“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.