‘Who, me?’ said one of the guards, coming over.

‘Yes, you. What’s your inside leg measurement?’

The guard thought for a moment. ‘Twenty-nine,’ he said.

‘Waist and collar size?’

‘Thirty-six and fourteen. Why?’

Fang sighed. ‘Go away,’ he said, ‘and send me one of your mates who’s thirty-one inside leg, thirty-two waist and a number sixteen collar. Go on, jump to it. Your colleague,’ he added, pointing to the short, fat guard who was standing a few feet away, ‘can stay. Go on, jump to it. We haven’t got all day.’

The guard trotted off, and a minute or so later was replaced by another one who was the right size. Fang bashed them over the head and stripped off their uniforms. ‘Here,’ he muttered, passing Julian the short guard’s boots. ‘I don’t know,’ he complained. ‘I mean, off-the-peg guards are one thing, but do I look like a thirty-six waist to you?’

Someone was hammering at the gate. ‘Desmond,’ Julian groaned. ‘Look, why don’t you buzz off, see if there’s a back door or something you can sneak out of before they start tearing the place down? It’s not you they’re interested in, and there’s no point in you getting hurt too.’

Fang was tempted. After all, he still had a wicked witch to find, and this didn’t seem like the sort of place witches frequented. On the other hand, he noticed, there were quite a few tall, pointy-topped towers, of the kind inevitably inhabited by crazy old wizards. There might even be a wicked queen…

‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ he replied. ‘Don’t you worry, they won’t get in here. And even if they do, they’ll never find us. A place this size, there must be millions of nooks and crannies we could hide in. Or a secret tunnel under the walls leading to a ruined priory. I heard somewhere there’s more miles of tunnel under the average castle than the whole of the Circle and Piccadilly Lines put together. No, you stick with me and you’ll be just fine.’

As soon as they’d put on the captured uniforms, they crossed the courtyard, climbed a short flight of steps and opened the door to the chapel. It was empty, and the light passing through the stained glass windows threw bizarrely garish pools of coloured light on the polished stone floor.

‘It’s odd, about the nooks and crannies,’ Fang said. ‘They must be put there on purpose, because they’re no earthly use for anything except hiding in, but you take a look at an architect’s floor-plan for a castle and show me where it says Nook here or gives the dimensions for a cranny. It’s almost as if they grow of their own accord.’

‘Or else something makes them,’ Julian replied. ‘You know, like woodworm holes and places where moths have been at the curtains.’

It was bleak and cold in the chapel, and on all sides the grim faces of dead knights and bishops, lying on the lids of their stone coffins like so many malevolent fossilised sun-bathers, seemed to be staring at them. It felt like the inside of Medusa’s freezer.

‘Somewhere around here,’ Fang muttered, ‘there ought to be some stairs leading down to the crypt. Plenty of places to hide in a crypt. Assuming these cheapskates haven’t turned it into a pool room or a wine cellar, of course.’

‘I don’t think I like the sound of a crypt,’ Julian replied with a shudder, as he did his best to avoid the eye of a particularly sinister-looking marble crusader. ‘Crypts have Things in them.’

Fang bent down, grabbed hold of an iron ring in the floor and pulled, revealing a trapdoor and some steps going down. ‘Depends on who you’re more afraid of,’ he said, ‘Things or your brothers, You know them better than I do.’

‘Good point,’ Julian answered. ‘All right, after you.’

Fang duly led the way, reflecting as he did so that a good industry-standard Thing, with the usual level of regulation magical powers, could have him back in his nice warm fur coat and running about on four feet quicker than you could say H.P. Lovecraft. ‘Mind your head,’ he called out as he disappeared down the steps, ‘the ceiling’s rather ouch!’

‘Thank you. I’ll bear that in mind.’

It was, of course, as dark as strong black coffee in the crypt, and for a while the only sound was Fang’s muffled swearing as he stubbed his toes on what turned out to be large marble sarcophagi. But of Things, amazingly, not a sign.

‘I don’t know,’ he grumbled. ‘A place like this, you’d expect it to be lousy with Things. Huh. I’ve been in creepier bus stations.

‘Have you?’

‘No. It’s a figure of speech.’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s a pretty poor show, though,’ Fang went on. ‘I suppose it could be something to do with the cock-ups, but it doesn’t feel that way to me.’

‘I think you’re right.’

Fang sighed. ‘I reckon it’s just good old-fashioned sloppiness,’ he said. ‘That or the cuts.’

‘Could be.’

‘And stop agreeing with me.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Excuse me,’ Julian interrupted from the other side of the crypt, ‘but who exactly are you talking to over there?’

There was a moment of utter stillness, during which the fall of a pin would have had the neighbours phoning the environmental health people to complain about the noise.

‘I think that’s a very good question,’ Fang croaked. ‘I thought it was you.’

‘No it wasn’t.’

‘Yes it was.’

Fang took a deep breath. ‘Excuse me asking,’ he said, ‘but are you a Thing? Not you,’ he added quickly, before Julian had a chance to reply. ‘Him.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you. The one who lives down here, not the one I brought with me. Are you a Thing, or just waiting for a bus or something?’ He clicked his tongue impatiently. ‘God, if only it wasn’t so dark in here…’

‘It is rather, isn’t it? Just a moment.’

There was a disconcerting flash of blue light, which faded into an aquamarine glow that revealed, among other things, a spider.

‘Actually,’ Julian admitted, ‘what I’m really terrified of, most in all the world, is spiders.’

‘Tough.’ Fang took a step closer to the web in which the spider hung. Web, he thought. No, surely not. The spider didn’t move; there, in the very centre of the fragile, lethally efficient environment it had created for itself, there wasn’t any need for it to stir, only to wait for the gullible and the clumsy to come blundering through. Web, Fang thought again. Imagine there was a spider’s web that stretched right across the known world…

‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ he said.

The spider lifted its front legs and waggled them.

‘Yes, very nice,’ Fang said impatiently. ‘Great symbolism. Now, would you mind turning back into whatever you really are? You’re giving my friend here the horrors.’

The spider began to spin. It quickly spun a huge ball of gossamer, so large that it could easily have concealed a human being. Just as Fang was about to lose patience (gossamer being spun, paint drying; you pay your money and take your choice) the cocoon split open and out fell a short bald man in rimless spectacles and a threadbare towelling robe bearing a monogram on the pocket that suggested that it had been stolen from the Grand Hotel, Cardiff. ‘Watch it,’ muttered Fang. ‘You nearly trod on my foot.’

‘Sorry,’ the short man apologised. He was sitting on a tomb whose lid was carved into what looked uncomfortably like an effigy of himself. ‘Problem with the encryption software. I’d try to fix it, but I can’t understand the code.’

‘Code,’ Fang repeated.

‘Code. Computer language. You know,’ the man added, ‘the stuff the programs are written in. What you get when you open one of the system files, and the screen looks like someone’s eaten too much alphabet soup and been sick. Code.’

‘I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about.’

‘What? Oh, of course, I forgot. Sorry.’

Fang took a deep breath. ‘Forgot? Forgot what?’

The man grinned a forty-watt grin. ‘I keep forgetting that I’m the only one of you, or rather us, who knows about the operating system.’