Dan tightened his grip on the steering wheel. He tried to find something to be upbeat about, and decided that there was a limit to the amount of trouble that the dwarfs could cause at Honest Ed’s. There’d be no beer, and they didn’t have weapons. What could possibly go wrong?

• • •

“Well, that went all right,” said Jolly sometime later, as the van drove away at full speed. “Sort of.”

Behind them came the sound of an explosion, and a Volkswagen Beetle—twenty thousand miles on the odometer, one lady owner, perfect motoring order—flew up into the air like a big, fat firework, trailing smoke and burning fuel. A second explosion, larger than the first, quickly followed as the rest of Honest Ed’s stock went up in flames.

“I told you I smelled gas,” said Angry. “Very dangerous stuff, gas.”

“Absolutely,” said Jolly. “You can’t go messing about with gas.”

“Can’t take chances with it.”

“Absolutely not.”

They were silent for a moment or two. In the distance, the horizon glowed in the light of the flames from Honest Ed’s former car dealership.

“Probably shouldn’t have gone looking for it with matches, though,” said Dan.

He was driving faster than was safe, but it seemed like a good idea to put as much distance between the dwarfs and Honest Ed as possible. When last they’d seen him, Honest Ed had been searching for a gun.

“Well, the flashlight was a bit small,” said Angry. “And it didn’t light things very well.”

“I think we solved that problem,” said Jolly. “It looks like Honest Ed’s is lit perfectly well now.”

“Did we get paid in advance?” Angry asked Dan.

“We always get paid in advance,” said Dan. “If we didn’t, we’d never get paid at all.”

They drove on. The dwarfs sang. Dan went back to trying to be optimistic. Things, he thought, could only get better, mainly because they couldn’t possibly get any worse.

• • •

In the basement of Wreckit & Sons, Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley sat at a desk and wrote what the Voice in the Wall told him to write.

WANTED, he wrote. FOUR DWARFS FOR STORE WORK. EXCELLENT PAY AND PROSPECTS.

Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley stopped writing.

“Do they really have excellent prospects?” he asked the Voice in the Wall.

Yes, replied the Voice in the Wall. They have the most excellent prospects.

Of dying.

18. This was not necessarily a good thing. There are many professions that might benefit from a smile and a hearty laugh, but undertaking is not one of them. The last thing people want as they arrive, red-eyed and weeping, to send their beloved auntie Ethel on her way to the next life is to find someone in a black suit grinning like a loon and opining that it’s a lovely day for a funeral. That way, frankly, lies a punch in the face.

19. A quick word here about people who put words like honest or cheerful before their names: they usually aren’t. Anyone who has to advertise the fact that he’s cheerful is probably sadder than a bird without a beak in a birdseed factory, while someone who has to boast about how honest he is will steal the eyes from your head while you’re cleaning your glasses. Mind you, this doesn’t mean that someone who calls himself Dishonest Bob, for example, is automatically honest. He’s just honest about being dishonest, if you see what I mean. Vlad the Impaler (1431–76) still went around impaling people, and Henry the Cruel of Germany (1165–97) was still cruel. They just believed that it paid to advertise. Generally speaking, then, if someone adds a good quality to their name, they’re probably lying, and if they add something bad, then they’re probably telling the truth.