“Clara, Clara, please wake up.”
I was back home in my own bed. Mum was trying to wake me up. I guess I was going to school, but… I felt strangely ill.
“Clara!!”
No, hang on. It wasn’t Mum. It was Oscar. And I wasn’t back in my bed.
My eyelids felt thick and heavy, and I knew without checking that my eyelashes were gone. They’d been burned off, along with most of my eyebrows. I ached everywhere both inside and out, so much that I almost couldn’t bear being alive. I had a headache and I felt sick. But I wasn’t hungry.
I wasn’t hungry.
It was absolutely incredible how much better I felt, despite the pain. Because if Bravita had won, then surely I would now be feeling so hungry that I’d have eaten anything living that came near me.
Wherever she was now, she wasn’t inside me.
I forced my eyes open.
Oscar was kneeling beside me. His face was deathly pale under the freckles and, for once, he didn’t look as if he thought everything was super-cool.
“You’re not dead, are you?” he asked. “Please tell me you’re not a zombie?”
“No,” I croaked. “I think I’m still me. I don’t fancy eating your brain – or anything else, in case you were wondering.”
“Phew,” he said. “In that case, please would you sit up and try looking a bit more alive?”
I sat up.
We were still in the cave. It was quiet apart from the soft whisper of the stream, and the light spilling through the cracks in the roof of the cave was no longer lightning but daylight.
Five figures were lying around me in a loose sort of circle. Aunt Isa, Mr Malkin, Mrs Pommerans, Master Millaconda and Shanaia. None of them said anything. None of them was moving.
“Aunt Isa?”
She didn’t react. Oscar sniffed.
“They don’t move,” he said. “I can’t even see them breathe. But their eyes are open. It’s super-spooky…”
I struggled to get up on my feet. He was right. They were lying very still, staring into the air as if…
Aunt Isa’s face was frozen in a fierce, determined grimace, Shanaia’s eyes were huge and anxious, Master Millaconda’s dark eyebrows were frowning so much they almost met. From Mr Malkin’s waistcoat pocket a nervous little squeak could be heard, and a nose and a pair of long whiskers quivered faintly along the edge of the pocket before disappearing back into the hiding place. Mrs Pommerans looked neither gentle nor kind right now, but decidedly angry. And not one of them moved a muscle.
I tentatively touched Aunt Isa’s shoulder. It felt like the shoulder of a doll, hard and stiff. I shook her harder.
“Aunt Isa!”
“It’s no use,” Oscar said glumly. “I’ve tried. I shouted and I’ve shaken them. They won’t wake up. Or at least I can’t wake them.”
“What happened?” I could barely get the words out.
Oscar rubbed his nose and sniffed again. He wasn’t crying any more, but I think he had been. His eyes were a little red.
“I… I really did try to hold onto you,” he said. “On the wildways…”
“I know. It wasn’t you. It was me that couldn’t hold on.”
“I wanted us to look for you, but Isa said stopping Alichia was more important. That we would have to look for you afterwards.”
I nodded. “And she was right,” I said. I stared down at poor Aunt Isa, still lying immobile and staring. Could she hear us? I had no idea. What if she was aware of everything that was going on, but unable to move?
“We followed Alichia through the entrance to the cave as quickly as we could. But then we heard loud crashes and a lot of… crackling, as if something was burning, and it got so hot that we couldn’t move forward without… without us catching fire. And when the fire – or whatever it was – went out, all we could see was you and Alichia, and Alichia was kneeling in the brook, wailing and howling because she’d been burned. And you were standing… you were standing up, looking completely out of it. You were flailing your arms and twisting and… it was really creepy. As if you were possessed or something.”
“I very nearly was,” I said. “Bravita tried to… move into me.”
“And you were screaming some weird word…”
“Adiuvate…” I whispered.
“And suddenly… suddenly they were all here. I mean, Isa and Shanaia were already here, but the other three came crashing out of nowhere, and your aunt grabbed hold of me and practically threw me on the ground next to you, and hissed: ‘Stay there!’ in that voice… you know the one where you think she’ll turn you into something nasty if you don’t do as you’re told… and then they formed a circle” – he pointed to the prostrate figures – “and started singing at the top of their voices.”
“What were they singing? Could you make out any words?”
“No. I mean, it was obviously some kind of wildsong, wasn’t it? And then you let out a scream… or rather, it was coming from you, but it didn’t sound like you. And then you collapsed in a heap and you didn’t get up. And the next moment… or no. They keeled over. At exactly the same time, as if they were somehow connected… I… I didn’t know what to do.”
I stepped into the centre of the circle. Then I put my hand on the small wheel ornament around my neck and said tentatively: “You can stop now. I… I’m me again. She’s gone.”
Nothing happened. They didn’t stir, they didn’t reply, they didn’t breathe, at least not so that we could see it. I squatted down on my haunches next to Aunt Isa and touched her shoulder again. I wondered if I should try a bit of wildsinging?
“Aunt Isa… please… please come back?”
“I’ve tried everything,” Oscar said. “I even slapped Shanaia across the face. You know, like they do in the movies when people faint or get hysterical. She didn’t move and I just ended up with sore fingers.”
“What about Cat? Have you seen him?”
Oscar shook his head. “No.”
“Or… a kind of ghost? A woman?”
Oscar’s eyes widened.
“No,” he said. “Is this place haunted?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Perhaps it was… but it isn’t now. What happened to Alichia?” Because I could see she was no longer in the grotto.
“She crawled out. Or rather – she tried. There was a rockfall. I think she was buried under it.”
“Where?”
“In the passage along the brook.”
For the first time I realized that the floor in the grotto was much wetter than usual. And that the water level was rising.
I took a few unsteady steps in the direction of the exit. When Oscar said there’d been a rockfall, he wasn’t kidding. It looked as if most of the roof had collapsed, and the reason the water was rising was because the brook could no longer follow its normal course through the grotto and out into the sea.
If even the water couldn’t get out… then what about us?
“Oscar,” I said. “Does that mean… that we’re trapped here?”
“I’m afraid we are,” he said. “Unless you know another way out of here?”