“Oh, go!” Tonino implored them as Master Spiderman came storming down the steps. But they would not move.

“What are you boys playing at?” Master Spiderman demanded. He went hurrying through the room towards the draped cobwebs. “According to my star chart, Gabriel de Witt died nearly twenty minutes ago. His soul must have arrived here by now. Why have you not knocked on the door? Are you too busy feeding your faces to notice? Is that it?”

He stormed past the lamp and the work bench without looking at them. All the leaf-shapes flinched as the angry gust of his passing hit them. Then, to Cat’s extreme relief, the big new leaf-shape lifted one side of itself in a sort of beckoning gesture and slid quietly over the edge of the bench into the shadows underneath it. The others turned themselves and flitted after it, like a row of flatfish diving, with the old, stunted one hastening after in last place. Cat and Tonino turned their eyes sideways to make sure they were hidden and then looked quickly back at Master Spiderman. He was hurling cobwebs right and left in order to get at the black cannister.

He snatched it up. He shook it. He turned round clutching it to his chest, in such amazement and despair that Cat almost felt sorry for him. “It’s empty!” he said. His face was the face of the saddest monkey in the most unkind zoo in any world. “Empty!” he repeated. “All gone – all the souls I have collected are gone! The souls of seven nine-lifed enchanters are missing and the new one is not here! My lifetime’s work! What has gone wrong?” As he asked this, the grief in his face hardened suddenly to anger and suspicion. “What have you boys done?”

Cat had been prepared to feel very frightened when Master Spiderman realised it was their fault. He was slightly surprised to feel more tense than frightened, and quite businesslike. It was a great help to have Tonino opposite him, looking calm and sturdy. “They got out,” he said.

“They started to grow,” Tonino said. “They were beans, you know, and beans grow. Why are you upset, sir? Were you meaning to swallow them?”

“Of course I was!” Master Spiderman more or less howled. “I have been intercepting the souls of dead Chrestomancis for more than two hundred years, you stupid little boy! When there were nine, and I swallowed them, I would be the strongest enchanter there has ever been! And you let them get out!”

“But there were only eight,” Tonino pointed out.

Master Spiderman hugged the cannister to himself and spread his mouth into a wide smile. “No,” he said. “Nine. One of you boys has my ninth soul – and the other eight have no way to get out of this room.” And he shouted, loudly and suddenly, “Where have they gone?”

Cat and Tonino both jumped and tried to look as if they had no idea. But the shout obviously terrified the dead souls lurking under the table. One of the middle-sized ones, the one like a fig leaf, made a dash for freedom, between the broken rungs of Cat’s chair and out towards the stairs and the open door at the top. The others all followed an instant later, as if they could not bear to be left behind, streaming after it in a luminous line.