The Merlin Conspiracy Read online

  “Then you deserve all you get,” Maxwell Hyde said. “I hope your house burns down. Come along, boys.” He took the lunch basket off me, and we went marching home with our twenty-two salamanders. They weighed nothing at all. If it wasn’t for the misty glow coming from them and the smell of fish and hot raffia, you’d have thought the baskets were empty.

  At his own house Maxwell Hyde went marching straight on through to the garden. “Fortunate about this heat wave,” he said. “It’s an ill wind. They’ll be warm enough among the bushes for now. Tell them they’ll be safe as long as they stay in this garden, Nick.”

  “Won’t the goat—” Toby began.

  “I imagine she’s got some sense,” Maxwell Hyde said. “Heartburn won’t be in it if she tries to eat a salamander.”

  The goat came to the end of her halter and watched with interest as we tipped the baskets gently on their sides and opened the lids and little glowing lizard shapes came tiptoeing out, and stopped dead still for a second like tiny lighted statues, and then whizzed suddenly into hiding in the flower beds. They look very like lizards, but they have whorls and curlicues coming from their heads and backs, made of sort of dots of light. They’re really elegant, like very small ghostly dragons.

  “I don’t see how anyone could be cruel to those,” Toby said as we went back into the main room. I didn’t answer. I was busy hoping we could go on to phase three of their evening routine now, which was mugs of cocoa, followed by bed. All those witches had exhausted me.

  The first thing we saw in that room was Dora, still in her hat. She was sitting on the sofa with her salamander stretched along her knee. You could see it very clearly against her black satin skirt. All its fire dot curlicues were gently vibrating. I’d never seen anything so obviously purring. Dora looked up at us with a worried, guilty smile. “I did very wrong, didn’t I?” she whispered. “It’s sweet!”

  Toby’s white, tense face relaxed, and he went away to make cocoa.

  “Her heart’s in the right place really, you see,” Maxwell Hyde said to me out in the hall. “She just gets influenced by people. Come upstairs and help me turn out the dirty washing. I think we’re going to need the laundry hamper for the next bit.”

  “Whatever for?” I groaned.

  He explained as we tramped upstairs. “Tonio’s Curios. We have to get the salamanders they’re selling out of there before Mrs. Blantyre gets on the far-speaker and warns this Tonio. I put a prohibition on her to stop her, but she’ll have wriggled out of it by morning. Dreadful old witch. Like one of those sweeteners that give mice cancer.”

  So, after a quick cup of cocoa, we loaded the big hamper into the backseat of Maxwell Hyde’s car, and Toby squeezed in beside it, and we drove out to Ealing. It was midnight by then. Clocks were striking all over London as we set off.

  Cars are different in Blest. They go with almost the same sort of clockwork chugging as the flier I saw in Loggia City, and they turn out to make me horribly carsick. I kept swallowing and tasting cocoa all the way and staring urgently at dark houses and then dark hedges in order not to think about how I felt.

  It was quite a way. Ealing in Blest is pretty well in the country. We stopped at the end of a village-like street and—well—sort of attended to what was in the air. Almost straightaway we could feel the solid misery of hundreds of salamanders that were shut in somewhere much too small for them. All we had to do was to drive gently in the direction the misery came from—until it was nearly unbearable, really—and we found the place. It was in a back street, facing open fields, with just one distant streetlight up along the hedge to show us the garage doors with heavy padlocks on the ground floor of a tumbledown old house.

  The feeling of panic and despair was so strong from behind the garage doors that we all worked as fast as we could. Toby and I wrestled the hamper out, dumped it in front of the doors, and opened its lid, while Maxwell Hyde did swift Magid work on the padlocks. He had those doors open in no time. We could see the salamanders then, as well as feel them. They were near the back, in two cages, each about the size of an Earth television set, and there were literally hundreds of them in both cages. The cages were glowing and pulsing as the salamanders crawled and scrambled and climbed over one another, every one of them desperate to find more space. Toby made a dart for them and hit a table with a statue on top. I stopped as I was plunging after him and caught the statue in my arms as it fell.

  “Wait!” whispered Maxwell Hyde, and made his blue witchlight for us.

  Just as well he did. The garage space was packed with old furniture, and every piece of furniture had statues and jugs on it. The salamander cages were on an old piano by the back wall, just beyond a collection of dented coal scuttles, with several fire screens in front of that. The noise you could make falling over all that didn’t bear thinking of.

  My legs were longest, so I climbed over to the back, taking big, high steps, and grabbed the nearest cage. The salamanders inside it were so frightened that they seethed about, with a noise like sand blasting onto metal. As I tried to pass the cage to Toby, my hair frizzled, and the cage got almost too hot to hold. I whispered to them that they were okay now, but I think they were too frightened to attend. I sort of tossed the cage to Toby, who shoved it at Maxwell Hyde, who sort of juggled it down onto the grass outside. The second cage was even hotter and noisier, and the grass made a sort of frying sound when Maxwell Hyde dumped it beside the hamper. I think he had to work some magic so that the hamper didn’t catch fire. Then the two of them opened the cages and tried to tip the salamanders into the hamper.

  Only about half of them went in. The rest surged up over the sides and across the lid and ran away. One ran up Toby and curled frantically round his neck. Toby made a strangled squealing sound, trying not to yell as it burned him. One ran up Maxwell Hyde’s trouser leg. He jerked and stamped and made faces in the witchlight, trying his hardest to stay quiet as he passed me the cages to put back on the piano. Toby got the hamper shut, although he was still squealing. While I was making long, careful strides over things I could barely see, I heard footsteps creaking on boards up above and voices overhead. I dumped those cages and made it out through the garage doors again in such a panic that I swear I levitated. I don’t remember touching the floor once. Lights came on in the upstairs windows as I shot outside. I dived on the hamper and heaved it, single-handed, into the car, and Toby rushed in after it, trying to wrestle the salamander off his neck. Maxwell Hyde plunged into the driver’s seat a second later, and we drove off like rally drivers.

  I looked back as we roared up the road to see that Maxwell Hyde had somehow managed to padlock the garage doors again. Light was now shining out of the cracks round the edges of them.

  “What happens when they call the police?” I asked.

  “Nothing. Most people can’t see salamanders,” Maxwell Hyde said, with his teeth clenched. “Police won’t admit to their existence. Damn it to hell! Is my trouser leg on fire, Nick?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You could have fooled me!” he said. “And we’ve left Hertfordshire—or is this Middlesex?—infested with the things!”

  We had a fairly eventful drive back. The salamander came out of Maxwell Hyde’s trousers half a mile later and I had to catch it before it got mixed up with the pedals. That was when I discovered that the floor of the car was thick with the creatures. Half the ones that got away must have bolted inside the car because it was warm and seemed safe, and they kept getting under the brake and the accelerator and the two other pedals that Blest cars have, and I kept having to pull them out. My hands were all burned before long. Maxwell Hyde cursed a blue streak as he drove, calling down all sorts of horrible things upon witches and junkshop owners and salamander smugglers, and kicking out at salamanders as he swore. It was hardly surprising that the salamanders inside the hamper stayed upset enough to make the hamper smoke and crackle. When I looked round to tell Toby to calm them down, I found he was asleep with his head on the hamp
er and the salamander that had been round his neck curled up on his ear.

  I sang to the wretched beasts. It was the only thing I could think of. I sat there trying to sing every soothing song I knew. I went through “Golden Slumbers” and “Bye Baby Bunting” and “Away in a Manger,” at which Maxwell Hyde stopped swearing and started choking with laughter, so I tried Scottish songs with lots of soothing swoopings, but those didn’t work so well, so I went back to “Golden Slumbers” because that seemed to work best.

  “Golden slumbers,” I hollered, “bless your eyes,/Smiles awake you when you rise!” The Beatles knew a thing or two. The more I sang it, the more salamanders crawled out of the upholstery and the door pockets and came and sat on me. By the end of our journey I was under a pile of them, all of them with their fire dot curlicues vibrating and fibrillating, purring their misty little heads off. The ones in the hamper weren’t quite so happy, but at least they seemed to have calmed down.

  Back in London, Maxwell Hyde drew up in front of the house and made the front door spring open of its own accord. I climbed stiffly out of my seat and went up the steps, and the salamanders all jumped off me and ran like a moving fiery mat in front of me to the back door, where I let them out into the garden. Then I went back and helped him wake Toby and heave the hamper along to the garden, too. When we opened it, bright twinkling salamanders ran out and about in such quantities that Helga had to skip this way and that to avoid them.

  “How do we feed them all?” I croaked.

  “We don’t. They live on the sun’s energy,” Maxwell Hyde said. “Or so I’m told. I hope I was told right.” He sent Toby up to bed, and Toby took his salamander up with him. I made more cocoa.

  “Have we got all the salamanders in the country now?” I rasped, when Maxwell Hyde came back from putting the car away. I was still hoarse from all those “Golden Slumbers.”

  He blew on his cocoa and shook his head. “By no means,” he said. “We’ve just spoiled one tiny corner of the trade, I’m afraid. Some of the rest we’ll pick up when houses catch fire here in London. Ditto in other parts of the country. But I suspect we’re also going to have to raid a few warehouses later this week. Tomorrow I’ll try and find out just how they’re coming into the country. Get some sleep first, though.”

  FOUR

  We had salamanders everywhere the next day. They were all over the garden and all over the roof, too. Several hundred of them came indoors, where they coiled up in every unexpected place they could find, provided it was warm. About the only place they didn’t get to was the kitchen stove—Dora’s salamander had taken the stove over, and it spit sparks at the others to make them keep off—and round Toby’s neck, because his salamander spent the day there, but they got everywhere else. I kept having to push them off my notebook and shake them out of my clothes. They climbed on the far-speaker, where Maxwell Hyde worked away in his shirtsleeves, sweating and phoning freight companies to see which of them imported apparently empty crates from hot countries. He sat on salamanders more than once.

  Around lunchtime he took a break and drank a cup of tea with me out on the baking lawn. I was looking up at the salamanders vibrating all over the roof. If you half closed your eyes, you could take them for a heat shimmer—them and the transparent people both. The transparent folks were obviously very interested and came drifting up in droves. The goat was beginning to look almost nervous.

  I said it was lucky there was still this heat wave.

  “Well, yes,” Maxwell Hyde said, staring up at the roof, too, “except that it’s all so dry. It would only take one spark from one frightened salamander— What really makes me angry is that importing these creatures is so cruel and unnecessary! If the fools doing it simply want to raise some extra power, why don’t they tap busy roads or power lines? Or there are hundreds of power nodes in these islands. They don’t need to torment living beings.”

  “Have you found where they’re coming from?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” he said. “But I will.” And he went back to making calls.

  After supper that evening he had his answer. The salamanders were being brought in by air from someplace in Egypt that wasn’t a place on Earth, or at least it was nowhere I’d ever heard of. The next cargo flight from there came into London Airport late on Saturday.

  “Nick, Toby, pencil in a sleepless night on Saturday,” he said gleefully as he turned the media on, starting the evening routine. “And remind me, one of you, to buy another couple of laundry hampers.”

  The media came on and reported that a barge on its way to Manchester had suddenly burst into flames. A lorry going to Norwich had done the same, and Bristol city center was on fire. Maxwell Hyde watched, champing the pencil he’d been taking notes with all day. “They’re being sent all over the country,” he said. “Why? Who needs extra magic in all these places all of a sudden?”

  “I hope the salamanders on the barge got to land,” Toby said, putting one finger gently on the salamander lying along his shoulder.

  “So do I,” said Maxwell Hyde. “By the way, that salamander stays here when we go to see your father tomorrow.”

  Toby’s face went white and mulish, but he didn’t make the fuss I would have expected. I suppose that said something about what his father was like.

  His father is called Jerome Kirk. He was living all by himself these days, in a farmhouse somewhere just south of the main chalk hills—the Ridgeway Downs was the name of them in Blest. I wouldn’t have called it that far from London, but Blest only has a couple of big motor roads, and even those wind about like anything. In order to get to Toby’s dad before lunch, we started at what felt like dawn to me. I still hadn’t got my eyes open when they bundled me into the car.

  For the first part of the journey I grumped to myself that if they weren’t going to have railways, then the least they could do was build a few good motorways, and worried about feeling carsick. Then my eyes came open, and I felt better. I even began admiring the way the green land lifted out of the milky white heat haze into a row of hills like a long spine across the middle of the country. The road snaked along under rows of dry trees, keeping the spine of hills in the distance, until we turned into a narrow lane, and then down more narrow lanes, and arrived at the farmhouse crouching among a lot more trees below the hills on the south side.

  We unstuck ourselves from the car seats and went and knocked at the unpainted front door. It was a gloomy, yellow old house, and it seemed amazing how anywhere could be so dark inside on such a blazing bright day. It had glum stone floors and low ceilings with lots of beams that didn’t seem to have been painted, or even dusted, for about half a century. There was dust and clobber everywhere. Toby’s dad kind of prowled about in it with his back to us most of the time. He was a big man with a big, bushy beard and a big, veiny nose and rather small, weepy eyes. He had a big belly, too, but the chief thing I remember—probably from seeing his back so much—was his bent, baggy legs in bent, baggy trousers. I kept thinking that when he took those trousers off at night, he probably leaned them against a chair and they stood up by themselves in the same bent shape.

  I think Jerome Kirk was supposed to be an artist, but there wasn’t much sign of it. One small room had an easel and paints and things in it, but they were all covered with dust like everywhere else.

  He didn’t seem all that glad to see us. “So you came,” he said. “I didn’t think you would.”

  Toby didn’t seem exactly over the moon either. He said, “Hallo, Dad,” in a subdued way. Jerome Kirk showed his teeth in a savage smile of welcome—I suppose it was welcome—and gave Toby a clout between the shoulders. Then he went on his prowl, while we stood there.

  After a bit he prowled back carrying a big earthenware jug. “You must be thirsty,” he said. “This is my own homemade perry. Want some?”

  Maxwell Hyde and Toby said, “No, thank you,” in chorus, but I was so hot and so thirsty that I said, “Yes, please!” I thought, while Jerome Kirk poured me out
some into a dusty glass, that Maxwell Hyde muttered something like “Not really advisable,” but I didn’t see why until I took a big, thirsty swig.

  The stuff was not just horrible. It was like being carsick. It was like the times when you burp wrong and your stomach juices come up into your mouth. I wondered if I was poisoned.

  Luckily Jerome Kirk poured himself a big tankard full and wandered off again, jug in one hand, drink in the other. “… outside and look at my orchard,” his voice came echoing back.

  We followed him out through his kitchen, where I seized the chance to pour the glassful down the sink and replace it with water. Toby got the giggles. Maxwell Hyde coolly got them both a drink of water, too, and we went outside into knee-length grass and clumps of nettles.

  There were a lot of fruit trees there, but they weren’t up to much. They were old and bent, with branches missing and a few pale little apples or wormy plums on the sick-looking boughs that were left. Dad would have had a fit. He cherishes his fruit trees. And Maxwell Hyde looked as if he agreed with my dad. He went wandering off with his mouth turned down at the ends. The thing I was most interested in out there was a rickety table with things on it covered with cloths and wasps circling. It looked like lunch.

  But obviously not yet. Toby just quietly disappeared, so I went wandering down the slope of the orchard, avoiding nettles and drinking my water, and wondering what we were supposed to do now we had come all this way to be here.

  Down at the end, in soggy green grass, Jerome Kirk suddenly appeared and cornered me against a giant tangle of blackberry bush interlaced with nettles. He did it really expertly. All through the talk we had, I was weaving this way and that, trying to escape and hitting a huge, thorny branch if I went one way and a mixture of nettles and thistles if I went the other. If I found what seemed a way to slide out, Jerome Kirk just wandered nearer and cut the way off. By the end I was backed right up against the tangle, getting prickled all over. I was really upset. Usually I pride myself on being able to duck out of anything, but he had me completely caught.