Senator Tod laughed again. “Oh, no! I have many names, my boy. I told you some of them at our first meeting.”
“You’re not a demon, by any chance?” I inquired as casually as possible. “From ancient times, Lord of Shadows and Darkness and all that?”
Both Henry and Arthur shot me glances of annoyance.
“Well, I was only wondering…,” I murmured. “He talks in that high-flown way, he says he has many names—I just wanted to be on the safe side.”
“A demon, no, I’m not a demon,” said Senator Tod, and he sounded almost regretful. “But Dona dents rotor!” He pointed behind him. “Tornado, nerd, sot—I have all those in me!”
He was starting all that confused stuff again.
“And your door is in this corridor, is it?” Arthur pointed to a yellow wooden door. “Is it that one?”
“Nice try,” said Senator Tod. He slowly took aim with his guns, fixing his pale-blue eyes on us. “What happens if you shoot people in here? Do they really die?”
“Of course not,” I said, scratching my arm uncomfortably.
“They don’t?” Senator Tod smiled. “But you’re not sure, are you, Goldilocks? Why don’t we try it? Bang bang.” He cocked one of the triggers. “Which of you shall I take out first? The girl?”
Okay, so this was the moment to turn into a dragonfly. Or better still, a killer hornet.
“But you’d need a gun for that,” said Henry before I’d made up my mind which. Taken aback, Senator Tod glanced left and then right. Instead of his guns, he was now holding two wriggling leopard cubs under his arms. And the knives in his belt had turned into long sausages.
“Wow!” I said admiringly. “Did you do that, Henry?”
“Bang bang,” said Henry, and Arthur laughed out loud.
“Ouch, they have sharp claws, right? But do you know what’s worse?” Arthur pointed behind him. “Here comes Mommy!”
Sure enough, a huge leopardess was prowling along the corridor toward us, growling even more fiercely than me just now.
Senator Tod was trying in vain to shake the leopard cubs off. “Get them away from here!” he cried, squeezing his eyes shut. But when he opened them, the little leopards were still there. And there was no sign of a gun anywhere.
“Come on, you guys, let’s go,” said Arthur, linking arms with both of us and leading us through his doorway. The last thing we saw before we closed the door was the leopardess crouching to spring.
12
I DON’T KNOW what I’d expected—maybe that we’d land in some kind of bat cave, or in Arthur’s parents’ grand house with its swimming pool and private cinema, but this surprised me. We were standing in a huge library. The place was flooded with light, and high above us was a mighty white-and-gold domed roof. The room was circular and surrounded by bookshelves three floors high, with galleries running around it for access to the books. Long tables with brass reading lamps and workstations, enough of them for dozens of school classes, branched out in a star shape from a central area where you presumably borrowed books. It all looked both modern and wonderfully old-fashioned, and a quiet “Wow!” escaped me.
“The Reading Room of the British Library,” said Henry, obviously not quite as impressed as I was.
“Yup. I like having it all to myself.” Arthur swung himself up on one of the tables. “So what do you think of our big game hunter?”
“Is he being torn to pieces out there at the moment?” I asked. Glancing at Henry’s feet, which were now in ordinary shoes, I switched from my Rollerblades to sneakers.
“Depends how far he’s in control of himself,” said Arthur, shrugging his shoulders. “He wasn’t doing too well against Henry’s and my powers of imagination—so now either he’ll have accepted the leopards as real and is terrified, or he’s taken over at the wheel and he’s running things himself.”
“Or he’s waking up.” Henry yawned and leaned against the table. “One way or another, I don’t think he’s particularly terrifying.”
“Well, you should,” said Arthur. “The fact that he knows our names and is out and about in these corridors shows that he’s closer to us than we’d like.”
I looked at Arthur. “You think he’s someone we know in real life?” That was a creepy idea.
Arthur shrugged his shoulders again. “In any case, he knows who we are, and I don’t like that one little bit.”
“Nor do I,” Henry admitted. “I’m pretty sure I’ve never met the guy before.”