“Most agreeable,” replied Ashley happily. “The filing is excellent, the sitcoms top-notch and the bureaucracy to die for. But far and away the best feature is your digital mobile phone networks. We can taste the binary data stream in the air. It gives your cities a favorably congenial atmosphere—to you, something like the bouquet of a fine wine.”

Mary was beginning to get a bit uncomfortable inside the closet, and she looked at her watch with increasing frequency, willing the hands to move faster so they could all go home. She shifted to get more comfortable, the door swung shut, and there was a soft click.

“Blast!” she muttered as she gently pushed at the door. It was no good. It was shut fast.

“Jack,” came Mary’s embarrassed voice over the walkie-talkie, “I’ve just locked myself in the closet and I can’t see the kitchen anymore. Can we abort?”

Jack looked around. The street was empty and quiet. He had said they’d go to midnight, and he liked to be good to his word.

“No,” he said to Mary over the radio as he walked through the garden gate.

“Sir,” came Gretel’s voice over the airwaves, “it’s just a thought, but my mother told me never to hide in closets in case… I was locked in.”

Jack looked around again. It had been quiet before, but now it seemed somehow even quieter. There was no distant hum of traffic, nothing. It was as though Cautionary Valley were suddenly an island, cast adrift from the rest of Reading and the world. He’d felt it before in the same place twenty-five years earlier. He shivered with the onset of a cold breeze, and his breath showed in the night air.

He brought the radio to his mouth and whispered, “He’s here.”

He signaled to Ashley to stay put, ran in a circuitous route to the front door and entered the house. When he opened the kitchen door, he stopped short, as there was a small conflagration on the kitchen table. The matches Conrad had been playing with had caught fire with an impossibly bright flame and were now rapidly burning a path up the table to where the boy sat, rooted to the spot with fear. They’d thought of this, and Jack killed the fire with a handy extinguisher, opened the closet door to let Mary out, then barked to Conrad, “The thumb—back in!”