THAT NIGHT, FOR THE SECOND NIGHT running, Molly fell asleep at her desk.
She’d been reading Wetherill’s almanac. She’d lit her desk lamp, locked the window, drawn the curtains, charged Gabriel with making sure that nothing – nothing – succeeded in luring her out of the window and down the drainpipe and settled in her chair to go through every single official ghoul sighting in Howlfair’s history.
A few hours and several pages of scrawled notes later, she’d identified some interesting patterns in the accounts of ghoul outbreaks. But her eyes hurt from squinting at tiny writing, and she felt as though someone had tightened a belt around her forehead. Meaning to restore herself with a brief doze, she put a cushion in the middle of her desk, laid her head on it – and fell immediately into a deep sleep.
For the second night running, she had vivid dreams.
Molly dreamt that she was walking through Howlfair on a rainy night. She arrived at Lastmead Lane, a winding hilly road of smugglers’ pubs, mostly terraced buildings, with cryptic names like The Cat o’ Knaves and The Old Ghost Gateway. They were the kind of pubs where folks with gold teeth and eye patches would go to plot acts of murder and banditry and the running of contraband. A fair number of folks through the ages had gone to a Lastmead Lane pub to plot a murder, only to get murdered themselves before last orders, silently strangled in some unlit nook.
If you managed to escape one of these pubs alive, you still weren’t in the clear. The bumpy cobbles had tripped many a wobble-legged drinker over the years, and sent countless tumbling down the hill towards the ancient statue of a hooded monk. Numerous people had died over the centuries by rolling head first into the monk and cracking their skulls. But despite the perils of Lastmead Lane, it was hard not to be enchanted by the colourful pubs with their strange old signs swinging in the wind; the small leaded windows, conspiratorially mottled and glowing with caramel firelight; the low doors and beams; the wafting murmur of a motley medley of sounds – jokes and raspy laughter and music and clinking glasses.
Molly found herself outside the northernmost pub, near the bottom of the road, where the hill fell steepest. Like the other pubs, its timber exterior was colourfully painted, as gorgeous as a gypsy caravan. But unlike the other pubs, it had no sign, only a hangman’s noose dangling from a wooden strut. The pub was called The Last Drop Inn.
Her dad had run a weekly book club here.
In the dream she opened the door and a blast of warmth coated her. The shady-looking drinkers at the curved, silver-railed bar fell silent. For a moment Molly felt dreadfully scared; then she noticed a short and messy-haired boyish man grinning widely at her. In front of him was a glass of limeade with a slice of orange. “Dad?” she gasped. “You’re not dead?”
He laughed. “Dead? ’Course not, silly – I’ve been in here!”
A butterfly landed on the barkeeper’s head.
Molly wondered how she could ever have thought that her father was dead when he’d been here at the Last Drop Inn all this time with his rowdy friends.
“Don’t just stand there frowning, Moll – come in!”
But as she walked forward she was ambushed by a fluttering gang of dark moths. She shooed them away. The pub door shut behind her with a prison clunk. The lamps blinked, failed and came on again. Molly noticed that grey moths and pale butterflies were settling on the bar and on the heads of the drinkers.
“Dad, I can’t believe it – you’ve been here all along, in the… Dad, what’s with these butterflies?”
Her father looked around. “What butterflies?”
Molly could have sworn that one flew out of his mouth when he said that. She was about to mention it, but the lights blinked again and failed altogether. In the darkness, Molly heard the sinister laughter of Dad’s friends. Unseen wings brushed her face. Dimly the light pulsed on for a moment, and Molly saw that Dad’s friends weren’t Dad’s friends any more. They had changed…
Darkness again.
What was going on?
She was overpowered by sudden panic. She stumbled backwards and bumped into the door. She realized she had her torch clipped to her belt, and she fumbled for it. Then she saw something glowing in the dark.
Blue spangles of light. Small, like eyes.
Molly pointed the torch, pushed the button with her thumb and illuminated a scene of horror.
The pub’s patrons were shroud-clad ghouls, leering and rotten, each with a glowing left eye. And Molly’s dad – well, he wasn’t Molly’s dad any more. In his seat sat a woman dressed in a tomb-grey gown made fussy with lacy frills. Her face was even greyer than the gown, beautifully sculpted and sombre. One eye socket was covered with a round blue eye patch made of something like velvet and studded with blue gems. Her ash-hued hair was pinned up, and impaled moths wriggled on the pins. Many other moths circled her head and emerged from her mouth as she opened it impossibly wide and began to inhale.
All of the pub’s air seemed to flow into that awful maw. Molly staggered forwards, drawn towards the vast mouth, and all the while she heard the woman’s voice in her head, a voice both sickly sweet and sinister.
“Molly, wouldn’t you like to know the secret of Daphne Loonchance? The secret of Tom Taffler? The secret of Benton Furlock? Come close so I can whisper it in your ear. Would you like some ghouls of your own, Molly? I’ll gather a lovely flock for you and tell the naughty fiends that I won’t let them back into Hell unless they obey little Molly’s every command. As long as you’re willing to pay my fee – on the night of the blue moon!”
Molly dropped her torch. She grabbed ineffectually at chairs and tables, trying to resist the draw of the woman’s breath. But her fingers failed to grip; she staggered towards the black tunnel of the huge open mouth.
“I don’t want ghouls!” she cried, back-pedalling frantically.
“Ah, Molly!” the voice chirruped delightedly inside her head. “Please – accept my generosity! A gaggle of ghoul slaves who’ll obey your wishes is the least I can give you! After all, it’s you who’ll seek to summon me this blue moon…”
“No flipping way!”
“Our friend Mr Furlock will help me bring the Dark Days back to Howlfair and make this valley a place fit for a demon to dwell. But once that is done, you, Molly, are the one who will one day open the Gates of Hell and let me take possession of your town.”
“No!”
“My town…”
“No way!”
“The capital of my new kingdom…”
Molly stumbled, and into the slipstream of wind she flew, the pub pitching from side to side as she was sucked towards the cavern of the lady’s mouth.
“Molly Thompson – the solver of mysteries!” hissed the voice in her head. “Tireless seeker of hidden knowledge, unable to resist the lure of the strange! A girl enslaved by curiosity, destined to sniff out the secret of the Guild of Asphodel, the secret that unlocks the doors of Hell… My own dear, doomed Molly.”
There was an almighty crash to Molly’s rear, and her torch beam suddenly blazed somewhere close behind her. She felt hands upon her. The one-eyed lady’s mouth shrank and snapped grimly shut, and her face clouded with shock and fury. Then, from over Molly’s shoulder, the metal bezel of her torch (it was Molly’s beloved Firefly Shadeshifter tactical torch) whipped through the air and smashed the vile woman in the jaw. And as Molly was being hoisted back towards the door, she heard a familiar voice, a man’s voice, saying brightly, “Evening, Orgella, me old mucker! Don’t know if you noticed, but this is a Guild pub – and this is my little girl you’re messing with.”
Molly’s heart jumped. It was Dad. The real Dad. Not an impostor.
The lady’s eyes blazed with fury and shock.
Whack! The blinding torch clocked Lady Orgella again, right on the chin.
Gasping, Molly turned to look over her shoulder as she was dragged towards the busted door, and for a moment she thought she saw Mrs Fullsway standing among a small mob of villagers.
“It’s OK, Moll – I’ve got you,” Dad said.
She looked over her other shoulder, trying to catch sight of her father as he wrenched her away from the woman – from the demon – but as she tumbled through the doorway, back into the rain and the darkness—
She woke.
Gasping, wild-faced, her curls drenched and stuck to her forehead, she heard meows and sought Gabriel in the darkness. She found him on the desk in front of her. Leaping from her chair, she began to throw on clothes over her pyjamas. Gabriel interrogated her with yowls.
“Stay here or come with me – doesn’t matter. I need to speak to Carl. I’ve seen his demon, Gabriel! I know what she looks like. And my dad – my dad came and rescued me from her. He knew who she was…”
Molly grabbed her torch from the drawer and clipped it to her belt.
Gabriel strongly disapproved. Nevertheless, moments later Molly was tiptoeing down the corridor, clutching her keys and a satchel full of books over her shoulder, Gabriel following with a scowl. Soon she was out in the night, heading through the empty streets to Howlfair Orphanage.