As Dozy was bringing up the rear he was more aware of the eyeballs than Mumbles. He felt hundreds of eyes boring into his back. He could hear them rolling along the dusty floor behind him. It was slowly driving him mad. Occasionally he would cast a glance over his shoulder and the eyeballs would stop moving. They would even stop staring at him for a while and suddenly find something interesting to look at on the ceiling or the walls. If they could, he was sure that they would have started whistling innocently, as if to say, “Don’t mind us, we’re not really following you, we just happen to be heading in the same direction.”

“Look—” Dozy began to say, then realized that (a) the eyeballs couldn’t do anything else and (b) what he actually wanted was for them to stop looking, so telling them to look wasn’t helpful.

“Listen—” he tried, but that wasn’t right either.

“Oh, just go away!” he said. “We don’t want any eyeballs. We have enough of our own. We only need two each. We’ve nowhere to put any more. We can’t keep you in our pockets. It would defeat the purpose.”

The eyeballs looked hurt, or as hurt as it was possible for disembodied eyeballs to look. The eyeballs peered at one another questioningly, then back at Dozy in a vaguely pleading manner.

“No, don’t try that with me,” said Dozy. “I mean it. You’ve had your fun, now go back to your pictures.”

He began walking again, but had taken only a few steps when he heard the wet rustling of eyeballs rolling, and felt them staring at his back again.

Dozy turned round in a fury.

“That’s it!” he said. “I’ve had it! For the last time, go back to your pictures!”

Just to be sure that they understood how angry he was, he stamped his foot hard on the floor. Something popped wetly under his heel, and there was the kind of squishing noise that only comes from standing on a round object that is mainly liquid and jelly held together by a thin membrane.

An eyeball, for example.

“Oops,” said Dozy.

He didn’t want to look down, but he didn’t have much choice. He lifted his foot and winced. He was no expert, but he was pretty certain that this particular eyeball’s days of staring at strangers had come to an end.

Mumbles came back to find out why Dozy had stopped walking, and told him not to worry: the bits of eyeball would clean off easily enough.

There was no way that the eyeballs could have heard him, thought Dozy. After all, they were just eyeballs. Even if they had, they probably couldn’t have understood him. Nevertheless, Mumbles’s words coincided with a burst of activity among the eyeballs. They began to vibrate. The red veins running across them expanded until the eyeballs were no longer big enough to contain them. They burst through the membrane of the eyes to form what to Dozy’s mind looked disturbingly like little legs. Each eyeball split beneath its retina to reveal a mouth filled with teeth. The two upper canines were longer than the rest, and needle sharp.