Clipping down their goldfish-bowl helmets, Dankish and Craven strolled through the door of number five. On their backs they each carried a yellow-and-black cylinder of poisonous gas, which led to a gunlike nozzle holstered in their belts.

Virginia’s lip curled with disgust and her fists clenched as she watched the two men silently from the landing above. She was going to teach those beetle murderers a lesson they’d never forget.

“Here we go,” she whispered to Marvin, who was hanging by his back legs from one of her pigtails. As the front door swung shut, she swiped her hand down, signaling the attack, and pressed the start button on her stopwatch.

Like an enormous black dagger, the first beetle squadron dived down, flying straight at the invaders’ heads, blocking out all the light.

Startled by the sudden attack, Craven and Dankish cried out as they twisted and turned, trying to swat the beetles away.

A chain of dung beetles speedily rolled balls of poo forward, pushing them into position between the banisters, where stag beetles waited to lift them. Once the first squadron had retreated to the hall ceiling and they had a clear shot, the dung bombs rained down.

The hall quickly became a slurry pit.

Virginia flapped her hands with delight at the yells of alarm and disgust that came from the muck-splattered helmets of Craven and Dankish.

Unable to see out of their visors, Craven and Dankish collided and grabbed on to each other as they slid, slipped, and fell. Each time they wiped their helmets, a new poo ball obliterated their view.

Virginia hugged her arms tightly around her chest, barely able to contain her glee. This was the funniest thing she’d ever seen in her life, and it was painful trying not to laugh.

“What the hell’s going on?” Dankish yelled, lifting his helmet a fraction.

That was the moment the bombardier and blister beetles had been waiting for: They zoomed down in a phalanx toward his exposed Adam’s apple, dividing before impact and skimming either side of his neck, releasing a generous spray of boiling acid onto his bare skin.

Dankish shrieked like Virginia’s mother when she saw a mouse, and jerked his hands up, knocking his helmet off his head and to the floor. The beetles waiting on the ceiling plummeted down into his suit like a malicious shower of hungry piranha.

Dankish screamed again and again as the acid squirters and the vicious biters went to work. He fell to the floor writhing, punching himself, trying to crush the beetles through the suit, and as he howled in agony the stag beetles scored a direct hit, dropping a brown dung ball into his open mouth.

Virginia punched the air.

Craven couldn’t see what was happening, because his helmet was covered in poo, but he could hear Dankish’s screams. As if in slow motion, Virginia watched his hands move to the neck clips of the protective suit and snap them open. Craven’s helmet only popped up a fraction of an inch before the bombardier beetles shot down for a second attack. His nasal howls soon echoed Dankish’s, and his helmet fell to the floor as a furious downpour of angry insects tumbled into his suit.

Virginia leapt up in delight as Craven, too, fell to the floor, screaming. She looked at the stopwatch. Three minutes to go. Peering over the banisters, she could see Dankish and Craven squirming around in a quagmire of poo, retching and howling as they were bitten and stung. The beetles were already streaming out of the holes in the heels of their suits, making good their escape.

They had done it! They had stopped Lucretia’s men!

Suddenly, the front door flew open and Humphrey thundered through it, with Pickering strapped to his back inside a cylinder harness, his broken ankles dangling at awkward angles. They were wearing gas masks they’d taken from the van.

“Ha-HA!” Pickering cried. “Thought you’d keep all the fun to yourselves, did you? Well, think again, because we’re here to show you how beetle killing should be done!”

Pickering’s crowing petered out when he saw Dankish and Craven.

Humphrey stared.

“Dear God, it stinks in here!” Pickering’s nose wrinkled.

Virginia’s heart sank as the cousins charged into the hallway, and before she could stop herself from leaning too far forward, she lost her balance and clattered noisily against the banisters.

Humphrey raised his head, looking up. “There’s someone up there!” he cried. “IT’S THE BOY!”

“Get him!” Pickering screeched. “KILL HIM!”

Virginia spun around in a panic. This wasn’t in the plan. There was no one to rescue her.

Humphrey tore a tank of poisonous gas from Craven’s back and swung it over his shoulder to Pickering, who hugged it. There was a cracking sound and a terrible scream as Humphrey charged forward over the fallen men, ignoring the storm of beetles biting and stinging his flesh. Impervious to the deluge of dung balls fired at him, he reached the bottom of the stairs.

“Oh no,” Virginia whispered to Marvin. “What do I do now?”

A screech sounded behind her: It was Goliath calling out an order. Three rhinoceros beetles climbed onto his wing cases, linking their horns and serrated legs around him. Four stags ran up and grabbed on to his underbelly. Together as one they began to roll toward the stairs, picking up Atlas, Hercules, and titan beetles, gathering momentum and beetles as they went. Virginia’s jaw dropped as she watched. By the time the beetle ball reached the top of the stairs, it was the size of a giant Space Hopper.

On the command of Goliath, another screech from the center of the ball, the beetles on the outside rose up onto their back legs, linking their arms together, their vicious horns sticking out.

Virginia grabbed Bertolt’s rockets, laying them on the floor so that they poked out over the stairwell, and looked at the stopwatch—thirty seconds.

She pulled the lighter from her pocket, quickly lighting the fuses before sprinting into the kitchen, throwing herself down the stairs into the shop, running to the manhole, and scrambling down the ladder. She rotated the handles at a furious speed, pulling the metal cover over the hole until it clunked into place, and strapped the climbing harness she was wearing over her tracksuit to the ladder.

Clinging to the rings of the iron ladder, above Beetle Mountain, Virginia closed her eyes.

“Do it, Bertolt!” she whispered. “Get the scumbags!”

 

 

“Someone’s coming,” Novak hissed from the doorway.

Bartholomew Cuttle grabbed his son’s hand. “Who’s that?”

“Don’t worry.” Darkus frantically pulled at the shackles around his father’s feet, and one of them broke open. “She’s my friend.”

“Mawling has started the morning round of the cells.” Novak tugged at her kimono belt anxiously.

“Are there are other prisoners?”

Novak bit her lip and didn’t answer. “Darkus, when Mawling gets here, he’ll see the lock is gone. What shall I do?”

“We need more time.” Darkus tugged at the other shackle, but it held firm.

Hepburn flew up to Novak and looped the loop.

“Good idea, Hepburn.” Novak held out her hand for the beetle to land. “We’ll give you as much time as we can.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Hepburn and I are going to put on a show,” Novak replied.

Darkus heard the patter of her feet as she ran up the hall. He struggled in vain with the iron cuff, finally hitting it in frustration. It broke open.

“Yes!” Darkus scrambled to his father’s head. “Dad, your feet are free. Can you get up?”

Bartholomew Cuttle rolled over onto all fours and slid onto his knees. Darkus noticed he was still wearing the blue shirt and corduroy trousers that he’d been dressed in the day he had disappeared, except that now the shirt was dirty and ripped.

His father crossed his arms and shivered. Darkus pulled off the green sweater.

“Here.”

Bartholomew looked at his son as if he had never seen him before and took the sweater, pulling it over his head.

“How did you find me?” he asked.

“I found the beetles first, or rather they found me,” Darkus replied, smiling down at his dad. “It’s going to be okay now, Dad. Uncle Max is waiting outside with the car.” He took one of his father’s arms and rested it over his shoulder. “Let’s get you on your feet. Hup!”

Bartholomew Cuttle tried to stand, but his knees gave way and he fell forward, landing back on his hands.

“This isn’t going to work,” he said. “I’m too weak.”

Darkus looked at the door anxiously.

His father gently pushed Darkus away. “You’ll never be able to carry me. You must leave before she sees you.”

“I will not,” Darkus said, gritting his teeth and pushing his father back.

Surprised by the shove, and terribly weak, Bartholomew Cuttle fell back. There was a dull thud as his head hit the floor.

“Dad! I’m sorry.” Darkus dropped down by his father’s face. “Dad?”

His father’s eyes were closed.

“No!” Darkus’s breath was sucked out of his lungs by the shock of realizing he’d knocked his dad unconscious. “No, no, no!”

He shook his shoulders, then tried to lift him, growing more frantic, until he realized he couldn’t lift his father on his own.

A sob of desperation burst from his chest as he sank to his knees. It was hopeless. Covering his face with his hands, he felt his body shaking and hot tears rolling down his cheeks, making his palms wet.

A familiar weight on his shoulder and the gentle scratching of Baxter’s horn under his chin made him wipe his eyes, and then he heard a familiar sound, like sugar pouring into a bowl. He looked down.

The beetles were surging together and crawling underneath Bartholomew Cuttle’s exhausted body. Dung, Hercules, and titan beetles formed a raft of elytra with their backs. Together they lifted Darkus’s father off the floor and carried him forward on thousands of tiny serrated legs.

Darkus let out a laugh of surprise and relief as he watched the beetles carry his father out of the cell door. He sprang to his feet and ran to join them.

“You are the best beetles in the world,” he whispered as they made their way down the corridor and into the wine cellar. “Baxter, go and tell Novak we’re out of the cell.”

Baxter leapt off his shoulder into the air and was gone. Darkus opened the door at the other end of the cellar, and they marched to the spiral staircase. Novak ran up, with Hepburn and Baxter flying above her.

“I did the best I could, but he’s going to see the cell door any second now,” she gasped. “We must hurry.”

Darkus heard a distant bellowing roar, then a strange high-pitched noise that seemed to really bother the beetles, who flicked their antennae and forelegs angrily at it.

“Mawling’s found the cell!” Novak grabbed Darkus’s arm. “He’s coming. He’ll release the assassin bugs! We’ve got to get out of here!”

“Assassin bugs?” Darkus’s mind flicked back to the room with the yellow ladybugs and angry stags.

“They drink blood.” Novak looked terrified.

Darkus spun around. “Beetles, can you get Dad up the stairs?”

Every single beetle—Baxter, dung, Hercules, titan, bombardier, blister, fire, and tiger—climbed on top of his dad now. Clutching the unconscious Bartholomew Cuttle with each of their six legs, they all flipped up their elytra on Darkus’s command and spread their vibrating wings. Slowly, the body of the unconscious man rose, ghostlike, up the stairwell to the kitchen.

Hearing a terrified scream, Novak and Darkus rushed up the stairs to find the cook staring wide-eyed at the floating specter.

“Close your eyes, Millie,” Novak cried. “It’s not real. Don’t look. I can explain everything. Please stop screaming.”

Darkus rushed across the room, into the hall full of crates, and threw back the bolts of the servants’ door, pushing it open. The levitating body of his unconscious father, held aloft by thousands of tiny wings, glided out into the morning sunlight.

He paused in the doorway.

“Get out of here,” Novak gasped.

Darkus grabbed her hand. “Come with us.”

Novak looked longingly at Darkus but shook her head. “I can’t,” she whispered, and took a step back.

“But if she finds out . . .” Darkus’s stomach churned at the thought of what Lucretia Cutter would do to her rebellious daughter. “Novak, she’s a monster.”

“But she’s my mother,” Novak said, and closed the door.

 

 

Humphrey stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up at the giant black spiky beetle boulder teetering at the top of the stairs.

“Pickers, what is that!?”

Pickering mounted the nozzle of the gas hose onto his shoulder.

“Who cares? Let’s kill it.”

Humphrey stepped up. The stair was slippery and he lost his balance, causing him to take a hurried second step. The next stair dissolved into powder beneath him. He lurched forward, and his back foot slid away.

As he fell, Humphrey saw the beetle boulder tip forward, shedding beetles—armed with horns, claws, and pincers—onto each stair.

His face hit the floor with a crash just as the beetle boulder hit him in the face. Angry beetles were catapulted forward, and he and Pickering were covered in a blanket of attacking arthropods.

“Shoot the gun!” howled Humphrey. “Gas them!”

“NO!” screamed Craven from the floor. “We don’t have our helmets on! You’ll kill us!”

“Put them on, then!” Pickering screamed. “I’m going to fire this thing!”

Humphrey watched Craven speedily drag his body to the front door and pull it open. He looked at Dankish, who grabbed his helmet and pulled it over his head, wailing as a batallion of black beetles inside advanced toward his nose.

“DO IT!” Humphrey roared, every bit of his body in pain.

Pickering raised the barrel of the gas gun and took aim at the beetles on Humphrey’s bald head.

“DIE! DIE! DIE! DIE!” Pickering screamed. He fiddled with the tap, trying to release the gas, but his fingers were slippery.

“What are you waiting for?” Humphrey howled, then froze as he heard a terrifying shriek rushing toward his ears.

Something was being fired at his head! He heard a terrifying series of loud bangs.

“I’ve been shot!” Pickering wailed. “I’m dying!”

Humphrey’s arms and legs flailed. The boy had a gun!

“Retreat! Retreat! RETREAT!” Pickering screamed, repeatedly punching the back of Humphrey’s head.

Bertolt’s eyes were locked on his stopwatch.

“Seven, six, five . . .” he counted down in a whisper.

Underground, Virginia was staring at her stopwatch. Three, two . . . She closed her eyes and held on tight.

“One!” Bertolt flicked the first switch.

There was a moment of silence.

A muffled boom.

And the Emporium windows exploded out of their frames.

Bertolt leapt to his feet, ran to the pay phone on the Laundromat wall, and dialed 999.

“Hello, can I have the police, please?” He thought about what Virginia had told him to say. She’d be safely underground by now, if she’d followed the plan . . . “Hello? Yes. I live on Nelson Parade. I thought you should know there’s a girl tied to a chair in a room above the Emporium. I can see her through the window. It’s very strange, because the two men who live there don’t have any children.”

He let the operator reassure him, then hung up before dialing again.

“Hello, can I have the fire brigade, please? I’d like to report an explosion at the Emporium on Nelson Parade.”

He held out the receiver and flicked down the second switch, blowing the ceiling off Humphrey’s bedroom and sending a wave of brick dust rippling out into the street.

“Oh my! Did you hear that? There was another one. Please come quickly. I think it might be terrorists!”