“It’s very lifelike,” he said.

“It’s. An. Elf,” said Nurd. “It can’t be lifelike. There’s nothing life to be like.”

Wormwood began to open the window.

“What are you doing?” said Nurd.

“I want to take a closer look at it.”

Nurd suddenly had the sense that this might not be a good idea. He couldn’t have said why except that they were on the second floor of a house and somehow there was an elf on their windowsill, which meant that either the elf had, as Wormwood suggested, managed to climb up, or, as seemed more likely, someone or something had put it there from above. Whatever the case, opening the window didn’t strike Nurd as the wisest of moves.

“I wouldn’t do that,” he said, “not until—” But the rest of the sentence was drowned out by the creak of the window being opened. There was a blast of cold air. In the distance, Nurd could hear sirens and—

Were those screams?

• • •

At the Biddlecombe Visitor Centre and Battlefield Museum, the caretaker, Mr. Karloff, was closing up for the evening. He wanted to get down to Wreckit’s for the grand unveiling of the new store because very little that was exciting ever happened in Biddlecombe, or very little that didn’t involve people claiming to have seen demons, or the dead coming to life. Mr. Karloff wasn’t sure that he believed all of that nonsense. During the supposed invasion of Biddlecombe by the forces of Hell, Mr. Karloff had been visiting his sister Elsa in Skegness, and had missed the whole affair. Despite the fact that some very trustworthy people claimed it was all true, honest to goodness, would I lie to you, Mr. Karloff regarded it as evidence of some form of mass hysteria.

It had not been a busy day at the visitor center, but then it was rarely a busy day there. For some reason, tourists didn’t want to come to Biddlecombe to stare at a damp field in which, long ago, two small armies led by very cautious men had eventually got around to fighting each other by mistake. The sign above the museum’s door read WE BRING HISTORY TO LIFE!, which was not true in any way, shape, or form. There were stones with more life than the Biddlecombe Battlefield Museum.

Mr. Karloff had tried to make the experience more interesting by creating a reconstruction of the battle using small plastic soldiers which he had carefully painted with his own hands. There weren’t enough Vikings and Saxons to make it look impressive, so he had bulked up the numbers with whatever he had lying around at home. If someone closely examined Mr. Karloff’s version of the Battle of Biddlecombe, they might have spotted some confused-looking German soldiers painted like Vikings, along with half a dozen cowboys and a couple of Indians who had been drafted into the Saxon ranks. The rest of the museum was filled out with some spearheads, broken axes, and the odd bone that had been found poking out of the field after spells of heavy rain.