The weather that night was fierce. I remember the wind howling around the lighthouse, ripping at the long grass on the clifftops and whipping up the wildest waves I had ever seen. The sea surged in huge black breakers, exploding in ice-white spray half a mile high. Each one of those waves could have swallowed a ship.
Sitting by the fire in the cottage, we turned off the wireless and just listened to the wind as it screamed through the cracks in the window frames. Mags sat in Mutti’s armchair and stared into the fireplace, hypnotized by the hell-red glow of the last burning log. It smouldered angrily, and so did my sister. She had been out all afternoon and had barely said anything since she’d got back. I still hadn’t forgiven her for leaving me to face the policemen alone.
Pa looked up, and we heard a tile grate and clatter its way down the sloping roof. ‘It was a storm to raise the dead,’ he whispered to himself, as if he were remembering the beginning of an old ghost story.
The thing is, on our bit of coastline, storms actually do raise the dead. There are hundreds of wrecked ships buried within the Wyrm. Hundreds of them. Every now and then – once or twice in a lifetime, perhaps – a heavy storm churns up the ocean floor, causing the sandbank to shift and convulse so that it spits out a rusty trawler, or the rotten corpse of a lost sailing ship. Sometimes they stay drifting there for a few days and can be recovered, but more often than not, the sandbank sucks them back down again – hoarding its grim trophies beneath the waves.
At the very lowest tide, you can see what looks like a forest of dead trees sticking up out of the shallow water. But they are not trees at all – they are the masts of ships long buried in the sandbank. They are skeletons in a watery graveyard. The remains of the Wyrm’s prey.
As I tried to sleep that night, I thought about my Mutti, spending her first night away from us, locked up in an internment camp. I wondered if the storm was keeping her awake too. I remembered the German lullaby she used to sing to us when we were little and couldn’t sleep – the one about the moon rising – Der Mond ist aufgegangen. I sang it silently in my head and tried not to cry. I didn’t want Mags to know how frightened I was.
Sleeping was like falling into a series of shallow black holes; I woke over and over again, yanked up into consciousness by the wind tearing at the tiles on the roof, or the blast of waves pounding into the cliff face below my bed. When I was awake, I thought about the faces of the people who had turned against Mutti in the courtroom – people who needed her to be the enemy so that they could do something with all that anger and fear and hate they had inside. I thought about the Nazis creeping closer and closer to us through the darkness; I thought about a U-boat hanging there in the murky-green gloom, far below the churning surface of the Channel. All through that long, stormy, miserable night, visions of the Wyrm writhed wildly in my mind.
‘Are you all right, Pet? Pet?’
My sister’s voice. Her hand on my shoulder, shaking me awake.
It’s not real, then – the sea-dragon squeezing and scraping its way up the lighthouse steps, the hiss of its rotten-fish breath, hungry jaws filled with row after row of teeth . . . I don’t have to hide any more – it’s not coming for me. It’s not real . . .
‘Pet!’
‘Uh?’ My breathing was quick, dizzy. My pillow felt wet under my cheek.
‘I think you were having that nightmare, Pet. That one you used to have when you were little. You were sort of . . .’
‘I was what?’
‘Whimpering.’
I sat up in bed. Our room was still dark, the ugly blackout curtains drawn tightly together. ‘Is it morning?’
‘It’s early. Five o’clock, I think.’
‘Did I wake you?’
‘I was awake anyway.’
I squinted at the dim outline of my sister. ‘Are you dressed, Mags?’ She didn’t appear to be wearing her usual striped pyjamas.
‘Yes. I’m going out. I’ve had an idea.’
‘What?’
‘If Mutti didn’t do those drawings,’ she whispered, ‘then someone else did. And if we can find out who the real spy is, we’ll be able to prove Mutti is innocent. Come with me, Pet.’
I sat there in the darkness. The last of the storm was over us now, and rain spattered rhythmically on the window.
‘Right now?’ My nightmare had left me shaken and frightened – I didn’t think I’d be able to move.
But Mags was not afraid at all. ‘Come on, Petra,’ she said. ‘For Mutti.’
The rain was easing as we set off, pulling on dark-coloured clothes and tucking our hair up into old woolly hats. Mags wore her satchel. She had packed a torch, an emergency jam sandwich, Pa’s brass telescope (as the police had the binoculars), and a notebook and pencil to write down the exact details of everything we saw. What we really needed was a camera, but we didn’t have one. We crept out of the house without turning any lights on and closed the door softly, so we wouldn’t wake Pa.
In the spring, our clifftop used to be bright with blossoming gorse, the new grass nibbled by a hundred baby rabbits, but now it was a grey, thorny wilderness of metal and concrete. The government had reinforced the coastline with trenches, barbed wire, pillbox guard posts. Perhaps this should have made me feel safer, but instead it reminded me of how close the enemy really was – a bit like when you’re playing tag and you slam the door behind you and shove a chair up against it. The wind had dropped and it was eerily quiet outside. As we made our way up the dark, wet path to the south cliff, my imagination conjured the sound of enemy boats landing on the beach below us, the crunch of enemy boots on the sand.
‘Where are we going, Mags?’
‘Not far. Not far at all now . . .’
Spooky Joe’s cottage loomed ahead of us – a low, dark, square shape. From a distance, it could almost have been one of the pillbox concrete bunkers. I was reminded of that misty morning a few months before when I had followed Mutti up on to the south cliff.
‘Quiet now,’ Mags hissed. ‘We don’t want him to know we’re here.’
Her plan suddenly became clear.
‘Spooky Joe?’ I breathed. ‘You think he’s the spy?’
Mags nodded. ‘Think about it, Pet,’ she whispered as we left the path and tiptoed behind the cottage. The blackout blinds were still down. ‘He moved here just before the beginning of the war. He’s got this amazing view out over the Channel – it must be nearly as good as our view from the Castle. And he’s virtually a recluse – no one really knows anything about him.’
I considered her arguments. They certainly seemed to make more sense than Mutti being the spy.
Mags and I took up our positions behind a gorse bush.
‘What are we going to do, Mags?’ I whispered.
‘I’m not sure yet,’ she replied, taking the bag off her shoulders and rummaging inside for Pa’s telescope. ‘Let’s just see if he . . .’
And then there was a noise from the cottage. A grating sound, like a bolt being drawn back.
‘He’s there!’ Mags squeaked, pulling me down into a crouch beside her. ‘It’s Spooky Joe – he’s coming out!’