He wondered why the kids in the kitchen hadn’t put it back in place.

There were other questions nagging at him, but he was too panicked and desperate for this to be a place of safety to think about them too closely. He followed the others down the hallway into the kitchen.

The first thing he noticed was that the room was totally rammed with junk. There were teetering piles of saucepans and frying pans and dirty plates, bin bags bursting, overflowing with rotten food, as well as toasters, microwaves, scales, deep-fat fryers, mixers, juicers … Every appliance you could imagine was stuffed in here, like a junkyard. And not just kitchen equipment – there were things that shouldn’t have been in a kitchen: Hoovers, TVs, bicycles, footballs, golf clubs, clothes, musical instruments, books and magazines, garden tools. It was as if someone had taken the contents of every house on the street and emptied them all into this room. You could barely move.

The next thing Felix noticed was that the three kids at the kitchen table were dead. And worse. Mutilated. One of them, the boy who had appeared to be waving at them, had been torn in half, so that his body was missing from the waist down, and he had been plonked in the chair on the bloody stump of his torso. The waving arm didn’t belong to him at all, but had been ripped from one of the other kids, a girl, and stuck upright in a heavy milk jug on the table. Felix’s brain started turning fast. There were no signs of decay, which meant they hadn’t been dead long, which meant that whoever had done this to them might still be around.

Felix clamped his hand to his mouth to prevent himself from gagging and spoke through his fingers.

‘Oh, man, this is whack,’ he moaned. ‘We got to get out of here.’

‘We can’t.’ Courtney was at the window, crouched down and staring out. As the others saw her, they instinctively ducked down also.

‘They’ve come. There’s loads of them in the street.’

DogNut crept over to join her, walking bent double.

‘Shit. D’you think they know we’re in here?’

‘I don’t think so. Not yet.’

DogNut could just see what was going on outside. There were indeed about thirty sickos there, spread out and shambling aimlessly around. One or two had their heads tilted back as they sniffed the air.

‘D’you reckon they can smell us?’ he whispered.

‘With this stink in here? Who knows?’

‘There must be a back way out,’ said Felix. ‘A posh place like this will have a garden of some sort. Must do.’

‘Yeah.’ DogNut and Courtney moved away from the window and joined the others. They were all trying not to look at the dark shapes of the dead kids at the table.

They moved back into the hallway and headed towards the back of the house. Olivia was sobbing and snivelling, making little whispering noises. Marco pulled Felix aside and punched him in the arm.

‘You was gonna leave her,’ he hissed, letting the others go ahead.

‘Shut up,’ Felix replied.

‘No, you shut up. We stick together. We’re a team. We look out for one another. We all got to know that. Or none of us is gonna feel safe.’

‘Yeah, dickface, cos, like, I feel really safe right now,’ said Felix sarcastically. ‘We’re in some kind of house of horrors here with an army of sickos outside and it’s night time, and I can’t see a sodding thing, so, yeah, safe!’

‘Shut up.’

‘No, you shut up.’

They soon discovered that the garden at the rear of the house was lower than the street level. One floor down.

‘There’ll be a back door downstairs, probably,’ said Finn.

‘Yeah, and what else is down there?’ said Felix.

‘Shut up, Felix.’

‘You shut up, Marco.’

The stairs leading down to the basement were dark. DogNut fished a torch out of his pocket. He reckoned he could risk switching it on as it wouldn’t be visible from the street back here. Even so, he shielded the beam as he pressed the button and then moved quickly to the top of the stairs. They could see straight away that there was an even worse jumble of stuff in the basement than there was up here; even the stairs were piled with junk.

The torch beam was dancing about all over the place and DogNut realized he was shaking badly.

‘Come on,’ he said, trying to hold his voice steady.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Courtney. ‘Someone messed up those kids in the kitchen. What if they’re down there?’

DogNut hauled out his sword. It would be hard to use it in these cramped conditions, but it gave him confidence.

‘Any sicko down there is gonna get owned,’ he said, and set off, the rest of them crowding behind him.

The chaos at the bottom was unbelievable. Like the hallway, there were books and magazines and old newspapers piled right up to the ceiling, leaving only a narrow tunnel between them, giving the effect of being in a maze. DogNut crept cautiously ahead and as he turned the first corner he fully expected to see some kind of monster waiting for them. All he found, though, was another short length of tunnel, and another corner to turn.

There were black smears along the walls where someone had repeatedly passed by. Someone large and dirty.

DogNut took a deep breath through his mouth and pressed on.

As they explored further, they discovered that there were little pockets of space carved out of the stacks, like rooms within rooms. One was obviously used as a toilet, the floor was thick with excrement and filthy shredded paper. Another had piles of bones and half-eaten body parts in it, another was, weirdly, full of toy cars. Hundreds of them. One room contained hundreds of CDs and DVDs.

Felix was getting hysterical. This house was crazy.

‘I didn’t think anyone collected CDs any more,’ he giggled. ‘I thought everyone downloaded everything these days.’

‘Shut up, Felix,’ said Marco, though he was laughing too.

They realized that the maze extended under several houses, where holes had been knocked through the walls, and they soon lost all idea of where they were. The likelihood of finding a back door was getting ever more remote. Finally they reached the end of the maze where they discovered a sort of den, with a greasy sofa that had long since collapsed, a huge flat-screen TV and a desk with several computers on it. There were no windows, though, or doors, no way out other than back the way they had come. The kids were so disorientated now they had no idea which way the garden might even be, so there was no point in attempting the dangerous work of burrowing through one of the precarious walls of paper.

‘I guess we’ll have to go back upstairs and climb down into the garden,’ said Marco. ‘I don’t fancy being stuck in this maze when whoever lives here comes home.’

‘I hate this,’ said Olivia.

DogNut had to stop himself from snapping at her, telling her it was her fault they had come in here in the first place. It wasn’t her fault, really, was it? He was in charge. He was a kid, though – kids always tried to blame someone else. His torch beam was zigzagging more wildly than ever, skittering over the details in the den. Landing now on the black stain on the sofa, now on a small human hand underneath the television, now on the broken remains of a Scalextric set, now on an empty bottle of whisky.

The image of the sicko, sitting down here, watching the blank TV and drinking whisky was ridiculous. Ridiculous and creepy.

He clamped his elbow against his side to try to stop his hand from shaking. He hated showing fear in front of the others, but he knew they were all feeling the same. The smell and the lack of air down here was awful.

‘I want to go,’ said Olivia, and she spoke for all of them.

‘We’re going.’

They set off, retracing their steps. At least they knew what to expect on the way out. They hurried through the maze, trying to avoid the filth on the floor.

A few minutes later they came to the top of the stairs and DogNut had to switch the torch off or risk being seen from the street. It must be totally dark outside now. No light came through the frosted glass in the front door.