Sebastian Fawkes was released, since an unexplained disappearance would not have gone unnoticed in the mainstream media. His next book, however, failed to reach a receptive audience. The follow-up barely punctured the Top Twenty Bestseller list. After he appeared, uninvited and drunk, on Wogan, a light-entertainment talk show broadcast by the BBC, his publishers quietly dropped him, and nobody much cared.

Gordon asked that Susan DeWick’s memory of the night be left intact. Skulduggery granted this request. Gordon and Susan were entangled romantically for three months afterwards before she fell for a struggling young actor and he fell for a supermodel. They remained close friends until Gordon’s sudden and unexpected death years later. Her book Stirrings at Norfolk, the first true horror novel to win the Booker Prize, was dedicated to him. It said, simply, To Fishface.

Gordon was to go on to document, in his way, the darker realities of life of which the normal person is not aware. He wrote stories to shock, entertain, thrill and traumatise, and he regretted not one moment of it. His participation in real-life adventures was not quite so prolific (that role would, of course, eventually go to his niece), but he did accompany Skulduggery Pleasant on at least one more case, solving the mystery of the Phantom Killer at Darkenholme House. But that… is another story.

It’s also not very interesting. The butler did it.

The Lost Art of World Domination

ith the shadows wrapped around him and the sliver of light falling dramatically over his eyes, the evil sorcerer Scaramouch Van Dreg stood in the dungeon and watched his captive with predatory amusement.

The dungeon was dark and damp and dank, and the chains that bound the skeleton detective were big and thick and heavy. They shackled the bones of his wrists to the stone floor, forcing him to kneel.

Scaramouch liked that. The great detective, the living skeleton who had foiled plan after plan, scheme after scheme, was now forced to look up at Scaramouch. Like he had always been meant to. Like everyone had always been meant to.

The detective, his dark blue suit burnt and torn and muddy, hadn’t said anything for almost an hour. In fact, he hadn’t moved for almost an hour. Scaramouch had been standing in the shadows, gloating, for a little over fifteen minutes, but he wasn’t entirely sure that his captive had noticed.

He shifted his weight noisily, but the detective still did not acknowledge his presence.

Scaramouch frowned. There was very little point in going through all this if his efforts weren’t rewarded with due and proper attention.

He brought himself up to his full height, which wasn’t very high, and sucked in his belly, which was substantial. He gathered his cloak and stepped forward, gazing down at the top of the detective’s skull with the pitiless gaze he had practised for hours.

“Skulduggery Pleasant,” he sneered. “Finally, you are within my grasp.”