STRAIGHT AWAY MOLLY SAW THAT ONE OF the two attic windows was open.
The curtains were flapping.
Then she spied the fat shadowy shape squatting on the Persian rug with poison in its eyes.
The sight of those eyes made Molly reach for the cross around her neck. But the chain had got entangled with her camera strap, and somehow she whapped herself in the nose with the camera. Like lightning, a camera flash blasted the chamber and revealed to Molly that the vampire bat on the floor had a tail and no wings. In fact, it wasn’t a vampire bat at all! O, ye gods, it was a vampire cat! No, wait – it was just her pet cat, Gabriel, who, blinded by the flash, gave a startled meow and ran straight towards the open window…
“Gabriel!”
Molly tripped over her fishing net and fell headlong onto the rug, sprawling. The rug ripped; her mother’s beloved grandfather clock, which encroached upon the far end of the rug, wobbled. And now it seemed that her cat had indeed become a bat, for in his mad panic he sailed through the window frame as Molly watched in horror from the floor. The grandfather clock keeled sideways and fell onto a glass table with a crash like the end of the world, but Molly didn’t even notice; on hands and knees she scrambled to the window through which Gabriel had flown.
Grabbing the frame, she hauled herself up to see the cat looking back at her from the other side of the window’s lip – Gabriel was clinging to the frame by his front claws.
“Gabriel, give me your paw!”
The cat raised a paw – then plummeted.
“No!”
Down the side of the Excelsior Guesthouse her beloved sidekick, her companion through a thousand adventures, dropped!
Gabriel landed (it must have been painful) on the flagpole that jutted out from above Mrs Helastroom’s room. The flagpole was already bowing under the weight of three oversized rooks who’d been using it as a perch. The cat’s descent bent it further. Gabriel and the rooks exchanged awkward looks. Then all at once the rooks took flight, causing the flagpole to whip upwards and catapult Gabriel wailing into the air. Molly heard the meow volleying above the roof as Gabriel soared over her head. Whimpering, she sprinted to the other side of the attic, dodging the fallen clock and the smashed table. Hoisting open the opposite window with a mighty grunt, she thrust her fishing net out –
Meeeaaaoooowwww!
– and then into the net the flying cat plopped. With a sob of relief, Molly hauled him back into the attic and tipped him onto the floor.
“Gabriel, how could you have been so crazy?” she wailed. “How did you even get in here? That definitely cost you another one of your lives!”
The cat escaped her as she tried to scoop him into her arms, and he ran for the door, slipping between the legs of the shadow-figure standing there.
It was Molly’s mother.