No escape. The old woman had got hold of a fire poker and was waving it about. Coming closer, banging the furniture. No way out. And then people at the door, banging on the door, calling, shouting, ‘My lady! My lady! My lady!’

‘It’s in here!’ she answered. ‘I’ve got it trapped. The foreign thing is in my room. I’ve caught it, I’ve found it. What you lost and could not find, I found! Here! In my room!’

‘The key’s in the lock, my lady. We can’t get in! Turn the key and we’ll be with you instantly, only hurry, my lady, hurry, do hurry, lest you be harmed!’

‘I harmed? Very unlike!’ she spat. ‘That it thing! Toss it out! I’m at the door now. See that it doesn’t try to run past you! I want it ripped apart in front of me, hell to the furnishings! Ready? One, two, three! Get it!’

But while the old lady was at the door turning the key and giving instructions, I was at the marble fireplace and scrambling back up into the wretched black passages, leaving so many marks behind me, sooty hand and footprints upon her marble fireplace. No matter that it hurt, so what that it hurt, good that it hurt, I bloodied myself upwards back into darkness and dirt. For a moment, looking down, I saw a torch shining beneath me and heard cries of, ‘It! It! It!’

And then, ‘Light a fire!’

On, on, I scraped my way. But I smacked into something just a moment later, the flue was bending. I followed it along and then I must have lost my way somehow, got confused by the passages, because there were different openings now, different holes and somehow I slipped and went smashing down another black tunnel and landed all the way down in some other Iremonger’s firegrate. You should get out of this habit, Pennant, I told myself, or you shan’t thrive long. This time I fell hard and smacked my back bad, and when I tried to get up I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. I’d wedged myself somehow between the grate and the andirons and the fireplace, it was a small fireplace it was, and I was stuck in it.