“Aha!” shouted Master Spiderman. He dropped the cannister and ran at an incredible speed through the room and up the first three stairs, where he was just in time to block the path of the escaping souls. Above him, the door banged shut. The line of leaf shapes swirled to a stop almost level with the lowest stair, where they dithered in the air a little and then darted away sideways with the big new soul in the lead and the smallest, oldest one fluttering rather desperately in the rear.

At this, Master Spiderman leapt down the steps and snatched up a butterfly net from the heap of rubbish. “Lively, are you?” he muttered. “Soon put a stop to that!” Two more butterfly nets left the heap and planted themselves, one in Cat’s hand and one in Tonino’s. “You let them out,” he said. “You get them caught again.” And with that, he went leaping after the streaming line of souls with his butterfly net held sideways to scoop them up.

Cat and Tonino jumped up and began pretending to chase the fleeing souls too, getting in Master Spiderman’s way whenever they could. Tonino galumphed backwards and forwards, waving his net and shouting, “Got you!” and “Oh bother, I missed!” in all the wrong places, and particularly when he was nowhere near the streaming line of souls. Cat sprinted beside Master Spiderman and, whenever Master Spiderman lunged to scoop up the souls, Cat made sure to lunge too, and either to jog Master Spiderman’s elbow or to cross Master Spiderman’s butterfly net with his own so that he missed.

Master Spiderman howled and snarled at him, but he was too intent on catching the souls to do anything to Cat. Round the basement they sped, like people in a mad game of lacrosse, with Tonino galloping in the middle, upsetting broken furniture into their path, while the line of shining, desperately frightened souls sped round the room at waist level, swerved outwards to miss the draped cobwebs, and rushed along the wall with the window in it, slightly higher up.

Window! Cat thought at them as he chased beside Master Spiderman. Window’s open! But they were too frightened to notice the window and streamed on towards the steps again. There, the ivy-leaf soul must have had the idea that the door was still open and tried to dart up the steps. The others all stopped and swirled round to follow it.

Seeing this, Master Spiderman shouted “Aha!” again and rushed towards them with his net ready. Cat and Tonino had to do some fast and artistic jumping about on the stairs, or the whole lot would have been scooped up there and then.

Then separate, you fools! Cat thought. Why don’t you all fly different ways?

But this, it seemed, the terrified souls could not bear to do. Cat could feel them thinking that they would be lost if they were alone. They streamed on in a cluster, up into the corner of the room and then on round it again, just below the ceiling, with Master Spiderman close behind, net raised, and Cat pelting after him. There was a heart-stopping moment then when the old, small soul flew too near the draped cobwebs and got tangled in them. Again the other souls swirled to a stop and waited. Cat only got there just in time. Butterfly nets clashed as Cat managed to stumble into the cobwebs and carve them apart to let the trapped soul loose.