Fire and Hemlock. Diana Wynne Jones

the other fast, and stopping to show half a word each. With them she also saw Seb watching, looking scornful. “Yes there are,” she contradicted Mr Lynn. “It’s like those vases. Now-here and Nowhere.” The idea of Seb was so strong in her mind as she said it that she felt as if she had also told Mr Lynn how Seb had tried to make her promise not to see him.

      “Nowhere,” repeated Mr Lynn. “Now-here. Yes, I see.” He was not thinking of Seb at all. Polly did not know whether she was relieved or annoyed. Then he said, “You mentioned a horse in your letter. A Nowhere horse, I suppose. What is my horse like? Do you have one too?”

      “No,” said Polly. She would have liked one, but she was sure she had not. “Your Nowhere horse is like that,” she said, pointing to the picture of the Chinese horse on the wall.

      They both looked up at it. “I’d hoped for something a bit calmer,” Mr Lynn confessed. “That one obviously kicks and bites. Polly, I don’t think I’d stay on his back five seconds.”

      “You’ll have to try,” Polly said severely.

      Mr Lynn took it meekly. “Oh well,” he said. “Perhaps if I spoke to it in Chinese—Now, how did I come to find this vicious beast?” They were thinking of various ways Mr Piper could have met the horse, when Mr Lynn happened to see his watch. “When does your mother want you back? Is she coming here?”

      “Half past five,” said Polly, and then had an awful moment when she seemed to have forgotten the lawyer’s address. She had just not listened in the taxi. But, because Ivy had made her say it, it had gone down into her memory somehow. She found she could recite it after all.

      Mr Lynn unfolded himself and stood up. “Lucky that’s quite near here. Come on. We’d better get going if we’re to be there by five-thirty.”

      Polly got her coat. Mr Lynn put on a once shiny anorak almost as worn-out as Edna’s dressing gown, and they set off, down the hollow stairs and into the now dark street. Strangely enough, Polly forgot to look in case Mr Leroy or Laurel were following her. The road was so busy and Londonish and full of traffic that she only thought how glad she was to be able to grab hold of Mr Lynn’s hand, and how grateful she was that he took her a shortcut down small streets where there were fewer cars and even some trees. The trees still had some shivering leaves clinging to them. Polly was just thinking that those leaves looked almost golden in the orange of the streetlights when the noise began in the street round the corner.

      It was about seven different noises at once. A car hooter blared. With it were mixed the awful screech of brakes and a splintering, crashing sound. Behind this were angry voices yelling and several screams. But the noises in front of these, which made it obviously different from a simple car crash, were iron-battering sounds and a terrible shrill yelling that was the most panic-stricken noise Polly had ever heard.

      Mr Lynn and Polly looked at one another.

      “Do you think we should go and see?” Mr Lynn said.

      “Yes,” said Polly. “It might be a job for us.” She did not believe it was for an instant, and she knew Mr Lynn did not either, but it seemed the right thing to say.

      They went round the corner. Mr Lynn said, “Good Lord!” and a lot seemed to happen in no time at all.

      The thing making the noise was a horse. It was loose in a narrow street with a rope bridle trailing off it, dodging and rearing as people tried to catch it – or the people might have been running away from it: it was not clear which. Slewed across the street behind the horse was a car with a broken headlight. A man was leaning angrily out of the car window, shouting. And the horse, a great, luminous, golden thing in the streetlights, slipping and crunching in the glass from the broken headlight, had just dodged someone’s grabbing hands and was now coming battering towards Polly and Mr Lynn, screaming more like a person than a horse.

      There was just an instant, while Mr Lynn said “Good Lord!” when Polly could see Mr Lynn’s eyes behind the orange glow of his glasses, staring at her, wide and grey and incredulous. Then the horse was almost on top of them, and it reared.

      Polly, to her everlasting disgust, did not behave anything like an assistant hero. She screamed almost as loudly as the horse and crouched on the pavement with her arms over her head. The horse was huge. It stood above her like a tower of golden flesh and bone, beating the air with its iron hooves, and screaming, screaming. Polly saw a big eye, a rolling bulge of blue-brown and white, shot with veins and tangled in pale horsehair, stuff like detergent bubbles dripping, and huge, square teeth. She knew the horse was mad with terror, and she screamed and screamed.

      She heard Mr Lynn say, “Here.” Something hard and figure-eight-shaped was pushed into her fending hand. Polly’s fingers closed round it without telling her what it was. She just knelt and screamed among flying shadows while the front hooves of the horse crashed down close beside her with Mr Lynn’s feet next to them. Then its back feet crashed. Mr Lynn’s hunched shoulder had hit the horse in its side as its back feet left the ground to lash at Polly, and swung it round just enough to miss her. After that, he managed to grab the rope trailing from the horse’s nose.

      There was furious trampling and squealing. Sparks that were pale in the orange light came from under the horse’s feet, and the horse’s head, twisting and flattened, more like a snake’s than a horse’s, darted at Mr Lynn’s arm and tried to fix the huge teeth in him.

      Mr Lynn said words which Polly, up to then, had thought only Dad and the dustmen knew, and pulled hard down on the rope. There was a further rush of feet and sparks, and the two of them were trampling away from Polly towards the crashed car. The horse stopped screaming. Polly could hear the things Mr Lynn was saying quite clearly. Most of it was to the horse, but some of it seemed to be just swearing. She giggled rather, because Mr Lynn was not behaving like a hero either. Nor did he look like one. As the horse stamped round in a half-circle in front of the broken car, with Mr Lynn hanging on to the rope at the end of both long arms and his anorak up under his armpits, he looked more like an orangutan than anything else, or perhaps a spider monkey. His hair, which even the wind at the funeral had not done much to disarrange, was all over his face and he seemed to have lost his glasses.

      Here Polly’s fingers told her again about the figure-of-eight object she was clutching. She looked down and found it was a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. She scrambled up and backed against a wall behind her, holding them very carefully. It would be awful if she broke Mr Lynn’s glasses. The horse was sliding about in the broken headlights. “Look where you put your bloody feet, you fool!” Mr Lynn said to it. It looked as if he was going to make it stand still any second.

      The motorist climbed angrily out of his smashed car. “I say!” he called out in a loud, hectoring voice. “Is this your damned horse? It could have killed me!”

      That set the horse off again. It became all orange, rearing panic, high on its back legs, with Mr Lynn frantically leaning on the rope. He swore at the horse, then at the motorist. “No, it is not my horse,” he added. “Get out of the way!”

      The horse managed to land out with a hind foot before its front feet hit the road. The motorist bolted for his life. Mr Lynn yelled at the horse that its grandfather was a donkey with venereal disease and told it to Come off that! And the two of them came rushing back up the street again. They trampled round in front of Polly, with Mr Lynn practically swinging on the rope. Polly could feel waves of terror coming off the horse. She had to hold both hands, and Mr Lynn’s glasses, to her mouth to stop herself screaming this time. In front of her were huge, bent, golden hind legs, stronger than she could have imagined, and a tail that lashed her face like her own hair in the wind, only harder, smelling of burning. Someone’s burned it! she thought. No wonder it’s so upset!

      The next thing Polly knew, the motorist was standing beside her, watching the horse and Mr Lynn rush away down the street. “How was I to know it wasn’t his bloody horse?” he said to Polly. “He’s behaving as if he knows it.”

      “Be quiet,” Polly said. Her voice was thick from screaming. “Mr Lynn’s being a hero.”

      The motorist