The Merlin Conspiracy (47 page)

I looked down at his angry face as we slid swaying past him. And I knew him. He was the Important Policeman, evidently still on the job. But he had a seedy, down-on-his-luck look these days, as well as looking older and wrinkled and anxious. His yellow uniform was saggy around him, with darns in it, and he had lost weight. His mustache was still just as bushy, though.

He looked up at me as I looked down. An expression came over his face of Where-have-I-seen-that-boy-before? Then he got it. His finger came up and pointed. “Hey, you! You're Nick Mallory! You skipped factory duty ten years ago. We
want
you!”

But Mini went imperturbably marching on. Important slid away behind. The great pillars of the stairway slid past, and a notice saying
LIFTS OUT OF ORDER
, and then we were out on a different and much more ruinous section of the arcade, where the sun came blinding down in long lines through gaps in the roof.

I looked back, and Important was gone. Behind Mini, there were still houses in the walls of the great canyon, but they were ruins, with empty black spaces for windows, and half the bridges were down.

“What's happened?” Toby asked.

“This is the next world on,” Romanov said. “The people we're looking for are one world along from this one, but the sun is pretty harmful in all these canyon worlds, so I'm taking a route that keeps us in shade as much as possible.”

Mini marched on, from arcade to empty arcade, always curving to the right out of the direct glare of the sun, until we went under the ruin of what looked like a factory and came out on the bare tops of the canyons. I think the canyons were not so deep in that world. At any rate, I could see them curving and branching in all directions around us, like the twigs and branches of a tree, as if the empty desert had cracked from the heat. At the end of the largest dark crack was something that glimmered.

“The people we want are in that xanadu there,” Romanov said, pointing to the glimmer. “It's fairly well defended. I'm going to try to get us in underneath.” It was pretty extraordinary. He had taken us from world to world so smoothly that I never noticed us go. Or Mini had. Come to think of it, Mini must have had a gift for it. I envied her.

“Down you go, Mini,” Romanov said to her. And we set off down a long slope where houses had dissolved away to rubble and formed a sort of ramp into the bottom of the chasm.

FIVE
RODDY

It was peculiar but practical, I suppose, of Romanov to load us all on his elephant. Romanov is one of the most practical people I have met, and so full of energy he made me feel tired. But the thought of his once being married to Sybil still amazes me. It is odder even than Grandad Hyde marrying Heppy. Still, it does explain where Grundo and Alicia get their noses from.

Toward the end of our journey I began to feel better, though I was still feeling odd. Every time the elephant seat lurched, I looked anxiously round at Grundo and then felt embarrassed at being anxious. It was habit, I suppose. Grundo was all right anyway. He was watching the walls of the gorge as we went down a sort of ramp into it and pointing out to Nick that the earliest of the ruined houses, on the ledges near the bottom, were carved straight out of the rock. Both of them were highly interested.

I was ashamed to see that Grundo nearly always
was
all right. Things that bothered me, like people being foul to him, just roll off Grundo's mind. He takes no notice because he is interested in
things
instead. Nick is the same. I felt very stupid not to have realized what Grundo was like before this.

The lurching was much less when we reached the bottom of the chasm. It was quite cold and dank there because the sun never shone on it directly. There was a trickle of river running through the middle, but nothing grew there but green slime. The elephant picked her way along the edge of the river, between lumps of fallen house as big as she was, until the walls of the chasm seemed to meet together overhead and we were crunching along inside a huge, arched cave.

“Oh, my dear!” squealed one of the Izzys.
“Bats!”

“Darkness,” wailed the other one. “I'm
frightened
!”

I don't think they were frightened in the least. They were enjoying themselves. Their voices echoed and reechoed in the cave, shriek upon shriek. And as soon as they heard the echoes, they made more noise than ever.

“Coo-eee!”

“Hall—oh—ho!”

Romanov turned round. “Be quiet,” he said.

The Izzys stopped, just like that. I don't think Romanov used a spell on them. He just had the most forceful personality in many universes. Soon after that he made a light. It was not the small blue flame our teachers had shown us how to make, but a soft, spreading glow that seemed to come from the elephant's forehead. She seemed to appreciate it. She walked much faster. And the chain of caves we were going through sprang into life as we passed, quite astonishingly. Things like stone curtains hung from the arched roofs, folded and draped and banded with colors, reds, white, yellows—even greenish—and were reflected upside down in the black, shiny waters of the river. Nick remarked that they looked like streaky bacon—well, he
would
!—which made Toby give a yelp of laughter.

Romanov said, “Quiet!” all sharp and tense, and after that none of us dared make a sound.

It was quite difficult not to exclaim because we passed through archways with shell pink drapes where we all had to duck, and a hall where ivory fingers were pointing down from the vault, each one glittering with water, and along lacy terraces, and arcades of red pillars, where it was very hard not to call out at the strangeness. Once the light swung across a high wall of jumbled red and black formations that shaped themselves into such a hideous glaring face that the Izzys were not the only ones who half screamed.

Luckily the river was noisy by then. Wherever we came round a corner and met it again, it was tumbling in higher waterfalls. Probably it covered the noises we made at the hideous face and again when a wall seemed to put out a huge clutching hand. By then we were climbing steadily. The poor elephant was going slowly. I could hear her puffing amid the noisy water, and I could feel Romanov encouraging her.

At last he said, “This will do, Mini. It's only twenty feet up from here.”

The elephant turned head-on to the nearest yellowish rock wall, and we assumed she was going to stop. Instead she went on walking. My hands clapped themselves over my mouth. Someone else squeaked. We were all sure we were going to crash into the rock. But the wall just didn't seem to be there, even though we could
see
it, and the elephant simply went on trudging upward through it. There was rock right up against my face. I could see it and smell it, even
taste
it, but I couldn't feel a thing. And after an eternal twenty feet or so we came up into daylight inside a giant dome.

It was daylight as you see it through sunglasses. I suppose the dome was tinted. But nearly all of us looked up nervously, expecting rain or thunder, even before we stared about and found ourselves in a thicket of fruit trees. They were all yellowy. Even allowing for that lurid light, I guessed those trees had not been tended for fifty years. I had a branch of misshapen figs almost in my lap and little undernourished oranges bobbed over my head. Grundo calmly picked figs. Nick reached up for an orange. Then they both threw them disgustedly away. I don't think any of the fruit was eatable.

Romanov pointed. “Go that way. No, don't worry about the vegetation. Go straight
there
.”

The elephant turned and walked the way he pointed. She made an awful mess. She stepped on trees. Trees got shoved out of the way, causing fruit to shower off them. Branches snapped and tree trunks crashed, and our knees were scraped by twigs as she marched on through. Bark and leaves and fruit rained over us. I looked behind and saw a squashed, cloven path of ruined trees and trodden fruit where we had been. The elephant's funny little tail was quivering and jerking with excitement. I think she was enjoying this. When I looked to the front again, we were plowing through apple trees, and the elephant's trunk was going out and back, out and back again, snatching apples and cramming them into her mouth—or it was until Romanov noticed.

“Cut that out, Mini!” he said, and hit her quite hard on her head.

She flapped her ears crossly and forged on. Shortly she crunched across a thicket of raspberry canes and came out into an overgrown field of melons. The melons were small and self-seeded, but all the same, you cannot
imagine
the effect an elephant has on a field of melons. There is the most incredible squelching and bursting. Seeds fly, and the smell of ruined melon comes up in waves. I was leaning over, so fascinated by the carnage, that I did not notice anything else until Toby said quietly, “I think we're here.”

There was a space ahead that was fenced off with white plastic walls. Anyway, it was something half transparent made into walls that came up to the elephant's shoulder. I thought I could see people beyond, though the light was queerer there, sort of filmy and foggy.

Romanov said, “Ten paces on, then stop and let us down.”

The elephant obeyed him literally. This meant that she walked straight through the wall, and it went
pop, pop, CLAP
as it tore in two and then
clatter
as she trod on some of it. But none of the people just beyond seemed to notice. They were simply standing there, in a grassy space, covered in the stuff that was making the light so queer. It was coming down from the roof, this stuff, in cascades and swaths of what looked to be white cotton-wool cobwebs. Everyone I could see was draped in it. They were all alive, though. That was what made it such a horrible thing to see. Every so often some of them would shift from one foot to the other or move their heads as if they were trying to get rid of a crick in the neck—but slowly, slowly, like people moving in treacle. The only good thing about it was that most of them didn't seem quite conscious. The pink blurs of faces that I could see—though they were very hard to see through the white cobwebbing—seemed to be at least half asleep.

Mam and Dad are in there somewhere! I thought. I could hardly wait for the elephant to bend one of her front legs up so that Romanov could slither onto it and jump to the ground. And when he was down, he stood for a long, long moment, staring at the draped, white, slowly fidgeting crowd, until I nearly screamed at him to help us down to the grass, too.

“This is a
very
strange spell,” he said, turning to look up at us, all perched on our seat. “I'm going to need all the help you can give me to solve this one. Do any of you have any ideas?”

I was shaking my head along with the others, no, when I realized I was down on the ground. The elephant bulked above us, but almost at once she retreated to what was left of the fence and cowered there—if an elephant
can
cower. Nick went over and patted her trunk. “I know,” he said. “None of the rest of us likes it either.” Then he said, “Roddy!” and pointed.

It was the Izzys, naturally. They had gone right up to the edge of the silent, film-draped crowd. One of them was making mad balletic movements toward the nearest shrouded person, while the other one was dramatically on her knees with her hands clasped. “
Speak
to me!” she was saying. “I, the Isadora of Isadora, implore and command you! Speak!”

I got to her just as she tried to take hold of the swath of veiling that anchored the person to the grass. From this close, it looked sticky, like slightly melted spun sugar. I dragged both of them clear of it. “Don't
touch
it, you little stupids!” I said. “It would probably get you, too!”

“But I wanted to break the spell!” Isadora protested.

Ilsabil said tragically, “How
could
you do this to us! That's Heppy in there!”

It
was
Heppy, now that I looked closely. She was shorter and dumpier than any of the shrouded shapes around her. By peering, I could just pick out the muted glow of her orange hair through the whiteness. I could see her eyes most clearly of all. They seemed to track slowly across me as I leaned toward her, but I had no idea if she knew me or not. For a moment I felt absolute despair. Heppy was a witch after all. The people standing in there with her were all magic users. But if Heppy couldn't break this spell, if
none
of them could, what chance was there of anyone's
ever
breaking it?