by R K Dreaming
“Darn it,” said Percy. “What if he doesn’t live there anymore? Maybe Felix’s records were out of date.”
Nan nodded, looking relieved, as if she hoped they could go home now.
“If I grew up here, it wouldn’t mean I wanted to stay here all my life. Especially with London so close.”
They kept going. When they reached the end of the street, they turned around and walked back towards the house again.
Percy supposed she should be disappointed by the abandoned feeling of the house, but she was excited.
“What if he is in there?” she whispered, as they approached it again. “What if he lives like that on purpose so that no one will come and visit? We should go around the back. Just because there are no lights on in the front, doesn’t mean there won’t be any lights on in the back. Or maybe he’s used magic to make the place deliberately look like that.”
“Why would he do that?” said Nan. “You heard what Opal said. “He’s a nice normal man.”
“A nice normal man who had a thief for a best friend!” said Percy. “I mean, what are the chances that he didn’t know that his best friend from childhood was planning such a daring heist? I bet he did know it!”
Percy pulled Nan to a sudden stop with a loud gasp. “My gosh! What if he knows where the wildmagic is stashed?”
“Opal said the Sheedy cousins already have the magic,” said Nan. “She was absolutely sure of it.”
“Then why are they still coming after her? It has to be because they think that she knows where the magic hoard is.”
“That’s just speculation.”
“Think about it. If you had a hoard of wildmagic worth millions and millions and you had just escaped from prison, would you come and chase after an old acquaintance’s wife or would you run away to live a life of freedom somewhere where no one could ever find you?”
Nan looked glum. “I’d run away to the life of freedom.”
“Exactly!”
“I don’t know,” said Nan reluctantly. “Adults are complicated. And if it was that simple, wouldn’t the Conclave of Magic have already thought of it?”
“Adults are stupid sometimes,” said Percy. “They’re always over complicating things that are simple. I been thinking about it. We don’t really know what happened that night. Hank could have etherhopped to anywhere after the heist. What if he got away from his buddies and hid the loot?”
“Why would he have the loot? They were the masterminds. They would have it.”
“But the heist didn’t go as planned. The conclave watch witches turned up. In the panic, Hank could have grabbed it. And it would make sense for them to split up wouldn’t it?”
Nan nodded. She looked annoyed that she couldn’t deny that this made sense. “If they split up, the watch witches chasing them would have also been forced to split up. It would have improved their getaway chances.”
“Exactly,” said Percy smugly. “And if Hank Hyde hid the loot before he died, the Sheedys might never have known where he hid it. Hank would have etherhopped to somewhere he already knew, right? A hiding place that Hank knew could be a place that his wife knew!”
“Or a place that his childhood best friend knew!” said Nan excitedly.
Percy high-fived Nan. “Now you’re thinking like me!”
Nan was now looking outraged. “She called him Sweet Max! She said he helped her make a new life for herself overseas. But what if he did it so that he could conveniently lose touch with her, and then enjoy all that wildmagic for himself?”
“Ha!” said Percy. “Exactly. All we have to do is prove it. And if Max isn’t at home, what better time to take a look around?”
“No way,” said Nan, her eyes going wide. “We didn’t come here to break in! We thought we were only going to talk to a responsible member of the witching community and ask him if he had told the Conclave of Magic about Opal’s text message.”
“And that’s exactly what we will do, if we bump into him,” said Percy. “He doesn’t have to know our suspicions. Gosh, I wish Felix was here. He could have flashed his ID and said that he was here in an official capacity just to make some routine enquiries.”
“It’s too dangerous. This is not what I signed up for,” said Nan stubbornly. “Mum is going to be so mad!”
“She won’t because you’re not going to tell her. And anyway, it won’t be dangerous. We don’t even know if Max did find the loot. But as a childhood friend of Hank’s, he might know where it is, and that’s going to solve our problem. If the loot is found, then the Sheedys have no reason to come after Opal anymore! It’s a win-win situation!”
“Unless he doesn’t know anything about anything,” said Nan. “And then we’re right back to where we started.”
“Only one way to find out,” said Percy, rubbing her hands with mock glee.
They were nearly at the house again. The lights were still off inside. By now she was sure it was abandoned.
The look on Nan’s face was one of such comical trepidation that Percy could not resist prancing over to the house in a comical pink panther-like manner. She only stopped when Nan dragged her into submission.
Percy flung open the front gate, and made a face when the hinges squeaked very loudly. She marched right up the path to the front door, where she put on her best friendly schoolgirl face, winked at Nan, and pressed the doorbell.
Nothing happened. The doorbell did not work.
“See?” whispered Percy. “Abandoned.”
She rapped the heavy brass door knocker several times instead.
They could hear the echo of it reverberating inside the house. It was a very lonely sound among all the quiet in there.
Percy rapped the knocker again several times, and then got impatient and banged on the door with her fist.
“Howdy hoooo!” she called.
Nan snatched Percy’s hand away. “Shut it! We don’t want to annoy him!” she said.
“I only did it to make sure he is not there. And I’m pretty sure he isn’t, if he hasn’t answered by now. Let’s go around the back and check it out.”
Before Nan could protest, Percy was already jogging lightly around the side of the house. She found a gate there that led into the back garden.
She was about to try the latch on the garden gate, when Nan shook her head. Nan pointed her wand at it and whispered an incantation quietly.
The lock clicked, and then the gate eased itself open silently under the command of Nan’s wand. This was a good call from Nan, since these hinges looked even rustier than the others and probably would have screeched like anything without the magic.
Nan was looking very worried indeed as if she was about to enter her doom. And so Percy tried to make her laugh by dancing sideways into the garden like a mad clown. When Nan glared at her, Percy couldn’t resist doing a cartwheel.
Nan ended up having to smother her giggles by clamping her hand over her mouth.
Percy was so busy playing the fool that she had the shock of her life when a figure crept quietly around the corner of the house.
It was a man. Spotting them, he froze. He stared at them and they stared back at him. His face was grimy and covered in a tangled beard. Overgrown messy brown hair stuck out from the hood over his head.
Nan gasped.
The man flinched, and stumbled back from them. Percy saw from the corner of her eyes that Nan had whipped her wand out and pointed at the man.
The man put both of his hands into the air as if someone was pointing a gun at him. He looked more scared than they did.
Nan made a strangled sound.
“No, please,” the man begged in an urgent whisper. “Please don’t scream. Someone might hear you.”
Nan’s hand shook as she pointed her wand right at his face. “It’s you!” she squeaked. “You’re Hank Hyde! Juliet Jolie’s first husband! You’re alive!”
8. The Tale Of The Heist
“Please,” Hank Hyde begged. “Please keep your voice down.”<
br />
He took another couple of steps back, but his eyes remained fixed on Nan’s wand.
Percy’s eyes narrowed. She had noticed the way he was limping.
“Your leg,” she said.
There was something wrong with his right leg. She couldn’t see it properly beneath his jeans, but it was stiff and awkward, and didn’t move like a normal one.
Hank’s eyes stayed on Nan’s wand as he whispered, “It got blasted by a conclave watch wizard when I was being chased by them. Just before I etherhopped away. They must’ve seen the blood and thought I’d been ether-frayed. I couldn’t believe it when I read it in the news.”
“So that’s how you survived!” whispered Nan.
He nodded. “My leg was gone. It was terrible. I couldn’t even go to a witch healer for help because I was in hiding. Ended up having to go into a Humbles’ hospital to get it fixed. Horrible it was. They cut the end off and sewed it back together like I was a bag of old clothes!”
He looked horrified at the mere memory of it.
“Why did you never tell anyone you were alive?” Percy demanded.
He glanced at her for just a tiny moment before his eyes returned to Nan’s wand.
“I’ll tell you everything,” he said. “But please not here. Inside. Come in. I’ll make you some tea. Just please don’t use that wand.”
“How do we know it’s not a trick?” Nan demanded. “How do we know that your buddy Max isn’t inside waiting for us?”
“He’s gone,” said Hank. “Max never liked hiding me in the first place, but he put up with me for all these years. Kept me a secret, bless him. But when he found out that the Sheedy cousins had escaped from prison, it was all too much for him. Especially after they murdered Juliet’s new husband. Max packed up. He’s gone travelling. He’s always wanted to do it. He’s not even in the country.”
“What’s his phone number?” Percy asked. “We’re going to ring it. And if it rings inside the house, we’re going to hear it and we’ll know that you’re lying.”
“Max hasn’t got a phone,” said Hank. “He never liked the things. They were always dying on him.”
Percy and Nan exchanged a quick glance. If this was true, it meant that Juliet’s message had never gotten through to Max. That was good news at least.
“Please,” said Hank. “I can’t stand on this leg for long. Hurts like you wouldn’t believe. My old prosthetic leg broke, and this new one I rummaged up doesn’t fit so good.”
“You stay where you are,” said Percy. “Keep your hands up in the air like that.”
While Nan pointed her wand at Hank, Percy approached him slowly and then carefully patted him down from head to foot, checking for anything concealed in his pockets.
“Nothing,” she said to Nan. “No weapons. No wand.”
“Wand?” he said despairingly. “As if I could use one of them these days without getting caught.”
Percy crept carefully over to the back windows of the house to look in. The lights were all off inside and she saw and heard no signs of life. She returned to the other two.
“Lead the way into the house,” she said to Hank. “But if you make one wrong move, my friend is going to blast you. And after your last blast, that’s the last thing you want.”
He hobbled over to the back door of the house, and fumbled in his pockets for his keys. Not finding them he mumbled, “Dammit!”
“Don’t tell us you’ve locked yourself out,” said Percy in a disbelieving voice. “If this is some trick. If you think Nan is going to—”
He moved suddenly and Percy grabbed Nan to yank her away. But he had only bent down awkwardly to lift up the corner of the mat outside the door. He took a key from under it.
“Oh,” said Percy. She had thought it was a ruse to try to overpower them. “Stupid place to keep a key,” she said.
“I’m always locking myself out,” he mumbled.
The back door let straight into a kitchen. Hank switched a lamp on, and Percy saw a corridor through an open door.
Hank looked thoroughly ashamed because the house was very grimy and looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in a decade. The bin was overflowing with trash, and it smelled bad.
“I’ve let things go a bit since Max hasn’t been here,” he explained.
The kitchen had a small dining table and chairs and one end. He invited Percy and Nan to sit down.
Percy shook her head. “Not yet.”
She and Nan locked Hank into the cupboard under the stairs, which was so small he had to crouch to get into it. He did this without complaining, and only gasped once in pain when his prosthetic leg caught on something.
After jamming the cupboard shut with several chairs, Percy and Nan quietly went to search the rest of the house to make sure it really was empty.
“I hope he doesn’t have a wand hidden in that cupboard,” said Nan quietly. “We wouldn’t want him etherhopping away.”
“After his last etherhop, I bet he’s never etherhopped since,” said Percy. “Imagine etherhopping after your leg’s been blown off. It must have been horrible.”
With Nan and her wand leading the way, they checked the downstairs lounge, a small study, and the two upstairs bedrooms and bathroom. All the rooms were empty of life.
The lounge, study and master bedroom, which all faced the front of the house, had a lonely abandoned feel to them, as if no one had been there in a very long time. Percy checked inside the wardrobe of the master bedroom, and found that most of the clothes were missing. It looked like Max really had been gone for a while.
The smaller bedroom showed recent signs of habitation, so it had to be Hank’s. Piles of dirty clothes were everywhere, and the room smelled of sweat. Wrinkling their noses, the girls left quickly.
They returned downstairs and let Hank out of the cupboard. He did not even complain. He hobbled straight through to the kitchen and set about washing three dirty mugs from the sink, which was piled high with dirty crockery.
After he had made them three mugs of tea, he carried them carefully over to the table. But Percy was not comfortable having him so nearby, so she ordered him to sit in the middle of the kitchen. That way he couldn’t reach anything easily to throw it at them.
He sat where she instructed, but the kitchen was too small for Percy to feel comfortable even then. With one leap, he could grab a knife from out of that sink.
She decided that the lounge was safer, and they went there, where she ordered him again to sit in the middle in a chair. All the while, Nan kept her wand pointed at him, and Percy was glad to see that his attention rarely strayed from it.
She’d never seen a wizard so afraid of a wand.
“How did you find me?” he asked, almost as if it was a relief to be found.
“We’re asking the questions,” Percy said. “You said that you would tell us everything that happened, so why don’t you start from the beginning?”
He nodded, fidgeting in his chair and clasping his mug as if his life depended on it.
“The thing you have to understand, see,” he said, “is that I never meant to deceive anyone. It was just that after the newspapers thought I was dead, I thought maybe I really was better off dead! I mean Fred and George had been arrested and got huge long prison sentences, all because that wildmagic belonged to Antioch Blaze. We should never have touched it. Everyone knows you don’t want to go messing about with Antioch Blaze. Horrible sort he is. Vengeful.”
“Why didn’t you run off with the wildmagic?” said Percy.
Hank Hyde gave a horrible sort of laugh. “Lost it, didn’t I?”
“Lost it?” said Nan incredulously.
“A likely story,” said Percy.
Hank Hyde rubbed his eyes tiredly, and then quickly grabbed for the mug balanced on his knee, which had nearly fallen off.
“If I had all that wildmagic, do you think I would still be here in this dump? When I first came here, I said to Max when I finally found it, I would share it with him. T
hat we could start new lives. But Max didn’t even want it. He only let me live here because he felt sorry for me. He thought I would find it in weeks, but it’s been years. Years and years I’ve been searching for it, and there’s been no sign of it. I think he’s given up hope. But I can’t. I just have to find the damn thing!”
“What do you mean that you lost it?” said Percy. “How could you lose it? If you had dropped all of those ampoules everywhere, then someone would have found one!”
He shook his head. “That was part of our brilliant plan, see? We had this little walnut shell, made of metal but looked just like a real walnut. Undetectable, it was. Innocent-looking thing, but magically extended so that all of the ampoules would fit inside. Every single one. And we put them all inside, and I had it in my pocket when we etherhopped away.”
“How come Fred and George let you have the walnut?” asked Nan sharply.
“Because the heist was a right bungle up from the start! The conclave were onto us that quick. We were inside that armored van, and everything had gone to plan until then. Fred had just cast the spell to send all the ampoules flying inside the walnut. But then the conclave came. Maybe the draekins got wind of it and summoned them. Someone blasted the van door open and the walnut went flying into the air, and I caught it, and we all etherhopped to separate places, just like we had planned.”
Percy gave Nan a significant look. This is exactly what they had thought must have happened.
“But one of the watch wizards grabbed onto my ankle as I etherhopped,” said Hank. “They must’ve grabbed onto Fred and George as they went too. I suppose that’s how they got em. Anyway, we was supposed to meet up at an agreed place after a couple of hops to throw em off the tail, that was the plan. But I was in a right panic. Didn’t know where I was going. First thing I thought of was my old gran’s garden. She looked after me and Max all the time when we were growing up. In the summer we’d camp in her garden, staying in tents and pretending it was real camping. What days those were. Wish I could go back.”