In three movements
A dare they have taken a hundred times
Alan and Steven walk the same dirt track most days — hedgerows, a deep ditch, skylarks, and the tithe barn at the end of it. Six feet up its end wall is a triangular air vent, and on the sill inside sits a toad that has never once moved.
Steven finds a stone in the grass: flat, glassy, a perfect skimmer. He measures the distance, lobs it underarm, and puts it straight through the vent. The birds stop singing all at once. A single black cloud crosses the sun, and the courtyard flagstones close over the boys' feet like a quagmire.
Eight hundred years, undone in an afternoon
The toad is Voth — the blackest wizard of the old age, the one the angels lost count of, turned to stone by Madelaine and left on that sill to wait out eternity. He mistakes the boys for warlocks in disguise, and he bargains with them for their freedom and their souls.
Then he drops a green glass bottle over the whole region and turns time backwards inside it. The fields are the same fields. The barn is new. And a cow at the gate opens her mouth to explain, in the voice of a duchess, precisely how much trouble two boys can cause with one well-thrown stone.
Destroy the stone, or never have existed
A red knight on a ribboned warhorse, a rook with a coarse southern twang, two medieval brothers digging worms until their fingers bleed, and a demon hauled up from the Misery and Misfortune Section — the boys collect allies and enemies at roughly the same speed.
There is one way home. Find the stone toad and destroy it before Voth's talisman is whole again. Fail, and the present they left behind — their mother, their track, their barn — simply never happens.
Scene One
The book is written in scenes — camera up, dialogue running.
A long, straight dirt track edged by tall hedgerows and a deep ditch. Two boys, both around ten, amble away from shot, hands in pockets. A large stone barn stands at the track's end. Skylarks twitter high above.
Bet it's not there.
It's been there every time. Years and years. If it had died, it would have got smelly, and it hasn't.
If it was alive, how could it jump back up and down that high? It'd have to get down just for water, even.
Alan leans in and hisses in his ear: “It sucks blood!” Steven shivers and hugs himself. They stop and gaze at the aperture in the barn's wall.
Folklore with a Yorkshire accent
Two brothers who sound real. Broad, blunt, funny, unsentimental — they bicker their way through a catastrophe entirely of their own making.
A villain worth being frightened of. Voth is patient, theatrical and genuinely cruel — no toothless children's-book menace.
Comedy in the middle of the horror. A duchess of a cow, an interrupting rook, and a demon who is thoroughly bored of his posting.
Written to be seen. Scene by scene, in screenplay shape — it moves at the pace of film, not prose.
The full cover
The paperback wrap in full — back cover, spine and front cover.
