said to Merope. “You’re interrupting this prisoner in his work.”
Merope turned to look at her, slow and astonished. “I’m what?” she said.
“Distracting the prisoner. Trespassing,” the woman said. “You’ve no business to be here. You must have escaped from another strand.”
“That’s right,” Merope said. “And I’ve come to fetch my husband away from this one.”
“You can’t do that,” the woman said.
Merope stood up to her full height, inches taller than the neat woman. Despite her torn and filthy dress, she was suddenly majestic. Her hair, clotted with blood and stained with wine, swirled outwards from her head and became bright gold, brighter even than the golden apples had been. Hayley stared, awed and admiring. My mother really is a sort of goddess! she thought.
“How dare you!” Merope said. “How dare you speak like that to a daughter of Atlas! No one here is a prisoner. They are all in unlawful captivity.” Her voice rose, like a powerful singer’s. “You’re all free,” she cried out. “Get up and leave, all of you.”
The people at the desks looked up, astonished and unbelieving at first; but when Merope held out her hand to Hayley’s father and he got up and came to her, still smiling, the rest began to stand up, hesitantly in ones and twos. As Merope held out her other hand to Hayley and began to sweep the pair of them across the room, everyone seemed to see that she meant what she said. They jumped up and made for the doors.
“Stop!” the neat woman called out. And when no one took any notice, she wailed, “How am I going to get all the forms filled in?”
“Try filling them in yourself,” Merope said over her shoulder.
They reached the break in the wall and there was the ladder into the hut and Flute standing beside it. He was looking very impatient by then. He more or less hurled Hayley up the rungs and then hoisted Cyrus after her. Hayley’s father had evidently become very stiff from sitting at the desk for so long. Merope seemed to float up and Flute scrambled after her.
“We’ve got him!” Hayley said joyfully to Fiddle as she reached the balcony.
“Good,” Fiddle said. He looked at Martya. “Shall we go?”
“Instant,” Martya agreed.
The hut tramped its feet and smartly goose-stepped itself into facing the other way.
And stopped.
Uncle Jolyon was standing in the way, with his taxi throbbing behind him. He seemed huge, and solid as a mountain. As everyone clutched the balcony rail and stared, he grew even vaster, until he was gazing down at them, with a sort of dishonest, implacable pity. His voice was as large as the rest of him.
“Shame,” he thundered. “You all thought you were so clever, didn’t you? But nobody ever really gets the better of me. And I’m very good at devising punishments for people who don’t do what I want. You are all going to have a very nasty time, now and until the end of time. Trust me.”
“I am not yours,” Martya said. “There is nothing you can do to me.”
“What makes you so sure of that?” Uncle Jolyon thundered back.
Hayley gazed up at his vast bulging shirt front in despair. Just as everything seemed to coming right! she thought. But as Martya said angrily, “Because I am the greatest witch that ever lives!” Hayley’s attention was pulled that way. She saw Flute’s big hand, down by Flute’s side, making gestures to her to fetch out the star from Orion’s bow. Hayley didn’t dare nod. She dipped her chin at Flute and, furtively, gently, she put her hand to her smallest pocket and began unzipping it.
“What have you done to Orion?” Harmony asked suddenly and made Hayley’s heart stutter, in case Uncle Jolyon noticed what she was doing.
“Orion?” Uncle Jolyon boomed. “I put him back amongst the stars of course “ for keeps this time. Asterope’s up there too, as far away from him as she can be.”
“But why shouldn’t they get together?” Troy said.
“Because they dipleased me,” rumbled Uncle Joylon. “The man’s a womaniser.”
“So are you,” Troy pointed out.
“Exactly. And I don’t want any rivals,” Uncle Jolyon boomed. “You, my boy, are now going to spend eternity being punished for your cheek. I haven’t decided what to do to you yet, but I know you’ll never, ever get to build your city.”
While they talked, Hayley got her pocket unzipped and felt the star, tiny, warm and faintly fizzing, roll into the palm of her hand. Flute gently edged up on one side of her and Fiddle on the other. “When I say Now,” Flute murmured, in the faintest of whispers, “push it into him as high up as you can reach.”
Merope said loudly, “This is entirely unjust. I think we’ve all been punished enough.”
“I don’t,” Uncle Jolyon retorted. “You, my good woman, are going back where you were, and so are you, Sisyphus, only this time it will hurt. As for that Hayley— Where is Hayley?”
Hayley was so much smaller than everyone else and Uncle Jolyon now so huge that he evidently had trouble picking her out from among the crowd on the balcony. Flute grinned at Fiddle and Fiddle nodded at Flute, and they both obligingly seized Hayley and boosted her upwards towards Uncle Jolyon’s vast face. Hayley found herself travelling up what seemed half a mile of shirt front.
“Now!” said Flute.
Hayley put out her hand with the star in it and pressed it with all her strength into the middle of Uncle Jolyon’s bulging chest. It twinkled there for just a second and then seemed to dissolve into his enormous body.
Uncle Jolyon made a strange noise, like a very deep organ pipe, and began to spread. He spread and he spread, and grew fainter and more gaseous as he enlarged, and moved away backwards as he grew fainter. Stinging coldness came off him. After that he moved away so rapidly that Hayley could soon see that he had now become a globe, a vast, sulky, yellowish thing, that spread and backed away and spread as it receded, until it was a yellow disc, blotched and banded with dreary red. Then it was shining a circle, and finally it became a large bright star up in the sky.
“Ah,” said Harmony. “The planet Jupiter.”
“Yes,” said Flute. “He can’t do much harm to anyone as a planet.”
“Or only the usual sidereal influences,” Fiddle said. “And those are generally rather jolly.”
They both grinned at Hayley as they lowered her back to the balcony.
“We go now,” Martya announced. “I need my forest.”
The hut at once jolted into its goose-step stride and took them away through the industrial estate “ which now had a seedy, abandoned look “ and then, in remarkably few strides, out on to a mountainside scattered with pine trees. After a few more strides, it stopped in a level place where they could look down on the respectable grey town where Aunt Ellie lived.
Everybody
