Jolly made himself another ice-cream cone. He’d already had twelve, but the sometimes bumpy nature of the terrain meant that he had only managed successfully to eat nine, while the remaining three were smeared all over his face and clothes.

“Lovely ice cream, this,” he said, for the thirteenth time.

“Oi, I hope you’re paying for all of those,” said Dan.

“I’m putting them on my tab.”

“You don’t have a tab.”

“Oh, now you tell me. You should have said that before I started eating them all. Bit late now, isn’t it?”

“He was right about the chocolate too,” said Dozy, who had taken to eating the sprinkles by the fistful. “Very high quality.”

Angry and Mumbles began singing about doggies again, at least Angry did. Mumbles could have been singing about dinosaurs and nobody would have been any the wiser. Constable Peel, his patience now at an end, was stretching out his hands to strangle one or both of them when Dan stopped the van, for there was now something to distract them all from the music.

“That’s interesting,” said Dozy. He and the other three dwarfs, each munching happily on Dan’s livelihood, hopped from the van, closely followed by the two policemen and Dan himself.

Stretched before them were thousands and thousands of little workbenches, each occupied by an imp. Between the desks walked other imps carrying buckets of bone dust. They poured the bone dust into a hole at one end of each desk, the seated imps turned a lever, there was the sound of grinding, and then from the other end of the desks emerged clean, intact bones, which the demons with buckets took from them before walking back the way they had come.

“Well, that explains a lot,” said Jolly. “Sort of.”

There was a larger desk some distance to their right. The dwarfs left the policemen and Dan, and made their way over to it. A demon who bore a remarkable resemblance to the recently vaporized A. Bodkin sat at the desk, snoozing. His nameplate read “Mr. D. Bodkin, Demon-in-Charge.”

“’Scuse me,” said Jolly, tapping D. Bodkin’s boot.

D. Bodkin woke slowly, and stared at Jolly.

“Yes, what is it?”

“Do you know where all of this dust comes from?”

“What dust?”

“The dust that makes the bones.”

D. Bodkin looked at Jolly as though Jolly had just asked him why the sky was gray and black with bursts of purple and red flame currently flashing through it. That was just the way things were.

“Is there something wrong with you?” asked D. Bodkin. “Look around: there’s only dust. Hardly going to run out, are we?”

The dwarfs started giggling. D. Bodkin, suspecting that he was the butt of a joke he didn’t understand, and who didn’t care much for humor at the best of times, glowered at them.