Outside

The highest point of the house, atop the artichoke dome of the observatory, features a dancing hippopotamus-shaped weathervane: “as the wind changed, it blew through the nostrils of the hippo's hollow head, making a whiny snarfling sound that fortunately could not be heard unless you were up on the roof fixing slates” [1-2].

Myers, quite the music expert, feels this is a nod to Walt Disney's Fantasia, the popular animated film set to a classical soundtrack. Bellairs was somewhat fond of classical music and surely would have remembered the scene featuring Ponchielli's Dance of the Hours from his opera La Gioconda (it opened with ostrich ballerinas, followed by a line of hippos in ballet tutus, the lot eventually being pursued by alligators in capes).

"There is a leisurely orgy of vintage words throughout the text; 'snarfling' comes to mind. It’s a word not to be found in the OED though someday it maybe there,” says Phil Gibson, a classmate of Bellairs from Notre Dame. “The verbal description of Prospero's house, and the frontispiece illustration, remind me of Sorin Hall - definitely our fustiest campus residence.”

Also of note, Prospero keeps a garden of varied flora and fauna as well as a fountain topped with a tubby satyr.

Inside

The front parlor of the house is a sort of makeshift laboratory (somewhat similar to Sherlock Holmes’ on Baker Street), where various colored liquids slurp and glosh and bubble in glass flasks, test tubes, and bottles.

Elsewehre there was an odd assortment of whatnot: a magic mirror that revels in popping off wisecracks to his owner, “a brass St. Bernard with a clock in its side, and a red tongue that went in and out with the ticks as the tail wagged; a five-foot iron statue of a tastefully draped lady playing a violin (the statue was labeled "Inspiration"); mahogany chests covered with leering cherub faces and tiger mouths that bit you if you put your finger in the wrong place; a cherrywood bedstead with a bassoon carved in one of the fat bedposts, so that it could be played as you lay in bed and meditated; and much more junk” [2].

It should be pointed out that during Bellairs’ days as a student at Notre Dame and later in Chicago he collected kitsch; a 1960 letter of John's explains the malady:

These friends share my addiction for antiques bordering on the disgusting, and have found a name for such trash: KITCH is the official title, invented by Gilbert Highet, and includes all the curious which affronts the sensibilities of sane people.

During the 1960s, Marilyn Fitschen says Bellairs bought whatever kitschy items he could afford with friends chipping in the occasional gift. One item that stands out in particular for both Marilyn and fellow graduate student Robert Yaple was a clock Bellairs saw on display in a window in Hyde Park but could not afford: a tall, painted, High Victorian cast-iron figurine of Sairey Gamp (of Charles Dickens’ The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit fame) holding a dog with a clock in its belly.

Myers explains that he and Bellairs also used the bassoon's nickname of "burping bedpost" several times in conversation (“yes, we did indeed have occasional conversations which touched on bassoons”), but must take issue with the awkward imagery presented in the book. “It would be impossible to lie in bed and play a bassoon carved into the bedpost while meditating. Even if the bassoon were upside down with the mouthpiece on the bottom, you would still have to finger the keys, which run along the whole length of the instrument, which would hardly be conducive to meditation. I suppose you could rather ponderously play a right-side-up bassoon while sitting up in bed, but that isn't what Bellairs said. Therefore, if I were John's editor I would have to challenge this whole rather twee image, but knowing his reaction to any criticism of his writings this would no doubt have put a strain on our friendship."

"One wall...was lined with bookshelves, and on them you could find titles such as Six Centuries of English Spells, Nameless Horrors and What to do About Them, An Answer to Night-Hags, and, of course, the dreaded Krankenhammer of Stefan Schimpf, the mad cobbler of Mainz [2]. Other books contained handwritten spells, puzzling pentagrams, and dizzying doodles of various characters, such as King Louis XI.

Basement

The house is just as fussy underground – here Prospero has a collection of jars and steins and an oddly dug tunnel hidden behind a non-descript door labeled “Root Cellar.”

It is in this cellar where we first catch a glimpse of the strange magic that is being unleashed upon the North and South Kingdoms. When we are first introduced to Prospero he is preparing to sit down to dinner, though we soon find that he is a bit leery of going into the dark, dank basement to retrieve a pint of ale. While filling his pitcher, he eyes a cloak hanging on the wall, and as it begins to move, Prospero is filled with dread:

He looked absently around the cellar as he waited for the pitcher to fill, and suddenly his eye was caught by the fluttering of an old cloak hanging on a wooden peg. And in that instant Prospero got the odd notion that the cloak was not his, and might not be a cloak at all. He stared intently at it as the fluttering of the garment became more agitated. And then it turned to meet him. With empty flapping arms it floated across the cellar floor, swaying in a sickening nightmare rhythm. Prospero clenched his fist and felt his pulse beating in his palms; he fought the rising fear as the cloak flapped nearer, for with all his heart he did not want it close to him. As it closed the gap between them, all the spells against apparitions ran through his mind, but he had the queasy felling that none of them would work. The thing was about six feet from him, its cold musty-cellar breath faintly brushing his face, when it simply stopped. The flapping arms dropped, and the gray cloak, or whatever it was, slumped into a ragged heap on the stone floor [7].

"...but the reader will hardly, perhaps, imagine how dreadful it was to him to see a figure suddenly sit up in what he had known was an empty bed. He was out of his own bed in one bound, and made a dash toward the window, where lay his only weapon, the stick with which he had propped his screen. This was, as it turned out, the worst thing he could have done, because the personage in the empty bed, with a sudden smooth motion, slipped from the bed and took up a position, with outspread arms, between the two beds, and in front of the door. Parkins watched it in a horrid perplexity. Somehow, the idea of getting past it and escaping through the door was intolerable to him; he could not have borne—he didn’t know why—to touch it; and as for its touching him, he would sooner dash himself through the window than have that happen. It stood for the moment in a band of dark shadow, and he had not seen what its face was like. Now it began to move, in a stooping posture, and all at once the spectator realized, with some horror and some relief, that it must be blind, for it seemed to feel about it with its muffled arms in a groping and random fashion. Turning half away from him, it became suddenly conscious of the bed he had just left, and darted towards it, and bent over and felt the pillows in a way which made Parkins shudder as he had never in his life thought it possible. In a very few moments it seemed to know that the bed was empty, and then, moving forward into the area of light and facing the window, it showed for the first time what manner of thing it was. But he was not at leisure to watch it for long. With formidable quickness it moved into the middle of the room, and, as it groped and waved, one corner of its draperies swept across Parkins’s face. He could not—though he knew how perilous a sound was—he could not keep back a cry of disgust, and this gave the searcher an instant clue. It leapt towards him upon the instant, an the next moment he was half-way through the window backwards, uttering cry upon cry at the utmost pitch of his voice, and the linen face was thrust close into his own. At this, almost the last possible second, deliverance came, as you will have guessed: the Colonel burst the door open, and was just in time to see the dreadful group at the window. When he reached the figures only one was left. Parkins sank forward into the room in a faint, and before him on the floor lay a tumbled heap of bed-clothes."