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to fade away, while your father becomes himself again. You want to destroy me, don’t you, young fellow? You want to kill me and you don’t know how. Except, as a matter of fact, you do know how. You know the name of the only thing in any world, Real or Magical, that can do what you desire. And even if you had forgotten what it was, you have just been reminded by your friend, the talking bear.’
    ‘You mean the Fire of Life,’ said Luka. ‘That’s what youmean, isn’t it? The Fire of Life that burns at the top of the Mountain of Knowledge.’
    ‘Bingo! Bullseye! Spot on!’ cried Nobodaddy. ‘The Towering Inferno, the Third-Degree Burn, the Spontaneous Combustion, the Flame of Flames. Oh, yes.’ He actually capered in delight, doing a soft-shoe shuffle with his feet, and juggling with his panama hat. Luka had to admit that this little dance was exactly the sort of thing Rashid Khalifa did when he was a bit too pleased with himself. But it was odder when you could see through the dancer.
    ‘But that’s just a story,’ said Luka faintly.
    ‘
Just a story?
’ echoed Nobodaddy in what sounded like genuine horror. ‘
Only a tale?
My ears must be deceiving me. Surely, young whippersnapper, you can’t have made so foolish a remark. After all, you yourself are a little Drip from the Ocean of Notions, a short Blurt from the Shah of Blah. You of all boys should know that Man is the Storytelling Animal, and that in stories are his identity, his meaning and his lifeblood. Do rats tell tales? Do porpoises have narrative purposes? Do elephants ele-phantasise? You know as well as I do that they do not. Man alone burns with books.’
    ‘But still, the Fire of Life … it
is
just a fairy tale,’ insisted Dog the bear and Bear the dog, together.
    Nobodaddy drew himself up indignantly. ‘Do I look,’ he demanded, ‘like a fairy to you? Do I resemble, perhaps, an elf? Do gossamer wings sprout from my shoulders? Do you see even a
trace
of pixie dust? I tell you now that the Fire of Life is as real as I am, and that only that Unquenchable Blaze will do what you all wish done. It will turn bear into Man and dog intoDog-Man, and it will also be the End of Me. Luka! You little murderer! Your eyes light up at the very thought! How thrilling! I am amongst assassins! What are we waiting for, then? Are we starting now? Let’s be off! Tick, tock! There is no time to lose!’
    At this point Luka’s feet began to feel as if somebody was gently tickling their soles. Then the silver sun rose above the horizon, and something quite unprecedented began to happen to the neighbourhood, the neighbourhood that wasn’t Luka’s real neighbourhood, or not quite. Why was the sun silver, for one thing? And why was everything too brightly coloured, too smelly, too noisy? The sweetmeats on the street vendor’s barrow at the corner looked like they might taste odd, too. The fact that Luka was able to look at the street vendor’s barrow at all was a part of the strange situation, because the barrow was always positioned at the crossroads, just out of sight of his house, and yet here it was, right in front of him, with those oddly coloured, oddly tasting sweetmeats all over it, and those oddly coloured, oddly buzzing flies buzzing oddly all around it. How was this possible? Luka wondered. After all, he hadn’t moved a step, and there was the street vendor asleep under the barrow, so the barrow obviously hadn’t moved either; and how did the crossroads arrive as well, um, that was to say, how had he arrived at the crossroads?
    He needed to think. He remembered the golden rule that one of his schoolteachers, the science master Mr Sherlock, a man with a pipe and a magnifying glass who always dressed too warmly for the climate, had taught him:
eliminate the impossible, and what remains, however improbable, is the truth
. ‘But,’ thought Luka, ‘what do I do when it’s the impossible that remains,when the impossible is the only explanation?’ He