Matilda practices moving objects with her mind

Matilda practices moving objects with her mind in a private, methodical sequence that turns an uncanny power into a skill she can control. With a cigar as her test object, she advances from a quick push to sustained lifting and, after six days of daily work, guided flight. The practice is not an end in itself: it is preparation for a plan to help Juffrouw Engel.

The private experiment

Matilda comes home to an empty house, as she often does: Mr. Wormwood has not returned from work, Mrs. Wormwood is still out at bingo, and her brother is elsewhere. She goes straight to the sitting room, opens the drawer where her father keeps a box of cigars, takes one, and locks herself in her bedroom. The sequence establishes the privacy and purpose of the experiment: she chooses both the time and the space, and takes an object from her father’s things without asking.

The cigar is selected for practical reasons. Matilda’s plan to help Juffrouw Engel has taken shape in her mind, but its success depends on whether she can perform a particular feat with the power of her eyes. She does not expect to manage it immediately; she counts on practice and effort. The cigar may be somewhat thick, but its weight is right for the work. It is therefore more than a convenient prop: its size and weight make it a carefully chosen measure of what her developing ability can do.

She clears a dressing table of a hairbrush, a comb, and two library books, places the cigar in the middle, then sits on the edge of her bed about three metres away. The arrangement gives the trial a simple, repeatable form: a target, a distance, and a place from which to concentrate. Her room, shut off from the rest of the household, becomes a makeshift practice space in which she can test the limits of an ability that has so far appeared extraordinary rather than routine.

From pushing to lifting

Matilda leans back and concentrates. She feels what she experiences as electricity gathering behind her eyes, accompanied by heat in them and a sensation of tiny, invisible hands darting toward the cigar like sparks. She whispers a command, and the cigar, marked with a red-and-gold band, almost immediately rolls across the tabletop and drops to the floor. The visible result is modest, but its speed surprises her: a directed effort has moved an object at a distance.

She enjoys the success. The sensation seems to her like sparks swirling in her head and flashing out through her eyes; the experience brings a feeling of power that she describes as almost heavenly. She retrieves the cigar and puts it back on the table, turning the first success into the start of another trial rather than leaving it as a lucky accident.

Lifting, she recognizes, will be harder than pushing. Her next aim is not merely to move the cigar along a surface but to raise it and keep it suspended. She calls the task essential to her plan and reasons that the cigar is not very heavy. When she tries, the object first rolls away. Through more intense concentration, however, one end rises a centimetre or two above the tabletop. She holds it there for about ten seconds before it falls back. The attempt is incomplete, but it establishes that her power can act upward as well as sideways.

Repetition and growing control

After this first partial lift, Matilda recognizes that the ability is beginning to respond. She practises for an hour. By the end, she can raise the entire cigar from the table and keep it in the air for about a minute, using only the power of her eyes. That substantial increase in control comes at a physical cost: she is suddenly so exhausted that she falls backward onto her bed and goes to sleep.

Mrs. Wormwood finds her there some time later and wakes her by shaking her, asking whether she is ill. Matilda says that she is not sick, only tired. The explanation fits the immediate aftermath of the exertion, while the contrast remains striking: an experiment that has produced a minute of sustained levitation leaves her asleep in her own room, where her mother encounters only the visible fatigue, not the cause of it.

The first session becomes a routine. From then on, Matilda shuts herself in her room after school each day and practises with the cigar. The repetition marks a change in the nature of her achievement: what began as a surprising push and a difficult, ten-second lift becomes a capacity developed through continued effort. The cigar remains the same test object, allowing progress to show itself in increasingly precise control rather than in a succession of different demonstrations.

Mastery and purpose

By the following Wednesday evening, exactly six days after she began practising, Matilda can not only lift the cigar but make it do whatever she wants in the air. She exults in being able to send it flying wherever she chooses. The progression has a clear sequence: first the cigar rolls; then one end rises briefly; then the whole object stays aloft for about a minute; finally, she directs its movement freely. Each stage answers the practical problem posed by the one before it.

This mastery matters because Matilda has been training toward a larger purpose. Her plan to help Juffrouw Engel depends on the specific ability she is developing, and the practice supplies the missing proof that she can control it reliably. Once the cigar can be lifted and steered at will, Matilda considers only the execution of her plan to remain. The chapter thus closes the interval between discovery and deliberate use: the power is no longer merely something she can make happen, but an instrument she has trained to serve an intention.