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expected to see a man-shaped hole in it. I hurried down the creaky steps and slammed it shut. The latch was broken; therewere slots for a bar, but no bar. There had to be something I could jam through them—
    I turned to look, and somebody tapped me lightly on the shoulder.
    This, of course, is Nervous Trigger number 13, and I have the complete set. Somehow I wasn’t holding the candles any more, and anyhow they were out. The shrieking terrified me even though I knew it was me. I cannoned hard into the table, tippedit over, ran for where I thought the stairs were, connected with my forehead and sat down hard. Somebody, also shrieking, tripped over me and fell headlong. He was down, so I kicked out savagely, and he shrieked all the louder. Well, he was human, and resentment booted terror out of the way. Only one thing to do. I pounced before he could, landed on his back, put a hand on his head and ground itinto the floor while I pulled his arm up behind his back.
    ‘Shrsh!’ he protested. ‘By’re lrve, gmtle shr!’
    ‘Moveonce,’ I snarled in his ear, ‘and I’ll slice out thy chitterlings to have carbonado’d for my nuncheon!’ Instant Elizabethan desperado talk; I was a bit proud of that, but maybe it left something to be desired. If anything, it seemed to reassure him. By the handful of hair I had, thiswas most likely the old fellow, so I relaxed a little and let him speak clearly.
    ‘I perceive by your graciousness, sir, and also by your grasp that you be not the daemon I – eh, ha ha, most unflatteringly thought you. That entirely innocent misprision, enhanced perhaps by your, shall we say, mode of entrance, leads me to ask if there is any fashion by which I may be of service to you? Preferablyother than on this commodious floor?’
    ‘We’ll see!’ I felt for his waist. He’d been wearing some kind of belt or girdle – I found it, pulled it loose and began tying up his hands with it. God, I felt tough. ‘Just so there’re no tricks – and so I can get some straight answers!’
    His voice shook more than this seemed to warrant. ‘I would earnestly desire of you, sir, that you not leave me bound,nor abandon me thus! We stand in the gravest danger, both!’
    ‘Danger? How so?’
    He hesitated, so I tugged the girdle tighter. ‘Sir, we were engaged in – in an inquisition of a purely philosophical nature—’
    ‘An experiment?’
    ‘
Experimentum,
indeed,sir. To this remote and desolate corner of the earth we came, where ancient forces are reputed to be ever present, to conduct it. In a spirit of mostinnocent enquiry we sought to, ah, summon one of a wholly angelic nature. But around the purest such venture there are ever evil forces hovering, and we, ah …’
    Pure; innocent. Protesting too much. I knew, I’d been there. ‘I just bet. Thought you’d got Someone Else, eh?’
    ‘Our mistake, sir, surely to be forgiven. Your irruption was to say the least unlooked for. But the conjuration was left incomplete,the circle broken! It but hangs fire, an you take my meaning. If not reversed, why, who knows what might—’
    There was a sudden low groaning, and the whole house shook.
    We both looked up. The boards above our head bowed and creaked. A rough-cut beam moaned and bent. There was a slight waft of a smell I couldn’t describe and wouldn’t dare, and a wind like a great inhalation lifted all the dust– and there was plenty in boiling clouds. The old fellow and I looked at one another. Then the beam cracked with a gunshot snap.
    I was out that door in two leaps, and only when I collided with a holly bush did I remember I’d left the old bugger in there. Give me credit, I did at least look back, but I needn’t have worried. A half-second slower and he’d have left footprints up my back. Hands tiedor not, he was out and past me with his robes flapping round his scrawny shins, and the 3.45 favourite should have gone like that. That was all a split second told me, that and the awful pale