“Oh, no,” I said. “Nothin
g at all. My parents have only been expelled from Court, the King’s only going to abdicate, and Mrs. Candace and the Dimbers have only been kidnapped, too. Nothing wrong at all.”
The boys’ faces turned up to me. Nick said, “Wow!”
“Is that all you can say?” I more or less screamed.
Dora, who seemed not to have heard a thing I said, beamed kindly. “You know, dear, you need to discharge all the adverse vibrations,” she said. “Sit down here and have a good cry. It does wonders.”
“Does it indeed?” I said rudely. “Thank you very much!” Then I sat down in the nearest shabby armchair and burst into tears. As one boy, Grundo, Toby, and Nick all became exceedingly embarrassed and turned their backs on me. I really wanted to scream then.
FOUR NICK
I had Grundo sleeping on the couch in my room that night. Everyone agreed that Roddy had better have Maxwell Hyde’s room, and Toby’s room didn’t have a couch. Lucky Toby. Grundo must be the most restless sleeper in all the universes. When he wasn’t turning over and over and jangling the couch springs, he was either snoring like a football rattle or shouting out in his sleep that everything was back to front and he couldn’t do it! He kept waking me up. And whenever he woke me, the feeling of nervous horror came back, and I lay and worried.
I knew we had to find Romanov and ask him what to do. With Maxwell Hyde gone, and from what Roddy said, I could see things in Blest were going down the plughole fast. Romanov would know what to do. He had real power. I could even sort of feel the weird nondirection I ought to go in to find Romanov, but I couldn’t even start to go that way. It was the same as the way I couldn’t walk into another world. I seemed to need somebody else there to help or give me a push before I could do it.
In the end it got light. I could hear birds singing and salamanders scuttling to get to the places where the sun would shine first. By then Grundo was sleeping as peacefully as a log, of course, but I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sleep now. I swore and got up.
And it was an odd thing. Instead of being nine-tenths asleep and unable to open my eyes like I usually am, I felt quite sharp and awake. Maybe it was because I’d been practicing being awake all night. I collected my clothes and dressed downstairs in the kitchen. While I was making coffee, I looked in Dora’s mirror with the rabbits round it, expecting to see that I had giant, droopy black bags under my eyes, but I looked normal. Just grumpy.
My coffee was poured out into a mug ready to drink when the doorbell rang. That was when I discovered I was in a really bad mood. The doorbell rang twice more while I was going along to answer it. Then someone battered away with the knocker. “All right!” I shouted. “All right, all right, all right! Do you expect me to teleport to the door or something?” I wrenched the door open.
Two quite small girls were jigging about on the doorstep, both in little pleated sailor dresses. The one on the left was in blue trimmed with white, and the one on the right was in white trimmed with blue. Otherwise I couldn’t tell them apart. When they saw my angry face, they flung their arms round one another and stared at me over their shoulders with identical soulful looks.
“He must be Grandad’s pet ape,” said the blue one, and the white one said, “I love them when they’re angry!” and sighed ecstatically.
“You’ve come to the wrong house,” I said.
“No, we haven’t,” said the blue one. “We want Mr. Maxwell Hyde.”
“He’s our grandfather,” the white one explained. “I’m Isadora, and this is Ilsabil, and tell him it’s urgent.”
“He isn’t here,” I said. “He’s been kidnapped.”
We all stared at one another blankly for a moment. Then the Ilsabil one said, as if she was about a century old, “They’re such liars, these boys.”
“We must search the house,” Isadora agreed.
They unwound their arms and started to walk inside, one on either side of me. I put out both my arms and stopped them at neck level. “Just a moment,” I said. “How come you’re trying to visit your grandfather at five-thirty in the morning? There’s been jiggery-pokery for weeks now. How do I know Maxwell Hyde really is your grandfather? He never said a word about you.”
“Now you’ve hurt our feelings!” Ilsabil said tragically.
“He never said a word about you, whoever you are!” Isadora said. Then, as if they had given one another a secret signal, they both shoved mightily at my arms. I shoved back. I could feel them using some sort of witchcraft to get past me. That didn’t bother me particularly, though it made me more suspicious than ever. I went on shoving back. The one on the left sank her teeth into my forearm, and the one on the right kicked my shins.
“Let us in!” they screamed.
By this time I was sure they were another part of the conspiracy that was now trying to storm Maxwell Hyde’s house. I took hold of them by a skinny arm each and tried to bundle them back into the street.
“We’ll wake everyone up in all the houses!” Ilsabil threatened.
“We’re being assaulted!” Isadora screamed. “Help! Child abuse!”
I suppose it was not surprising that the noise woke everyone except Dora—Dora is even harder to wake than I am. Grundo turned up at my elbow, buttoning his shirt. “Oh, God! It’s the Izzys!” he grunted. “That’s all we needed!”
The Izzys stopped yelling and fighting in order to exchange weary looks across me. “It’s per-thetic again!” said one.
“Fetch Roddy,” commanded the other.