“Shadows?” said Professor Hilbert.

Crudford pointed a stubby finger at the sky.

They looked up. More and more stars were vanishing, and darkness swirled in their place. To Maria, it felt like they were trapped inside one of those glass domes that are usually filled with water and imitation snow and a village scene, and beyond the glass the world was filled with smoke. As they watched, the darkness assumed a face. It was a face unlike any that they could have imagined, a face constructed by a presence that had only heard stories of faces, but never actually seen one. The mouth was askew, and the chin too long, and one pointed ear set lower than the other. Only the eyes were missing.

“The Shadows,” said Crudford. “A little of their essence has already managed to get through, otherwise none of this would be happening, but it’s the difference between smelling the monster’s breath and feeling its teeth ripping into your flesh. They won’t be kept out for long, and once they get in here the whole Multiverse will be at risk. Biddlecombe has been turned into a gateway, a bridge between the Kingdom of Shadows and your universe. But all universes are connected, if only by threads, and once the Shadows infect one universe then the Multiverse is doomed. They’ll turn it black, and everything in it will suffocate and die, or be turned to Shadow.”

“And the Great Malevolence doesn’t want this to happen,” said Maria, “because it doesn’t want the Shadows to have the Earth, or the Multiverse. If anyone is going to destroy all life, it’s going to be your master, right?”

“Absolutely,” said Crudford. “It’s the whole point of its existence. Without it, it’d just be bored.”

“But why is this happening now?” said Maria.

“Someone built the engine that allowed Biddlecombe to be shifted,” said Crudford. “But it had to be powered up, and that power came from elsewhere, from outside. It came from Hell and, if I’m not mistaken, it took the form of a beating heart. Furthermore, the Shadows are blind. They had to be led to Biddlecombe, and the only way that could happen was with sound. They followed the heartbeats. Can’t you hear them? The heart is close, very close.”

But try as they might, they could hear nothing.

“That shop is the core of the engine,” said Crudford. “We have to get in there and switch it off before it’s too late, and move that beating heart out of this universe.”

“But whose heart is it?” asked Maria. “Whose heart could be capable of powering an occult engine, and leading a legion of Shadows to Biddlecombe?”

“Mrs. Abernathy’s,” said Crudford, and he sounded almost apologetic. “The heart of Ba’al.”

• • •

In the Mountain of Despair, the Great Malevolence brooded.

Before he had traveled to Biddlecombe, Crudford had popped back to Hell for long enough to let his master know what appeared to be happening on Earth. The Great Malevolence had not been happy to hear about it. In its anger it threw a couple of demons at walls, and tossed a passing imp on the fire. The imp didn’t mind too much about the flames as it had fireproof skin, but it had been on its way to do something very important and had now completely forgotten what the important thing was.⁵⁶ With nothing else to do, it found a nice patch of hot ash and settled down for a nap.