Dry now, and over the trauma of having been spat at by a whirlpool, Dani and Granny thanked Rarelief for all his advice, promised to say hi to his mother should they see her, and set off after Hamish and Ruairi as quickly as they could. Following Rarelief’s instructions, Dani twisted the large square-looking boulder two times counterclockwise when they reached the banks of the River Gargle. Then they waded through the river, just between the whirlpool and the tumbling waterfall. They were neither spun out nor spat at. They picked their way up the bank of the river on the other side and made across the dunes to the Beach of Bewilderment.
Halfway across the Beach of Bewilderment, they were forced to stop their trek.
“They look green to me,” Dani said to Granny.
“They’re clearly blue,” Granny said.
“Green!” Dani shouted back.
Granny stopped dead, turned, and shouted at Dani, “Fine! They’re a greeny-blue,”
“No! They’re a bluey-green,” Dani said.
“Fine, fine, fine. They’re not blue. They’re greenbottle blue!” Granny said.
“That just means blue,” Dani said. “You’re trying to win by pretending you’re giving in. Why not bluebottle green?”
“Because there’s no such thing as bluebottle green,” Granny explained, getting agitated again. “And greenbottle blue is an established and very recognizable color!”
“So you say!” Dani snapped.
“I think we’re getting off the point a bit here. Is it really that important?” Granny asked, motioning to what was approaching. “Rarelief warned us about this.”
“About what?” Dani asked.
“He said we’d get bewildered on the Beach of Bewilderment, and that we must take care or we’d lose focus,” Granny said.
“He did?” Dani asked, looking confused. “I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything. How long have we been here?”
“Look,” Granny said.
While Granny and Dani had been standing in the middle of the beach, bewildered, arguing with each other about whether the creatures which had slowly but solidly emerged from the water lapping up on the beach were in fact green or blue, the creatures, the Yondersaay tarantulafish, as large as Mum’s mauve hire car, had slowly and quietly, unfettered and unencumbered, crawled closer.
And closer.
And closer.
“We’ve just been standing here when we should have been running for the hills!” Granny said.
“And now that they’re right beside us, Granny,” Dani said, “I absolutely see what you mean; they are definitely a bluey shade of greenbottle blue.”
“With rusty legs.”
“Hairy rusty legs.”
“And bright orange underbellies.”
“Their faces are black, though,” Dani noted.
“Very black,” Granny said, and Granny and Dani moved closer together.
“Can they kill you?” Dani asked.
“Well …” Granny hesitated.
“Well?” Dani turned and faced her great-great-great-grandmother.
“Their bites are pretty nasty, I’ve heard. Poisonous,” Granny said. “And they have fangs. But before they even get close enough to bite you, they can sting you with the barbed hairs full of venom that they flick off their bellies with their back legs like poison arrows.”
“Poison! Venom! And is it lethal?” Dani was getting very worried now.
“It won’t kill you outright, I don’t think,” Granny explained, “but its effect can be medically significant. When you’re down on the ground writhing in agony, they wrap you up in their silk, bring you back to their underwater burrows, and eat you with those things on their faces.”
Dani’s voice came out in a high-pitched shriek. “Writhing in agony! Eat you! Medically significant! What the hell does medically significant mean?”
“I think it means we should get the heckadoodle out of here,” Granny said.
“At last we agree on something!” said Dani.
They made to run, but Granny and Dani were completely surrounded. Some of the tarantulafish were already lifting their back legs to pluck poisonous hairs from their bellies, ready to flick them. Granny and Dani could hear sickening clicks coming from the faces of the tarantulafish. The man-eating, venom-flicking, poison-fanged tarantulafish were getting ready to feast on an old woman in her good maroon coat and her good maroon hat with the puffin feathers and a young, red-haired girl in multiple layers of winter clothes.