Then she glided into the next room and taking her great-great-grandmother's handmade soapstone-encrusted 1806 duelling pistols from their handmade amber-splattered mahogany box, loaded them and entered
the outer sanctum sanctorum of her husband, Mingey, the writer. The first shot went into the 1927 Underwood typing machine. The second went into his leg where it shattered his femur. "Ger und git'it ursilf!", she whispered.

Little beknownst to Per, or not knownst at all, as it would turn out two pages from now in the expurgated edition for Penguin (Puffin!) buchs, her husband had been dead for years and his body inhabited by a very vigourous and incestous ghost of one of her dead borthers, Smilder Snod Sphagnum, who had died in a taffy-painting accident in Islington when she was twelve. The baby she had just delivered had been instilled in her womb under his instigation, although whose DNA was in use under them there circumstances is beyond anybody's guess... Until the sequel.

Anyway, as she turned to go dye some woolens she'd borrowed from the Vicar's mistress, she failed to hear the odd sound of the wounds knitting themselves into non-existence on the femur and the typing machine. For the typing machine, for all its dents and rust and clacking, was not a typical typing machine. No, it, too, had been inhabited by a ghost, the shade of Mrs. Pettigrew T. Smurghle, who loved to have her keys pressed... in this life and that. Smilder's spirit, as it cavorted covertly inside Mingey's flesh, was unaware of Mrs. Pettigrew T. Smurgle, who's real name was Spinkley, but Spinkley, who preferred to be called Fred, was very aware of what was going on with Mingey and Per-Alta and the babe, and she had plans of her own for all three of them. But first, she had to find the spirit of Mingey, which had fled into a used beer cooler when he died.