Wednesday 11th November 2015

We none of us slept last night. Mouse says that he's feeling all right physically, thanks to Bwbach's saliva and Johan's fire, but he couldn't sleep for trying to convince himself that, somehow, this had all been his fault, for running away in the first place and not thinking to try to help his brothers until it was too late. In his position, I'd have been crying, but clay can't cry, so instead Mouse kept rolling around, clattering against the table we were lying on until I was afraid he might chip himself further, or even roll onto the floor and break again. In the end, Bwbach had to stick his legs together and his arms to his sides with sticking-plasters (at least we had those in the van), wrap him up in a spare sock of Johan's and fasten it with elastic bands, and sit holding onto him until he'd calmed down. Eventually, when Mouse was less agitated and just despondent, he said, 'But you've all done so much to help me. I ought to help my brothers. I can't pay you back for all you've done. I need to pay it on to someone. If my brothers are dead, who else is there?'

'There's everyone else!' said Johan. 'You could – you could help Spotiswode and me look for Wights and Hollows. If we can restore them to themselves, kids like Enoch won't be so scared they think they need to build clay soldiers to protect them!'

'We need to look for Kuriana first!' interrupted Bwbach fiercely.

'No, no, you see, I've worked it out. If I can turn into a dragon when I need to heal with fire, we don't need another dragon!' said Johan excitedly. 'And I'll be much easier to get through Customs, too.'

'No! You need to look for Kuriana to make sure she's all right!' said Bwbach. 'What if this Dr Marrs captured her? He could be doing anything to her now!'

'Oh. Right,' said Johan.

We decided we needed to find out what was going on. So, when it was daylight, Johan shape-shifted to look like Dr Marrs, and set out to the ferry terminal again, with me and Mouse in his pockets.

'Hi there, cutie,' he said to the check-in clerk. 'Remember me, babe?'

The clerk considered for a moment, and then groaned. 'Oh, pig!' she said. 'You're the nutter who insisted he saw a dragon, aren't you?'

'Yeah, but – uh – I might've been a bit drunk then. Maybe even a bit stoned, uh – the fish-and-chip shop had some stuff to sprinkle on the chips that looked like salt, but everything went a bit crazy after that, and – uh – come to think of it, I don't even remember how I got here – wait, I told you I saw a dragon? What did I say it looked like?'

'Well, mostly you said it was purple and it had horns. You were very insistent about that: "It's that purple one again, the one I saw before, with straight horns not curly, I'm sure of it, if we can just pack it into a cage, it'll be an asset in hospitals." If you Yanks are going to cross the Atlantic just to patronise us, I wish you'd at least try to get your folklore right!' she added. 'The Welsh flag is a red dragon, and they don't have horns at all. Just long ragged ears, and darts on their tongues and tails.'

'Have you seen one?' Johan asked eagerly. I wasn't sure whether he was excited on his own behalf, role-playing Dr Marrs, or both.

'No, and nor will you! Any more than you'll see Loch Ness Monsters in Scotland, leprechauns in Ireland, or good rugby players in England! Well – not until your next overdose of "fish and chips", anyway!'

'Yeah, okay, I didn't mean to. Gee, after that, I've lost all sense of time – what day was it I saw the dragon, again?'

'Mon-day. Two days a-go. It's Wed-nes-day now,' said the clerk, with the air of one speaking to an idiot.

'Right, right. And – uh, what did I say this dragon did?'

'You said it'd tried to fly off, but it couldn't fly far because there was barely any moon, so if I'd just call the police, we could capture it, and it wouldn't be able to fly properly before Friday night or Saturday night at the earliest.'

'Yeah? Gee, I must've been high as a satellite.'

The clerk smiled sympathetically. 'Yep, that's the impression I got, too. That's why I promised you I'd call them and ask them to get in touch with you when they'd found your dragon.'

'Oh, well, better be off, then. No sense making a fool of myself again, right?'

Just to be on the safe side, Johan then morphed into the guise of Mr Faulwetter and drove to the nearest police station to ask whether they'd seen anyone of Dr Marrs' description, explaining that he was a friend who was schizophrenic and obsessed with dragons and had wandered off without telling anyone where he was going. They hadn't, which implied that Marrs had either been stupid enough to think that the ferry-ticket clerk had believed him about Kuriana, or (more likely) had realised that no-one would believe him, and had stopped going around talking about dragons without proof. Yet he hadn't gone back to the island, either. And we had no idea where he might be, or whether he was near Kuriana, or whether she was in danger from him.

'And we don't know whether any of my brothers are alive, either,' said Mouse. 'We didn't find the bodies of all of them. If some of the others ran away, like me, they could be anywhere in the world.'

'We'll look it up on the internet,' I promised him. 'We'll type "homunculus sightings" into a search engine, and if there are any videos anywhere in the world of clay-man homunculi like you, or transfigured homunculi like me, or any other variety, they'll come up.'

Johan blinked for a moment. 'Twigleg, you're a genius!' he exclaimed. 'If Kuriana's trail has gone cold, Marrs will be looking on the internet for evidence of her – or any other dragon! If I shapeshift into dragon-form and let myself be spotted, someone's bound to film me on their phone and post it on Youtube. If I stay near major cities where no real dragon would go, lots of people will want to film me, and it'll distract their attention from the valleys where real dragons might be hiding! And by the time any dragon-hunters turn up, I'll be somewhere else!'

'Oh, yeah? And what'll you do if they catch you?' asked Bwbach.

'Turn back into a human, of course. Then they must have hallucinated the dragon. C'mon – it's way harder to believe in shapeshifters than in dragons!'

'But won't people recognise you, after a while?' Bwbach argued.

'Why should they? I won't be the same human every time – or the same dragon. As long as I'm Faulwetter whenever people want to see my driving licence or my passport, I'm good.'

'Your passport and driving licence?' I repeated. 'Aren't they Professor Spotiswode's? And didn't he have his passport with him when he went to Ireland with Atticus?'

Johan considered. 'Oh. Uh, yeah,' he said, then brightened. 'Oh well, I could do with a stack of different IDs with different faces on them, anyway,' he said. 'I just need someone with good forging skills – you know what? I bet Atticus has forging skills. Being a vampire, living for centuries without getting much older, needing a new name and a new birth certificate and stuff every few decades – he must be an expert on it. I just need to go to him and…'

'But that's where Kuriana will be heading!' pointed out Bwbach. 'I thought you wanted to lead dragon-hunters like James Marrs away from him?'

'And if Atticus is in the middle of setting up home in some remote farmhouse, looking after three children, and trying to learn how to be a farmer, he probably hasn't had time to stock up on equipment for making forged documents,' I added.

'Yeah, yeah – okay, I'll fly off to a few other places first, get myself filmed, then go and find Atticus,' said Johan. 'Bunch of spoilsports!' he added, with a grin.

'All right,' said Bwbach. 'But can you drop us off home first?'

And that is what Johan did. We managed to arrive back in time for lunch, but he drove off again as soon as he'd engulfed a sandwich. We heard on the news quite late this evening that there seemed to be a spate of pranks involving people making fake dragons. First of all, what looked like a rather small red Welsh dragon, slightly larger than an Irish wolfhound, had been seen in Birmingham at 3pm, trying to join in a game of football with some children in a park, but run away when the mother of one of the children shouted at it. Also, around 6pm, a snakelike, four-legged creature resembling the traditional Chinese dragon, about three metres long, with blue and green scales and red and gold spines along its back, had appeared in a Chinese restaurant, wandered around tables nudging customers to scrounge food from them, which it ate before slinking into the toilets and disappearing. It was thought that the 'Welsh dragon' had probably been someone's dog dressed up in a silly costume, and the 'Chinese dragon' an animatronic model (though it was realistic enough to be able to eat prawn crackers), but nobody was sure whether the two incidents were connected, or what it meant. In any case, there were films of both of them – rather shaky footage, filmed from a distance, of the red dragon, and a lovely close-up of the Chinese dragon's face as it flickered out its long red tongue to lick the camera lens.

'He's overdoing it,' Professor Greenbloom said. 'He never could resist showing off. But he's succeeded in capturing everyone's attention, and he might even increase people's affection for real dragons.'

In the meantime, Mouse and I have been researching homunculi. There seem to be many recorded methods of making us, though I don't know whether they all worked. The most popular versions all involved using human sperm. I used to think human sperm just made humans, but I've been reading about this in the last few months, and apparently conception in mammals involves the woman's body producing an egg, and the man's sperm combining with the egg. So, homunculi who were created by fermenting human sperm in a glass tube or a hollowed-out egg, instead of having half their father's genes and half their mother's, would have half their father's genes and none of anyone else's. Professor Greenbloom says he doesn't see why any man would choose this means of having children. Professora Greenbloom says it's probably because alchemists were the kind of men who had trouble finding wives.

At any rate, most humans who have created homunculi wanted to do horrific things to us, and I was probably luckier than a great many homunculi. It was only after Nettlebrand ate my creator that I read, in one of his books on magic, a list of uses for homunculi, including chopping our heads off and drinking our blood (in order to turn into a sheep); or using it as a lotion (in order to turn into a monkey); or locking us in dark rooms for forty days with nothing to eat except a mixture of blood and milk, then disembowelling us and rubbing our intestines on one's hands and feet (in order to be able to walk on water or travel instantly to anywhere in the world). Compared with all these fates, being eaten by a giant cyborg dragon actually seems a fairly logical death; at least it's easier to understand why monsters need to eat than why anyone would want to turn into a sheep and would go through all the difficult, messy process of creating and then killing another person to achieve this.

There was another experimenter who kept ten exceptionally talented homunculi in jars of water, and asked them to foretell the future. These homunculi weren't just people who had been able to learn a little magic from books, as I have, but savants with innate magical powers, and yet they weren't even able to leave their jars or to touch one another. When one of them (male) managed to escape from his jar and tried to undo the lid of another (female) homunculus's jar, he soon fainted from exposure to air, and had to be put back in his water to revive him. Evidently they were an aquatic species, very different from Mouse or me – but if they had been allowed a large shared aquarium, at least they could have enjoyed each other's company. Perhaps they would even have had the chance to find out whether homunculi can have children, and, if so, what the genetic make-up of their children would be.

Most modern-day humans don't seem interested in doing this, when they can create true human embryos in test-tubes for couple who are having difficulty conceiving children. But after a short search, we found a video of a Russian experimenter trying to create his own homunculus by injecting his sperm into a hen's egg. I think the video was a fake – but all the same, looking at how the man picked up the pale, rubbery creature in a pair of tweezers, I was haunted by the thought that this might be a real homunculus being cruelly pinched. If he/she/it survives, I hope he/she/it manages to find a good home and safety and love and an education and all the good things that he/she/it deserves. But I wish there was more I could do to make sure that happens. In the meantime, I'm probably going to have nightmares tonight, but I don't want to take fairy dust to make them stop. I don't want to hide from reality.