CRUSHED BY FATIGUE, MOLLY SETTLED ON HER bed. But Gabriel, for some reason, decided that it was a good time to sit next to her head and sniff her hair.
“Gabriel, stop being a weirdo!”
Eventually, with her last reserves of strength, she rose and put him out of the room.
“I’m sorry, Gabriel, but you’re going to have to stay out here. That’s an order.”
He paced up and down the corridor outside her room, mewling, but didn’t defy her command.
Molly lay on top of her Dracula duvet, unable to fall asleep. A clammy terror fluttered in her abdomen. She kept hearing noises inside her skull, as though a creepy recording were playing: a clock ticking; dragging footsteps; raspy breathing.
Whispered words.
At some point she heard bells, and then she realized that the telephone was ringing in the scarlet snug down the corridor. Moments later she heard Gabriel hiss, and old Mr Banderfrith banged on the door and shouted: “A call for you! Someone named Lorry!”
“It’s Lowry, Mr Banderfrith,” Molly croaked. “Tell her I’m ill. Tell her I’m dead.”
Banderfrith huffed and plodded away.
Hours passed. After tripping over Gabriel in the corridor, Mum shouted to ask if Molly wanted any dinner, but Molly dismissed her with a few groans.
Outside the window, the day dimmed, diminished, darkened.
And at some strange hour, Gabriel began to wail and scratch at the door, and Molly suddenly found that she had her strength back. Her head felt foggy but her limbs felt vigorous.
Then she heard Lowry’s voice calling to her from the night beyond her windowpane.
She sprang off the bed and crossed the room. Leaning over her desk, she hoisted up the sash and frowned into the grainy darkness. She fumbled in her desk drawer and pulled out her torch. Pointed the beam. It picked out a shape standing beside one of the yew trees in Howlfair New Cemetery.
“Lowry?” Molly hissed.
“Molly, stop blinding me!” Lowry squinted and shielded her eyes from the torch’s light. “Turn that off and get down here now! I’ve been—”
A tidal surge of wind took the rest of her words away, washing them into the foaming treetops. The tree trunks creaked abysmally.
“Lowry, I can’t come down!” Molly rasped into the rustling dark, pocketing her torch. She became aware of scratching at her door. She realized it was Gabriel, frantic to get in. From further down the corridor came a shout – grumpy Mr Banderfrith was barking at Gabriel to shut up. Outside, the winds looped around and came back towards the guesthouse, rattling Molly’s window frame.
She blinked, and as her eyes closed she suddenly saw, floating in the black theatre of her cranium, Benton Furlock’s insipid hand, the fingers fluttering…
The fingers closed in a fist.
Molly gasped. She opened her eyes, forced them to un-blink – and she found to her astonishment that she was sitting on her desk, one leg out of the window.
“Flipping Nora!”
Then, from outside the window, came a call: “Molly, come on! Down the drainpipe!”
Down the drainpipe? What fresh madness was this? How had she got onto the desk? Did Lowry honestly expect her to climb out of her window on a windy night and shimmy down a hundred feet of copper drainpipe to get to a graveyard and—
She blinked again, involuntarily, and again her eyes locked shut; again she found herself trapped inside her cranium with the puffy white hand fluttering, reaching, clenching, pulling at her. And once again Molly wrested open her eyes to find that she had been relocated – for now she was outside the Excelsior Guesthouse, facing the umber wall.
Clinging to a copper pipe!
What the heck was going on?
“That’s it, Molly! Come on!” Lowry sang from the graveyard. “You can do it!”
Am I dreaming? Molly thought frantically. But the cold pipe she was hugging seemed perfectly real against her palms and forehead. Her feet wobbled. Am I being remote-controlled?
Whatever was going on, the only way was down; there was no way she’d be able to hoist herself back through the window.
Get to Lowry. Find out what’s going on. Don’t look down!
Utterly petrified, her feet seeking out the metal braces which held the pipe to the wall, cold winds chopping at her, Molly descended.