back, zipping from cover to cover, slinking forward whenever he couldn’t see it.
Arthur wasn’t even sure it was a Nithling. Perhaps it was something else, something made by Grim Tuesday that the Grotesques had set upon him. He needed to know more, but he didn’t dare to stop and look at the Atlas while the thing was creeping up on him. He needed somewhere to hide, perhaps a house—
The moment he looked away, the Scoucher stormed out from behind a pile of paving stones next to an unfinished path. One reaching tentacle even longer than the rest brushed the back of Arthur’s hand as he turned to flee. It wasn’t much thicker than a shoelace and he hardly felt its touch, but when he glanced down, blood was flowing freely. More blood than seemed possible from such a tiny scratch.
Arthur was halfway across a well-mown front lawn when someone called his name from the neighbouring house.
“Arthur?!”
He knew that voice. It came from Leaf, the girl who had helped him after his asthma attack, whose brother and family were among the first afflicted by the Sleepy Plague. He’d seen her briefly the day before while travelling via the Improbable Stair. He had no idea where she actually lived, but here she was on the porch next door, staring at him in surprise. Or staring at the Scoucher—
“Look out!” she cried.
Arthur changed direction, narrowly avoiding a sweep of the Scoucher’s tendrils. He jumped over a low brick wall, trampled through Leaf’s parents’ prize vegetable garden, leaped up the front steps of her house and charged through the front door. Leaf slammed it shut after him. A second later it was hit by a sound like rain drumming on the roof – the impact of hundreds of tentacles upon the heavy door.
“Your hand’s bleeding!” Leaf exclaimed as she slammed home a large bolt. “I’ll get a bandage—”
“No time!” gasped Arthur. A lot of blood had come from the simple scratch, but the flow was already slowing.
Arthur opened the Atlas, ignoring its sudden expansion. He added in a low wheeze, “Have to… see how… fight…”
The drumming sound came again. Leaf gasped and jumped back as several tentacles ripped the draft excluder off the bottom of the door and slithered inside. She picked up an umbrella and struck at them, but the tentacles gripped the umbrella and cut it into pieces. More and more tentacles came through under the door. Then they started sawing backwards and forwards.
“It’s cutting its way through!” screamed Leaf. She pushed over a plant in a heavy earthenware pot and rolled it against the door. The Scoucher’s tentacles struck at the spilled earth for a second, then went back to their sawing. The door had a steel frame, but the tentacles cut through it quite easily.
Arthur concentrated on the Atlas.
What are a Scoucher’s weaknesses? How can it be defeated?
An ink spot appeared on the page, but was not blotted up. Words came quickly, and once again were in English and the regular alphabet straightaway. The penmanship was not up to its usual standard.
Scouchers are a particularly unpleasant type of Nithling. They issue from the narrowest cracks and fractures, and are consequently short of substance. Typically they gain a greater and more defined physical presence in the Secondary Realms by consuming the blood or ichor of the local inhabitants. Scouchers in their earlier phases may take a variety of shapes but always have several limbs that end in very fine tentacles, which are lined with tiny but extremely sharp teeth. They use these tentacles to cut their victims, who usually fall unconscious. The Scoucher then laps up the free-flowing blood—
“Arthur! The door—”
“How can I defeat a Scoucher?” Arthur asked furiously.
Silver is anathema to Scouchers, as is ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium and platinum. Scoucher hunters typically use silver dust blown through—
“Silver! Have you got anything silver?” Arthur wheezed, clapping the Atlas shut.
At the same time Leaf grabbed his arm and dragged him across the room and into the kitchen. She slammed the kitchen door behind them and threw herself at the refrigerator, trying to slide it across. Arthur shoved the Atlas into his pocket and grabbed one corner of the fridge, rocking it out from the wall as the terrible sound of splintering wood suddenly stopped in the other room.
“It’s inside!”
The fridge was barely set down before it rocked forward. Tentacles punched through the flimsy kitchen door and rasped across the steel sides of the fridge.
“Silver! Silver will kill it!” Arthur repeated. He opened the nearest drawer, but all he could see were chopsticks and wooden utensils. “A silver fork will do!”
“We don’t have anything metal!” Leaf cried out. “My parents won’t eat with metal.”
Several tentacles ripped the freezer door off and flung it on the ground. More tentacles swarmed in to grip the edges and the whole refrigerator shifted across the floor with the squeal of metal feet on tiles.
“Jewellery!” exclaimed Arthur as he looked around for something, anything silver. “You must have some silver earrings!”
“No,” said Leaf, shaking her head wildly. Her earrings swung too, without any sort of metallic jangle. They were ceramic and wood.
Another squeal alerted Arthur a second before the refrigerator started to topple over. He jumped away an instant before it fell and followed Leaf as she raced through the door at the opposite end of the kitchen.
Arthur slammed the rear kitchen door shut behind him. But this one had no lock, and from the weight of it, could barely stop a determined fist, let alone otherworldly tentacles.
“Come on!” screamed Leaf. She ran down a flight of concrete steps to the back door, Arthur close behind. “I know… we have got some silver!”
The back door led into a garage that had obviously never housed a car. It was part plant nursery and part storage area, with bags of potting mix stacked up next to boxes identified by contents and date.
“Look for a box marked MEDALS or SKI JUMPING!” instructed Leaf urgently, pushing Arthur on. She turned back herself and locked the door, using a key from the drip tray of a hanging planter. She was just withdrawing the key when several tentacles punched through the door and lashed across her arm. They cut deeply and Leaf staggered back, shocked into silence. She tripped over a tray of seedlings and fell heavily on to a sack of sand.
Arthur took a step towards her, but she waved him back, before pushing her hand hard against the cuts to try and slow the bleeding.
“Silver medals,” she coughed out. “In a box. Dad won lots… that is, came second… silver medals ski jumping. Before he met Mum and became a neo-hippie. Hurry!”
Arthur glanced at the door. The Scoucher was cutting through it as easily as it had the front door. He would have less than a minute to find the medals, maybe only seconds.
Rapidly he scanned the boxes, dates and contents labels tumbling through his brain. Children’s toys from ten years ago, an encyclopedia, Aunt Mango’s paintings, tax records, Jumping—
Something
