They chose a spot at the back of the hallway, where there was an old, disused fireplace, and where Sergei could easily put up a fire-screen without its presence seeming odd. 

This time, Elsie told them to stand well back – a command which everyone but Danvers obeyed. He planted his feet firmly behind her, put a hand on her shoulder, and declared in some long-winded fashion that he intended to brave all perils by her side.

It turned out to be a practical instruction. When she stepped forwards, grasped that imaginary door-handle and swung it back, a sheet of black sand whipped at their faces, and even Jack and Sergei, who had kept back as instructed, doubled up, cursing, with sand in their eyes.

The howling of the wind was intense, even outside the doorway. Sandy air barrelled up and shook the chandelier above the staircase, making the crystals rattle and clink.

Jack felt someone grope for his hand, and saw Elsie, one hand firmly curled around the banisters, dragging him forwards. Her hair was being whipped up like a candle-flame, but at least she didn't have to worry about sand in her eyes.

"Keep your eyes closed until you get past the sandstorm," she shouted. "Just push through it, it's only a few feet deep."

"You can't keep this doorway open for a bloody week!" Jack protested, getting a mouthful of sand for his trouble.

"I told you, it's small, it'll pass."

"Can't I wait here until it pass-?"

"Just go," she said, shoving him in the back. "It's safer like this. No-one can shoot you down on the approach if you're hidden in a sand-storm!"

"Next time, we should talk more about thi-"

But she shoved him again, and this time she must have used her demon-strength rather than her Elsie-strength, because it was irresistible. 

Jack toppled forwards, his hands outstretched, but the currents of air stopped him from falling. In fact, they did all the steering, because he had his eyes tightly shut, and couldn't have fought their pull even if he'd known where he was going.

But, as she'd promised, the storm was brief. The sand scratched his face and battered his eyelids for a few, intense seconds, and then it dropped to the ground – or to the grass, as it turned out, because, when he finally dared to open his eyes, he was standing in a summer meadow. 

He could still see little, iridescent grains of black sand amid the grasses, but there was otherwise no trace of the storm. Bits of downy fluff, rather than vicious projectiles, drifted through the air. Clusters of daisies and buttercups studded the field like constellations.

Perhaps his mind wasn't going to be as hostile to him as he'd thought.

At one end of the field was a row of evenly-spaced poplar trees with small, shimmery leaves that quaked and shone and rustled like a drum-roll – as if they were building up to something. The sun was behind these trees, and it made their shadows fall across the grass like bars.

Jack stood still for a while – in bewilderment more than anything else – letting the axe droop to the ground. He didn't know which direction to go charging off in. And nor did there seem any great need for charging.

Then he saw the little girl – not right away, because she was good at hiding, and the wind in the trees masked her tentative footsteps. She was peeping out from behind a tree-trunk at the barred, sunny end of the meadow. She was dark-skinned and snub-nosed, with a sleek black plait trained over each shoulder.

And, for a moment, he stared at her in disbelief. He even thought of raising the axe. The idea that he had found her so quickly – that it could be that easy...

But then he saw a leaf blow through her, and realized that, where the tree-trunks were striping the meadow with their shadows, she was casting none of her own.

Not that easy then. What was she? An enemy? A false trail? But something designed to lead him astray wouldn't have been so shy about it, surely? He could easily have missed her.

Well, it was a nice day. He could feel the precious seconds slipping away from him, but it would be no good chasing after her. If she was insubstantial, she might be impossible to grab hold of. And besides, it was not the kind of footing on which he wanted their relationship to start.

So he sat down on the grass, laid the axe aside, and started to make daisy-chains.

It seemed like a long time – five or ten of his sixty minutes, perhaps – but she eventually drifted up to him. She swung her arms irresolutely, just as she had when he'd first seen her, and said, "Is it really you?"

Jack replied that it was really him, but whether 'him' was who she thought it was, he couldn't say.

"Handsome Jack," she said triumphantly. "My sister pretended to dance with you, and you got upset and punched the wall of our house, and cut your knuckles up something dreadful!" She swung her arms again. "I thought that was funny, because people could walk through you, but you could still punch a house."

"I could go five rounds with any house in London," said Jack, who enjoyed talking to children.

He was still wary. He kept his eyes mostly on the daisy-chain. She spoke a lot like Sita, and she remembered the last time they had met, but that was not necessarily an argument that she was who she said she was, because they had last met in a memory – a sort of cul-de-sac of time – and he wasn't entirely sure the real Sita would know about it.

"I expect people can walk through you now," he said, nodding at her arm. Close to, there was a transparency about her. The downy fluff was drifting through her as if she offered no impediment.

"Yes, but I don't think I could punch a wall! And that's not just because I'm far too sensible. I'm cut off from my body, you see."

Jack nodded, as though he heard this sort of thing all the time. "Are you dead, then?"

"I don't know. It's all a bit new."

"Where is your body?"

Sita pointed back the way she had come, to the bars of poplar-trees. "Over there. It's being guarded by a Spinx," she added proudly. She had obviously seen the word written down and not known how to pronounce it.

Jack raised his eyebrows to let her know he was suitably impressed.

"Although, actually, he looks a bit more like a Gryphon. Sort of big and black and shaggy, with a beak. I asked him whether he was sure he was a Spinx, and he said certainty was not in the nature of his kind, which I thought was probably a riddle. So we decided he's a Spinx."

"Very clever," said Jack.

He supposed he ought to have been worried about the big, black, shaggy creature guarding her body, but that at least was familiar underworld fare. At the moment, he was a bit more worried about the daisy-studded meadow and the poplar trees. "Is it always so nice around here?"

"Don't know," said Sita. "I haven't been here long. I got taken to meet the King and Queen, though. You got to curtsy and recite some verses. The Queen likes verses. This is like a waiting-room where you wait to see them."

"Am I waiting to see them, then?"

"You must be," said Sita reasonably. "Or you wouldn't be here. What verses do you know?"

Jack tried to think of some, but found that this filled him with more terror than the shaggy black beast. "When you say the Queen, I take it you don't mean Victoria?"

"Of course not," said Sita, giggling. "This is the demon-realms, didn't you know?"

"Well, I like to keep an open mind when I'm travelling," he muttered. "So she's a demon Queen, is she? What does she look like? Just so it doesn't come as a surprise."

Sita squinted dubiously. "She looks like my mama, but she isn't. She – well, all of them – they take the shape of people you know. But it's not really them, because they're always cross with you." She tilted her head. "Well, mama was often cross with me, to be honest," she admitted, "but never papa or Leeny or Colonel Wellesley, and Agnes Graves thought I was the cleverest girl in the world, even if I was a dark-skinned savage."

Jack winced, but said nothing. She had probably been called worse. But the matter-of-fact way she talked about it wrung his heart and made his fists itch.

Sita sat beside him on the grass and drew her knees up to her chest. "Anyway, the Queen will probably look like your mother, when you go to see her."

"I never saw my mother," said Jack.

"What, never?"

He heaved his shoulders into a shrug. "Well, I suppose I did, technically, but I don't remember it. She died a few hours after I was born. I don't think we'd know each other if we saw each other. We're not very similar."

"I s'pect you've inherited something from her. Her ears, maybe, or her constitution."

"If I had her constitution, I'd be dead too," Jack murmured. He didn't say 'I would give anything to have switched constitutions with her on that day'. It was not something he thought about much, but that was because it went without saying. He had known it, on some level, before he'd been able to think or speak. Perhaps Sita knew this, because she gave a loud sniff, and blustered on as if she was trying to cheer him.

"Anyway, the Queen wants to keep me, on account of my knowing so many verses, and looking so sweet. There's some ancient salvage law, set down in the time of Beelzebub – who's a folk hero down here, and not at all to be mentioned in the same breath as the devil – which says she can keep anything that falls into her dominions. If you walk into her dominions, you're all right, but I fell over a waterfall, and she stretches out this big net thing to catch anything that floats down the river, and she gets all her jewels that way. But, because I landed in her net, I'm hers, and she set the Spinx to guard my body and made it so's I can't wake up."

A slow smile inched over Jack's face as she chattered. What she was actually saying ought to have made him gloomy as hell, but the way she said it counted for a lot.

"Are you seven or eight?" he asked, when she had chattered herself into silence.

"I turned eight on May the twelfth," said Sita.

"This would be May the twelfth, 1861?"

She squinted at him again, then put a hand to her mouth. "Oh, that's right, you're from the future, aren't you? Was it 1882?"

Jack nodded. "In fact, I'm here to take you back to 1882 with me."

"I'd sooner go back to 1861, if it's all the same to you!"

He hesitated, trying to keep his smile in place. "1861 isn't there anymore. Or, if it is, I can't get to it."

"But my mama would be an old, old lady, and my cat wouldn't know me! We got a cat when Colonel Wellesley's Siamese had kittens. They were all light with blue eyes except for this small, dark one, so we got given it 'cause we're dark ones. Mama said it was a compliment. Everything Colonel Wellesley says is a compliment 'cause he's Colonel Wellesley. Anyway, we don't mind it being dark, because it's ever so clever!"

Jack had been quite relieved to let this explanation wash over him. Now that it stopped, and faced with the prospect of telling her that mama and cat and probably also Colonel Wellesley had been murdered a long time ago, he quailed.

"Well, your sister's waiting for you in 1882," he mumbled. 

He had finished the daisy-chain. He tried to put it on her, but it dropped through her shoulders and fell to the ground.

"Never mind," she said, giving him a rueful shrug. "I'm not so keen on flowers anyway."

"Oh yes," said Jack, remembering the way she had squashed the forget-me-nots when she'd sat next to him in Camden.

"Why don't you present it to the Queen?" Sita suggested. "You're going to need something, if you don't know any verses."

At that moment, Jack heard something – an unnatural, scritchy, crunchy sound – and looked down to see the earth at his feet cracking open. He froze and watched the crack spreading – watched it flee from him like a little, darting black mouse, leaving its tail behind it.

The earth twisted and shook – pebbles fell down into the blackness – and, when the dust cleared, two figures were rising out of the chasm in front of him. 

They appeared to be climbing up a set of steps – and, indeed, when he looked down, it was to see a vast, deep staircase leading into the earth. The daylight didn't reach very far, but he thought he could see a balustrade on either side of the staircase, guarded every few feet by spiky, unrecognizable statues. The air that came up to him was stale and earthy, with a tang of charcoal or smoke or sulphur that he couldn't quite place. 

He didn't start to panic until he saw the figures. It was Joel and Alim, standing decorously on either side of the newly-opened stairwell. They were dressed in livery – as heralds, he supposed, although their long trumpets were pointed down at their sides, like weapons they didn't currently need. The livery was black and white. He thought he saw a shape on their tunics like the Ace of Spades, only spikier. 

"Their Majesties will see you now," said Alim.

But it was a dull, spiritless Alim. He had always been quiet and calm, but now there was nothing behind it – no quick, sardonic intelligence glancing out. It was as though something had crept into Alim's corpse and twitched his limbs into motion.

Joel was the same. No, Joel was immeasurably worse, because there was more of a contrast. Jack had heard Joel's voice raised in passion. He had seen him shout and whine. The contrast between the voice that had rung out in India and this deadened drone was chilling.

The boy motioned serenely down the steps and said, "This way, interloper."

Jack felt something tug at his fingers and looked down, still dreamy with horror. It was Sita. She was trying to take hold of his hand. Her little face was screwed up in concentration, as though she could will herself solid if she just thought hard enough.

"They take the shapes of people you know," she insisted. "It's not really them."

"Why won't – they look at me?" he said jerkily. "Do they blame me?"

Sita greeted this with a look of understandable confusion. "Blame you for what?"

Jack tried to pull himself together. It was just difficult to avoid thinking of this place as the land of the dead: underground, ruled by a pitiless King and Queen, filled with grey, spiritless versions of your dead friends. He realized he had been conflating this place with the underworld even before he had seen Joel and Alim in their black livery. 

Sergei had tried to put him right – had insisted that he was not going to see the dead, but a different kind of life. He was Captain Cook, not Orpheus. Not that it had ended any better for Captain Cook.

"Can I come too?" said Sita, addressing herself to Alim. Jack wondered what he looked like to her.

Alim inclined his head with no particular sentiment. "Her Majesty wishes you to return to your guardian. She will require you to answer riddles for her amusement when she has dealt with the interloper."

"Oh," said Sita, with another awkward motion of her arms. She turned to Jack, and hissed, "Good luck. Remember not to be boring."

And then she drifted back to the poplars and stood beside them irresolutely, as if she wanted to watch him leave.

Jack let his dead friends escort him down the staircase. The summer meadow above them dwindled to a trap-door and then a postage-stamp as they descended deeper into the earth. There was indeed a huge, smooth, black-stone balustrade, which would have been quite fun to slide down if not for the demon statues perched along it every few feet. Jack studied them, wondering whether these were what his demon escorts really looked like. They were a little like the gargoyles, except they had big, black, bull-like horns which seemed to weigh them down like an ornate headdress.

The staircase ended at a huge set of double-doors. Despite being made of stone – the same smooth, mirror-like stone of the balustrade – they were quite light and intricate. Everything about this place had an ethereal feel to it. The doors were carved with patterns like a spider's web, and looked as though they could be brushed aside just as easily.

Joel and Alim swung them open with some ceremony, and Jack was blasted once again with stale, dusty air. He took a few, tottering steps into the room, almost swaying with the heat, and then his insides turned to ice.

He couldn't see them very well, the King and Queen, but the suggestion was enough. He knew who it was. He wasn't really surprised, because Elsie had said this world would be populated by creatures from his head, and who was in his head more often than she was? 

The throne room was very long – lined with intricate, black-stone pillars. Between each one of them was a fire burning in a black brazier, and these, too, were intricate: iron lace-work in beautiful loops and swirls.

She was intricate – the Queen. Her dress was black lace, and mostly sheer, so that he could see the skin of her belly, the line at the centre of her ribcage. Thicker clusters of lace hid her nipples, and the area between her legs, but it wouldn't have taken much scrutiny to see through them – and heavens knew what would happen if she turned around.

He knew what that smell was now, the smell of fire: it was the gunpowder scent of her skin, and it exploded in his chest and scattered sparks along every inch of his body. He didn't need to look at the King – or to recognize the King as Robin – to know that he was lost.

It wasn't her, of course, but maybe... well, maybe how he thought of her at times. Cruel and pitiless, and debilitatingly attractive. He was pulled towards her with so much force that he could hardly stand. It felt as though she had a hook in his belly, and was reeling him in.

Robin was comparatively small potatoes. Just there to heighten his confusion, probably, although he made a decent King of Hell, with his marble-pale skin, and his cruel, handsome, pointed features. There was no lace on him, just a black tunic trimmed with silver, belted at the waist with – oh, good lord – a belt of silver skulls.

How tacky. She was magnificent and he was tacky. But then, he was just a token figure, wasn't he? It was like the Queen of Hearts and her little, fussy, absent-minded King. Everyone knew who was in charge. When Sita had been telling him about the King and Queen, it had been the Queen's love of verses, the Queen's demands, the Queen's orders, that had dominated the conversation.

Jack came as close as she wanted him to – as near as she had decided to reel him – and then stopped. The words "What do I do?" squirmed through his head, and it was some moments before he realized he had said them out loud.

"Well, bowing is traditional," said Ellini. "When presenting oneself to a King and Queen."