Mortimer scoffs. “You can’t possibly believe a dinosaur did this to him!”

“It’s not like a normal dinosaur,” says Barrymore. “It’s a ghostly creature, scarred and hideous, eyes alight with vengeful flame!”

“Burning bog gas and an old man’s heart!”

Far off in the mist, something krees like an enormous eagle, and the carriage pachys snuffle and stomp their feet.

“We should really do something with our missiles,” says Captain Exigon, in zombie Russian.

“Well,” says Graaahh at length, “there aren’t any countries I want to obliterate.”

“I was thinking more of treating them like treasure,” says Exigon. “We could bury them somewhere, and mark it with an X!”

“Then hunt for more!” Graaahh is getting into it. “Terrors of the seas! With a disarmament agenda!”

“Exactly!” says Exigon.

“Graaahh!”

So that’s where all the missing Russian nukes are and you don’t have to worry about them anymore.

“Knock who?”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“No, come on. Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Interrupting cow.”

Silence.

A pointed look.

Silence.

“You’re supposed to say ‘interrupting cow who’ so I can–”

“MOO”

“Fine, dammit, you tell one.”

“Knock knock.”

“Who’s–”

“MOO”

“NO!”

“Did you think the cow was just going to leave?”

“This isn’t a hypothetical door-opening scenario with persistent characters! It’s a purely linguistic construct!”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“The Doctor.”

“Doctor Who?”

“Yes.”

Silence.

“Get it?”

“Yyyes?”

“I thought it was funny.”

“I worked that out.”

“And anyway you already took the interrupting–”

“MOO”

“They call those crack tennies,” says Maya.

“Who calls anything ‘tennies?’” says Rob.

“You know what I mean,” says Maya. “I used to try and pull them down.”

“They’re boundary markers. Wards. Protection.”

“Do you think I need protection?” He doesn’t say anything; she tilts her head.

They turn down Twenty-Ninth. Rob leans back and sends the next pair whirling upward, where it catches by the laces on the catenary line.

“So,” she says, “do you carve magic runes on the soles or something?”

“I just use a Sharpie,” he says.

“मैं मुसीबत में हूँ?” ask the suspicious yellow eyes in the crack of the door.

“We just need to know if you saw anything on the night of September… forty-eighth,” says Showalter, checking his notescroll. “There was an incident.”

“मैं सुअरों से बात नहीं है!”

“We’re going to have to continue this downtown,” sighs McMeel.

They drop through a manhole and into a mine cart, whose blue-and-reds flicker on stalagmites as they hurtle toward the sub-sub-substation.