At seventy years of age, recently retired William Hyatt was looking forward to spending his dotage with his family and indulging his three wonderful grandchildren. He was therefore surprised one fine spring day when a man he’d never previously met came knocking at his door with three items of note: a cell phone, a photograph of William’s youngest granddaughter Cecily (a peach of a four-year-old with wily plaits and sky blue eyes and a cheeky, gap-toothed smile), and a large, flat package in brown parcel paper.

The man at the door – a hired thug with nothing to say for himself but with eyes that could drill through brick, the sort of fellow William had once been well-acquainted with in his working life – handed William the phone. The voice on the other end of the line said:

“I’ll spare you any amateur dramatics, Mister Hyatt. I have a job for you.”

William eyed the brown package and its familiar, rectangular shape. “I’m legitimate now,” he said. “I don’t do that kind of work any more.”

“You will,” the voice on the phone replied, “or I take little Cecily kitten-fishing. You know what that is, Mister Hyatt?”

There was a certain infamous practice that involved groups of men – always men – taking baskets of specially-bred kittens out to sea on yachts, whereupon they’d spear the animals one by one through the scruff of the neck on four-inch fish-hooks and lower them over the side of the boat. The kittens would thrash and mewl and bleed in the water, which was their job: they were bait. It was, it was commonly agreed, the best way to catch sharks.

“Yes,” said William Hyatt, defeated. “I know what kitten-fishing is.”

The man at the door handed William the package and William unwrapped it with liver-spotted hands. Inside was an oil painting on canvas in a lightweight gold frame. The painting was of an old house on a hill on the cusp of a wheatfield beneath a bleak, cloud-scarred sky. In the middle of the field was a scrawny, dreadful figure. A scarecrow. William frowned. It was an ugly piece.

“My apologies in interrupting your retirement, Mister Hyatt, but your outstanding reputation as a master forger par excellence marks you out as the only man up to the task,” said the voice on the phone. “I would like thirteen copies of this work by the summer solstice, if you please.”

“Thirteen…?”

William squinted at the painting, specifically the scarecrow. And, as he looked, the scarecrow slowly turned its head and stared back at William, its face of dirty cloth suddenly animated beneath the wide brim of its hat and its stitched mouth gaping with a terrible, terrible grin.

William gasped and almost dropped the painting, but some steely resolve inside remembered Cecily and he held on for dear life. Her life.

“I anticipate your best efforts, Mister Hyatt,” said the voice on the phone. “As will all the Lords of Fear…”

Sister Constance Elizabeth, of the Holy Convent of St. Mary’s in downtown Los Angeles, was a rare beauty; a willowy young thing, she wore her soft chestnut hair tucked back beneath the band of her habit, and her lucid eyes, the colour of the ocean in a seaside postcard, were complemented by a shy, heartbreakingly vulnerable smile. She was also the gentlest of souls and the children of the local community adored her, especially on those warm mornings when she stood outside the convent gates and gave out ice cream cones from a small freeze-box. Sister Constance was known to remark that her fondest memory from her own childhood was enjoying a similar treat after Sunday School in the summer months, and to be able to pass on such a simple yet wonderful pleasure was a deeply personal delight.

All this considered, little Henry Lee Elmsworth was obviously distraught when, just as Sister Constance was handing him a raspberry ripple cone (and complementing him on what a fine young man he was growing up to be at the age of seven), a bullet impacted in the middle of her forehead and detonated her skull, splattering the immediate area – little Henry Lee included – with blood and skin and chestnut-colored locks and a few gooey pellets of brain.

As Sister Constance Elizabeth staggered backwards on bent legs (her hands reaching up for a split second to where the uppermost third of her head had once been before falling away), little Henry Lee stared at his ice cream with wide eyes. One of the nun’s pretty eyeballs was lodged there, having exploded outward from its socket, and there was a lot more dribbly scarlet then before. Not all of it was raspberry sauce.

It put him right off, to be honest. Which was actually just as well.

“I wouldn’t eat that if I were you,” said the lissome blonde who now approached the convent gates, a decrepit old shotgun slung over one shoulder and a smoking Colt .45 in her other hand. “On account of the arsenic,” she continued, briskly. “Nasty stuff. Stomach contractions, cardiac arrest, the lot. Ruin your whole bloody day and then some.”

Henry Lee looked at the girl. She was young, late teens, and extraordinarily pretty, her curvaceous figure fitted snugly into an ivory shirt and khaki jacket and slacks. Her hair, so pale it was almost white, was tied back in a careless braid and her eyes were a gorgeous blue. She wore a stylish Victorian choker about her throat, a ruby-hued jewel the size of a duck’s egg set into a web of black lace. The jewel was glowing softly.

“You’re English,” little Henry Lee said, noting the girl’s accent.

“That’s right.”

Henry Lee looked at his ice cream, then looked down at Sister Constance Elizabeth’s twitching corpse. Blood was pooling from what remained of her head, scarcely more than a few slivers of skull and hair attached to a jagged stump of neck. The blood had reached the toes of Henry Lee’s shoes. It was then that the shock gave way to sheer, shrieking terror, and the poor boy dropped his cone and ran. The blonde girl stared after him indignantly.

“Hey!” she yelled. “It could be worse! I could be Welsh!”

Sighing, the girl looked back towards the Holy Convent of St. Mary’s. She was oblivious to the cries of numerous bystanders who were now seeking cover from the gun-toting lunatic who had pitched up on their street, although one or two advanced on her instead, horrified and angered by what had just transpired. These irate few were only baulked when the girl waved her shotgun absently in their general direction.

They needn’t have worried, of course. Buckshot of concentrated hellfire – or bullets from the Colt, like the one that had given Sister Constance the ultimate migraine – was harmless to regular humans, and would pass through mortal flesh with only a tingle to mark its unnatural course. Demons, on the other hand – that is to say, any entities of otherworldly origin with malignant intention at heart – would be advised to make sure their infernal affairs were in order before they boarded the train to Boomsville. As the fiend that had been inhabiting the body of the unfortunate Sister Constance up until a minute ago had just discovered…

“Right then, chaps,” the blonde murmured. “Swear to God, a girl finds herself preoccupied with storming the gates of the netherworld for a week or three and when she gets her arse back in gear she finds that everything’s gone to… well, hell. Honestly, ritual bloodletting and vampires in the streets? Dracula resurrected and then vanishing mysteriously? Demons taking over a convent so they can poison children and no doubt get up to all kinds of other nasty mischief? If I’d known Los Angeles was going to be like this I’d have ignored my bloody visions and stayed in London. Snuggled up in bed with the Sunday papers, nice mug of tea and a buttered crumpet? Lovely. But no. Not me. Me, I’ve got to come sniffing out a bunch of sodding - ”

Overhead, a sudden eruption of brackish smoke darkened the morning sky, spooling out from the crest of St. Mary’s like volcanic smolder – or like the black fingers of some gigantic claw, grasping wickedly at the light. The girl looked up, scowling. As she watched, a number of figures shot upwards from the chapel, screaming and writhing and scratching in their masses. A half-dozen, a dozen, a score. They weren’t nuns, of course, not any more – they were things, inhabiting nuns’ fleshly shells, their tattered habits charred to ash and their hair ablaze with dark, liquid flame, carried aloft on streams of bodily gasses that now ignited at hands and feet and from their mouths stretched so wide with their unholy ire that their dislocated jaws hung loose at their throats.

Infernal, airborne nuns. The girl named Elsa Bloodstone rolled her eyes.

“Bugger,” she said.

“How so?”

The scarecrow at the window glanced back over his shoulder, his eyes – jagged cutouts in the soiled brown sackcloth of his face – glowing an unearthly red. He was grinning, even though he didn’t feel particularly cheery. It was simply that his approximation of a mouth was stitched that way.

“Because she’s supposed to be dead, that’s how so,” the scarecrow rasped, flecks of straw poking out of his cloth orifice. “Or, at the very least, having the flesh roasted repeatedly from her pretty little bones in one of Erebus’s tar and brimstone pits.”

“But she isn’t.”

“No, she isn’t. She’s standing outside our sanctuary taking potshots at our unholy legions is what she’s doing.”

“Who said she was in Hell?”

“Belathauzer.”

The second scarecrow – the one sat in the armchair reading a copy of the Los Angeles Herald – put aside his newspaper and gave a snort. “Ah, well, there you go then,” he said. “Handy with a pitchfork that one, but never the most reliable of demonspawn, especially when his right head starts contradicting the left one. Whom exactly are we talking about, anyway?”

“Elsa Bloodstone. Daughter of the late Ulysses Bloodstone, ten-thousand-year-old Hyborian warrior, adventurer, monster-hunter and demon-slayer.”

“Really? Well, that’s torn an arse-sized hole in things.”

“My thoughts exactly…”

The first scarecrow was about to say something more when another voice interrupted. Scarecrows One and Two turned to see scarecrow Three in the doorway of the shadowed vestry. In his scruffy rags and with his scrawny, shambling gait, this specimen was identical to his fellows.

“We’ve got trouble,” said three.

“Oh, you noticed, did you?”

“Get stuffed.”

“Already am, dear boy.”

Scarecrow Three sighed. “We’re assembling in the gallery. You know, just in case you were inclined to preserve your immortal souls in their present forms and not take a hellfire bullet or two in your hay baskets?”

The first scarecrow grunted. The second stared at his newspaper mournfully.

“Damnable shame,” he murmured. “I was just getting a taste for all this.”

“What, consecrated ground?”

“I was thinking more of the nuns,” scarecrow Two mused. “Always had a thing for convent girls. All that denial and pent-up libidinous angst just begging to be tapped, then all that delicious guilt when they let themselves go…”

“I must say, demon seeds do germinate wonderfully well in these devout types, don’t they?”

“Quite.”

The third scarecrow narrowed his red eyes. “Yes, yes,” he snapped. “We all feel the same – obviously so, considering that we’re multiple manifestations of The Original – but I never said we were leaving, now did I?”

The other two scarecrows exchanged a glance. “What?” said One. “So we’re not beating the proverbial retreat?”

“Absolutely not,” the third hissed. “After all, never let it be claimed that The Straw Men, loyal emissaries of the esteemed Lords of Fear, are as timorous as the fleshlings upon whose terror our masters gladly feed…”

“Oooh,” she said. “Scary Mary, quite contrary. And there was me just dying for some proper target practice…”

Elsa extended one arm, the one with a supernaturally suffused Colt .45 at the end of it, and squeezed the trigger twice in succession. The two demon nuns on her right detonated in explosions of blood and bone as bullets of concentrated hellfire impacted in the middle of their chests at an upward trajectory, reducing their ribs to splintered kindling and punching their blackened hearts up the funnel of their necks and out through the backs of their skulls. Elsa then shifted her weight nonchalantly and brought the shotgun cradled in the crook of her other arm to bear. The shotgun’s name was Emily. It had been a gift from a friend. Elsa had been delighted.

She pumped both barrels into the first of the two nuns on her left, earning a cloud of fiery backdraft and blood mist, then readjusted her stance and pumped again, taking the second sister’s head clean off at the shoulders. The nun’s body kept on coming due to her momentum, spiraling in a black and white death dive, but Elsa simply sidestepped and allowed the decapitated missile to slam into the asphalt beyond her with a whumpf of dark flame.

Someone screamed. Actually, it was more than one someone. Elsa turned to see that a crowd was gathering on the perimeter of the chaos – if indeed chaos had perimeters, as these gawping cretins seemed to believe – and that the general reaction to what they were witnessing wasn’t overly positive.

“It’s their own fault,” Elsa declared. “I told them I was Agnostic, but they just wouldn’t let it lie…”

No one laughed. Tough crowd. A screaming nun hurtled forward from Elsa’s blindside, eyes on fire and vomiting blood, and Elsa only just managed to stuff the business end of Emily into the witch’s mouth and incinerate her demonically possessed brain with a second to spare. Elsa scowled. These sodding nuns were getting on her wick now.

“Right then, my monochromatic darlings,” she said as she stalked forward, pausing only to level her Colt and blow a neat hole in an airborne nun’s stomach, along with an enormous notice board asking What Would Jesus Do? Staring at the message through the smear of intestines, Elsa sniffed.

“I tell you what he’d do,” she said. “He’d hitch up his smock, slap his finger on the trigger, and then he’d find out who was behind all this malarkey and spank his impious backside all the way back to Hell.”

Someone nearby gasped. Elsa smiled.

“Don’t worry love. I’m English. We’ve been getting away with blasphemy for bloody years…”

The Straw Man – or, to be precise, The Original as the others now called him – was confident that he would have liked Helena Suárez had he known her in life. Regrettable, then, that she’d been one of the first tenants of the convent to be… transformed.

“The Strange Case Of The Fiery Hand,” The Straw Man mused, tapping a scrawny finger against the brim of his hat as he scrutinized the cover of one battered old paperback. The design depicted a blonde with prominent cleavage and sleek legs, tethered with ropes and at the mercy of a scowling man in a trench coat and trilby with a revolver in his mitt. The Straw Man’s inhuman face twitched as cloth and hay and stitched black thread creased into a wry grin. “Ah, my sweet Sister Suárez,” he cooed. “You racy little minx, you…”

From outside there came the sudden roar of a shotgun discharging, followed closely by unholy screams. The unmistakable sound of demonic purging. The Straw Man glanced up in interest, then eased himself from his chair and shuffled across to the library window. He looked out open the street, his black eyes narrowed.

“Hello, hello. What have we here, then?”

The Straw Man saw the girl stride through the convent gates, idly sweeping her weapon from side to side and putting paid to any potential attack with precise bursts of consecrated hellfire. He looked down at his book, then back out the window, then back to the book. Blonde hair, legs, cleavage. And an attitude, if he wasn’t mistaken. How delightful!

“Always was a great believer in providence,” The Straw Man said, his grin now even wider. He strained to get closer to the window in want of a better gawp, but of course he couldn’t. Not with the manacle of black magic locked tight about his right ankle, and linked to the leg of the chair where he’d been sitting with a chain of plaited faerie-dust.

He grimaced now, kicking irritably at the otherworldly chain with the toe of his free boot.

“The question is,” he muttered, “Has fate sent her to free me or foul me up worse than I am already…?”

An infernal nun dropped from the roof, trailing black flames. Elsa couldn’t swing either of her guns up in time to fire off a shot, but that wasn’t the end of the world. She wasn’t entirely dependent on firearms after all. Instead she took a quick step backwards and twisted her upper body, catching the nun on one shoulder whilst throwing her weight into the other, and the resulting shift of momentum allowed her to slam her attacker against the brick wall alongside the window that had momentarily distracted her. She then snapped up her right knee into the possessed nun’s gut with such force that it caused the beast’s stomach to explode and its ribcage to rupture outwards through its lower chest like a decidedly inappropriate piñata. The demon looked surprised, glancing down to see that much of its immediate insides were now outside. Then Elsa placed the nub of her Colt against the nun’s forehead and pulled the trigger, detonating the fiend’s cranium like a pumpkin. It was oddly therapeutic.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the last of them. Not by a long chalk.

Elsa whirled at the sound of further vile screeching and saw that she was becoming surrounded. Flaming nuns were encroaching on almost every side as well as gathering along the guttered roof above like smoking gargoyles, and they were forcing her away from the window that had interested her. On purpose? Elsa frowned. Okay, then. This was all getting a little more intimate than she’d anticipated…

Glancing along the only length of the convent wall left open to her, her senses were now all a-riot – especially when she saw a luminous, crimson glow spilling from another window, just ten meters distant. She sprinted for it, laying down a sweep of covering hellfire with the shotgun hooked backwards under the crook of her arm, and without breaking stride she leapt. There was an explosion of glass and slate and lead, and then Elsa was hitting the ground beyond the window and rolling to her feet, both guns brought to bear upon… nothing?

No, not strictly nothing. The area in which she now found herself was unfurnished - just a long, narrow gallery rather than a room, with bare board floors and dark paneling – and there were no nuns in here, infernal or otherwise. There were paintings on the walls however, however. Lots of them, thirteen in total, canvasses of uniform size and depicting an identical rural scene of a field, with a dark house in distant perspective and a single figure in the foreground. A scarecrow.

Each scarecrow was staring out of its respective painting, mouth stitched in sinister grin and eyes glowing a bright, bloody red. This was the crimson luminescence that Elsa had witnessed flickering through the window, and now that she was viewing the source up close the blonde girl found herself experiencing an unusual fluttering in the pits of her stomach and a dryness in the back of her throat.

Palpitations, sweaty palms, an iron taste on the tongue… Elsa scowled. Was this what she thought it was? Was she… afraid?

She heard soft, mocking laughter and she turned, expecting to see the hideous faces of the possessed nuns congregating at the shattered window, but there was nothing there. Too late, she realized that the chuckling was emanating from the paintings.

“Come join us, pretty,” a papery voice crooned. “There’s room for one more in the world of straw…”

And then Elsa felt the crimson glow wash over her, and felt an insistent pulling at her clothes and hair and skin – at her very soul – and, despite herself, she couldn’t help but scream.

Elsa knew that he was there, even in the darkness. Maybe it was his scent – odors were supposed to be timeless weren’t they, the barest trace of something that was once familiar dredging up distinct memories no matter how deep in the past they were buried? – or maybe it was more spiritual than that. Maybe she’d always known this day would come, and on some subconscious level she’d been ready.

“I knew you’d come back for me,” she said, quietly. “I knew you wouldn’t leave me forever, Daddy. Not with all these monsters in the world.”

He was close. She reached out for him, and found his shoulder and then his arm. She curled her hand into his, so much larger than her own, as if she were still a child. So firm, so comforting. Even with no more flesh left on the bones.

Elsa whimpered and flinched, trying to pull away, but then the skeletal hand closed about her and held her tight.

“Don’t be skittish, pumpkin,” slurred a cloying breath. “Come give your old Dad a hug.”

And suddenly the darkness was filled with a harsher stink, the perfume of earth and beetles and dead flowers. And straw. Bundles of straw on a hot summer’s afternoon…

Elsa screamed. Not through shock this time, or fright, but through rage. They were using her secrets. They were using her secret wishes against her.

“Trust me, lads,” she hissed, eyes narrowed to slits, “that’s not the brightest thing you could have done. Some things should remain private.”

She concentrated, willing the blackness away – and in the next instant there was a flood of light, so sharp and wide it caused her to squint. She gazed up into the widest expanse of sky she’d ever seen, far wider than anything England could ever have offered, a panoramic sweep of pale blue mottled with swathes of cloud. Beneath that sky there were fields of crops – wheat, corn, maize, barley whatever the hell it was; it was yellow and green and there was lots of it – and in the distance there was a dark building on a hill. A farmhouse, with a scattering of barns and outbuildings close by. Elsa was lying on the ground, in a patch of tawny grass, one leg tucked beneath and one arm behind her. The other was reaching forward, her hand splayed as if to pull herself up the hill towards the house. Because…?

Because she’d have to crawl, obviously. She couldn’t walk. Her legs didn’t work, because her body was twisted with polio. She –

“Not me.”

Elsa pushed herself to her knees and raised a hand to her neck. Her fingers traced the familiar outline of her black choker with the ruby red jewel that rested at the delicate curve of her throat, and she smiled grimly.

“Poor Christina Olson, she didn’t have a bloodstone,” she murmured. “This is her painting, not mine. So you may as well show yourselves, you little tossers, because patience was never one of my virtues…”

Elsa looked around and saw them then: a horde, encroaching from all sides in much the same way as the demon nuns, although these blighters were even more horrific in their own way. They walked with a swift shamble, their clothes mismatched rags and their limbs flickering at their sides like broken wings, their faces a ghastly gallery of stitched sackcloth spewing thatched clumps of straw. Scarecrows. Elsa scowled. They looked like something out of a nightmare, but in truth she reckoned they were the only real aspect of the world in which she found herself.

She stood, arms crossed, and in that moment comprehension dawned that she was empty-handed. She really, really wished that, wherever it was she’d been brought, her shotgun and her Colt had come with her…

“We can feel your fear, missy,” the nearest of the straw men gurgled, his eyes burning with delight. Elsa raised an eyebrow.

“Bollocks you can.”

The scarecrow faltered, as did its companions. “What…?”

“You heard me, Worzel. What, do I look like a jackdaw? Going to flap away screeching caw, caw through a beakful of sunflower seeds, am I?”

The straw men snarled, circling warily. Elsa sniffed, flicking her hair, then fixed the first scarecrow with a stern eye.

“You can’t imagine what my interpretation of fear would be,” she said. “My dreams were filled with vampires and werewolves and boggle-eyed, hairy-legged whatjamacallits before I’d even turned two years old and could articulate what it was that woke me up screaming every night. When I killed my first demon at eighteen it exploded in a ball of flame and acid and I had no idea if the bloodstone I’d just started wearing would honestly protect me like it was supposed to. And I grew up without my father. Believe me, there’s nothing worse than that. Those deep, dark secrets you tapped into to try and put the frighteners on me? That trace scent? Memories from when I was a baby. I didn’t have a Daddy – and that was because of things like you. Fear? Stitch-boy, how’s about I give you a lesson in fear…?”

The lead scarecrow reared back, his sackcloth mouth no longer curled into a grin. “But… but you don’t have your guns - ”

“No, I don’t. How unfortunate for you – because guns would be quick.”

Elsa hurled herself forward and grabbed her enemy about its skinny chest, then wrapped one arm around its neck and twisted. The scarecrow’s head came loose with a foomph of straw and dust, but Elsa had no use for this; she discarded it and instead hefted her foe’s now decapitated body as a makeshift weapon, swinging it by the scruff of its collar and felling three more Straw Men with the flailing legs of the first. The scarecrows scattered, some shrieking and wringing their stitched approximations of hands whilst others looked on in disgust.

“Stand your ground, dammit!” the lead scarecrow barked. “Remember who you are! Remember what you are! She can’t hurt us, not here, not - ”

Elsa stepped forward and punched the scarecrow so hard in the face that the back of his head erupted in a cloud of cloth and stalk, his attacker’s knuckles protruding from the hole. Scowling, Elsa then pulled her hand free again, dragging a tangle of musty, straw-and-mulch cerebellum along with it.

“Well, look at that,” she declared. “Seems like L. Frank Baum was wrong.”

The scarecrow looked confused. Or maybe just cranially eviscerated. One of the two. As she set about the rest of the pack with just her fists and boots and the periodic accompaniment of a traditional Glasgow headbutt, Elsa began to whistle.

“Oh, I could while away the hours, conferrin’ with the flowers, consultin’ with the rain…”

The blonde girl was cutting down the scarecrow horde like… well, like wheat. And she seemed to be enjoying the exercise, because she didn’t spot one particular foe approaching from behind, a gleaming, copper scythe clasped in his straw mitts.

“…and my head I’d be scratchin’, while my thoughts were busy hatchin’…”

The scarecrow raised the blade of the scythe high, his sinister face twisted into an expression of pure evil.

“…if I only had a - ”

And then the scarecrow struck, cackling in vindictive triumph as the scythe’s curved edge cut down into the back of the girl’s neck with a resounding thwack.

The Straw Man scowled, staring down at the magical manacle about his ankle. As he looked, however, he saw that the chain of plaited faerie-dust that held him in place like no earthly constraint ever could was now beginning to tremble, flaking specks of colorful light and losing its maddening hue.

“Oh,” The Straw Man said, with a flicker of a stitched smile. “Oh, I say. Now there’s an unanticipated twist that Sister Suárez would have appreciated, I’m sure…”

“That blow should have taken your head clean off,” the fiend hissed. “How…?”

“Actually, my bloodstone renders me impervious to physical harm, including attempts at sneaky decollation,” Elsa countered. “Or at least it should,” she continued, frowning. “But then why am I bleeding?”

“Isn’t it nice that in this day and age where knowledge is everything that we all still have the capacity to be surprised?” a rasping yet melodious voice interjected.

Elsa and the scarecrow both turned to see another Straw Man – The Original, in his disheveled yet strangely stylish rags and his swallow-brimmed hat – standing close by, his cloth face carved with a jack o’lantern grin.

“You!” the scarecrow screamed.

“Me,” agreed The Straw Man. And then he reached out and touched his fellow, and the scarecrow erupted in a sudden whorl of ghastly green flames, howling and spitting as he combusted. The Straw Man turned nonchalantly, and executed another handful of his dark reflections in similar fashion. He didn’t even have to touch these ones, he just waved his hands in their general direction and up they went. Foomph, indeed.

Elsa stood, grimacing and still pressing tenderly at her neck. The Straw Man glanced at her.

“This… place, it works to different rules,” he told her. “You’re vulnerable here, although not to the same extent as if you didn’t have that pretty little jewel of yours augmenting your physical being. But, by the same token, they were vulnerable to you too. They underestimated you. I bet they didn’t expect you to start fighting back, any more than they’d anticipated you subtly altering the composition of their painting. Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World, right?”

“It was always one of my favorites.”

“Right. Beauty and impeccable artistic taste. Anyway, best thing of all? When you fought back against them you disrupted the ethereal magicks they’d bastardized to chain me up in the human world – and this allowed me to break free and re-cross the dimensional threshold. See? Lovely jubbly, everyone’s a winner.”

The Straw Man grinned, then glanced across at the burning, writhing effigies that had once been his fellow scarecrows. “Well,” he amended, “apart from them, obviously.”

Elsa gazed at The Straw Man in disbelief. “Okay,” she said, slowly. “But who exactly are you…?”

The Straw Man tipped his hat. “I’m The Original, toots,” he beamed. “And soon to be the one and only again, once I’ve rounded up and put the match to the last of these here varmints. And then, the cherry on the cake… I’m your ticket back to Kansas. Or, in this instance, Los Angeles. Just click your heels together three times, Dorothy, and say - ”

Elsa pouted as she stood and stretched, scanning the darkened gallery that she’d disappeared from earlier and which she’d now returned to.

“Home being England,” she said, pointedly, “which this certainly isn’t.”

“You can’t leave yet,” the voice of The Straw Man retorted. “You’ve got to go shopping on Rodeo Drive, catch some rays on Palm Beach, save a million innocent souls from the Lords of Fear…”

Elsa turned to stare at the scarecrow in the hat, who was now standing next to her here in the human world just as he had been in the world of the painting. The Straw Man’s eyes flashed. “It’s why you were drawn here,” he told her, suddenly serious. “Someone – or something – desecrated this holy ground to curry favor with a pride of otherdimensional demonkind, despoiling nuns and forging my painting in a plot designed for a singular purpose.”

“Feeding children arsenic in their ice cream?”

“Instigating fear. My duplicates may be gone but that mystery someone’s still out there. They’ll strike again.”

“And you think I’m the one to stop them?”

“That’s your job, isn’t it, toots? You’re the daughter of the demon-slayer. The legacy lives on through you. But maybe you don’t have to go it alone…”

Elsa smiled thinly. “You want to be my partner, Stitchley?”

“Love to, Peaches. But no, not me. Reckon we’ll meet again, right enough, but for now I need to destroy these.” The Straw Man indicated the thirteen paintings on the gallery wall, now depicting identical rural scenes but without scarecrows in the foreground. “And I need to find my own painting, which they knew better than to keep anywhere around here. These bastitches couldn’t have destroyed it any more than they could destroy me – The Original’s for keeps, baby – but I won’t feel safe and snugly until I’ve got it back in my hands.”

“So who…?”

There was a sudden blare of siren from outside, followed by an urgent voice echoing through a loudhailer. Elsa rolled her eyes.

“Wonderful. The local constabulary.”

“We call them cops.”

“Whatever. Think they’ll believe the nuns I killed were demonically possessed?”

“You’re English. They wouldn’t expect anything less.”

Elsa turned to say something more but The Straw Man had already slipped away into the shadows. Curious bloke, she thought to herself. But, considering how bizarre her life was on a day-to-day basis, entirely acceptable. Grimacing, the blonde girl collected her Colt and her shotgun and climbed out of the gallery window into daylight. There were coppers – cops – everywhere beyond the perimeter of the convent grounds, all with guns trained on her person, which was expected. One thing entirely unexpected, however, was the close presence of a disarmingly alluring brunette with a stylish 1920s flapper haircut, dressed in a black and gold bodysuit, hovering ten feet above ground on a pair of delicately curved wings that shimmered like frosted glass in the morning sun. At no more than eighteen inches tall, the winged woman resembled a fairy – or a hornet. Something in-between.

“Ah,” said Elsa. “Wait a minute, wait a minute… it’ll come to me… oh! Oh! I know you! You’re The Wasp, aren’t you? Of The Avengers. Which is appropriate, because you really do have this whole Emma Peel, Diana Rigg thing going on…”

The winged woman cocked a perfectly manicured eyebrow. “How sweet to be recognized,” she said, with an inscrutable smile. “Now, young lady… how about you tell me what the blazes is going on here before I see if a bioelectrical sting that can sear through six-inch-thick steel can do the same to you?”

Elsa Bloodstone grinned, her ruby jewel shining. “Actually, that would be an intriguing experiment,” she said. “But do you think we could talk about this over lunch? There’s much to discuss and I’m gagging for a cup of tea…”

In the darkness of the not-place, things shifted. One of these things raised its head and winked an eye the colour of dead people.

“Blehdh?” it said, to which the shadowed man nodded.

“Indeed,” he sighed. “Still, as entertaining as the Straw Man was, those infernal duplicates were never more than a means to an end.”

“Blehdh?”

“Yes, of course. But we have other strategies to employ, each more cunning and lethal than the last, yes?”

“Blehdh.”

The shadowed man sniffed. “You worry too much,” he said. And then he smiled, at least in as much as a face like his could smile. “In fact, there might even be a way to turn this development to our advantage. As the scarecrow advised Miss Bloodstone, she doesn’t have to face our machinations alone. But, if we can convince her that her potential new allies might prove more hindrance than help, then perhaps - ”

There were no doors in this place that was not a place, and yet there came a knocking all the same. The shadowed man scowled, than flourished a hand that was not a hand and conjured the darkness apart in ribbons of satin and flesh, encouraging a crack to appear within crevices forever untouched by moonlight. Beyond this aperture, a woman waited with infinite patience. She was serene and elegant, resplendent in a kimono of shimmering silk colored with myriad blues. Her eyes were delicate brush-strokes of black against skin rendered snow-pale with rice-powder base, her top lip painted with a glisten of deep red as she sipped at a china cup. When she felt the gaze of darkness upon her she glanced up and smiled a smile of glass masked in cloth.

“Greetings, honored emissary of the Lords of Fear,” the Japanese woman murmured. “Forgive my intrusion. But I thought we might take tea… and discuss these strategies of yours.”

The shadowed man’s scowl deepened.