“You two—um, three—have a lovely time,” said Mrs. Johnson as they left the house. “I just hope that it’s a special evening for you.”

Even if the reopening of Wreckit & Sons had been the grandest event that Biddlecombe had ever seen, the evening would not have been destined to go well for these two young people and one small dachshund. As things happened, it was destined to be an opening unlike any other.

Dimensions were fragmenting.

Cracks were appearing in the Multiverse.

The Shadows were gathering.

Eternal Darkness was coming.

Not a good evening for a date, then. Not a good evening at all.

XV

In Which Brian the Tea Boy Really Wishes That He Had Found Himself a Safer Job, like Hand-Feeding Great White Sharks, or Juggling Scorpions

BRIAN THE TEA BOY was still not used to the ghosts. Oh, he understood that they weren’t really ghosts as such. Professor Stefan had sat him down shortly after the policemen had paid their visit, and explained to Brian in some detail his theory about why a former sweet factory seemed to be quite the hive of activity for people who had been dead for a long time.

“Think of the Multiverse as a series of bubbles, and each bubble is a universe,” said Professor Stefan. “But they’re not like the bubbles in a glass of fizzy pop. Instead, they’re pressed very tightly together, so tightly that the ‘skin’ of one universe almost, but not quite, shares the skin of another. And what is in these universes, you might ask?”

“Ghosts,” said Brian.

“No, Brian,” said Professor Stefan in the tone of a man who has just discovered a large hole in his bucket of patience, and is now considering hitting someone over the head with the bucket, “not ghosts. Ghosts don’t exist. Let’s say it together on the count of three. One, two, three. Ghosts don’t exist.”

“G-ghosts don’t exist,” echoed Brian dully, casting an anxious glance over his shoulder in case one decided to pop up and prove him wrong. Brian felt that he had been reduced to a big jellied spine waiting for a shiver to run down it.

“Very good,” said Professor Stefan. “If you could say it without stammering, that would be even better.”

“S-sorry,” s-said Brian.

“D-don’t— Blast it, you have me at it now. Don’t worry, just listen.”

“Right,” said Brian.

“What I think we are seeing in this sweet factory are quantum universes parallel to our own, but we’re being given glimpses of different points in their time lines, which is why the people who keep popping up are wearing the clothing of Victorian servants, or Tudor courtiers, or, in that slightly disturbing incident involving the elderly gentleman climbing into his bathtub, nothing at all. Similarly, it’s entirely possible that somewhere on their time lines, people are glimpsing scientists in false beards who are pretending to run a sweetshop, although so far we’ve seen no evidence of that.

“Look, people think of time as a single straight line, like this,” said Professor Stefan. He drew a straight line for Brian, just to be helpful.