“Okay.”

“Because they’re not ghosts, not in the way that you think, and they can’t see you or hurt you.”

“Er, yes, right.”

“And we’re not going to mention them to policemen, or anyone else, isn’t that right?”

“Absolutely.”

“There’s a good chap. Now, back to work you go. Milk, two sugars, and a Jammie Dodger, please.”

Brian did as he was told. He made a large pot of tea, put some mugs and a plate of Jammie Dodgers beside it on the tray, added a jug of milk and a bowl of sugar, and looked at his handiwork. It was all very neat and tidy. He picked up the tray, and instantly his hands began shaking so much that the Jammie Dodgers were awash with tea and milk before he even managed to get halfway to the door.

“Oh dear,” said Brian.

He turned round to return to the kitchen counter, and stopped dead.

There was a not-ghost in the room with him.

XVI

In Which a Scientist Tries to Be Cleverer than Maria, and Fails

THE BELL ABOVE THE sweetshop door jangled. It was Professor Hilbert’s turn to sell sweets for a couple of hours, but then it always seemed to be Professor Hilbert’s turn. Professor Stefan didn’t like dealing with children and, on the two occasions Dorothy had been left in charge, she had eaten so many caramel chews that her jaw had swollen on one side, making her look as though she was concealing a golf ball in her mouth. As for Brian, his hands continued to tremble so much that he inevitably poured more sweets on the floor than he managed to put into bags. If Brian and Dorothy had been left in charge, Mr. Pennyfarthinge’s would have gone out of business in a week.

Professor Hilbert was engaged in mapping reported sightings of strange phenomena in and around Biddlecombe, which was no simple task, as everything about Biddlecombe seemed strange, even the stuff that people had begun to regard as comparatively normal. For example, it was widely accepted that something unusual was living at the bottom of Miggin’s Pond, but attempts to discover precisely what it was had been hampered by the ducks, which were very protective of their new resident and tended to attack anyone who attempted anything more threatening than throwing bread at them. The long-dead, and very unpleasant, Bishop Bernard the Bad, who had popped back to life for a while with the sole intention of sticking hot pokers up people’s bottoms, had been reduced to bits of broken bone and mummified flesh, but on quiet evenings his remains could still be heard rattling angrily in the crypt beneath the church. It had been suggested that someone should go down and examine them, but since the person who had made the suggestion was Professor Stefan, and the someone he had in mind was anyone but himself, that suggestion had been put on hold.

Nevertheless, Professor Hilbert had still managed to pinpoint at least five areas of Biddlecombe in which unusual numbers of residents had recently complained of seeing spectral figures. Professor Hilbert shared Professor Stefan’s view that these were glimpses of parallel universes, although he also believed that there were other dimensions as yet unknown existing alongside these universes. From his interviews with the boy named Samuel Johnson, Professor Hilbert had come to some understanding of how beings from these other dimensions had entered our own, and had even managed to abduct humans from our world to theirs. Professor Hilbert suspected that Samuel Johnson wasn’t telling the scientists everything he knew, but Professor Hilbert didn’t mind. Like many adults, he believed that he was cleverer than any child and, quite possibly, most other adults. In this, of course, he was wrong. Being clever is not just about how much you know, but about knowing that you really don’t know very much at all.