Nugget cried. Nugget didn’t stop crying. Wheedle didn’t want to pat her – every time he did, a bit more of her pelt disintegrated – but he crooned and sang to her and shuffled as close as he could possibly get without touching her crumbly coat. And still Nugget. Wouldn’t. Stop. Crying.
Wheedle groaned; he was so scared for her and he didn’t know what to do.
‘Does it hurt, Nugget?’
Nugget’s sudden silence came and her dissolving skin shuddered. She peered at the street, shrinking back underneath Wheedle’s belly. Stone powder floated off her into the wintry air.
When he saw what had made her so quiet, Wheedle wished Nugget would cry again. ‘Spigot,’ Wheedle hissed. ‘Spigot!’
Spigot shook himself out of solid stoniness, opened one bright eye and stood up on his thick stone legs. The eagle leaned against Wheedle’s other side and they all looked down.
The fairy dust was back, circling the lights, hovering in the trees, sliding in from the road towards all the doors along their street. Wheedle leaned over the roof and watched dust coil up the Kavanaghs’ steps. He took a quick look up and down the pavement. There were no people, just like the previous night. Wheedle was sure the dust was keeping them asleep. Though sad voices rang out from the far distance, the only human noises in the Kavanaghs’ street were snores.
‘Can you watch Nugget for me?’ Wheedle asked.
Spigot squawked.
Wheedle descended the front wall of the house and shivered as he jumped hoof-deep into swirling powder. By the time he landed, the dust had reached the Kavanaghs’ door and begun edging around the hinges and between the door and the frame. The finest dust had got in when nothing else could. Wheedle stood for a moment on the Kavanaghs’ doorstep and listened. Inside, Nick gave a snore, then a choked cough. Until that noise, the dust had been sliding under every door along the street that Wheedle could see. But as Nick coughed again, all the dust in the street changed direction, like a wind had caught it.
Wheedle winced. As if it heard the boy.
It swept away from the other houses and converged outside the Kavanaghs’ house, thick as a sandstorm. It hung there for a moment before roaring forward and hitting the front of the house. Wheedle closed his eyes, scrunched them, and buried his head in his forelegs. The dust pushed over him, flew through his stone fur, caught in his ears and brushed along his tail. When he no longer felt it pour across his back, he looked up and saw the last of it pushing inside through every gap it could. Door, window, vents, cracks.
That can’t be good.
He waited, wondering what to do next. He tried the door handle. It was locked, so he couldn’t get in without breaking the door down.
Then the sounds began. Rising sounds, the sounds of humans getting out of bed, muffled feet, muffled movements.
That’s definitely bad, Wheedle thought.
The door opened and Richard walked out, followed by Nick and then Michelle, who carried Beatrice in her arms. The quartet were blank-eyed and deliberate, striding towards the street.
Wheedle knew he couldn’t let them go. He grabbed at Michelle’s foot and she tripped. Beatrice flew out of her arms and Wheedle caught the baby deftly enough, but when he put her down she began crawling towards the road. Wheedle grabbed at the baby’s nappy and held her close. She went limp. Michelle picked herself up, stared blankly at Wheedle and walked towards him. It reminded him of a fish’s unblinking stare and he shuddered. Behind her, Nick and Richard continued their shuffle into the street. Wheedle knew he couldn’t stop them by himself, and even if Spigot came down from the roof, now there were three grown humans versus two gargoyles. Nick alone had been hard enough to subdue when Bladder had been there to help.
Michelle reached for Beatrice.
‘No, you don’t,’ the gargoyle said, and ran for the house, shutting the door behind him. Dust swirled around him. It weaved around Beatrice and she struggled to break his grip, but Wheedle held on to her.
The knob turned and Wheedle stretched up and flicked the lock.
Michelle knocked.
‘Sorry, no one home,’ Wheedle yelled, and retreated further inside, into the kitchen. The dust sat on a thin layer across the floor as Wheedle jumped on to the dining table. The old oak thing complained under his weight. The dust slid back towards the front door.
Michelle stopped knocking and Beatrice relaxed in his forelegs She peered around blearily, as if she’d just woken.
‘Spigot, come down,’ Wheedle called out, hoping the stone bird was listening.
Spigot’s stone face looked in from the kitchen’s French doors. Nugget was hanging from his beak. Wheedle unlocked the back door and let them in. Bits of gravel dropped from the little gargoyle on to the back step. Wheedle winced.
‘I need to follow Sam’s family. You stay here and look after these two.’
The eagle complained.
‘No time.’ Wheedle placed Beatrice into Spigot’s wings and Nugget reached for her too. The stone bull headed for the front door. His eyes felt gritty.
Wheedle scanned the street. Richard, Michelle and Nick were three houses away, lurching down the other side of the road, the fairy dust half leading, half carrying them. Wheedle wondered where they could be going when they stopped at a drain.
Not there. Not The Hole, he thought. No, they can’t!
They did.
Richard slid his legs between the bars and the metal turned to vapour. Michelle looked back at the house and frowned.
‘Yes, yes,’ Wheedle called. ‘Beatrice is in there. Come home.’ He started across the street towards them.
Michelle stepped into the drain, losing substance for a brief moment.
Wheedle ran towards them and heard ogre voices rise from below. Nick crouched on the street, by the drain. Wheedle grabbed at his pyjama collar, but a claw reaching from below yanked hard on Nick’s leg. Wheedle pushed his feet into the ground, fixing himself to it. If he held on long enough, maybe the yanker would give up. But three more solid tugs, Nick’s collar ripping, sent the boy tumbling through the drain and disappearing into the dark below. All Wheedle could see when he looked down was a gentle circular glow shining from Nick’s forehead, which lit his eyes.
Wheedle could make out ogreish voices.
‘Yuck, what is them? I fought we was gettin’ us some humans.’
‘Quick, put the bag over ’em. Let’s get ’em to Her Maggisty.’
Wheedle moved forward, sniffing at the drain and listening as heavy footsteps receded and the ogres’ conversation faded.
Wheedle did not want to be seen. There were thousands of monsters ahead: he could tell that by the huge sound, the endless conversations and the rumbly deep throats roaring out. The noise was huge, far bigger than it had been when he, Spigot and Bladder had last encountered a large crowd of monsters there. It made sense though; the last time had been in an open field. Here the ogres and boggarts, bogies and imps were holed up in the yawning dome of the Great Cavern, with all its echoes and acoustics. Wheedle slid out of the tunnel mouth and straight up the wall, not even looking to see who might be watching. He needed to get up high, to see if he could spot where the Kavanaghs had been taken. He did not stop climbing until he got to the entrance of his pack’s long-abandoned burrow. It’d been months since he’d been here. It sat empty except for a layer of ordinary dust and faded chocolate wrappers.
Sound rose from the cavern floor. Voices, squawks, screams, howls, the rustling and pounding of small and huge feet, the rattling of chains. Wheedle, his ears alert, peered out of the burrow door and looked down.
He could see nothing of importance, except the huge mountains of sighs piled all over the cavern floor having become taller and wider because no ogre king had appeared to breathe on them and hatch them to life. The pounding feet of the surviving ogres and trolls caused small avalanches to ripple down the stacks, but the hillocks remained high enough to clog Wheedle’s view. A huge pile of beans blocked his line of sight to where he knew Ogre King Thunderguts’s stone throne sat on the dais.
The ledge outside the burrow was bare, so Wheedle stepped out. Nervous faces peered out of holes and dens across the way. Small heads with blinking peepers and big heads with glowing eyes stared at the base of the cavern. No one was interested in one gargoyle running about. If he had to guess, Wheedle would say that Maggie had ordered them all back to the Great Cavern, but they hated the smell of the place. It didn’t smell of death so much any more, but it was stale and dormant, lifeless. The place was half full; many of the bigger monsters had been killed off when Sam destroyed the sword, and Wheedle knew pixies, brownies, boggarts, bogies and leprechauns didn’t take up as much space. There were no gargoyles though. They would be happy to stay away from this place forever. Most other species of monsterkind had returned, although not all. Maybe others were hiding down in their own caverns.
Stealing the Kavanaghs, getting all the monsters back to The Hole – Wheedle supposed only Sam was missing from Maggie’s collection.
As he scurried around, following the ledge that circumscribed the wall of the cavern, he swung his head back and forth, checking burrows to make sure nothing could dash out and push him down to a shattering death. And he kept an eye on the floor, trying to see the throne. If Maggie was anywhere, she was there.
The dais came in to view, but only a lump of an ogre stood next to the throne. He recognised Nasty Nan the Goblin dusting the seat, but there was no Maggie.
Something else caught Wheedle’s attention.
Next to the dais was a large solid box, the size of Sam’s bedroom, but squarer. On top of it, smack in the middle, sat an upright barrel. He dashed around to the other side of the ledge so he could get a closer look. If it was empty, it might be a good place to hide. It was hard to see; there were yet more egg piles in the way, and he couldn’t get a better view. A trio of boggarts sat on the tier below him.
Wheedle heard crying. Soft crying. In The Hole? Crying? Was it a trap? He listened some more. It came from a few tiers down, quite close to the ground, just behind the throne. There was more than one crier. Richard? Nick? Michelle? All three?
Wheedle ran along the top tier until he was behind the stone throne. There was movement on the floor around the dais, but he still couldn’t see Maggie, just a lot of scarpering pixies, lumbering ogres and a few clumps of brownies, witches, trolls and the like.
The wall below him was a patchwork of dirt covered with dark burrows. A lot of boggarts had lived there once and, he guessed, still did. He hoped Maggie wasn’t inside one of these burrows with the Kavanaghs now. If she was, no wonder they were in tears.
He listened to the crying. It was right below him, about halfway between the tier he was on and the floor. He’d have to risk being seen by those below him. There were several ogres lurching around – big fangs, big fists, big feet – and a few smaller monsters and imps scurrying to get out of the way of stomping ogres. But as he studied them, he realised most monsters were sitting with bowed heads. Not a happy bunch at all, and not one of them was watching the walls above.
He crept down to the burrow the crying came from. He couldn’t hear voices talking, just snuffling and weeping – maybe more than three people. Maybe the Kavanaghs weren’t the only people who’d been captured.
He put his head through the top of the doorway, getting closer to the sobbers in the dark. It didn’t look any different to the dozens of other doors peppering the wall around it. He sniffed. He couldn’t smell any fairy dust or humans and crept in a little closer. It was dingy inside, but there was movement, and then the crying stopped.
Wheedle didn’t have time to scream as a large mitt clamped over his head and pulled him into the burrow.