The Merlin Conspiracy Read Online Free PDF Page A

thing about Dad. He reads detective stories all the time when he isn’t writing himself, and he really admires the people who write them, far more than the people who write his kind of thing. He was all excited because his favorite author was going to be speaking at the conference.
    I didn’t want to go.
    â€œOh, yes, you do,” Dad said. “I’m still shuddering at what happened when I left you alone here last Easter.”
    â€œIt was my friends who drank all your whiskey,” I said.
    â€œWith you as a helpless onlooker while they broke the furniture and draped the kitchen in pasta, I know,” said Dad. “So here’s what I’m going to do, Nick. I’m going to book you in with me, and I’m going to go, and when I go, I’m going to lock up this house with you outside it. If you don’t choose to come with me, you can spend the weekend sitting in the street. Or the garden shed. I’ll leave that unlocked for you, if you like.”
    He really meant this. He can be a real swine when he puts his mind to it. I thought about overpowering him and locking him in the garden shed. I’m bigger than he is, even though I won’t be fifteen until just before Christmas. But then I thought how he isn’t really my dad and how we’d both sort of adopted one another after Mum was killed because—usually—we like one another, and where would either of us be if that fell through?
    While I was thinking this, Dad said, “Come on. You may even enjoy it. And you’ll be able to tell people later that you were present at one of the very rare appearances of Maxwell Hyde. This is only the third time he’s spoken in public, and my sense is that he’s a very interesting speaker.”
    Maxwell Hyde is this favorite author of Dad’s. I could see I would be spoiling his fun if I didn’t let him take me along, so I gave in. He was ever so pleased and gave me one of this Maxwell Hyde’s books to read.
    I don’t like detective stories. They’re dead boring. But Maxwell Hyde was worse than boring because his books were set in an alternate world. This is what Dad likes about them. He goes on about the self-consistency and wealth of otherworld detail in Maxwell Hyde’s Other-England—as far as I could see, this meant lots of boring description of the way things were different: how the King never stayed in one place and the parliament sat in Winchester and never did anything, and so forth—but what got to me was reading about another world that I couldn’t get to. By the time I’d read two pages, I was so longing to get to this other world that it was like sheets of flame flaring through me.
    There are lots of worlds. I know, because I’ve been to some. My real parents come from one. But I can’t seem to get to any of them on my own . I always seem to have to have someone to take me. I’ve tried, and I keep trying, but it just doesn’t seem to work for me, even though I want to do it so much that I dream I’m doing it. There must be something I’m doing wrong. And I’d decided that I’d spend the whole first week of the summer holidays trying until I’d cracked it. Now here was Dad hauling me away to this conference instead. That was why I didn’t want to go. But I’d said I would, so I went.
    It was even worse than I’d expected.
    It was in a big, gloomy hotel full of soberly dressed people who all thought they were important—apart from the one or two who thought they were God or Shakespeare or something and went around with a crowd of power-dressed hangers-on to keep them from being talked to by ordinary people. There was a lecture every hour. Some of them were by police chiefs and lawyers, and I sat there trying so hard not to yawn that my eyes watered and my ears popped. But there was going to be one on the Sunday by a private detective. That was the only one I thought