Several floors above the pit where Sharon and Mr Ruislip had just fallen into endless dark, things were not going well.
They were not going well for a number of reasons.
Firstly, the office Kevin, Edna and Gretel were exploring had suddenly, and unhelpfully, filled with plastic bags. And while this was not, in and of itself, a major problem, the sudden animation of the plastic bags and the seemingly unified decision these items of garbage had taken all at once to come to life and attack the inhabitants of that space was definitely creating a difficult working environment.
“Get it off!” screamed Edna, as a shopping bag proclaiming EVERY DAY IS DISCOUNT DAY! wrapped itself around her arm, pulling her towards the ground.
“Sweetheart, I’m kind of busy!” hissed Kevin, swatting a bag with his sports holdall as it flew directly for his face. Gretel was already half swamped. Plastic bags were clinging to her legs, her belly, her arms, her shoulders, and even as Kevin glanced her way, the troll’s great form spun sideways, pushed down by the thickening mass plastering itself to her flesh. A bright orange Sainsbury’s bag drifted down and tried to spread itself over the troll’s nose and mouth, only for Gretel to roll like a carpet out of its way, crunching and rasping in the swathes of plastic already clinging to her. Even the troll’s immense strength didn’t seem enough, and Kevin groaned with a foreboding of defeat as something cold and crumpled managed to stick itself across his back, rippling and writhing against his touch as he tried to peel it off.
“There’s a trigger spell somewhere in here!” he screamed. “Destroy the trigger!”
Edna was cowering under a desk, a doodle-strewn notebook held up in front of her to bat away the incoming clouds of plastic, which swarmed and circled the room. Gretel roared feebly as a bag wrapped itself around her throat and began to twist and tighten. Kevin tried to get to her, but a bag had got around his foot and didn’t want to move, pulling him back down. He flailed at the empty air, then fell, blood running freely from his nose.
He’d taken the wrong blood type, that much was obvious. And now, as Kevin lay on the floor reflecting on all the untoward things that might be happening to his internal organs, he felt the cold pressure of another bag wrap itself around his hand. Another settled across his body, embracing him like a taxidermist’s blanket. He saw a white bag settle, so slowly, over Gretel’s features. It morphed itself to the troll’s nose and mouth, then flared up and down as the troll groaned, choking for breath under the plastic seal.
“Edna,” croaked the vampire. “Find the trigger!”
Under the desk, Edna whimpered, swatting away a bag that had attempted to ram itself into her mouth like a sponge. “I can’t,” she cried.
Gretel’s struggles were growing less, her lungs slowing in their battle against the death mask stuck over her face, and even as Edna looked around her in panic, more plastic was encasing the vampire too, pinning him to the floor.
There was…
… not so much a sound as a pressure, a sense of particles moving with a sound just beyond human hearing. The floor-to-ceiling windows hummed; mugs bounced along the surface of the desks; cables buzzed inside their shielding. Something grey, fast and winged was spinning through the air outside the office. Banking tightly, it snapped its wings in close and barrelled towards the building’s vibrating glass exterior, which now began to pop, began to splinter, began to crack; and an instant before Sally the banshee burst through into the office, mouth agape and vocal cords singing beyond human powers to hear, the glass walls of Burns and Stoke exploded.