Professor Hilbert, meanwhile, was regretting calling Maria “little girl,” even if he had done so only in his head. She had spotted something that he had missed entirely. It could have been a coincidence, but Professor Hilbert was a scientist and took the view that although coincidences were sometimes just that and nothing more, there were times when coincidences were actually patterns that you had previously failed to spot.

What they were looking at was clearly an inverted pentagram formed by five buildings, all of which had been designed by the mysterious Hilary Mould. It wasn’t a perfect pentagram: the crematorium, which occupied the top left point of the star, was slightly too far to the right, but if you included the cemetery next to the Church of St. Timidus then it was closer to the mark. Similarly, the Biddlecombe Visitor Centre and Battlefield Museum was slightly too far to the right, but again, if you allowed for the battlefield itself, it was spot-on.³⁷ Throw in the old lunatic asylum, the abandoned prison, and Mr. Pennyfarthinge’s Sweete Factorye and, hey presto, there was your pentagram.

“Hilary Mould owned all of the land on which the buildings were constructed,” explained Maria. “He came from a very wealthy family; at one point, the Moulds collected rent from half of Biddlecombe. Mould then offered to design the buildings and contributed half of the cost of construction himself. Biddlecombe didn’t really need a prison or a lunatic asylum, or even a visitor center—it didn’t have very many prisoners, only a couple of people who qualified as even slightly odder than usual, and hardly anybody ever came to visit—but getting some new buildings at a bargain price seemed like a good idea to everyone. And then, when the final stone was laid, Hilary Mould simply vanished.”

Professor Stefan shook his head in bemusement.

“But why bother?” he said. “I mean, what’s the point of creating some kind of notional star in the town of Biddlecombe?”

Behind him, Dorothy coughed. It was a very deep cough. It sounded like a gorilla had just stepped into the room and politely wanted to be noticed.

“I might be wrong,” said Dorothy, “but it looks like he was building a vast occult generator. You know, a kind of supernatural power station.”

“But powered by what?” asked Professor Hilbert, annoyed that he had been upstaged by a female for the second time that day.

“Death and suffering,” said Dorothy. “You have a battlefield, a prison, an asylum, a crematorium, and Mr. Pennyfarthinge’s Sweete Factorye or, more particularly, Uncle Dabney’s line in unpleasant eating experiences.”

“It would explain a lot,” said Maria, who was impressed by Dorothy’s insights, and regarded them as another blow struck for feminism. “Like how Biddlecombe became the focus for the invasion from Hell. It couldn’t simply have been the Abernathys and their friends messing about in a cellar with things that they didn’t understand.³⁸ They weren’t powerful enough, and it made no sense that what was happening at CERN in Switzerland should have found an outlet in Biddlecombe.³⁹ It was because of Mould and his buildings.”