The Merlin Conspiracy (37 page)

Mrs. Blantyre looked sweetly hurt. “If you really insist. They come from a dear little junkshop out in Ealing, dear. Tonio's Curios. They only cost sixpence a dozen. I can't think why—”

“
Thank
you,” said Maxwell Hyde. “
Good
evening, madam. So she'll have bought twenty-four,” he told us as we hurried away, “to go round thirteen. Elevens into twenty means that most of the others are going to have two each.
Damn!
”

As we hurried on to the next address, Toby began to have trouble. The salamanders were still terrified and still heating up. The creel started to stink of hot fish. I took it off him and raised it up to my face, where I tried to give the poor things a shot of the power that had conquered Mrs. Blantyre. “It's all
right
,” I said. “We've rescued you. You're going to be
safe
now. It's
okay
!”

They
sort
of believed me. It was interesting. They had proper thoughts, like Mini, tiny, desperate thoughts, and they understood me. They simmered down a bit, and Toby took the creel and took over soothing them again.

It was fairly hectic. We rushed from house to house in the dark, and Maxwell Hyde intimidated person after person into giving up terrified, despairing salamanders. We filled the creel and the lunch basket with them and began on the raffia basket, which began smoking and crackling almost at once, until I more or less shouted at it. And twice Maxwell Hyde had a real row on a doorstep, when someone pretended they had only got one salamander and he knew they had two. They shouted after him that they were calling the police.

The twelfth house we went to was on fire. Rolls of orange-tinted smoke were coming from its downstairs windows, and the fire engine was clanging its way down the street to it as we got there. The front door of the place crashed open. An old fellow came staggering out, shouting, “Help!”

Toby and I dived to catch the two salamanders that shot out with him. Toby got his, but I was carrying two of the baskets, and I missed mine. It streaked down the nearest drain and vanished. It's probably still around in the sewers somewhere.

“I only dipped them in water!” the old fellow said indignantly to Maxwell Hyde. “That's all I did, dipped them in water!”

“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 hamper 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.”

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.