“What’s weird?” said Alex, who couldn’t see. She snatched at his hand.

“Oh,” said Darwen. “Sorry.”

He took Rich’s hand too, and the three of them stared through the portal in amazement. It had to be one of the strangest things Darwen had ever seen: a cracked and dirty window frame with a brick surround sitting in a dark Costa Rican jungle.
 “Maybe it connects to that central machine you told us about,” said Alex.

“Only one way to find out,” Darwen answered. “I’ll have to let go of your hands while I get the window open, but I’ll stick my hand back out for you, so don’t go anywhere.”

“And don’t you go on without us,” said Alex. “The Peregrine Pact, remember? It’s not just you.”

“I know,” Darwen answered, irritable.

He released them, stepped up to the slender brass frame, and reached in. The air buckled slightly, but then his fingertips found the hard surface of the window glass. He pushed, but nothing happened, so he reached for the wooden frame and lifted. The window slid up easily, though the opening was still only about a foot and a half wide.

Darwen grabbed the ledge and pulled himself in, realizing as he did so that the window was several feet up. Below him was a cracked porcelain sink marked with brown water stains. He climbed down headfirst, bracing himself against a brass tap, crawling into the sink itself, and finally jumping onto an uneven tiled floor.

It was a bathroom. Old and badly in need of repair and redecoration, but a bathroom nonetheless.

“Weird,” he said again.

He used a wooden laundry hamper to climb back onto the sink, and from there he reached through. He felt Alex grab his hand, and he pulled until her head was through and she could see what she was doing. Then he did the same for Rich.

“Hey,” said Alex. “Our very own bathroom! And not a lizard in sight.”

The house—if that was what it was—felt cool and smelled musty. One thing was certain: they weren’t in the jungle anymore.

“This is awesome,” said Alex. “Before, we went into Silbrica to see exotic, weird stuff, right? To get a break from boring old reality. Now we go to Silbrica to use a decent bathroom, maybe watch some television, and generally get away from the weird, exotic stuff all around us!”

Darwen opened the bathroom door and stepped out onto a narrow landing. It was a house, and a small one at that. There were wall-mounted gas lamps that glowed bluish, though several of them didn’t work. What light there was showed peeling textured wallpaper spotted with mold and a carpet gray with dust. Darwen doubted they’d be sneaking in here to watch television.

They were, apparently, upstairs. There were two scratched doors on one side of the hallway—bedrooms, presumably—and a narrow staircase to their left, which went down in three angular turns.

“This place feels . . . I don’t know,” said Alex. “Familiar. Like I’ve been here before, or dreamed about it.”

Darwen felt the same way, but he couldn’t think of when he might have been here. It reminded Darwen of the old terraced houses in Lancashire, but one that had been derelict for years. There were no signs of portals or the elegant machinery he was used to in Silbrica.

He pushed open the closest door and saw what he had almost expected: a dim room with a bay window, a moldy-looking bed, and a wardrobe with its doors hanging open. He stepped inside, and the floor creaked beneath him. He pulled the curtains open. Outside he saw trees, their branches brushing up against the house, and again he had that odd feeling that this wasn’t the first time he had been there. He rejoined the others.

“Downstairs, I suppose,” he said, leading the way. There was something about the stair carpet that seemed familiar too, as did the wallpaper at the bottom. He frowned and looked at Alex, who had the same expression on her face. Rich, by contrast, looked merely interested.

“What?” he said.

“This place doesn’t ring any bells?” asked Alex.

“Nope,” said Rich. “Never been anywhere like it in my life.”

“Shhh,” said Alex. “Listen.”

They all became still, and Darwen could hear it too, a faint clicking and chittering that seemed to be coming from somewhere down the hall.

Machinery?

It was possible, he supposed, but it didn’t sound quite right somehow, and he could feel the hairs on his arms and neck starting to stand up, like his body remembered something his brain didn’t.

Alex pushed past him, down the hall and into a kitchen. Darwen followed with Rich trailing behind him, but then Alex became quite still, blocking the door. Darwen gave her a shove, and she turned. Her expression stopped the two boys cold.

“I know where we are!” she hissed.

Darwen had never seen her look so scared.

The chittering had grown louder. Darwen turned toward it and saw another half-open doorway into a tiny lounge with a fireplace and a table with the shattered remains of an old tea set . . . and a floor littered with pale balloon-like objects that Darwen instantly knew were eggs. Maggots, three feet long, milky white but with black pincer mouths, covered the rotting furniture, and over in the corner were five huge, shiny insects, all as big as he was.

The Jenkinses.

That was what they had been called when Darwen had last seen them: huge, horrible insect creatures disguised as an elderly couple whose bodies they wore like flesh suits. But it couldn’t be. At least one of the Jenkinses had been killed by the train months ago. But there they were, and now Darwen knew why the house had seemed both familiar and unfamiliar. He had, after all, not been upstairs last time.

They looked like giant mantises, though they were the hard and shiny black of beetles, and they had large, compound eyes like flies. They were, perhaps, a little smaller than the two that had disguised themselves as the Jenkinses, but that made them no less repulsive or dangerous—and last time Darwen and his friends had only escaped because of the screen device he had broken at Halloween.

His first instinct was to make for the front door, but that wouldn’t get them back to the jungle camp. “Back upstairs!” he gasped.

The insects responded as if they hadn’t known he was there. Their whip-like antennae flicked toward him, and their mouthparts opened, drooling. Then they moved, a sudden scuttling, one across the egg-strewn floor, one up and over the ceiling, a third diagonally across the wall.

They were fast. Much faster than the Jenkinses had been.

Rich cried out. Alex just stared, hands clasped over her mouth. Darwen pushed both of them back into the kitchen. As he did so, Rich slipped on some nameless slime on the tiles, knocking Alex onto her back. He slumped heavily against the wall, splitting the rotten plaster open, and out of the wall cavity fell two huge pale maggots, both at least a yard long, one landing wetly in Alex’s lap.

She screamed, thrusting it wildly from her, eyes shut against the horror of it. Rich rolled to one side as the other one arched its back and pulsed toward him, its black horny lips gaping.

Darwen looked wildly around for a weapon and, finding a heavy saucepan, he snatched it up and flung it at the maggot. The pan bounced off the creature’s rubbery body, went straight up into the air, and came down handle first. With a soft splosh, it impaled the maggot, and the creature began to whip back and forth, emitting a thin and awful scream.

For a moment Darwen was frozen with horror—aware that two of the mantis creatures were approaching fast but somehow unable to run away. One of them glared at him, its mouthparts uncoiling, and then it sprang. It shot through the air with astonishing speed, its clawed feet splayed, and then something happened. There was a flash and a pop like a firework, and the insect fell heavily, smoking as it slid lifeless across the floor. Darwen turned back toward the front of the house. Silhouetted in the open doorway like an Old West gunfighter was a tiny animal cradling a smoking weapon on which glowed a pinprick of amber light. It stepped into the light of the hallway, and Darwen recognized the dark, stoat-like form.

Weazen!

“Evening,” he growled as he fired at the other mantis, which ducked and weaved as a cabinet of moldy crockery exploded behind it. He spit to the side, then fired again. “Can’t hold ’em off for long. I suggest you do a runner, mate.”

Darwen dragged Alex to her feet as Rich ran back through to the staircase. Behind him, he could hear the click of insect feet and the crack of Weazen’s blaster. As they got into the hallway, Darwen glanced back through the kitchen door. At first there was nothing, and then the head of the first creature appeared upside down on the door’s lintel above him. He ran, and it came after him, scrabbling across the ceiling.

Rich and Alex pounded up the stairs. Darwen was momentarily sure that the steps would be rotten too, that they would fall through into some appalling maggoty nest, but they managed to successfully reach the top and bolt across the landing to the bathroom. Darwen gave chase and was almost at the top of the stairs when he felt something snag in his hair.

His hand brushed at it automatically, but he felt the stick-like insect leg, and his revulsion gave him a new burst of speed, breaking the connection. He flew up the last three steps and down to the bathroom, slamming the door behind him on the first of the three insects.

“Lock it!” Alex screamed.

Darwen snapped the little brass bolt home, but he knew that wouldn’t hold them. Through the door, he could hear the sounds of their clicking beaks and scratching claws as they groped and fumbled, desperate to gain entry. “Curtain rod!” he yelled, putting his shoulder against the door as it shuddered under the weight of the insect assault.

Rich climbed onto the edge of the bath and lifted the brass shower rod down. Together they tried to brace it between the foot of the toilet and the handle of the door. The insects were pushing harder, and one of the door’s thin panels had started to bulge and crack around the edges. Darwen heard the distant zap and crack of Weazen’s weapon, but he knew there were too many of the insect monsters for the Peace Hunter to handle alone. For a moment he hesitated, wondering if he should head back.

“Help Alex!” shouted Rich, taking up position with Darwen at the door. “She can’t get out without you. Now, Darwen!”

Darwen stepped away, and the door quivered for a terrible second until Rich could take his place. Darwen took Alex’s hand, helped her onto the sink, and kept hold until she was up and through the window.

“Now you,” he said to Rich.

“The door’s not going to hold,” Rich answered.

As if to punctuate the point, the loose panel in the top left-hand side popped right out, and something long and clawed reached in.

There was a cabinet under the sink. Darwen dropped and opened it, hoping vaguely for bug spray. There wasn’t any. There was, however, a glass bottle of bath salts. He grabbed it, swinging it hard at the insect leg that was reaching for Rich. The leg was snatched back, and in that instant Rich made a run for it, Darwen seizing his hand as he clambered onto the sink.

Darwen vaulted up after him, pushing him through the window as the bathroom door flew open and crashed against the wall. One of the shiny bugs skittered in on the tiled floor, another on the ceiling.

Darwen shoved Rich through and leaped for the window frame, grabbing and pulling in one motion. Something snatched at his feet and he kicked wildly, connecting with what he thought was a giant insect head, propelling himself the rest of the way through.

Rich and Alex grabbed his arms and pulled him through into the dark of the jungle. For a moment he felt the sudden warmth of the night, and then Alex was screaming, and he turned to see the first of the insects clambering through after him. Rich leaped backward, but Alex picked up a rock and smacked the windup contraption on the side.

The first insect was halfway through when she hit the device a second time. There was a shrill scream as the portal failed and the mantis’s head was lopped neatly off. Alex hit the gate once more for good measure, and the slim brass frame buckled and snapped.

She turned on Darwen, and her face was wild, her breath coming in great surging gasps.

“Let’s NEVER go there again,” she shouted. “Okay?”

Darwen sank to the moist earth, panting.

“It may be the blind, screaming terror of the giant homicidal bugs talking,” said Rich in a dazed voice, “but were our lives just saved by a ferret with a rocket launcher?”