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alleys, his feet pattered on paving stones, on cobbles and bricks. His arms held out, his eyes wide open, he shambled behind me through gardens and graveyards. Every time I looked back he was closer. And finally, at the Hunger-ford Stairs, I felt his hand on my shoulder.
    I woke with a start from a terrible dream. With a gasp I sat bolt upright—just as the dead boy had sprung up in my nightmare. With my heart a-shudder I breathed deep breaths.
    There was a boy beside me. His hand had been on my shoulder, but now it flew off, and he cried out in alarm— “Oh, Jeminy!’—to see me come awake so suddenly.
    He was nearly as gruesome as die running corpse of my nightmare. His head was odd-shaped, his face rather twisted, his ears just lumps of flesh. He wore no shirt, only trousers that had frayed nearly to the knees, and just one suspender to hold them up. His ribs stuck out in turns and knobs, as though an old man's knuckled fingers clutched him below his skin.
    “Look at him now,” he said. “See there? Told you it's him.”
    “It ain't,” said a black-haired fellow. “That's his coat, Penny, sure as a gun, but it ain't the Smasher.”
    I touched the back of my head. There was a lump as big as my fist, an&it hurt like the devil. I thought I'd cracked my skull, as the voices of the boys seemed to echo in my head. But I soon saw that I'd been brought to a great, hollow chamber. Lit by guttering lamps, it smelled strongly of night soil, and hummed with a watery sound of drips and plops and ripples. I was in the sewers, I decided, deep below the buildings and the streets.
    The entrance was a round, black hole. The floor was strewn with bones of all sizes, from the hollow legs of birds to massive beef bones sucked of marrow. Along the walls ran a thick shelf, and upon it sat a dozen boys dressed in rags. There was one not more than five years old, his head resting on another's shoulder. They all watched me. Thin and pale, caked with dirt, they seemed like a colony of goblins, living in darkness, dressing in human clothes they didn't understand. They wore socks for gloves, stockings for caps; some of their coats had only one sleeve, and others none at all.
    One in particular put shivers of fear in my spine. Twice the size of any other, he alone had a full set of clothes, but all too small, as though he were exploding through them. His head was a troglodyte's, beetled and bumpy; his breaths went in like gusts of wind, and out like groaning bears.
    “When you're dead, you're dead, Penny,” said he, his voice surprisingly soft. “You don't come back.”
    “What do you know, Boggis?” said little Penny. Even his words were a bit twisted, as though his mouth wasn't quite right inside. “Body snatcher dug him up,;dead or not.” His hands had webs of skin between the fingers, and they held the coins that Worms had given me. They jingled in that webbed fist “Had theses didn't he? Came from his grave.”
    The black-haired boy only shrugged. He had a torn hat that he pushed back on his head. “The Darkey will know”
    With a grunt, tiie giant got up from the bench. He was enormous. His head would have touched the roof of the chamber if he had had a neck. But it sat squarely on his shoulders, like a bucket on a barrel. His arms were too long, his legs too short, and in his own way he was just as grotesque as dwarfed Penny. He took one lurching step, then another, and there he stopped with his great fists dangling down, his great chest heaving.
    “Prove it's him,” he said. ‘-Make him talk, then we'll know. Or look and see.”
    -Look for yourself, why don't you, Boggis?” said Penny. “Afraid to touohhim, ain't you?”
    I didn't want any of them to touch me, Boggis least of all. But I couldn't run away, and I dared not speak. All the boys had city accents, thick as the mud of the Thames, and whoever they thought I was must have been the same. The moment I opened my mouth they would know I wasn't him.
    Boggis came no