Howie murmured. “I’m officially freaked now – and this close to soiling myself.”
“I think I already have,” Miller breathed.
The scraping continued – down the length of the landing, to the top of the stairs. They heard Jezza struggling and swearing with exertion. Then there was a calamitous din that echoed through the house and shook the banisters.
Something large came smashing down the staircase, thudding and banging with a dull metal clash, like the chiming of a huge leaden bell. It slid like an avalanche of old bedsteads down to the small landing where Miller had experienced terror earlier that afternoon and thundered into the wall beneath the partially boarded window.
The two men stared, open-mouthed, and waited for the echoes, that were bouncing through every room and vibrating the broken glass in the window frames, to ebb away.
Then Jezza’s sweating, ghostly-white face appeared over the banister above and he laughed softly.
“Dear God!” Howie gasped, pointing at the great shape that had crunched into the wood of the half-panelled wall. “What the hell is that?”
And when the Dawn Prince was in exile, he sent neither message nor sign back to his Kingdom. So, whilst the Ismus and his subjects waited, they filled their days with merrymaking and happy pleasures. But every party has to end when the revellers grow weary, yet still the throne remained empty and no word came to Mooncaster… O how they longed for tidings.
“I’VE HAD MY identity stolen!” Carol yelled at Martin Baxter as soon as he opened the front door.
“Who are you now then?” he asked.
“Some scumbag has been using my credit card details to get flights to Barcelona, a huge flat-screen TV, a tumble dryer and God knows what else in Comet – and a massive shopping spree in Homebase. The best part of four grand they’ve rinsed me for!”
“Hello to you too,” he greeted her.
“I’m furious!” she seethed, brandishing a statement she’d printed out from her online banking.
“And I’m Martin. Shall I go out and come in again?”
The woman glared at him for a moment, then wilted and managed a smile. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m covered anyway, so I’ve not really lost that money. It’s so bloody annoying though. I was on the phone for over an hour trying to sort it out. Can you believe these people? How dare they?”
“There’s a lot of scum in the world,” he said. “It’s mad, isn’t it? You’ve got to shred every trace of who you are on every letter, bill and envelope before you throw them away, otherwise they’ll have you. Destroying yourself before someone else does. You wouldn’t believe my day, by the way. Where’s Paul?”
She pointed upstairs.
“Daft question really,” Martin said.
Carol went over to him and welcomed him home properly, with a hug and a kiss. “I’ve already heard a bit about your day,” she said. “Got a call from my mum who’d heard all from some neighbour or other. Sounded bad.”
“It was! Good job you picked Paul up today to take him to Gerald’s. It was mental.”
“I was just going to get changed. My shift starts at nine. We left you some lasagne. I’ll nuke it for you.”
“Thanks – I am starved.”
He took his jacket off and hung it in the narrow hallway before following her into the kitchen. Carol Thornbury was a pretty woman, seven years his junior, with dark brown hair and a feisty personality. If there was one word to describe her, it would be ‘capable’. But then, as a nurse, she’d have to be. Whatever life threw at her, she dealt with it in her usual efficient manner. She might have a bit of a rant to begin with, but she quickly applied her common sense to whatever the problem might be, without any unnecessary fuss or drama. When her husband had walked out on both her and their five-year-old son, she had been as organised at sorting out that mess as with everything else in her life. She had managed perfectly well without a man for several years until her path crossed Martin’s. Sometimes he felt that she had even organised getting the two of them together. If she had, he was thankful.
“You got a parcel today,” she said, waiting for the microwave to ping. “I think I see more of that postman than I do you. Wouldn’t mind if he was remotely dishy, but he looks like Fungus the Bogeyman’s uglier brother.”
Martin’s face lit up and he hurried into the lounge where a medium-sized parcel stood on the coffee table.
“Bless you, eBay!” he cried, snatching the package and dashing upstairs with it.
“What about the lasagne?” Carol called.
“In a bit!” he answered. “First things first.”
Carol rolled her eyes. “We’re going to need an extension at this rate,” she told herself.
It was a three-bedroom semi, but only two of those were ever slept in. Whenever guests came to stay, they were compelled to sleep on the sofa downstairs. The third bedroom was Martin’s own private sanctuary. Somewhere he could escape the grinding rigours of teaching at a modern High School and the Emma Taylors of this world. A place filled with things that his pupils would hang him out to dry for if they ever found out about them.
“Paul!” he shouted, knocking on the box-room door as he passed by. “It’s here!”
The maths teacher took a shallow breath before entering his own ‘inner sanctum’. Then strode inside.
The few visitors who were ever privileged to be ushered in here were always lost for words. There was too much to see, too much to take in straight away to be able to formulate any coherent sentence, so they always made the same sort of exclamations.
“Oh, wow!”
“Amazing!”
“Blimey!”
Only Carol’s mother had ever been practically minded enough to come out with, “How do you dust it all?”
Martin Baxter, the cynical, down-to-earth maths teacher who took no nonsense from any of his students, was a monumental, dyed-in-the-wool, sci-fi and fantasy geek – with a capital G.
His special room was crammed from floor to ceiling with all manner of merchandise: DVDs, costumes, props, limited-edition prints, toys, action figures, models, replicas, books, comics, magazines and framed photographs of himself meeting the stars of his favourite films and television shows. There were busts of just about every character in the Lord of the Rings movies and daleks of every dimension, from the tiny ‘Rolykins’ version up to life-size (a particularly extravagant, pre-Carol present to himself). Spaceships from diverse universes flew in formation from the ceiling – followed incongruously by Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. There were Star Fleet uniforms, complete with a selection of various comm badges and tricorders, and even a genuine phaser from the first season of the Next Generation (another expensive present to himself in his bachelor days).
A preposterously long, multicoloured scarf festooned a hatstand, an Alien egg with the face-hugger just crawling out of it, a bottle of Tru:Blood, a prop business card used in the 1957 movie Night of the Demon by the black magician Julian Karswell – with the silver warning written on it – the Clangers, together with the Soup Dragon, Iron Chicken and froglets, a lamp housed within the golden head of C-3PO, several magic wands in display cases, a chunk of Kryptonite that glowed in the dark, a top-of-the-range lightsaber which made movie-accurate sound effects and many more objects which had taken Martin years to accumulate. One of his most prized acquisitions, however, was also one of the smallest – an actual authentic Liberator teleport bracelet from Blake’s Seven. Now that had been expensive!
Even with his mathematical