the trapdoor. The stairway down to the next flight took a whole week to be cool to the touch, and it still made her cough horribly every time she went down there; but she had gone down there, and she had seen the trapdoor, and had started wondering what was below.
If she had asked Cobweb the correct question, Cobweb might have given her an answer that made her more worried; but Cobweb now spent a lot of time in the glow of the fire looking very hard at the moon, which was waxing quite fat and white in the night sky. The correct question would have been, Cobweb dear, have you noticed anything about the order of the monsters so far? And Cobweb would have said, The witch is sandwiching expensive ones next to cheap ones, if she did not say, Oh, do stop bothering me!
Goblins are cheap; very venomous spiders are expensive, especially if, when alive, they are the size of three beds; night-boars give a lot of show for the money, but don’t honestly cost a lot if you know where to get them; so it stood to reason that what was coming next was going to be worth the cash.
The trapdoor down to flight thirty-six opened to a very long ladder, balanced up against the wall on pegs. Flight thirty-six itself, once Floralinda looked down there with her lamp, was quite empty and light: unlike in the earlier floors, this flight had windows. They were very large, but up so high that there was no hope of opening or shutting them, and they had iron bars at their bottoms to stop you from touching the glass; these iron bars were very bowed and scratched, which would have been an awful sign had Floralinda thought about it. But they did let plenty of light through, so that Floralinda could see clearly that there were no leaves, nor wood, nor straw, putting paid to her fire idea. There was only a central column of stone, and up against that central column was sat—a big, yellow, furry bear!
“Then I can’t leave too soon,” said Cobweb, once she described what was down there to the fairy. “Tomorrow night ought to do it. You can see that the moonlight is already helping my wings, and I’ve come up with a fool-proof story. I’m simply going to say that I met a child in the woods who didn’t believe in fairies, and that we had a dialogue; at the end I saved it from a wolf or a lack of imagination or something; that’s unexceptionable, especially if you count the woods as a very large back-yard,” she finished.
Floralinda did not think this story was very good, and she was frightened all over again at the idea that Cobweb might soon go. She said, “I think it’s dear that you’re scared by a bear, Cobweb; but I’m not; bears and princesses have historically been fine in close quarters, and we even marry them under the right circumstances.”
This drove Cobweb into a frenzy. “Hark at her! Think it’s dear! You carry me down there right now, and I’ll tell you something you won’t like.”
Which was an offer that you or I might have been able to say No thank you to, but Floralinda was puzzled, and she carried Cobweb on her shoulder all the way down to the end of flight thirty-seven.
“See!” said Cobweb, when they were peeking down the trapdoor. “Now, why has a bear been chained up, as though it were in the circus?”
Floralinda answered that perhaps it had used to be in the circus and wanted to feel comfortable, to which Cobweb was so disgusted that she could not speak for a moment.
“That is a devil-bear,” said the fairy.
Floralinda had heard a little of devil-bears. Even she knew that devil-bears were larger and cleverer and crueller than their other ursine brethren, and indeed often cleverer than men, though their cruelty and men’s was probably of a muchness. As Cobweb spoke, the bear began to pace around its pillar and strain the length of its chain. Floralinda could see clearly now that its fur was matted and pallid and ought to have been white, not yellow at all, only it had grown discoloured, like lace that hadn’t been stored properly. When it peered up at them, she got an awful feeling in the pit of her stomach. The devil-bear had eyes like human eyes, with long white lashes, only the iris was red