Darkness had come to the town. Strange things were happening in the dead of night. Children would put a tooth under their pillow at bedtime, excitedly waiting for the tooth fairy to leave a coin. In the morning they would wake up to find something unspeakable under there. A dead slug. A live spider. Hundreds and hundreds of earwigs creeping and crawling beneath their pillow. Or worse. Much worse…

Someone or something had come into their bedrooms in the hours of darkness, snatched the tooth and left a blood-curdling calling card behind.

Evil was at work.

But who or what was behind it?

How could they sneak into children’s bedrooms without being seen?

And what could they possibly want with all those teeth…?

Meet the characters in this story:

Alfie, a boy with rotten teeth

Dad, Alfie’s dad

Gabz, a little girl

Miss Root, a dentist

Fang, her cat

Miss Hare, a Science teacher

Winnie, a social worker

Raj, a newsagent

PC Plank, a policeman

Texting Boy, a boy who never stops texting

Mr Grey, a headmaster

Mr Snood, a Drama teacher

Mrs Morrissey, an old lady

1

A Simple Case of Toothache

Alfie hated going to the dentist. As a result the boy’s teeth were almost all yellow. The ones that weren’t yellow were brown. They bore the stains of all the goodies that children love, but dentists hate. Sweets, fizzy drinks, chocolate. The teeth that were neither yellow nor brown simply weren’t there any more. They had fallen out. One had bitten into a toffee and stayed there. Assorted fruit-flavoured chews had claimed others. This is what young Alfie looked like when he smiled…

That’s because this twelve-year-old boy hadn’t gone to the dentist since he was very little.

Alfie’s last visit was when he was around six. It was a simple case of toothache, but it ended in disaster. The dentist was an ancient man, Mr Erstwhile. Despite his good intentions, Mr Erstwhile should have retired many years before. The dentist looked like a tortoise, an old tortoise at that. He wore glasses so thick they made his eyes appear to be the size of tennis balls. Mr Erstwhile told Alfie the tooth in question was rotten, a filling wouldn’t save it and unfortunately he had no option but to take it out.

The dentist yanked and yanked and yanked with his huge steel forceps. But the tooth wouldn’t come. Mr Erstwhile even rested his foot up on the chair by Alfie’s head to lever himself against it to help wrench the wretched tooth out. Still it wouldn’t come.

The ancient dentist then enlisted the help of his even older dental nurse. Miss Prig was instructed to hold on to him and tug as hard as she could. Even then the tooth wouldn’t come.

Soon

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Prologue

1 A Simple Case of Toothache

1

A Simple Case of Toothache