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of the lectern and look at the book.
    It was a book of poetry written by some demented old dead person who thought he was marvellous.
A Marvell
, it said, and Thugger thought it a bit rich, calling yourself a marvel, especially when you couldn’t even spell it properly, but then there were a lot of things they couldn’t do in the past, like fly aeroplanes and send text messages. Thugger was glad he didn’t live in the past.
    Then, as he was wondering why the Searcher was beeping so much at the book, and why he couldn’t get an image on his screen, two things happened at once; he got a text message from Fisty that said, ‘HELP WHERE R U?’ and before he could reply, the lectern was creaking round and round like something in a horror movie and a flight of stone steps had opened up beneath it. The Searcher stopped beeping.
    Gingerly, Thugger put his phone back in his pocket, took out his torch, and started off down the stairs.
    Things were not going well for Fisty.
    He had gone through all the cupboards and drawers in all the bedrooms and tried to make it look like nobody had been there, but whatever he did, he left a trail of socks and knickers and hair brushes and towels, and then there was Elvis the robodog lifting his leg against the beds and savaging the pillow cases.
    Spooky dump, this
, thought Fisty, who had never seen a four-poster bed and couldn’t understand how you could watch TV with all those curtains drawn round you. But then, there were no TVs in the bedrooms – very weird.
    ‘Come on, Elvis, find the watch, there’s a good robodog, find the watch and bring it to me and we’ll get a big fat reward, that’s right, and I’ll buy you a new Attack programme for your lovely little microchip brain.’
    Elvis barked happily, and the two of them trotted off down the corridor towards the west wing of the house. That would have been all right, but then Bigamist appeared.
    Elvis had never seen a rabbit. There were no rabbits in London and his circuit board had never had to memorise one. Fisty had seen rabbits, but never one like this, coal black, the size of a tabby cat, and wearing a diamond collar.
    Bigamist had seen dogs, but not dogs with metal legs and 360-degree swivelling ears, and not dogs that HAD NO SMELL. The rabbit twitched his nose, then twitched it again. The man smelt of chicken nuggets and tomato sauce, but the dog had no smell at all.
    For a few seconds, the three of them looked at each other, then Fisty decided he’d have a bit of fun. He bent down and pressed Elvis’s KILL button.
    The dog’s Mohican run of purple fake fur down his orange metal back stood on end, and his yellow tongue slavered out of his steel jaws. His black eyes flashed light-up red, and with one bound he leapt on Bigamist, took him in his mouth and threw him across the room.
    ‘Ha ha ha,’ laughed Fisty. ‘Rabbit pie tonight.’
    But Bigamist had other ideas, and he was just as nasty and mean a creature as either Fisty or Elvis, so instead of acting like any normal rabbit and dying of fright, he shot down the corridor with his enemies in pursuit.
    Bigamist knew a thing or two about Tanglewreck that Fisty and Elvis didn’t know, and he led his pursuers to the one place they least wanted to go – the dungeon.
    At the last second the wily rabbit leapt over the false floorboards, while Fisty and Elvis crashed down on them, and straight through into the dark damp dungeon below.
    As they lay in a heap on the floor they saw the rabbit’s eyes gleaming down in triumph.
    Elvis had lost one of his metal ears in the fall, and was whimpering sadly, but Fisty didn’t care about Elvis’s ear. It was his phone he was worried about – what if it had broken when it had fallen out of his pocket?
    He scrabbled round in the dark, until at last he found it, in a puddle on the floor, and keyed in his desperate text message to Thugger: HELP WHERE R U?
    But Thugger
    by now
    was very lost and very frightened in a room that opened on to