the lock.
Strong hands grabbed her from behind. She screamed again as she was lifted off her feet and carried back. She kicked out, slamming a heel into his shin. The man grunted and let go.
Stephanie twisted, trying to swing the poker into his face, but he caught it and pulled it from her grasp. One hand went to her throat, and Stephanie gagged, unable to breathe as the man forced her back into the living room.
He pushed her into an armchair and leaned in on her. No matter how hard she tried, she could not break his grip.
'Now then,' the man said, his mouth contorting into a sneer, 'why don't you just give me the key, little girlie?'
And that's when the front door was flung off its hinges and Skulduggery Pleasant burst into the house.
The man cursed and released Stephanie and swung the poker, but Skulduggery moved straight to him and hit him so hard, Stephanie thought the man's head might come off. He hit the ground and tumbled backward, but rolled to his feet as Skulduggery moved in again.
The man launched himself forward. The two men collided and went backward over the couch, and Skulduggery lost his hat. Stephanie saw a flash of white above the scarf.
They got to their feet, grappling, and the man swung a punch that knocked Skulduggery's sunglasses to the other side of the room. Skulduggery responded by moving in low, grabbing the man around the waist, and twisting his hip into him. The man was flipped to the floor, hard.
He cursed a little more while he was down there, then remembered Stephanie and made for her.
Stephanie leaped out of the chair, but before he reached her, Skulduggery was there, kicking the man's legs out from under him. The man hit a small coffee table with his chin and howled in pain.
'You think you can stop me?' he screamed as he tried to stand. His knees seemed shaky. 'Do you know who I am?'
'Haven't the foggiest,' Skulduggery said.
The man spat blood and grinned defiantly. 'Well, I know about you,' he said. 'My master told me all about you, Detective, and you're going to have to do a lot more than that to stop me.'
Skulduggery shrugged, and Stephanie watched in amazement as a ball of fire flared up in his hand. He hurled it, and the man was suddenly covered in flame. But instead of screaming, the man tilted his head back and roared with laughter. The fire might have engulfed him, but it wasn't burning him.
'More!' He laughed. 'Give me more!'
'If you insist.'
And then Skulduggery took an old-fashioned revolver from his jacket and fired, the gun bucking slightly with the recoil. The bullet hit the man in the shoulder and he screamed, then tried to run and tripped. He scrambled for the doorway, ducking and dodging lest he get shot again, the flames obstructing his vision so much that he hit a wall on his way out.
And then he was gone.
Stephanie stared at the door, trying to make sense of the impossible.
'Well,' Skulduggery said from behind her, 'that's something you don't see every day.'
She turned. When his hat had come off, his hair had come off too. In the confusion, all she had seen was a chalk-white scalp, so she turned expecting to see a bald albino, maybe. But no. With his sunglasses gone and his scarf hanging down, there was no denying the fact that he had no flesh, he had no skin, he had no eyes, and he had no face.
All he had was a skull for a head.
Chapter Four
The Secret War
Skulduggery put his gun away and walked out to the hall. He peered out into the night. Satisfied that there were no human fireballs lurking anywhere nearby, he came back inside and picked the door up off the floor, grunting with the effort. He maneuvered it back to where it belonged, leaving it leaning in the doorway; then he shrugged and came back into the living room, where Stephanie was still standing and staring at him.
'Sorry about the door,' he said.
Stephanie stared.
'I'll pay to get it fixed.'
Stephanie stared.
'It's still a good door, you know. Sturdy.'
When he realized that Stephanie was in no condition to do anything but stare, he shrugged again and took off his coat, folded it neatly, and draped it over the back of a chair. He went to the broken window and started picking up the shards of glass.
Now that he didn't have his coat on, Stephanie could truly appreciate how thin he really was.
His suit, well tailored though it was, hung off him, giving it a shapeless quality. She watched him collect the broken glass, and saw a flash of bone between his shirtsleeve and glove. He stood up, looking back at her.
'Where should I put all this glass?'
'I don't know,' Stephanie said in a quiet voice. 'You're a skeleton.'
'I am indeed,' he said. 'Gordon used to keep a trash can out at the back door; shall I put it in that?'
Stephanie nodded. 'Yes, okay,' she said simply, and watched Skulduggery carry the armful of glass shards out of the room. All her life she had longed for something else, for something to take her out of the humdrum world she knew — and now that it looked like it might actually happen, she didn't have one clue what to do. Questions were tripping over themselves in her head, each one vying to be the one that was asked first. So many of them.
Skulduggery came back in, and she asked the first question. 'Did you find it all right?'
'I did, yes. It was where he always kept it.'
'Okay then.' If questions were people, she thought, they'd all be staring at her now in disbelief.
She struggled to form coherent thoughts.
'Did you tell him your name?' Skulduggery was asking.
'What?'
'Your name. Did you tell him?'
'Uh, no . . .'
'Good. You know something's true name, you have power over it. But even a given name, even Stephanie, would have been enough to do it.'
'To do what?'
'To give him some influence over you, to get you to do what he asked. If he had your name and he knew what to do with it, sometimes that's all it takes. That's a scary thought, now, isn't it?'
'What's going on?' Stephanie asked. 'Who was he? What did he want? Just who are you?'
'I'm me,' Skulduggery said, picking up his hat and wig and placing them on a nearby table. 'As for him, I don't know who he is; never seen him before in my life.'
'You shot him.'
'That's right.'
'And you threw fire at him.'
'Yes, I did.'
Stephanie's legs felt weak and her head felt light.
'Mr. Pleasant, you're a skeleton.'
'Ah yes, back to the crux of the thing. Yes. I am, as you say, a skeleton. I have been one for a few years now.'
'Am I going mad?'
'I hope not.'
'So you're real? You actually exist?'
'Presumably.'
'You mean you're not sure if you exist or not?'
'I'm fairly certain. I mean, I could be wrong. I could be some ghastly hallucination, a figment of my imagination.'
'You might be a figment of your own imagination?'
'Stranger things have happened. And do, with alarming regularity.'
'This is too weird.'
