LITMIR.BIZ

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      hristmas was a few days away, and all but one of the houses on this suburban Dublin street had lights in the windows. Three of the most competitive neighbours had filled their small gardens with flickering Santas and frolicking reindeer, and some idiot had even wrapped a cable of fairy lights round the lamp post outside his gate. There was no snow, but the night was cold, and frost clung to the city like glitter.

      The big car that rolled to a stop outside the house with no lights was a 1954 Bentley R-Type Continental, one of only 208 ever made. It was an exquisite car, retro-fitted with modern conveniences, adapted to the needs of its owner. It was fast, it was powerful, and if it received even the slightest of dents, it would fall apart.

      That’s what the mechanic had said. He’d done all he could, used all his knowledge and all his abilities to bring this car back from the brink so many times – but the next dent, he promised, would be its last. All the tricks he’d used to keep it going, to bend it back into shape, would be counteracted. The glass would shatter, the metal would rupture, the frame would buckle, the tyres would burst, the engine would crack … The only way to avoid complete and utter catastrophe, the mechanic had said, was to make sure you weren’t in the car when all this happened.

      Skulduggery Pleasant got out first. He was tall and thin, and wore a dark blue suit and black gloves. His hair was brown and wavy, and his cheekbones were high and his jaw was square. His skin was slightly waxy and his eyes didn’t seem capable of focusing, but it was a pretty good face, all things considered. One of his better ones.

      Valkyrie Cain got out of the passenger side. She zipped up her black jacket against the cold, and joined Skulduggery as he walked up to the front door. She glanced at him, and saw that he was smiling.

      “Stop doing that,” she sighed.

      “Stop doing what?” Skulduggery responded in that gloriously velvet voice of his.

      “Stop smiling. The person we want to talk to lives in the only dark house on a bright street. That’s not a good sign.”

      “I didn’t realise I was smiling,” he said.

      They stopped at the door, and Skulduggery made a concerted effort to shift his features. His mouth twitched downwards. “Am I smiling now?”

      “No.”

      “Excellent,” he said, and the smile immediately sprang back up.

      Valkyrie handed him his hat. “Why don’t you get rid of the face? You’re not going to need it in here.”

      “You’re the one telling me how much I should practise,” he said, but slid his gloved fingers beneath his shirt collar anyway, tapping the symbols etched into his collarbones. The face and hair retracted off his head, leaving him with a gleaming skull.

      He put on his hat, cocked at a jaunty angle. “Better?” he asked.

      “Much.”

      “Good.” He knocked, and took out his gun. “If anyone asks, we’re scary carollers.”

      Humming ‘Good King Wenceslas’ to himself, he knocked again, and still no one answered the door, and no lights came on.

      “What do you bet everyone’s dead?” Valkyrie asked.

      “Are you just being incredibly pessimistic,” Skulduggery asked, “or is that ring of yours telling you something?”

      The Necromancer ring was cold on her finger, but no colder than usual. “It’s not telling me anything. I can only sense death through it when I’m practically standing over the dead body.”

      “Which is an astonishingly useful ability, I have to say. Hold this.”

      He gave her his gun, and crouched down to pick the lock. She looked around, but no one was watching them.

      “It might be a trap,” she said, speaking softly.

      “Unlikely,” he whispered. “Traps are usually enticing.”

      “It might be a very rubbish trap.”

      “Always a possibility.”

      The lock clicked open. Skulduggery straightened up, put his lock picks away, and took his gun back.

      “I need a weapon,” Valkyrie muttered.

      “You’re an Elemental with a Necromancer ring, trained in a variety of martial arts by some of the best fighters in the world,” Skulduggery pointed out. “I’m fairly certain that makes you a weapon.”

      “I mean a weapon you hold. You have a gun, Tanith has a sword … I want a stick.”

      “I’ll buy you a stick for Christmas.”

      She glowered as he pushed the door. It opened silently, without even a creepy old creak. Skulduggery went first and Valkyrie followed, closing the door after them. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to this level of gloom, and Skulduggery, who had no eyes for this to be a problem, waited until she tapped him before moving on. They passed through into the living room, where she tapped him again. He looked at her, and she pointed to the Necromancer ring. It was buzzing with a dreadful kind of cold energy as it fed off the death in the room.

      They found the first dead body sprawled across the couch. The second was slumped in the corner, amid the wreckage of what once had been a side table. Skulduggery looked closely at each of them, then shook his head at Valkyrie. Neither was the man they were looking for.

      They moved into the kitchen, where they found a third corpse, face down on the floor. Were his head not twisted all the way around, he would have been looking up at the ceiling. A bottle lay beside his hand, smashed against the tiles, and the smell of beer was still strong.

      The rest of the ground floor was clear of corpses, so they went to the stairs. The first one creaked, and Skulduggery stepped back off it. He wrapped his arms around Valkyrie’s waist, and they rose off the ground and drifted up to the body on the landing. It was a woman, who had died curled up in a foetal position.

      There were three bedrooms and one bathroom. The bathroom was empty, as was the first bedroom they checked. The second bedroom had scorch marks on the wall and another dead woman halfway out of a window. Valkyrie guessed this woman was the one responsible for the scorch marks – she’d tried to defend herself, then tried to run. Neither attempt had worked.

      There was someone alive in the last bedroom. They could hear whoever it was in the wardrobe, trying not to make a sound. They heard a deep breath being taken as they approached, and then there was absolute silence for all of thirteen seconds. The silence ended with a ridiculously loud gasping for air. Skulduggery thumbed back the hammer of his gun.

      “Come out,” he said.

      The wardrobe burst open and a shrieking madman leaped out at Valkyrie. She batted down his arm, grabbed his shirt and twisted her hip into him, his shriek turning to a yelp as he hit the floor.

      “Don’t kill me,” he sobbed as he lay there. “Oh God, please don’t kill me.”

      “If you had let me finish,” Skulduggery said, slightly annoyed, “you would have heard me say, ‘Come out, we’re not going to hurt you’. Idiot.”

      “He probably wouldn’t have said idiot,” Valkyrie told the sobbing man. “We’re trying our best to be nice.”

      The man blinked through his tears, and looked up. “You’re … You’re not going to kill me?”

      “No, we’re not,” Valkyrie said

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