugly as possible. After that, she felt much better. In the morning, she pinned the picture up on the bathroom cupboard and felt better still.

Thomas came and sat on Earwig the next night, too. Earwig stroked him. Then she started to make a drawing of the Mandrake, as huge and frowning and horrible as she could make it. She put dots of red inside his eyes and added the horns—only they looked more like a donkey’s ears. She would have liked to put in a demon or so, but she did not know what demons looked like, so she went back to making the Mandrake’s face look horrible. But she kept being distracted in her drawing by a strange light on the wall of her room. It almost looked as if the wall was blushing, or there was a fire deep inside it.

“Whatever is that?” she said angrily, after she had made a mistake in the Mandrake’s mouth the third time.

“It’s the Mandrake,” said Thomas. “His den’s on the other side of this wall.”

Earwig dropped her felt-tip pen and stared at the cat. His round, light-green eyes looked calmly back. “You—er—you speak!” she said.

“Of course,” said Thomas. “Though not often. I think you should stop that drawing. It’s beginning to disturb the Mandrake.”

Earwig pushed her paper and pens hurriedly under the covers. “Do you know about spells?” she asked.

“A fair amount. More than you do,” said Thomas. “I’ve seen you looking in her book. The one you really want is near the end. Want me to show you?”

“Yes please!” said Earwig.