In the dusty, dingy cellar, Puddlebrain scratched her ear.

"Nits?" asked Edna.

Puddlebrain glared at her sister. "A fly or something, actually."

Edna raised her eyebrows questioningly. Hmmm. Not convinced. Something bothered her and she couldn't quite remember what it was.

"Anyway," continued Puddlebrain. "We've got more important things to think about. We've just been spared a good roasting for one thing. Brenda Corrigan might well have followed Quentin, but I'm pretty sure the rest haven't and they'll be baying for our blood before too long."

Billy nodded his head. "The lady speaks sense. Amazing."

Puddlebrain ignored the gnome's comment and carried on.

"We have to either get out of here or find out what really happened."

Gemini shook her head vehemently. "Why should we care about that lot?" she wanted to know. "After what they just did? Let them disappear themselves off if they feel like it! Good riddance to bad rubbish, that's what I say"

Edna leaned forward. "I agree, Gemini. But if it's the only way to prove we didn't do it, we might have no choice." She leaned back again, confidently. "Besides, we've got our magic back now. If they don't believe us in the end, we'll disappear them off after their friends ourselves."

Billy frowned. "And back to your natural form you slip," he sneered. "That sort of talk is how you got into a mess in the first place. You need to..."

Billy stopped. The furrow on his forehead deepened. He was staring at the locked and bolted doorway.

A black shape, man-size and menacing, had just melted through the door.

"What...?"

The witches looked at him. Edna opened her mouth to speak, but the shadow touched her on the back of the head and she vanished. The thing rippled. Gemini went to scream, her eyes wide, but she didn't get the chance. Moving like water across glass, the black mass slid over and touched her too. She disappeared.

There was no sound. There was no flash. They were there, and then they were not.

Billy scrambled backwards as it moved towards him, but it ignored the gnome and headed for the remaining witch.

Puddlebrain knew she didn't have anywhere to run to. The cellar was too low and cramped to do anything, not that she would have known what to do anyway.

A glob of night stretched out from the shadow and reached for her. Instinctively she raised her arm, her finger pointing.

There was a flash and a shriek and the thing was gone, hit by a shot from Puddlebrain's hand.

The shriek faded slowly, almost dripping from the witch's ears. Billy crawled forward, for the first time having nothing to say. Puddlebrain lowered her arm carefully. Her ears were ringing from the sound the thing had made before it disappeared –like a thousand people all screaming at once. She looked around her. Apart from herself, the gnome and a few hundred dizzy specks of dust, the cellar was empty.

"W...?"

"Indeed," answered Billy. "I think we've just seen what happened to Mr. Bopsidy."

Puddlebrain shook her head to try and rattle some sanity back in. It didn't seem to work. Her sisters really had departed. She really had blasted a walking shadow into nothing – although how nothing could be blasted into nothing... It dawned on the witch that she may well have just destroyed the only thing that might have been able to bring her sisters back. Puddlebrain began to cry.

Seventy years of frustration at being a half-witch (or in Gemini's case a half-wit-witch) piled onto being kidnapped, smothered with barely escaping being main course at the town barbeque, topped neatly with losing her sisters was just too much for her. She wept, her hands over her face and her shoulders shuddering with each sob. Her cries and moans filled the cellar, making its enclosed spaces seem even more suffocating. Billy felt as if he were being crushed. He had an idea of what the witch must be feeling, but this wasn't the time, and certainly not the place, to fall apart over it. He slapped her. Puddlebrain instantly stopped crying and dropped her hands, stunned.

Hmmm, thought Billy. That felt quite refreshing!

He raised his hand to have another go, but a warning stare from Puddlebrain stopped him. The look told him that if he tried it, he might well be following the shadow thing on the next wagon into oblivion. Well, at least she'd sort of calmed down, even if she was still blubbering a bit. It was better than nothing. The gnome wasn't insensitive to her problems, not at all. But he was a gnome. These lapses of concern and friendliness were obviously some disease he'd picked up while being in Little Whimsy. He just couldn't help himself. But the gnome in him helped keep them in check and keep the problems at hand in focus.

"Look Puddlebrain," he said, putting on his best I'm-here-for-you voice and trying to keep the hint of if-I-must-be out of it. "Snivelling won't bring your sisters back from wherever they've decided to hop off to. It also won't stop the entire village, or what might be left of it, from banging your doors down and having you for breakfast. We need to do something."

"But they're gone!" Puddlebrain whined.

"Yes. They are. Full marks for spotting that one. Go to the top of the class."

Puddlebrain gave him a look that would wither a sapling at twenty paces. He ignored it.

"But what you don't seem to see," he continued, "is that, when Brenda Corrigan vamoosed, there was no black whatever-it-was hanging around joining in the party!"

Puddlebrain thought about it. Billy was right. Brenda had simply disappeared. Gone in a flash – except without the flash. But so what?

"And?" she asked. She had stopped crying now, and her sniffs were subsiding. She wiped her nose on her sleeve without thinking about it. For the first time in centuries she really did feel like the baby of the family, even though she was a good three times as old as anyone else in the village and she didn't, right at this moment, actually have any family.

Billy crouched down. She had shown so much promise only moments before. "I don't think that thing was really what has been taking everyone. I think it was just... an agent or something."

"An agent? For whom? And why?"

"Well, come on. I'm good, but I'm not that good! I don't know. Something or someone else. Something is taking the residents of Little Whimsy for whatever purpose. And it took your sisters too."

Puddlebrain sat up straight. Her mind was moving slowly from the negative to the positive. She was no longer thinking about losing her sisters, but of finding them again. If she had to find the others at the same time, well, you couldn't have everything. She'd make allowances.

"Well, that's fine for Brenda and probably Quentin, but why did that thing come for my sisters? And why didn't it take me?"

"I don't think you gave it a chance, little Miss FireFinger. You want to be careful where you wave that thing around. Anyway, maybe your magic made it more difficult to just take you, and something more was needed. Maybe it needed some sort of personal touch?"

Puddlebrain nodded her head, not that anything really made any sense. The shadow had made physical contact with Edna and Gemini. Perhaps being a witch gave them some sort of protection or additional barrier. They couldn't just be whisked off. The extra defence hadn't particularly helped her sisters, but it could have made it harder. This was all guesswork, but that was all they had.

"Could be," she said. "But what now? Where do we start? How do we get out of here to begin with?"

"Getting out of here is the least of our worries," Billy said. "The villagers, if there are any left, all think you're responsible. Just show them your finger and they'll probably run a mile. As for where... I don't know. This is your village. You tell me."

"I don't know. It could be anywhere!"

Billy tapped the side of his nose thoughtfully. It sprung from side to side in a hypnotic rhythm that held her gaze and stilled her scattered thoughts.

"I doubt you'll find it in a sunny meadow or a playground," mused the gnome. "It'll be somewhere people veer away from. Where is the darkest, scariest place you know?"

Puddlebrain frowned. Dark and scary. Dark and scary. Dark and...