This was all getting a bit eventful.

In fact, when the parcel arrived, delivered by a kind of robot drone that dropped out of the sky making droning robot noises, it brought with it a sense, which gradually began to permeate through the whole village, that it was almost one event too many.

It wasn’t the robot drone’s fault. All it required was Arthur Dent’s signature or thumbprint, or just a few scrapings of skin cells from the nape of his neck, and it would be on its way again. It hung around waiting, not quite sure what all this resentment was about. Meanwhile, Kirp had caught another fish with a head at both ends, but on closer inspection it turned out that it was in fact two fish cut in half and sewn together rather badly, so not only had Kirp failed to rekindle any great interest in two-headed fish, but he had seriously cast doubt on the authenticity of the first one. Only the pikka birds seemed to feel that everything was exactly normal.

The robot drone got Arthur’s signature and made its escape. Arthur bore the parcel back to his hut and sat and looked at it.

“Let’s open it!” said Random, who was feeling much more cheerful this morning now that everything around her had got thoroughly weird, but Arthur said no.

“Why not?”

“It’s not addressed to me.”

“Yes it is.”

“No it isn’t. It’s addressed to … well, it’s addressed to Ford Prefect, in care of me.”

“Ford Prefect? Is he the one who—”

“Yes,” said Arthur, tartly.

“I’ve heard about him.”

“I expect you have.”

“Let’s open it anyway. What else are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” said Arthur, who really wasn’t sure.

He had taken his damaged knives over to the forge bright and early that morning and Strinder had had a look at them and said that he would see what he could do.

They had tried the usual business of waving the knives through the air, feeling for the point of balance and the point of flex and so on, but the joy was gone from it, and Arthur had a sad feeling that his sandwich-making days were probably numbered.

He hung his head.

The next appearance of the Perfectly Normal Beasts was imminent, but Arthur felt that the usual festivities of hunting and feasting were going to be rather muted and uncertain. Something had happened here on Lamuella, and Arthur had a horrible feeling that it was him.

“What do you think it is?” urged Random, turning the parcel over in her hands.

“I don’t know,” said Arthur. “Something bad and worrying, though.”

“How do you know?” Random protested.

“Because anything that’s to do with Ford Prefect is bound to be worse and more worrying than something that isn’t,” said Arthur. “Believe me.”

“You’re upset about something, aren’t you?” said Random.

Arthur sighed.

“I’m just feeling a little jumpy and unsettled, I think,” said Arthur.

“I’m sorry,” said Random, and put the package down again. She could see that it really would upset him if she opened it. She would just have to do it when he wasn’t looking.

Chapter 16

Arthur wasn’t quite certain which he noticed as being missing first. When he noticed that the one wasn’t there, his mind instantly leapt to the other and he knew immediately that they were both gone and that something insanely bad and difficult to deal with would happen as a result.

Random was not there. And neither was the parcel.

He had left it up on a shelf all day, in plain view. It was an exercise in trust.

He knew that one of the things he was supposed to do as a parent was to show trust in his child, to build a sense of trust and confidence into the bedrock of relationship between them. He had had a nasty feeling that that might be an idiotic thing to do, but he did it anyway, and sure enough it had turned out to be an idiotic thing to do. You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

You also panic.

Arthur ran out of the hut. It was the middle of the evening. The light was getting dim and a storm was brewing. He could not see her anywhere, nor any sign of her. He asked. No one had seen her. He asked again. No one else had seen her. They were going home for the night. A little wind was whipping around the edge of the village, picking things up and tossing them around in a dangerously casual manner.

He found Old Thrashbarg and asked him. Thrashbarg looked at him stonily, and then pointed in the one direction that Arthur had dreaded and had therefore instinctively known was the way she would have gone.

So now he knew the worst.

She had gone where she thought he would not follow her.

He looked up at the sky, which was sullen, streaked and livid, and reflected that it was the sort of sky that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse wouldn’t feel like a bunch of complete idiots riding out of.

With a heavy sense of the utmost foreboding he set off on the track that led to the forest in the next valley. The first heavy blobs of rain began to hit the ground as Arthur tried to drag himself to some sort of run.

Random reached the crest of the hill and looked down into the next valley. It had been a longer and harder climb than she had anticipated. She was a little worried that doing the trip at night was not that great an idea, but her father had been mooching around near the hut all day trying to pretend to either her or himself that he wasn’t guarding the parcel. At last he’d had to go over to the forge to talk with Strinder about the knives, and Random had seized her opportunity and done a runner with the parcel.

It was perfectly clear that she couldn’t just open the thing there, in the hut, or even in the village. He might have come across her at any moment. Which meant that she had to go where she wouldn’t be followed.

She could stop where she was now. She had gone this way in the hope that he wouldn’t follow her, and even if he did he would never find her up in the wooded parts of the hill with night drawing in and the rain starting.

All the way up, the parcel had been jiggling under her arm. It was a satisfyingly hunky sort of thing: a box with a square top about the length of her forearm on each side, and about the length of her hand deep, wrapped up in brown plasper with an ingenious new form of self-knotting string. It didn’t rattle as she shook it, but she sensed that its weight was concentrated excitingly at the center.

Having come so far, though, there was a certain satisfaction in not stopping here, but carrying on down into what seemed to be almost a forbidden area — where her father’s ship had come down. She wasn’t exactly certain what the word “haunted” meant, but it might be fun to find out. She would keep going and save the parcel for when she got there.

It was getting darker, though. She hadn’t used her tiny electric torch yet, because she didn’t want to be visible from a distance. She would have to use it now, but it probably didn’t matter now, since she would be on the other side of the hill that divided the valleys from each other.

She turned her torch on. Almost at the same moment a fork of lightning ripped across the valley into which she was heading and startled her considerably. As the darkness shuddered back around her and a clap of thunder rolled out across the land, she felt suddenly rather small and lost with just a feeble pencil of light bobbing in her hand. Perhaps she should stop after all and open the parcel here. Or maybe she should go back and come out again tomorrow. It was only a momentary hesitation, though. She knew there was no going back tonight and sensed that there was no going back ever.

She headed on down the side of the hill. The rain was beginning to pick up now. Where a short while ago it had been a few heavy blobs, it was settling in for a good pour now, hissing in the trees, and the ground was getting slippery under her feet.