Somewhere in the Multiverse, Mrs. Abernathy’s heart was beating.

9. Which was probably to be expected, given that the slime was usually his own. “I’ve produced more slime, sludge, glop, gunk, mucus, and mire than you’ve had hot dinners,” he would boast proudly to anyone who might listen. Which would usually be enough to put someone about to sit down to a hot dinner right off the idea.

10. An adventure described in The Infernals, available from all good bookshops and some bad ones. If you haven’t read it, please find a copy and turn to the second footnote in Chapter One, which will wag a finger disapprovingly at you for picking up the later books in a series without first reading the earlier ones.

11. See what I did there?

IV

In Which We Go Shopping, and Rather Wish That We Hadn’t

LET’S DRIFT BACK THROUGH Biddlecombe on this cold dark night, drift like smoke.

Like Shadows.

Wreckit & Sons had once been the largest shop in Biddlecombe. It sold almost everything that anyone could possibly want: pins and pots, breadbaskets and bicycles, televisions and tea trays. It was four stories tall, took up an entire block of the town’s center, and its shelves stretched for miles and miles. Its basement was so huge and poorly lit that a man named Ernest Tuttle had once got lost there while trying to buy a tennis racket and a socket wrench, and promptly vanished. His ghost—a pale, moaning figure—was said to haunt the store, until it was discovered that it was not, in fact, Ernest Tuttle’s ghost but Ernest Tuttle himself. He had spent two years trying to find a way out, and couldn’t understand why people kept running away from him. When they pointed out that he was pale and moaning, he replied that they’d be pale, too, if they’d been trapped in a basement for two years living only on rice cakes, and they’d probably moan a bit as well. His feet hurt, he told reporters, and he believed that the mice had adopted him as their king. He still hadn’t managed to find a tennis racket or a socket wrench either.

The store was another of Hilary Mould’s buildings, but it wasn’t quite as offensively awful as the others. There was something almost grand about Wreckit & Sons. In the right light—somewhat dim, a bit murky—it resembled a cathedral, or a temple. Arthur Bunce, the man who had originally asked Hilary Mould to design the store, took one look at it and promptly went mad. Instead Mould bought the building himself, and he disappeared shortly after. The building remained empty for many years until a gentleman named Wreckit took a fancy to it, and opened his department store there.

But if Wreckit & Sons sold a lot of things that people might want, it also tried to sell a lot of things that nobody could possibly want. As he grew older, Mr. Wreckit became more and more eccentric. He began calling it Wreckit & Sons for starters, which annoyed his daughters greatly, as he didn’t have any sons. His buying habits changed. For example, he bought two thousand three-dimensional Chinese-made photographs of this man: