I sprang into action the moment they were out of sight. I don’t know about remorse and despair, but I was ready to bet that the Prayermaster was simply using that guff to cover up his next move. I knew he was going to walk round the house and look for another way to get in. And the window was open beside Romanov’s bed.
“Quick,” I said to Mini. “Guard the door while I’m inside.”
“All right,” she said. “Are they really wanting to kill the person in the house?”
“Sure of it,” I said. “Don’t let them in whatever they do.”
I whipped underneath Mini and through the door, dumped the eggs on the kitchen table and whirled round to shoot the bolt on the inside. Rattle, clap. That felt better. I didn’t bother shutting the kitchen window then, because Mini was faithfully in front of it, making the room quite dark. All the same, the place seemed smaller again than it had been. I simply pelted out and along the corridor to Romanov’s bedroom. That seemed smaller, too, and it smelled a bit dank, but the main thing was that there was nobody else in there yet except Romanov himself. I’d got there in time. I slammed both halves of the window shut and banged the latch until it was down so tight that I couldn’t get it up again.
Romanov groaned and rolled over at the noise, but that was all right.
I raced out and into the bathroom. That was suddenly quite tiny, and the little window high in the wall didn’t seem made to be opened anyway. I charged across the corridor to the room that was probably Romanov’s workroom. I opened the door to it, but I couldn’t go in there, any more than I had been able to before. It was dark in there anyway. I hoped that this meant it didn’t have a window, but to be on the safe side, I slammed the door shut and dragged the telephone table over in front of it. Then, hoping that whatever kept me out would at least hold the Prayermaster up a bit, I rushed back toward the living room. As I remembered, the walls there were mostly windows, great wide ones, and he’d only have to smash one to get in.
Before I got there, an evil white face with horns and a beard came round the corner at me. I nearly screamed. I jumped several feet backward. Then I swore. It was that goat. It must have whizzed indoors after me.
“Keep away from me,” I said to it, “or I won’t be responsible for what I’ll do!”
Then I went into the living room. I had to stop for a second and stare. The shelf of books was the same, but all the sofas were gone, including the one I’d slept on. In their place there was a set of moth-eaten old armchairs standing about on a floor of old bare wood with dingy rugs on it. There were still a lot of windows, but they weren’t the nice, pale wooden modern ones I remembered. They were a sort of job lot. There was one rickety long one with lots of small panes, one big tall one that was just a sheet of glass surrounded by new white wood, and about six small crooked ones that would have looked better in one of the sheds. And they all had different fastenings, none of which worked very well. I rushed round them hammering them shut and wedging the worst catches with books. The one that was a big sheet of glass really worried me, though. It was so easy to break. But when I pushed my head against the glass and squinted downward, I saw there was a sheer drop from it to a piece of water that looked like real deep ocean. Big white surf was breaking against the walls of the house down there. So perhaps it was all right. Unless Prayermasters could fly, of course.
I turned round to discover that the goat had followed me. It looked at me. I looked at it. And I realized I’d gone and shut myself into the house with it. I knew goats smell strong, but I hadn’t known before that when they’re indoors, they reek. Or it was more of a stench, really.
“All right,” I said. “But if you eat any of these books, Romanov will probably kill you.” I knew he would. They all had leather covers and titles like A True and Faithfulle Historie of the Travels of Jehan Amberglaffe. My dad is always paying fortunes for books like those. He doesn’t let me touch them.
The goat looked slyly aside from me and started eyeing up an armchair.
“Yes, have that instead if you have to,” I said.
Then I remembered the kitchen window and raced off to shut that. The goat had been in the kitchen first. The stone floor was all covered with crumbs from the loaf it had snitched off the table. But Mini, bless her heart, was still standing outside. I took a look out under her gray wrinkled belly as I made that window fast. The hens were pecking about in the grass again, and the flier was still there above them on the slope, but there was no sign of the Prayermaster or his boys.
Perhaps, I thought, while I hastily crawled around the flagstones scooping up handfuls of loaf crumbs, they’re all in one of the sheds doing dangerous incantations. So the next thing to do is go and stand in Romanov’s bedroom and incantate back at them. I threw the breadcrumbs into the range fire and set off that way again.
Before I’d even reached the door, I heard the hens shrieking and flapping outside. Then I heard the last sound I would have expected: the violent, tinny whirring of the flier. They were leaving. Or pretending to go. It had to be a trap.
To tell the truth,
I felt a bit of a fool. I leaned over the sink and peered under Mini’s wrinkly gray tum—which moved out of the way as I got there, as if Mini was as surprised as I was—and the rotor thingy on the flier’s pointed end was definitely spinning, and its front end was cocked upward ready for takeoff. Its door was still open, though, and Japheth’s skinny shape, all covered in bright red embroidery, was tearing along the hillside beside the garden wall, arms waving, obviously terrified he’d be left behind.
That was astonishing enough. Even more astonishing, there was a new person there. He was an elderly man in tweeds, and he was just stopping on his way down to the house to look over his shoulder at the flier. He had a sort of ex-army look, this new man. I wondered if he’d somehow frightened the other three off. Anyway, he watched, and I watched, while Japheth went rushing up to the open door of the flier and scrambled up through it, and then got it jammed in his hurry to close it and had to open it again, so that it was still partly open when the flier took off in a tremendous, whirring swoop and then went fairly belting, and wagging about as it belted, away across the waters on the other side of the garden.
The ex-army man shrugged and came on toward the house again, sort of staggering as if he was exhausted.
I suddenly recognized him by the way he walked. It was the drunk who had given me the blue flame. I said, “Oh, no!” and wondered whether to keep the door bolted and lie low.
He was outside the door the next second. I heard him say, “Come on, elephant! Out of it now! Move over!” and I heard Mini politely getting out of his way. She really was much too polite and humble for an elephant. After that he was banging on the door and shouting, “Hallo, the house! Anyone home? Open up, damn it!”
And I behaved just like Mini. I suppose it was those military orders. I unbolted the door and stood aside while he came stumbling in.
“Somebody here,” he said. “Good. For Pete’s sake, have you got any coffee? I’m out on my feet and dying of a hangover.” And he pulled a chair out from the table and crumpled into it, with his elbows on the table and his face in his skinny old hands. “Coffee!” he croaked imploringly. “Black coffee!”
I know how it feels to need coffee. I’m like that every morning. I shoved the kettle onto the hot part of the range and began looking for the other things. “Coming up,” I said.
“Thanks.” He sighed. His tweed suit was sopping. He was steaming as he sat there. His face was sort of bluish white, and he was so exhausted that he never looked at me, or even at Mini, who was peering in through the door at him. But he seemed to feel he had to explain himself. All the time I was making the coffee, he was bringing out little sentences, in jolts, by way of explaining. “Not usually like this,” he said. “Fact is … I have to get drunk before I can walk the dark paths … can’t see them sober … never could … Shaman stuff not my strong suit … Worn off now … head like a treadmill … Took so long … Hadn’t bargained for Romanov’s island being in the past … Cunning stuff … Ten years or more behind the times, this place is … though I believe parts of the island may be in the future, too … Must be why Romanov knows what’s going to happen … Have to ask him how it’s done … Pay him, too … Please remind me to ask him what his fee is this time … Thanks, lad. Thanks. You’re a hero.”
I pushed the biggest mug I could find, full of strong coffee, into his hands, and he drank it scalding hot without stopping to breathe. Then he held it out for more. He drank the second lot slowly, in sips, without speaking, and steamed, and turned a slightly better color. When I’d given him the third mugful, he sat up a bit straighter and asked, almost alertly, “What was that flier doing outside that went off in such a hurry?”
“I don’t know why they went off like that,” I said, “unless they were afraid of you.”
“Could have been,” he said. “Depends who they were.”