12

21 September

FIRST THE WHISPERS WERE IN A DREAM. AND THEN THEY weren’t. Tom had no idea when it changed, when he went from dream to real, but one minute he was fast asleep and then he was awake and the dream was slipping away. He thought perhaps there were trees, and something in the trees that was watching him. Maybe there was the church, but definitely whispering. He was totally sure about that. Because he could still hear it.

He sat up. The luminous numbers on the desk alarm clock told him it was 02.53. His parents were never up at this time. They’d be fast asleep, the house closed up for the night.

So who was whispering?

Hanging upside-down, he stuck his head into the space above Joe’s bunk. His brother had his own room, right next door. He kept all his toys in it and played in it a lot, but he never slept there. Every night he climbed into the bunk below Tom’s.

‘Joe, are you awake?’

Even as he opened his mouth he could see that the bottom bunk was empty. The quilt was pushed back and there was a dent in the pillow where Joe’s head had been.

Tom swung his feet round and dropped to the carpet. All seemed still on the dark landing. Three doors were slightly open – the doors to the bathroom, to Millie’s room and to his parents’ bedroom – but behind each door there was just darkness. As he stepped closer to the top of the stairs, a cool breeze swept through the house; the front door was wide open.

Had someone come in? Or gone out?

The top step gave a very loud creak. Half hoping his parents would wake up and hear him, Tom took another step and then another.

Who had been whispering? Where was Joe?

As he reached the bottom step a wind swept past him into the house. Tiny hairs on his arms stood up to make goose bumps. Then the wind was gone and the air was soft and almost warm again. No need to shiver, really, except he couldn’t stop.

He knew he should wake his mum and dad. Joe’s leaving the house in the middle of the night was too serious for him to deal with alone. Except when he and Joe were involved in a scrape, the blame was never shared 50:50. A good 90 per cent of it invariably came in Tom’s direction and the facts of the case were rarely allowed to get in the way. If he woke his parents up now, he knew exactly who would find themselves in the you-know-what the minute Joe was found and returned home.

Tom was going to kill him this time, he really was.

He stepped outside and, for a moment, forgot that he was angry, forgot that he was getting very close to being scared. So this was what it was like then – the night-time – soft and scented and strangely warm, a place where all the colours had gone, leaving black and silver and moonbeams in their place. He took another step away from the house.

Then that feeling began to creep over him again, the one he seemed to get every time he left the house these days. Even inside the house sometimes, especially when it was getting dark outside, it could steal up on him. Some days, it seemed to Tom, the curtains just couldn’t be closed quickly enough in the evening.

Someone was watching him now, he knew it, someone very close. He could almost hear breathing, he just had to hope it was his brother. Tom turned his head slowly towards the corner of the house.

Two large eyes in a pale, flabby face looked back at him. Then they were gone.

Tom ran for the house. In the relative safety of the doorway, he stopped and turned back.

A girl, about his own age if size was anything to go by, was shinning up the wall that separated the Fletchers’ garden from the church land. She climbed quickly, as if she’d done it many times before, long hair trailing behind her and loose clothes fluttering in the breeze. Like Tom, she was barefoot, but her feet were nothing like his. Even at this distance they looked enormous compared to the rest of her. So did her hands.

Then Tom caught sight of something else at the corner of the house, at the exact spot from which the girl had appeared. He was ready to dive indoors when he realized it was Joe, in his red and blue Spiderman dressing gown.

‘What are you doing?’ he hissed as Joe came trotting towards him. ‘Come back inside now or I’m getting Dad.’ Glancing back up towards the church wall, he saw the girl had gone. Really gone, or just hiding? Because that’s what she did. She hid and she watched.

‘We’re not supposed to be here, Tom,’ muttered Joe.

‘I know we’re not,’ shot back Tom. ‘So let’s get back inside before Mum and Dad wake up.’

Joe lifted his head. His eyes looked huge in his pale face. ‘No,’ he said, letting his eyes drift away from Tom to the wall. ‘We’re not supposed to be here,’ he repeated. ‘It’s not safe.’