This time the phone didn’t ring.

Walden put the handset down. Aneeta was staring at her, still crumpled and wet-eyed though she’d cleaned her glasses and put them back on. Walden forced herself to step back into her teacher persona. Dr Walden was calm. Dr Walden was certain. Dr Walden always knew what to do.

Her first responsibility was the child in front of her. She could not send Aneeta back across the road to Scrubs now. Safest to assume the worst-case scenario. Nikki was no match for Old Faithful. If a wild incursion started on the school grounds, a student wandering around by themselves would be a juicy snack for anything that came through. She could not leave Aneeta alone in her office, with its filing cabinets of confidential student information. The rest of the Victorian suite was Walden’s private refuge. Living in a boarding school could send you mad if you did not carve out a space to be a real adult human being. No student—and very few colleagues—had ever been permitted to cross the holy threshold between Walden’s office and her sitting room.

“I’m going to nip over to School House and check everything is all right,” she said. “I’d like you to stay here, please, Aneeta. Not in the office—through here.”

It could not have taken more than a few moments to ensconce Aneeta on Walden’s elderly sofa and grant her permission to watch TV and to help herself to anything she liked in the kitchen. Walden’s personal laptop was on the side, already signed into her work email; she sent a quick email to the Scrubs night-duty address, letting them know where their missing sixth former was—perhaps another thirty seconds of work. It all felt like hours too long.

Walden left Aneeta there sitting on the sofa and clinging to her phone. She kept thinking about the dial tone when she’d tried to call School House. Back in her office, something occurred to her. She turned to the possessed wall clock. “Hey, you.”

The clock’s resident demon—a second-order imp—manifested its eldritch cuckoo obediently. Walden breathed a sigh of relief. If something big had crossed over from the demonic plane to the mundane world, its presence would create a thaumic vacuum, hoovering up the wild magic that sustained lesser possessions like this one.

And then her relief shattered as the imp evaporated.

“Fuck,” said Dr Walden, and started running.