Darkus couldn’t return to school because Uncle Max had told them he was sick, with a high temperature. On the way home, they stopped at a pet shop and Uncle Max bought him a bag of oakwood mulch for Baxter’s tank. Back at the flat, Darkus carried the newly cleaned aquarium to the yard behind Uncle Max’s flat. Placing it on the concrete steps that led down to the overgrown scrub that had once been a lawn, he filled it halfway up with the mulch. Then he gathered pieces of bark from around the yard to lay on top. In the center of the tank, he leaned three strips of bark against one another to create an earthy nook, trying to make a beetle habitat like the ones he’d read about in his red book.

“How come I didn’t know that Dad loves beetles?” Darkus wondered out loud as he arranged leaves and sticks around the edge of Baxter’s tank. “It’s weird. I know that he likes custard creams, and cats, and cycling.” He turned and looked at Baxter, who was crawling along the concrete step beside him. “Don’t you think it’s weird?” He paused as if listening for Baxter’s response, then shook himself. “I’ll tell you what is weird. Talking to beetles. That’s weird.”

He picked up the mug of milk Uncle Max had brought down for him before he’d gone to work, and drained it. After Mum died, Dad had lost interest in everything, and there were times when Darkus thought he didn’t care about anything anymore, not even him. So perhaps it wasn’t so strange that he’d stopped being interested in beetles.

Darkus looked down at Baxter.

“Insect hunting sounds fun, huh?” He put down the empty cup. “When we find Dad, I’m going to make him take us.”

Baxter marched up to Darkus’s mug and rammed it with his horn. The mug rocked.

“Hey! What’s that cup ever done to you?”

Baxter butted it again, knocking it over. Darkus watched, fascinated, as the beetle jammed his horn under the cup and raised it, clattering it against the wall of the tank.

“What’d you do that for?” Darkus righted the mug.

Baxter moved his horn slowly from left to right and then head-butted the mug again, knocking it back onto its side. He spread his elytra and lifted into the air, tugging at the handle of the mug with his claws.

“You want me to pick it up?” Darkus offered. “Is that right?”

Baxter flew into the tank and looked up expectantly.

“In there? With you?” Darkus placed the mug beside Baxter. The beetle set about pushing the mug into the wigwam of bark Darkus had made, then reversed in and out several times.

“What’s that,” Darkus scoffed, “a bedroom?”

Baxter reared up, lifting his thorax and front legs, waggling them at Darkus—as if delighted at being understood.

“It is a bedroom!” Darkus laughed. “Since when did beetles need bedrooms?”

Baxter tilted his head cockily, as if to say, You know nothing.

Darkus was about to argue, then chuckled and clapped his hand to his forehead. He was not going to quarrel with an insect! Sometimes he really thought he was communicating with the beetle, even though that was impossible. He instinctively knew what Baxter wanted, or at least he felt like he did. If Darkus paid close attention, the beetle’s movements made sense to him, and at times he was sure Baxter was trying to tell him things, like in the museum with the yellow ladybug.

He wondered what Uncle Max would say if he told him—although perhaps that wasn’t a good idea. Uncle Max already behaved like he didn’t trust Baxter, which Darkus thought was unfair. Baxter was just a beetle, after all, and it wasn’t his fault he was cleverer and more special than ordinary beetles.

Dad would have made him prove it. He was forever telling Darkus to be scientific in his approach to things. “Life is a mystery, son, and science the tool for understanding it,” was Dad’s stock response to every puzzle, even when that puzzle was something as ordinary as trying to find his other shoe. Darkus used to groan when Dad used the phrase, but right now he would have given anything to hear it.

“Of course!” Darkus sat up straight. “I should do a scientific experiment to see if Baxter really can understand me. That’s what Dad would do.”

He looked around in the dirt at the bottom of the steps. If he was going to prove that he and Baxter could understand each other, he needed to find another ordinary beetle and set up a control test.

Using a stick, he scratched around in the flower bed beside the steps. He didn’t find any beetles there, so he lifted a stone and found a collection of wood lice having a meeting. “You’ll have to do,” he said, picking one off the stone and watching it roll into a tight ball in his palm. “Don’t be frightened. I’m not going to eat you.”

He picked up Baxter in his other hand, placing him and the wood louse toward the back of one of the concrete steps. “Now, when I let you both go,” he said, slowly and clearly, “I want you to stay exactly where you are. Okay . . . go!”

Neither creature moved.

Darkus stared at the wood louse, willing it to take a step forward.

Nothing happened.

“Okay, this time,” he said, picking up both insects again, “when I put you down, I want you to crawl to the edge of the step and then stop.”

Again he placed the insects at the back of the step. For a second neither of them moved, but then Baxter started crawling forward.

“Yes. C’mon, Baxter.” Darkus felt a rush of pleasure as the beetle moved toward him. Then the wood louse scurried forward. Both insects stopped when they got to the edge of the step, and Darkus scratched his head. So far, he was proving nothing.

The wood louse turned and crawled away along the edge of the step. “Ha! I asked you to stop when you got to the edge of the step, not crawl sideways,” Darkus said triumphantly to it, just as Baxter fell face-first over the edge of the step, landing on his back with his legs waggling in the air.

“Oh! Are you okay, Baxter?” He picked up the rhinoceros beetle and returned him to his tank, feeling deflated. “You’re pretty clumsy, did you know that?”

Deciding to give up on the experiments, he peeled the banana that Uncle Max had brought with his milk, broke off a lump, and placed it in the tank beside Baxter. Dad’s beetle book said that rhinoceros beetles eat fruit and tree sap, and he’d discovered that Baxter was particularly fond of bananas. As he watched the beetle scramble onto the banana, he wondered for the millionth time that day where his dad could be, what his disappearance had to do with beetles, and what Lucretia Cutter—that strange, angry woman on canes—had to do with his father.

His thoughts were interrupted by sounds of banging and shouting from the other side of the backyard wall. The neighbors were fighting again.

“You traitorous snake, open this door!” There was a loud bang. “If you don’t open it, I’ll—I’ll break it down.”

“I’d like to see you try, you weak little weasel.” Humphrey roared with laughter.

“The council is coming at the end of the week.”

“Well, you’d better get a move on and start clearing the yard, then, hadn’t you?”

“It’s your rancid pit of a bedroom that’s the real problem.”

“I’ll clean up my room once you’ve cleared the yard.”

“Just KILL THOSE BLASTED BEETLES, you SLOB!”

Darkus leapt to his feet.

Beetles? There were more beetles next door?

He looked at the rhinoceros beetle happily eating banana in his tank. It had never occurred to him that there may be more beetles where he’d come from. What if they were special, too, like Baxter?

He ran down to the dilapidated shed at the end of the yard, stepping up onto the rotting windowsill and then pulling himself onto the mossy roof before scrambling along to the wall and lying flat along the top of it. He couldn’t help but let out a low whistle of surprise as he looked down into the yard on the other side.

It was crammed full of furniture.

Uncle Max had told him the neighbors were hoarders, but he’d never seen anything like this before. The yard was piled high with junk.

It looked as if a mob of brawling furniture had been frozen with a ray gun. Table and chair legs stuck out, their feet like clenched fists about to land a punch. A brave hat stand was making a break for it at the south side of the yard, held back by tendrils of bindweed. Wardrobes cowered beneath tarpaulin. Naked lamp stands were bound together with rope. Bedsprings pinged out of mattresses, and a giant bathtub reared up in the middle of the yard, a pink scooter dangling helplessly from its taps.

“Cool!” Darkus breathed out, immediately wanting to explore.

Near the building itself, a towering sycamore tree reached up past the window where the shouting was coming from. There were enough leaves on the sycamore tree to hide Darkus, and if he had to run, there were plenty of hiding places in the furniture. The sky was bloated with charcoal-colored clouds, and daylight was fading. The darkness would provide even more cover.

He glanced back at the flat; Uncle Max wouldn’t be back from work till after six. Without another thought, Darkus dropped down into the forest of furniture, determined to climb the sycamore tree and get a peek into that room.

As his feet touched a tabletop, there was a loud splintering sound, and he launched himself sideways, swinging on the arm of a vertical sofa, sliding down its upright seat, and landing on a pile of faded cushions that farted up a cloud of mildew.

Darkus froze, listening.

“Humphrey, do you hear me?”

“Pardon?” Humphrey made a noise like a cat coughing up a hair ball. “You need to speak up a bit.”

“YOU KNOW VERY WELL WHAT I SAID, YOU BRAIN-DEAD WARTHOG. OPEN UP THIS DOOR IMMEDIATELY.”

“Now, that’s not very nice, is it?” Humphrey replied in a sugary voice. “Calling me a warthog!”

Darkus let out a sigh of relief; they hadn’t heard him. He crawled off, along the back of a wooden cupboard, in the direction of the voices. Beside a stack of side tables was a narrow gap. He squeezed his legs into it, his feet finding the ground, and standing, sidled along until the gap widened and met a bookshelf filled with boxes of cassette tapes, comics, and rotting toys.

A memory came to him, of being little and nestling between two stacked armchairs. He’d gone to an auction with his mum and dad and crawled into the furniture when they weren’t looking. He heard their alarmed voices calling out for him and saw again the relief on both their faces when he’d poked his head out of the furniture and waved.

Sadness washed through his body. He shook his head to dissolve the memory and squatted down, slithering forward through an avenue of chair legs, pulling himself over an aggressive thistle, gritting his teeth as it tore at his sweater.

He came out in a cupboard-size clearing. Stretched overhead was a tarpaulin, blocking out the daylight and protecting a tall grandfather clock that would forever say it was a quarter to nine. He pulled open the door in its body, and it came away in his hand. Inside was a rust-speckled pendulum and a mess of shredded paper. The pointy nose of a mouse peeped out, and then two beady black eyes looked up at him.

“Sorry,” Darkus whispered, placing the door back in its frame.

You could build a brilliant den in the middle of all this furniture, he thought, stepping through a curtain of ivy hanging from a wardrobe rail. No one would ever know you were here. He wondered if Virginia and Bertolt liked dens. Building one was more fun if you had people to do it with.

As he went, Darkus opened drawers, cupboards, and boxes, finding tongs, an ornate hand mirror, and even a set of false teeth. He left everything as he found it, keeping the location of the sycamore tree in his head. Sliding over a desk and under a bed frame, he came nose to nose with a fox. They stared at each other, neither of them moving. The fox blinked, unbothered, and walked away through the middle of a stack of empty picture frames.

“I’M WARNING YOU, HUMPHREY GAMBLE, THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE.”

“Oh no! Boo-hoo! I’m so scared!”

“EITHER YOU OPEN THIS DOOR, OR I’M COMING IN!”

The voices were closer now.

Darkus saw a black front door with a silver number 73 screwed to it. He turned the handle. Behind it was a kitchen dresser. He scrambled up the dresser, using the shelves like rungs on a ladder, and found that from the top he could see across the yard. The tree was three yards away. Darkus plotted a path through the furniture that would lead him straight there. Dropping back down into the maze, he wormed his way forward until he arrived under a foldaway table opposite the sycamore tree.

Beyond the tree, a tangle of bicycles obscured the back wall of the shop. He thought about his own bicycle. It was in the shed at home, sitting unused outside his empty house, south of the river in Crystal Palace. It felt like a lifetime since he had been there, and happy. The familiar tide of sadness rose in his chest as he felt homesick for the time before Dad had disappeared. Unwanted tears sprang into his eyes.

Angrily, he pushed his feelings aside, scrambling out into the open and sprinting to the tree. He jumped up, catching hold of the lowest branch, swung his legs up, and climbed swiftly up the tree. When he arrived on the branch opposite the window, his heart was pounding in his chest.

At first, he couldn’t make sense of what he was looking at.

The wooden window frame was empty of glass, which explained how he’d heard the two men quarreling. And all over the wood and surrounding brickwork, unnoticeable from the ground, were hundreds of red ladybugs. There were so many of them scurrying around the window frame that it looked like it was moving.

Darkus smiled. These ladybugs made him feel different from the giant yellow one he’d seen that morning, which had been wrong somehow.

He peered through the window. Inside, sitting with his enormous backside wedged up against the door, was the fat one, Humphrey, wearing only a pair of boxer shorts and an undershirt. He had a white bucket beside him and was scooping up a handful of pink stuff from it, pouring it into his mouth and then licking his fingers clean.

But it wasn’t Humphrey that made Darkus stare.

At first glance, it looked like there was a mountain in the room, sitting on the flowery carpet and reaching up to the ceiling. Darkus thought it was some kind of model until he looked closely at the mossy hillside and realized it was a huge pile of moldy teacups. The gaps between the cups were filled with grass, mushrooms, and the tiny plants he’d seen growing out of cracks in walls. There were dandelions sprouting out of the side facing the window, and near the peak a butterfly bush grew, with purple flowers hanging down like bunches of grapes.

He gazed at the impossible thing, his eyes jumping between cup rims and handles, and suddenly he noticed that between the cups—and inside them—were flickering antennae and serrated legs. He remembered Baxter’s delight at getting a mug inside his tank and realized that these cups were all full of beetles.

He spotted two stags peeping out of a chipped teacup, and then a rhinoceros beetle, smaller than Baxter, with copper-colored elytra, backing into a coffee mug. A flash of emerald green drew his attention to a cluster of glamorous jewel beetles, which he recognized from an illustration in his red book. When he saw the trail of giraffe-necked weevils climbing awkwardly up a path between the mugs, looking like a row of clowns dressed in red and black, he clamped his hand over his mouth to suppress a cry of delight and almost fell out of the tree.

Darkus’s heart soared to see so many species. The beetle mountain was the most alien and beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

There was a bang on the door. “I’m warning you, Humphrey,” Pickering’s voice came from the other side, “this is your last chance.”

Darkus saw Humphrey lick his lips and grin. He was obviously enjoying winding up his cousin.

“I’M COUNTING TO THREE,” Pickering barked, “AND THEN I’M COMING IN. ONE . . .”

Humphrey guffawed into his chubby fingers.

“TWO . . .”

Humphrey leaned back. “You’ll never do it,” he crowed.

“THREEEEEEE!”

There was a loud crash as the blade of an ax ripped through the wooden door just above Humphrey’s head.

“Spawn of Satan!” Humphrey sprang forward onto all fours, his belly swinging from side to side as he crawled away.

Shocked, Darkus startled as the door flew open, and lost his balance again, grabbing on to the branch to stop himself from falling.

Pickering stood in the doorway with the ax raised above his head. He advanced menacingly toward his cousin. “I warned you, Humphrey,” he said with an unnerving smile, “but you wouldn’t listen.”

“Now, Pickering, old boy, no need for violence, eh?” Humphrey was on his knees.

“You just wouldn’t listen.” Pickering’s eyes were wide and unblinking.

“A joke, Pickers . . . surely you can take a joke?” Humphrey gave a weak laugh.

“A joke? A JOKE?” Pickering pointed at the mountain. “You think that is a joke?”

“It’s just a bunch of dirty cups,” Humphrey spluttered. “I was going to wash them up, honest I was.”

“You disgust me, Humphrey Gamble.” Pickering shook his head. “I can’t believe we’re related. Look at those tea stains splattered up the walls—and what’s that?” He pointed. “Fungal spores!” His chest heaved, and Darkus thought he was going to be sick. “There’s creepy-crawlies all over the floor.”

Darkus looked down and realized that what he’d thought was a flowery carpet was actually a threadbare rug covered in beetles.

“This room is a health hazard!” Pickering’s voice was getting higher. “Now can you see why I had to write to the council?”

“You did it to get rid of me,” Humphrey said matter-of-factly.

“Well, yes,” Pickering admitted. “But can you blame me? You’re a pig, letting your room get like this. How long have you been throwing your dirty cups into the corner?”

Humphrey shrugged and muttered, “Since we moved in.”

Pickering turned toward the mountain of crockery. “You’ve even smashed the glass in the window . . .”

Humphrey’s eyes followed Pickering.

To Darkus’s horror, he suddenly found both men staring right at him.

Quick as lightning, Pickering darted over to the window, reached out, and grabbed Darkus by the scruff of his sweater. Darkus’s horror was eclipsed by fear as he found himself dangling in midair. He grabbed at the window frame with his fingertips, letting out a strangled scream, and the ladybugs took off, a cloud of red and black. There was no one to help him. Uncle Max was out.

“BAXTER!” he cried as he was hauled through the window and thrown down onto the floor, scattering beetles in every direction.