For a second the four of us stood, looking at each other, and the ground, and the big world, and where the sea finished – finished! And then we ended up in a giant hug, jumping on the strange, hard floor.
‘We’re here! We’re here!’
I think we’d have carried on jumping and hugging for longer, but James is tall and Lana is short, so we were all jumping at different heights and speeds, and Lana almost jumped into my chin and bashed me. Then we just spent a couple of minutes hugging and laughing breathlessly. One of us would manage to stop laughing, but then that was funny, so we’d be laughing at each other not laughing.
‘What shall we do first?’ said Lana, pulling away, but still with a giant smile on her face.
‘That white house by the cliff,’ said Kate. ‘I want to go and see what’s in there.’
‘I want to get some gorgeous clothes,’ said Lana. ‘And have a bath. Oh, no! Guys! We have to find hair dye like those women.’ She looked around at the empty street in front of us, a panicked expression on her face. ‘I can’t remember what hair dye even looks like. Where would I find some?’
‘I’d like a mirror. And some scissors,’ said James, raising his eyebrows at me. ‘To finish cutting my hair. Since somebody else didn’t finish it.’
‘A mirror!’ said Lana, with a sigh. I wasn’t sure I wanted one that badly. Like I said, I’m not always a fan of reality and I wanted to keep on picturing myself with that long, flowing blonde princess hair for a bit longer – and not the scraggy, uneven spikes I probably had instead.
‘Food,’ said Kate.
‘Food!’ we all shouted at the same time. This was going to be amazing.
‘Children!’ called Soldier John. ‘You need to start by waving at your friends . . .’
We turned, guiltily, and looked back towards the Jellyfish. As we raised our hands to wave, there was a distant cheer from the people on board, who were further away and smaller now than I had realized.
‘. . . and then you need to find as many containers that could carry water as possible. You need to bring ’em ’ere, in a bag, and be ready to give ’em to me when I get back with the next load of people.’
‘We’ve done all of the closest houses,’ said Stinky. ‘You’ll need to try the streets behind this one.’
‘If you see any movements from the ’ouses, then run back here quickly,’ added John.
‘And do what?’ I said. ‘Movements from what?’
But already Dr Jones was pushing the boat back away from us, and Soldier John was pulling the sail up. On the deck, those two bulky black bags were sitting, ready for the Jellyfish people to fill them.
‘Movements from what?’ I said again.
‘You know what,’ said James. ‘But we haven’t seen anything here for . . . a while. It’s fine.’
Stinky set off at a run up Long Street. Dr Jones quickly followed, but Staring Crone turned, slowly, to face the Jellyfish.
‘Come on,’ said James. ‘Worry about it later, Martha. There’s nothing here now.’
We set off. It was strange, at first, to run on the hard tarmac on the ground, but do you know, because your feet don’t sink into it you can run further and faster than normal, so it’s also easier too? I’d forgotten the smell of land. The air when you breathe is warmer and drier, so it feels full of dust at first. But there are more smells, too; every few metres the air changes so you might get the tang of crisp seaweed in one place, then the warm petrol-y sharpness of the tarmac, then the clean sweetness of leaves. All within seconds! There were trees, and grass, and I wanted to stop and touch them to remind myself what they felt like, but Stinky was urging us on, so I knew it would have to wait.
We veered round the corner. We hadn’t been able to see this road from the Jellyfish, and it arced upwards, towards the cliff, before curving round again behind another row of houses higher up. Through there, up in the gaps between the houses, you could see row upon row upon row of other houses, and buildings and churches and just . . . loads of things. From the Jellyfish, we’d only been able to see the cliffs on either side, and the row of streets between them. The size of the town had been concealed from us and, although I’d known it was bigger than just what we could see, I couldn’t possibly have imagined what was before me now. Some of the buildings were so big . . .well, what were they for? Where did it all end?
‘Come on, Martha,’ called James. ‘Hurry up. You can look later.’
He ran into a house with an open red front door and empty glassless windows. The shredded brown remains of curtains swayed loosely from the window frames, but otherwise there was no movement.
‘Here.’ Stinky came running out of another house, clutching a black plastic bag already bulging with lumps. He put it into the middle of the road. ‘Put your containers in here.’ He ran back into the house next door.
Dr Jones appeared from the grey building opposite, pausing to put some bottles into the bag before running across the street and in through the open windows of another house.
A bucket and a couple of squashed plastic bottles lay in a front garden. I picked them up and put them in the bag. Going into any of the buildings felt really scary. Why did they all have broken windows? And why were their doors all open? I didn’t like the idea of being stuck in any of them. They all felt too closed in, like the idea of all those walls encircling you suddenly made them feel too small, like they would crush you. I could feel that tight feeling in my throat coming back again at the thought of going inside.
I looked along the street. There was nothing moving at either end, but there were loads of places where things could be hiding, where killers could be waiting. The ground beneath me seemed to give a wobble, as though the pavement was shifting and settling on the ocean waves. I stamped my feet and looked down, but it was still solid, and I was still on dry land.
James came running out of a red door. He threw an armful of bottles into the bag. ‘You OK, Martha?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t want to go in,’ I whispered. ‘I don’t think I can.’
‘Why? What’s the problem?’
He peered at me, and I could feel tears starting to come.
‘Come on,’ he said, grabbing my hand. ‘You can freak out later. There’s no time now. There’s definitely nothing hiding in this house. But there are more bottles, and you can help me get them. We’ve got to save the others!’
Lana came running out, wearing a red leather jacket, and clutching an armful of bottles. She threw them into the bag, before turning and running back inside again.
‘Come on,’ said James. ‘Let’s do this.’
He pulled me through the front gate and in the door. Inside, the floor was softer, with an old, sodden carpet underfoot, and light shone in from windows at the back. I didn’t feel trapped, but it didn’t feel pleasant either. There were long scratches on the walls, and I wondered what had caused them. Maybe just cracks in the plaster? Or maybe something heavy had been dragged through the house. Maybe that’s all it was. And not the claws of kriks.
‘It reminds me of the dead people,’ I said. ‘It’s all too empty. Where did everybody go?’
‘Under the sea. Now stop mooning and hold out your hands,’ he called, coming in from a room at the back. ‘Put these in the bag.’ He thrust some plastic boxes in my hand, and sped back again to gather more.
Back on the street the first bag was full and another two had appeared. Dr Jones came running out of a building halfway up the street.
‘They’re coming back,’ shouted Stinky. ‘Hurry up!’
Dr Jones sprinted into another house, while others ran out of theirs.
‘Come on. Take one,’ said Stinky, grabbing the largest of the bags. We ran down towards the sea again.
The tide was suddenly much further out now, the walls of the drowned houses exposed and treacherous. This time, Soldier John didn’t attempt to guide the boat in at all, instead jamming an oar into the shallow sea bed beneath him and holding the boat there as an anchor. His passengers had to jump down into waist-high water before clambering up on to slippery walls and edging along them to the shore. The water around the boat was laced with bobbing seaweed, and Soldier John eyed it uneasily. There were dark objects visible here and there, which could be stones, or rubbish, or nothing. But they could also be something else.
‘I don’t think you should go back,’ said Dr Jones. ‘I think you should leave it until there’s more light, and until the tide is higher.’
‘No, I can get there and back before dark,’ he said.
‘But then you’d be leaving just one boatload of people on the Jellyfish for the rest of the night,’ she pointed out.
‘I’ll get them back in the dark,’ he said. ‘Find me some torches this time.’
Dr Jones nodded.
‘You can’t go back.’ A gravelly voice spoke loudly, and with finality, from behind us on the shore. Staring Crone was gazing out towards the Jellyfish. ‘You can’t go back,’ she repeated. ‘The Jellyfish won’t let you.’
We followed her eyes out to the creature in the sea. The Jellyfish was now perceptibly closer than it had been a few minutes ago, and its tentacles were waving wildly. You could see the ripples in the mesoglea, and the violence with which the creature was shaking the people still on board. They were a hunched group in the centre, and they were being prodded and stroked by the flailing tentacles with an urgency that couldn’t go on much longer. One of the larger tentacles – a great, snaking limb, taller than a tree – lifted lazily out of the water. It paused momentarily in the air, before effortlessly dropping down on to the roof of the Big House with a force that sent the people on board running. The wood from the Big House crumpled like sodden cardboard, as though the years of being exposed to water had left it soft and thin. Or as though nothing built by humans was a match for the monstrous Jellyfish.
Going back now would be suicide. But if we didn’t, Old Albert and the people on board would die.