Shan and Gath nodded.

And in the general hilarity and good cheer that followed, nobody noticed that it was only Nurd who had not agreed.

1. For those of you unfamiliar with mange, it is an ailment that causes a loss of fur. Think of the worst haircut you’ve ever received, and it’s a bit like that, but all over your body.

2. Technically, that sentence should read “if there was one thing for which Mrs. Johnson was a stickler,” as nobody likes a dangling preposition, but I said that Mrs. Johnson was a stickler for good spelling, not good grammar.

3. Such as Augustus the Second (1694–1733), King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, also known as Augustus the Strong. He managed to bankrupt his kingdom by spending all of its money on bits of amber and ivory, lost a couple of battles that he really would have been better off winning, and fathered over three hundred children, which suggests that, in between losing battles and collecting trinkets, he had a lot of time on his hands, but his party piece consisted of gripping a horseshoe in his fists and making it straight. He would probably have been very happy just straightening horseshoes and blowing up hot-water bottles for a living, but due to an accident of birth he instead found himself ruling a number of kingdoms. Badly. You should bear this in mind if your dad or mum has a name beginning with the words “His/Her Royal Highness,” and you are known as “Prince/Princess Something-or-Other.” Unless, of course, your name is really “Something-or-Other,” in which case you don’t have anything to worry about (about which to worry—darn it) as your parents didn’t care enough about you to give you a proper name, and you are therefore unlikely to amount to anything. Sorry.

II

In Which Someone Sees a Ghost (Yawn)

AS HAS ALREADY BEEN established, the town of Biddlecombe was a lot odder than it once had been, but the curious thing about Biddlecombe was that it had always been ever so slightly strange, even before the attempted invasion from Hell. It was just that people in Biddlecombe had chosen not to remark upon its strangeness, perhaps in the hope that the strangeness might eventually grow tired of being ignored and just go and be strange somewhere else.

For example, it was well known that if you took a right turn on Machen Street, and then a left turn on Poe Place, you ended up back on the same corner of Machen Street from which you had recently started. The residents of Biddlecombe got round this peculiar geographical anomaly by avoiding that particular corner of Machen Street entirely, instead using the shortcut through Mary Shelley Lane. Visitors to Biddlecombe, though, tended not to know about the shortcut, and thus they had been known to spend a great deal of time moving back and forth between Machen Street and Poe Place until somebody local came along and rescued them.