Nick and I set off about an hour after his parents. This was because I filled Dad’s car with all my worldly possessions. Nick wanted to know why.
“Other people have security blankets,” I told him. “I have a car filled with everything I own.” I didn’t like to confess to him that I keep having this strong feeling that I am going to be homeless after Easter. No – worse than that: it feels as if the world is going to end then, and I have to carry everything around with me and make sure that, when I’m crouching in a cave after Armageddon, I at least have my computer and my vet-case to hand (both of which will be very useful, of course). I don’t know what’s making me feel this way. It could be the Thornlady dreams. It’s not my dad. I’ve rung him and he swears he’s improving (except I know he’s saying that to make me feel better). It’s just that I have this gloomy conviction that’s settled on me like a rainy week. I even phoned Mum about it. She was her usual cheery self.
“Ah, Maree,” she says, “you want to take notice of a premonition like that. I know, because it runs in my family too. My mother foretold the very day and hour she was going to die, and she wasn’t even ill when she told me.”
Thanks a bunch, Mum.
Anyway, I loaded in my stuff and Nick got into the car saying, “I won’t say anything. My father made me promise not to keep winding you up.”
“What do you mean, winding me up?” I said, starting the car with a roar and a swoop. It always seems to do that when I’m a trifle irritated.
“He means the way we usually go on – he calls it sparring for dominance,” Nick said placidly. “He doesn’t understand that I have to do that or you’d walk all over me.”
“Oh, spare me!” I said. It took me half the drive to simmer down after that one. Uncle Ted no doubt meant well and I knew he’d had a private talk with Nick yesterday, but Nick had no business to spill the beans to me. It annoyed me even more that I knew Nick had said it on purpose, to make me angry instead of gloomy. News for you, Master Nick. A person can be angry and gloomy. That seems to be my permanent state at the moment. And I detest being managed.
Arriving in Wantchester didn’t exactly improve my state of mind. Nick fetched out the map the convention had sent Uncle Ted, that Janine had photocopied for us after breakfast, and said, “Here it is. Hotel Babylon, right in the middle of town. Easy. Why do you think it’s called Babylon? TV show? Burning fiery furnace? Hanging gardens? Go straight ahead here.”
“What are hanging gardens?” I said, taking the road he pointed at. “It always makes me think of rows of gibbets in a park.”
“Trees in the air, I think of – go first right,” said Nick.
“We’d notice those,” I agreed, going where he said, “or a furnace. Or a dirty great tower broadcasting in a hundred languages. Tower of Babel. That was in Babylon too, wasn’t it?”
Ten minutes later, we both noticed it – a large sign above the houses that said HOTEL BABYLON – but the town has a one-way system to beat any other town I know and it took us on past at a distance. I drove on, grinding gears about, and after a while we saw the sign again, going past on the other side. But there was no way to get to it. We saw the Cathedral, a shopping precinct, the Town Hall and the river. We crossed the river, because there seemed no way not to, and next thing I knew we were entangled in an open space full of long glass arcades like tunnels to nowhere, tha
t Nick identified belatedly as Whinmore bus Station. Much too late. By that time I was having to back out of the place, bonnet to bonnet with a double-decker bush, whose driver was not pleased to see us there.
I drew into a bus stop to recover from that. From there we saw the Hotel Babylon sign quite clearly, about a hundred metres away, behind the glass arcades. The only way I could see to get there was to drive through the bus station and risk another double-decker bus.
“The place is trying to stop us getting to it,” I said. “It’s like an evil spell. Perhaps I should try driving to it widdershins, the wrong way round the one-way system.”
“You’ll get arrested,” Nick said. He was perfectly happy. By this time he had a map of Wantchester set up on his laptop and was filling in all the places that we passed. The bus station, I saw, had just gone in as “Glass Maze with Monsters”.
“Nick, are you doing this to me on purpose?” I demanded, with menace.
“No way. Try turning left at the next lot of traffic lights,” he said.
Since a bus was trying to get into the bus stop where we were, I drove on. And after that I really did feel as if something was trying to stop us getting to the hotel. I said so to Nick after we had accidentally visited a small factory and were doing a brisk tour of the suburbs. I could see we were almost out of town by then. There were fields and bare trees on one side of the road.
Nick grinned. “Then we say the spell to stop the spell.”
Naturally we both began chanting:
“How many miles to Babylon?
Three score miles and ten.
Can I get there by candle-light?
Yes, and back again.
And then I felt much better and turned in someone’s driveway and we drove back into Wantchester from the other side. I can hardly describe the hilarious mixture of laughter and misery and anger that I was feeling by then. I said, “And on top of it all, I keep having the Thornlady dreams again!”
“Why didn’t you say?” Nick said. “We should have done the Witchy Dance for Luck in the garden at home. Now we’ll have to do it the moment we find a place to stop.”
“Are you sure?” I said.
“Positive. Urgently,” he said. In a hilarious, not-quite-sane way, we both knew it was true.