“Careful now,” Dan warned. “They react to the light.”

He removed the padlock and pulled the bolt. The door began to open with a creak. The room beyond was big and comfortable, but very dark. As the door opened farther, a rectangle of light appeared on the floor and grew wider and wider, like the beam of a spotlight tracing its way across a stage.

A figure jumped into the light, followed by a second, and a third, and a fourth. They all looked a little bleary-eyed. Their spangled shirts had seen better days, and their trousers bore food stains. Their voices also sounded somewhat croaky, but that was nothing new.

“Hi,” said the first. “I’m Starlight.”

“Oh Lord,” said Jolly.

“And I’m Twinkle,” said the second.

“Good grief,” said Angry.

“I’m Gemini,” said the third.

“They never stop, do they?” said Dozy.

“And I’m Phil,” said the fourth. “And together we’re—”

“BoyStarz!” they all cried in unison, and performed a small twirl before they began doing to a perfectly innocent song what grape crushers do to grapes.

“Make them stop,” said Jolly, his hands pressed to his ears. “Please!”

“It’s very hard,” said Dan. “They see a light and they start performing. I’ve tried electric shocks, but that just seems to make them livelier.”

These were hard times for the boy band BoyStarz. For a start, they were no longer as young as they were, but “MenStarz” didn’t have the same ring to it. Phil in particular looked like a doorman at the kind of nightclub where people got killed on a regular basis, while Sparkle, Twinkle, and Gemini had only enough hair among all three of them for two people to share. Their career had never recovered from vicious rumors that the BoyStarz could not sing, and they simply mimed along to songs recorded by more talented vocalists. This led to the BoyStarz signing up for a special tour to prove the doubters wrong. In this it was successful, to a degree. The tour did prove that the BoyStarz could sing.

Horribly.

One critic compared the sound of BoyStarz singing live to the final cry of a ship’s horn as it sinks beneath the waves with the loss of everyone on board. Another described it as only marginally less awful than being trapped in a room with a flock of frightened geese that were honking in panic as they bumped into the walls. A third wrote: “If Death had a sound, it would sound like BoyStarz.”

The BoyStarz kept trying. They turned up for the opening of shopping malls, but nobody came. Then they started showing up for the opening of individual stores, but still nobody came. Eventually they grew so desperate that if somebody opened a newspaper, or a packet of crisps, BoyStarz would pop up beside them and start warbling about how love was like a flower, or a butterfly, or a sunny day. People started complaining. Where once the BoyStarz had been driven everywhere in limousines, they now rode bicycles, or they did until someone stole the bicycles to stop them from showing up unexpectedly. It was all very sad, unless you actually liked music, and songs being sung in tune, in which case it wasn’t very sad at all.