It was nice on the balcony. Calm and peaceful. Normal. The gardens, though overgrown, looked like any other gardens, a complete contrast to the weird interior of the house.

She knew she couldn’t stay out here, though.

It wasn’t over.

She gulped in fresh air and spat to clear her throat. Turned back to the anxious faces of her little gang. They stood in a line, waiting for their orders.

‘Take a quick look round,’ she said, stepping back in through the broken windows. ‘See if there’s any signs of Olivia. I don’t reckon she’s likely to be up here, but we need to check. Then we’ll work our way down.’

‘And then what?’ asked the museum boy.

‘Then we get the hell out of here, kiddo.’

33

Paul was shaking so much it was almost funny. His whole body was vibrating, his teeth rattling in his skull. He was gripping his knife so tightly in his hand that his fingers were bone white and bloodless. Sweat ran down his arms, under his sleeves, and dripped on to the floor. He was staying next to DogNut, trying to show he was tough, and not fooling anyone. Jackson was a couple of paces behind them, then came Ryan’s hunter and finally Ryan himself, walking backwards, watching their rear. They were in the basement, slowly working their way through the maze. Jackson and DogNut both carried torches. The beams crawled over the paper walls and the soggy floor, occasionally touching on a bone, or a turd, or a scrap of hairy skin, only to skitter away like startled insects.

As they came to each corner, they stopped and DogNut would carefully peer round, trying not to touch the walls if he could help it.

‘This is some weird shit, man,’ muttered Ryan as they came into one of the little hollowed-out antechambers. This one was filled with old radios and tiny broken human skulls. Baby skulls by the look of them.

‘Ryan don’t like this one bit at all,’ he went on. ‘Should have listened to his mum and stayed at home.’

‘You believe me now, yeah?’ said DogNut. ‘I told you this wouldn’t be no primary-school outing, and you ain’t even seen the guy what built this house of horrors yet.’

‘Maybe we should all stop talking and go a little quieter?’ said Jackson, nudging past Paul to join DogNut at the front. ‘Let’s move on,’ she whispered. ‘The quicker we go, the quicker we get this over with.’

Jackson didn’t speak anything like the girls that DogNut had grown up with. She had an unexpectedly posh accent that didn’t go with the face and the attitude. What’s more, she was confident enough not to put on a voice, didn’t have to pretend that she was someone else. DogNut had spent his whole life trying to sound like the black kids on his estate. That was how you talked if you wanted to be cool. He admired Jackson, but she was alien to him and he didn’t really know what to make of her.

Before they moved forward, she shoved Paul back and put him between Ryan and his hunter.

‘You shouldn’t have come down here, Paul,’ she said softly. ‘You’re not up to this. Try to keep out of the way and not get into any trouble.’

‘But I want to kill him.’ Paul’s face was twisted with a mix of fear, pain and anger. Jackson stared at him.

‘Do you really think you could do that, Paul?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘When did you last kill someone?’

‘Never. But I can start now.’

‘I doubt it,’ said Jackson, and before Paul could say anything else she put a hand over his mouth.

‘Nobody’s going to judge you, Paul. Nobody’s going to think badly of you. Let us do it. You just try not to get hurt. That’s what Olivia would have wanted.’

‘I’m going to kill him,’ Paul repeated once Jackson had taken her hand away. ‘And you’re not going to stop me.’

‘OK. But for now stay back here – you’re slowing us down.’

Jackson returned to DogNut and the two of them led the way down the next stretch of passageway.

34

‘We mustn’t let Paul come in here.’

Marco was by the kitchen door, holding it shut. He and Felix had made sure that there was nothing living in the kitchen and had then quickly secured the room in case the Collector was nearby. They had three kids from the museum with them. Two of them looked like they were about to be sick. The third one was actually being sick. He was bent double, throwing up noisily into a bucket of slops. Marco thought it was funny that he had carefully used the bucket so as not to make any mess, when the room was already covered in filth of all kinds.

You had to see the funny side of things or you’d crack. The kitchen looked even worse this morning. The Collector had added to his vile collection of broken bodies around the table and used poor Olivia’s head as a centrepiece. It was almost unrecognizable, one side of it completely caved in. Marco hoped she’d died quickly.

‘Please,’ said one of the other boys. ‘Please let’s get out of here. I can’t stand it. It’s disgusting.’

‘In a minute,’ said Marco.

‘At least we don’t have to look no further,’ said Felix. ‘We know what’s happened to Olivia. Perhaps we should put it in a bag, or something?’

‘Put what in a bag?’ asked Marco.

‘The head,’ said Felix. ‘Olivia’s head.’

‘What for?’

‘I don’t know, to show the others. To show Paul.’

‘He don’t want to see that,’ said Marco incredulously. ‘Why would he want to see that?’

‘It’s proof, isn’t it?’

‘He don’t need proof. We just tell him we found her body.’

‘But we ain’t found her body!’ Felix protested. ‘Only her head.’

‘If you was her brother,’ said Marco, pointing at the table, ‘would you want to see that?’

‘No.’

‘Right.’

‘So what are we going to do with it?’ Felix asked. ‘Maybe we should bury it?’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Marco, with a cutting edge to his voice. ‘A tiny coffin with a head in it. That’ll be lovely.’

‘Marco …’

‘Felix!’ Marco interrupted him. ‘That thing on the table ain’t Olivia. Olivia’s gone and there ain’t nothing we can do about it.’

‘Please, please, please, let’s get out of here …’

Felix turned to the whimpering boy with the expression an adult might make to a baby and grabbed the face of one of the dead boys at the table. He worked the mouth so that it opened and closed like a ventriloquist’s dummy, making it speak.

‘Oh, diddums,’ he said in a grating, comedy voice. ‘Is this all too much for you?’

Then the dead boy’s lower jaw came away in his hand and a shower of rotting flesh and maggots dropped on to the table. Felix threw the jaw away and jumped back, laughing hysterically and wiping his hands on his trousers.

‘You’re sick,’ said the museum kid.

‘No, he’s sick,’ said Felix, pointing towards one of the boy’s friends, who was puking on the floor. He then shifted his attention to the jawless body at the table. ‘But I think this guy is the sickest,’ he said. ‘He really needs to see a doctor.’

‘You moron,’ said Marco. He was torn between laughing and screaming. He knew what Felix was doing. He was trying to avoid the pain and hurt and fear by making a joke of it. None of them could really face what was going on in their world, and they’d all developed their own ways of coping.

But Felix had gone too far. He was really freaking the museum kids out.

‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘Hide Olivia’s head so there’s no danger Paul might see it. Then we’ll search the other rooms on this floor, and please, Felix, don’t think it might be funny to tell Paul about the head. We keep shtum about that. All he needs to know is that we found her body.’

‘Yeah?’ said Felix with mock innocence. ‘Where is it?’

‘Shut it, Felix.’

‘You shut it.’

‘I can’t do it,’ said the museum boy. ‘I can’t stay in here any longer. I want to go outside.’ His face was wet with tears and he was shivering badly.