“Twenty-five. Older than he looks,” Grandad told me. “A powerful magic gift does that to some people. Roddy, do you mind taking Grundo and going off somewhere? We’ve got things to talk about here that aren’t for children.”
Grandad is like that. He never likes to talk about the interesting things in front of me. Grundo and I drifted off.
“He’s too old for Alicia, the Merlin,” I said to Grundo.
He was surprised. “Why should that stop her?” he asked.
2
NICK
ONE
I thought it was a dream at first. It was really peculiar.
It happened when my dad took me with him to a writers’ conference in London. Dad is Ted Mallory, and he is a writer. He does horror stories with demons in them, but this conference was for people who write detective stories. This is the strange thing about Dad. He reads detective stories all the time when he isn’t writing himself, and he really admires the people who write them, far more than the people who write his kind of thing. He was all excited because his favorite author was going to be speaking at the conference.
I didn’t want to go.
“Oh, yes, you do,” Dad said. “I’m still shuddering at what happened when I left you alone here last Easter.”
“It was my friends who drank all your whiskey,” I said.
“With you as a helpless onlooker while they broke the furniture and draped the kitchen in pasta, I know,” said Dad. “So here’s what I’m going to do, Nick. I’m going to book you in with me, and I’m going to go, and when I go, I’m going to lock up this house with you outside it. If you don’t choose to come with me, you can spend the weekend sitting in the street. Or the garden shed. I’ll leave that unlocked for you, if you like.”
He really meant this. He can be a real swine when he puts his mind to it. I thought about overpowering him and locking him in the garden shed. I’m bigger than he is, even though I won’t be fifteen until just before Christmas. But then I thought how he isn’t really my dad and how we’d both sort of adopted one another after Mum was killed because—usually—we like one another, and where would either of us be if that fell through?
While I was thinking this, Dad said, “Come on. You may even enjoy it. And you’ll be able to tell people later that you were present at one of the very rare appearances of Maxwell Hyde. This is only the third time he’s spoken in public, and my sense is that he’s a very interesting speaker.”
Maxwell Hyde is this favorite author of Dad’s. I could see I would be spoiling his fun if I didn’t let him take me along, so I gave in. He was ever so pleased and gave me one of this Maxwell Hyde’s books to read.
I don’t like detective stories. They’re dead boring. But Maxwell Hyde was worse than boring because his books were set in an alternate world. This is what Dad likes about them. He goes on about the self-consistency and wealth of otherworld detail in Maxwell Hyde’s Other-England—as far as I could see, this meant lots of boring description of the way things were different: how the King never stayed in one place and the parliament sat in Winchester and never did anything, and so forth—but what got to me was reading about another world that I couldn’t get to. By the time I’d read two pages, I was so longing to get to this other world that it was like sheets of flame flaring through me.
There are lots of worlds. I know, because I’ve been to some. My real parents come from one. But I can’t seem to get to any of them on my own. I always seem to have to have someone to take me. I’ve tried, and I keep trying, but it just doesn’t seem to work for me, even though I want to do it so much that I dream I’m doing it. There must be something I’m doing wrong. And I’d decided that I’d spend the whole first week of the summer holidays trying until I’d cracked it. Now here was Dad hauling me away to this conference instead. That was why I didn’t want to go. But I’d said I would, so I went.
It was even worse than I’d expected.
It was in a big, gloomy hotel full of soberly dressed people who all thought they were important—apart from the one or two who thought they were God or Shakespeare or something and went around with a crowd of power-dressed hangers-on to keep them from being talked to by ordinary people. There was a lecture every hour. Some of them were by police chiefs and lawyers, and I sat there trying so hard not to yawn that my eyes watered and my ears popped. But there was going to be one on the Sunday by a private detective. That was the only one I thought might be interesting.
None of the people had any time for a teenager like me. They kept giving my jeans disapproving looks and then glancing at my face as if they thought I must have got in there by mistake. But the thing that really got to me was how eager Dad was about it all. He had a big pile of various books he was trying to get signed, just as if he was a humble fan and not a world-famous writer himself. It really hurt my feelings when one of the God-or-Shakespeare ones flourished a pen over the book Dad eagerly spread out for her and said, “Who?”
Dad said in a modest voice, “Ted Mallory. I write a bit myself.”
Mrs. God-Shakespeare scrawled in the book, saying, “Do you write under another name? What have you written?”
“Horror stories mostly,” Dad admitted.
And she said, “Oh,” and pushed the book back to him as if it was contaminated.
Dad didn’t seem to notice. He was enjoying himself. Maxwell Hyde was giving the big talk on the Saturday evening, and Dad kept saying he couldn’t wait. Then he got really excited because one of the nicer writers—who wore jeans like me—said he knew Maxwell Hyde slightly and he’d introduce Dad to him if we hung around with him.
Dad was blissed out. By that time I was yawning every time Dad’s back was turned and forcing my mouth shut when he looked at me. We went hurrying up and down corridors looking for Maxwell Hyde, pushing against crowds of people pushing the other way, and I kept thinking, If only I could just wheel round sideways and walk off into a different world! I was in a hotel when I did that the first time, which gave me the idea that hotels were probably a good place to step off from.
So I was daydreaming about that when we did at last catch up with Maxwell Hyde. By then it was just before his lecture, so he was in a hurry and people were streaming past us to get into the big hall, but he stopped quite politely when the nice writer said, “Oh, Maxwell, can you spare a moment for someone who’s dying to meet you?”
I didn’t really notice him much, except that he was one of those upright, silvery gentlemen, quite old-fashioned, with leather patches on his old tweed jacket. As he swung round
to Dad, I could smell whiskey. I remember thinking, Hey! He gets as nervous as Dad does before he has to give a talk! And I could tell he had had a drink to give himself some courage.