You’d better tell me what you know, toad,” said Tiffany. “Miss Tick isn’t here. I am.” “Another world is colliding with this one,” said the toad. “There. Happy now? That’s what Miss Tick thinks. But it’s happening faster than she expected. All the monsters are coming back.” “Why?” “There’s no one to stop them.” There was silence for a moment. “There’s me,” said Tiffany.

The kind of accidents you prefer to call...accidents.

Did I do anything last night that suggested I was sane?

Good or bad, do it as you. Too many lies and there's no truth to go back to.

I stroll along, talk, I sign books, people buy me drinks, I forget where my hotel is, I get lost and fall into some local body of water... done it hundreds of times.

For the first time in her life Granny wondered whether there might be something important in all these books people were setting store by these days, although she was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy. Among the many things in the infinitely varied universe with which Granny did not hold was talking to dead people, who by all accounts had enough troubles of their own.

But there was more to it than that. As the Amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and who were the rats.