“Hell’s bells!” I said out loud. “I think it really is a huge fossil!”
“WHO,” said the hillside, “ARE YOU CALLING A FOSSIL?”
I fell several yards down onto the turf. It gave me such a shock. And the whole cliff thrummed and heaved and then buckled as the huge jaws moved, and it more or less threw me off. I looked up to find that the place that I had thought was an eye socket had opened. A vast green eye was looking down at me.
I don’t think I could have moved. I managed to say, “What are you, then?” My voice came out as a squawky whisper, but I was too interested not to ask.
“THE WHITE DRAGON OF ENGLAND,” the huge head answered. “DO PEOPLE NO LONGER SPEAK OF ME?”
“Yes,” I said hurriedly. “Oh, yes. They do.” After all, I had heard of such a creature on Earth, and it stood to reason that there was one on Blest, too, with all the magic they had there. “But not very often,” I said, to be truthful. I was looking back along the hillside as I said this, and now I could see very plainly where the green turf humped upward over the shape of the enormous body. If it comes out, I thought, I am dead. Its tail must have stretched right back into the woods. “Er,” I said, making stupid conversation for all I was worth, “you’ve been here a long time, haven’t you?”
“FROM THE BEGIN
NING,” it replied. The hillside shook and blurred with its voice. I could feel it through my entire body. “I SLEEP UNTIL I AM NEEDED. DO YOU HAVE NEED OF ME?”
“Not really,” I said. “Well, no—no, not at all, really. I just came along here by accident, really.”
The vast green eye blinked, shut, open, shut. I hoped it might be going back to sleep, but I could tell it was thinking. I could feel, almost hear, great slow, grinding thoughts going on in the huge head.
The eye opened again. “I AM NOT WOKEN BY ACCIDENT,” said the earth-moving voice. “NOTHING I DO IS EVER ACCIDENTAL. I AM NOT CALLED FORTH LIGHTLY.”
“Oh, I quite understand,” I said. You say such silly things when your brain is canceled out by terror. “I—I’m not here to call you forth. Honestly!” I began to back away down the slope, very gently and quietly, but I had to stop when the hillside blurred again and pieces of chalk and turf and earth began to drop all round me.
“WHEN YOU DO,” the great voice announced, “REMEMBER THAT I WILL NOT BE PLEASED. MANY PEOPLE WILL HAVE REASON TO REGRET THAT YOU CALLED ME. GO NOW.”
Nothing would have possessed me even to try to call that thing out.
I went, staring upward the whole time at that vast green eye watching me all the way down to the path. It turned in its socket to watch me as I trotted shakily back the way I had come. My knees trembled. As soon as I had got beyond where that eye could possibly turn far enough to see me, I sprinted—I fair pelted—between hot gorse bushes, and I did not stop running until I came down to the road and saw Toby and Maxwell Hyde standing by the car. I trotted up to them, streaming with sweat. Maxwell Hyde was looking grim. Toby, for some reason, was looking rather like I felt. I supposed they were annoyed with me for keeping them waiting.
“Sorry to be so long,” I said in an airy, artificial way. What had just happened was something I didn’t think I would ever be able to speak about. “Went further than I meant to,” I said.
“Get in,” said Maxwell Hyde. “Both of you.”
We got in, and he drove off. He had been driving for miles before I recovered. I kept thinking, That thing! That huge thing! Lying under the turf, just waiting. Too true that people would regret it if it ever came out.
When we were nearly back to London, Maxwell Hyde spoke, in a very dry voice. “Toby,” he said, “I think we shall have to cut the connection with your father. He’s in with a bad crowd, I’m afraid.”
Oh! I thought. My mind had been so blown by that dragon that I had clean forgotten the talk I had had with Jerome Kirk. But it looked as if he had been fool enough to try to enlist Maxwell Hyde in his group, so I wouldn’t need to tell about it after all.
“Yes,” Toby more or less whispered. “He talked to me, too.”
“Is that why you’re looking so devastated, then?” Maxwell Hyde asked him.
“No,” Toby said. “That was the wood.”
“What about the wood?” his grandfather said snappishly.
“I don’t know,” Toby said. “There were tall people. I didn’t know if they were really there or not. They were scary.”
“Scary how?” Maxwell Hyde asked. “Diabolical, you mean?”
“No. I wondered if they were angels,” Toby said. “But they kept asking me if I was ready yet, and I didn’t understand. The wood asked me, too, you see.”
This gave me the idea that Toby had had an experience at least as terrifying as mine. I could tell he was relieved when Maxwell Hyde just made that “hmm” noise that people do when they have no idea what someone is talking about and didn’t ask any more. He bent his head toward me instead and said, “And you talked to the good Jerome, too, did you, Nick?”
“Yes,” I said. “He’s in with whoever’s getting the salamanders.”
Maxwell Hyde went “hmm” again, but this time in a nasty, considering, grim way. I could tell by the way he glared through the windscreen that he was thinking about what I’d said all the rest of our drive through London. It was getting to be dusk by then. As he parked the car, he said, “Well, we won’t talk about that anymore. I’m starving. Too worried about munching on a wasp to eat much lunch.”