“Sir, we haven’t had any lunch yet.”

Master Spiderman’s round monkey eyes blinked Cat’s way. “Is that so? Well, you may have food as soon as you have swept and tidied this room.” At that, he turned and ran up the stone steps to the door, with his musty black coat swirling. He stopped at the top. “Do not try to do any magic,” he said. “I’ll have nothing like that here. Nothing stupid. This place is in a time apart from any other time and you must behave yourselves here.” He went out through the door and shut it behind him. They heard a bolt shoot home on the other side of it.

That door was the only way out of the basement. The only other opening in the stone walls was a high up window, fast shut and too dirty to see through, which let in a meagre grey light. Cat and Tonino stared from the door to the window, and then at one another. “What did he mean,” asked Tonino, “to do no magic? Can you do magic?”

“I don’t think so,” said Cat. “Can you?”

“I – I can’t remember,” Tonino said miserably. “I am blank.”

So was Cat, whenever he thought about it. He was uncertain of everything, including why they were here and whether he ought to be frightened about it, or just miserable. He clung to the two things he was certain about. Tonino was younger than he was and Cat ought to be looking after him.

Tonino was shivering. “Let’s find the brooms and start sweeping,” Cat said. “It’ll warm us up and he’ll give us something to eat when we’ve done it.”

“He might,” Tonino said. “Do you believe him or trust him?”

“No,” said Cat. This was something else his fuzzy mind was clear about completely. “We’d better not give him an excuse not to give us any food.”

They found two worn down brooms and a long-handled dustpan in the corner by the stairs, along with a heap of amazingly various rubbish – rusty cans, cobwebby planks, rags so old they had turned into piles of dirt, walking sticks, broken jars, butterfly nets, fishing rods, half a carriage wheel, broken umbrellas, works of clocks and things that had decayed too much for anyone to guess what they had once been – and they set about cleaning the room.

Without needing to discuss it, they started at the end where the stairs were. It was clearer that end. The rest of the room was filled with a clutter of old splintery work benches and broken chairs, which got more and more jumbled towards the far end, where the entire wall was completely draped in cobwebs, thicker and dustier than Cat would have thought possible. For another thing, when they were near the stairs, they could hear Master Spiderman creaking and muttering about in the room overhead and it seemed reasonable to think that he could hear them too. It was in both their minds that, if he heard them truly hard at work, he might decide to bring them something to eat.