A water main had burst and was already starting to freeze. It was growing colder. Nurd hadn’t noticed before. He looked at Wormwood. The tip of Wormwood’s nose had turned blue.

“Your nose has turned blue,” Nurd told him.

“Has it? It was feeling a bit funny.”

Wormwood scratched at his nose. It fell off in his hand. He peered at it, then shrugged. These things happened, or they happened to Wormwood. He excavated a disturbingly filthy handkerchief from somewhere on his person, carefully wrapped his nose in it, then stuck it in his pocket for safekeeping.

“Why did you wrap it in a handkerchief?” asked Nurd.

“In case I sneeze,” said Wormwood. “I don’t want to make a mess.”

“Ah,” said Nurd. “Very sensible.”

They walked on, offering Nurd time to think about what Wormwood had just said. Nurd stopped walking, gave Wormwood a hard flick on the ear, and they continued on their way.

Snow fell on them. Nurd looked up, but there wasn’t a cloud in sight. The night was so clear that the sky was filled with stars, like millions of gemstones scattered across a great swatch of dark cloth. Nurd had never seen so many. They took his breath away, but there was something wrong about this sky. It seemed blacker than he remembered, which made the stars shine brighter. The problem was that they weren’t the right stars. The constellations had changed. No, that wasn’t quite true. Nurd thought that he could still pick out Gemini, and Draco, and Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the Great Bear and the Little Bear, but other stars were overlaid upon them. They were dimmer, but growing in intensity. It was as though one solar system were somehow intruding on another.

Nurd found Polaris, the North Star, the center of the night sky, which had guided travelers on land and sea ever since the earliest days of exploration. Once Polaris was visible it was hard to be lost, for it marked the way due north. There was consolation in its presence.

As Nurd watched, the great star blinked once, and disappeared.

• • •

Dan and the dwarfs were still being pursued, although not very quickly. The Nosferati, as Dan had dubbed them, were addicted to sneaking along, their long fingers grasping, their shadows stretching ahead of them, almost touching the heels of Dozy, who was bringing up the rear. But they did so very, very slowly, and had a fondness for stopping occasionally and making scary faces.

And while there was no doubt that they were horrible, and nasty, and smelled of the grave, they might have been more troubling had their every move not been accompanied by music played on an unseen organ. Every footstep, every raised hand, every arch of the eyebrows came with a tune. They were monsters from a silent movie, and in the days of silent movies each cinema would pay an organist to play along with the film. It was part of the deal, and even these Nosferati, liberated from picture frames, had to play by the rules.