The ceiling funnel fired Scaler into Cainus’s bedroom. She landed on his sandy moth-chewed mattress, her mismatched legs in a tangle. A stream of objects followed, landing all around her.

“What!?” she spat. “What just happened? Where am I?”

She rolled upright, sniffed, and looked at the endless pit of trash surrounding the bed. “Phew-ee,” she said. “And I thought my place was untidy.”

The enormous room was eerie. The rotting garbage cast unpleasant shadows in the flickering torchlight.

Scaler shivered. “Uh oh,” she murmured. “The vacuum hole. Well, I’ll say one thing about the Tomb of the Jackals – it ain’t exactly cosy.”

“Scaler!” a voice cried. She almost jumped out of her purple bandages. “Oh, Scaaaaler! It’s me, your Ibis Mummy friend.”

Scaler leaped up. “Prong?”

“Yes, it’s Prang. Honk, honk!”

“Hmm,” Scaler muttered to herself. “That doesn’t sound like Prong’s voice. But she has mistakenly called herself Prang a few times. I’d better go check.”

The voice came from a big, dark cupboard, built of stone and perched atop the rubbish heap. Its door hung wide open.

“I was sucked down the vacuum hole too,” the voice said. “Now I’m stuck in this wardrobe. Honk!”

Scaler climbed across the squashy garbage to the wardrobe. “Prong?” she called. “Is that really you?”

“Of course it’s me, as surely as my name is Prang. I mean Prong! Whatever name you just called me, that’s me.”

“This is super dodgy,” Scaler said quietly. The wardrobe was darker than night. Gritting her green teeth, she stepped inside. She could feel scraps of cloth beneath her claws and hooves. “Prong? Prong, are you in here?”

CLANGGG!

The wardrobe door slammed shut. Scaler whirled about.

She was trapped.

The door itself was made of criss-crossed wires, so she could see through it to the torchlit bedroom.

“Blargh!” she screamed as a terrifying figure rose up outside the door with a snarl.

“Got you!” the figure declared from its woolly head.

“Donut?” said Scaler.

“Ha! I am no Donut, you foolish fish-head.” The Crocodile Mummy reached up to his snout and began to undo a row of buttons. “This body suit is one of my brilliant disguises. I kept them safe from moth attacks in a precious chest. Prepare to be astonished, as I remove it and reveal my true self.”

He took a deep breath and boomed, “It is I . . . mmf, mmf . . . blast these buttons . . . mmf . . . It is I, your most feared enemy . . . mmf, my disguises usually come off very easily but this one has thicker paws, you see . . . quite tricky to undo . . . just bear with me . . . It is I, the one known as . . .”

But struggle as he might, his buttons would not open.

Scaler’s fantail bristled with anger. “Cainus the Jackal!”

“Aw, you’ve gone and ruined the surprise,” Cainus moaned. He lay on his back wrestling frantically with the crocodile onesie, unable to remove it.

“I should have recognised your pompous voice,” growled Scaler from her little prison. “Sometimes it’s so frustrating not having a brain. How the heck did you get into Mumphis?”

Cainus thrashed about in his woolly outfit. “Mmf. Your very own sand-swimming was the inspiration for my genius. Mmf. Wearing a diving suit made of old bottles, I swam beneath the sand under the city gates. Mmf, mmf. I almost died of suffocation three times . . . and I now have a phobia of sand . . . but I did it!”

“Four thousand years, and you only just thought of digging under the gates?”

“I’ve had other things on my mind,” Cainus said defensively. “And now, fishy, you shall never escape this wardrobe. I turned it into a prison by twisting my coathangers to make an unbreakable door. Hoo-hoo, a real fisherman’s basket! Mmf, it’s awfully hot in this suit. Curse these blasted buttons!”

He stood back up and leaned against the wardrobe door, panting. “I don’t suppose you could reach through and undo this, by any chance? I’m about to pass out.”