They could see the girl in green quite plainly now. She had reached the end of the passage and stood whispering to the other person. The firelight shone on both of them. The girl in green was strangely altered. No longer fresh and young and pretty—her face looked old and hard and scornful. Jack and Molly caught a few of the words she was whispering. “Oh, Jack,” Molly sobbed. “They’re the Pumpkin’s friends. We’re trapped!” CHAPTER XI _Trapped_ Jack and Molly clutched hold of each other tightly, while a feeling of despair rushed over them. How foolish, how very foolish, they had been to trust the girl! What awful thing could be going to happen to them now? they wondered. The whispered conversation between the two at the end of the passage ended in a loud burst of laughter and giggling; then the girl turned toward them and beckoned. “Come on,” she said, “and the quicker the better it will be for you.... No nonsense now,” as the children did not move. “How dare you!” Jack managed to say. “Open this door and let us out at once. You—you mean sneak!” His voice was shaky, but very determined. “Oh, don’t be silly,” said the girl. “You’ve _got_ to obey now—so you might just as well come—unless you’d like me to fetch you both?” “Heh! Heh!” laughed the figure behind her. “I’d like to see you fetch them—that I would!” The laughter and the nameless threat underlying the words gave the children a creepy sensation all up and down their spines. “Oh, let’s go before she _fetches_ us,” cried Molly, and went forward, dragging Jack by the hand. “That’s sense,” said the girl, and made room for them to pass out of the passage into the firelight. They found themselves in a round, cave-like room, which was lit up by the dancing flames of a log fire. Afterward Jack and Molly could not remember seeing any furniture in the room—nothing but the fire and a stone-arched fireplace. They could not recall seeing any windows, but they remembered the floor, which was made of cobbles, because it was hard to walk on. The room appeared to have no ceiling, or else a very high one, at any rate no ceiling was visible; overhead all was drifting smoke and black gloom, like the entrance to a railway tunnel. “Let’s have a look at the pretty dears,” said the figure beside the girl, moving forward, and Jack and Molly stood face to face with the ugliest old woman they had ever seen, in fact, had ever even imagined. Her clay-coloured face was a mass of deep wrinkles; her narrow, sunken eyes looked like two restless black beads, darting from side to side, as if to escape from the two slits of eyelids which imprisoned them. Her nose and chin curved towards each other, after the fashion of nut-crackers, and her otherwise toothless mouth had one long yellow fang always visible. A bright crimson scarf was wound round her head, like a turban, from which long wisps of jet black hair escaped and hung about her face.