At last. AT LAST I see Kat’s hand reach down through a circular opening to pull Karim out, 100 and then she grabs me while he tries to get his breath back. I slam down the lid of the hatch and look around me for something to block it with. We’re in another storage building, surrounded by crates, and Kat is already pushing a couple to me, ready to slide over the lid. We work together, scraping them across the ground and onto the hatch, then we pull Karim up and move to the shed door.

I open the door a crack so I can peer out and try to work out where we’ve ended up.

‘Where are we?’ Karim asks. ‘Please tell me it’s not somewhere creepy.’

I see a couple of other wooden shed-type buildings, surrounded by hundreds of stone statues – everything from naked ladies to crocodiles. ‘We’re either in Medusa’s lair, or we’re at Verge’s.’

‘What the flip is Verge’s?’ Karim says.

‘It’s the garden centre where everyone in Straybridge gets their Christmas trees,’ I say.

‘They have a really nice café,’ adds Kat. ‘Best hot chocolate in town.’

‘Assuming that most of the people in Straybridge are sporelings,’ I say, ‘we can’t risk being seen by 101 anyone. So we find somewhere nearby to hide out and lie low until things have calmed down.’ As much as anything else, we need to rest. Especially Karim – he’s not looking too good.

‘Where, though?’ Kat says. ‘They’ll be searching for us.’

‘Assuming also that there are still some people who aren’t sporelings, they can’t openly hunt us down in public. They’ll have to be careful. If we can find somewhere with good cover, and where we can see people coming, I think we’ll be OK.’

‘I know a place,’ Kat says. ‘The stock shed. Follow me.’

She pulls her hood up and darts out into the daylight, using the statues as cover. With no time to think about it, Karim and I follow. As its December, there aren’t any customers browsing the garden sculptures, so we cover a lot of ground quickly, weaving in and out of life-sized hippos and Roman pillars, trying not to knock anything over and start a domino chain of statues crashing into each other. It’s a winding route, so difficult to know for sure, but I think we’re heading for the far corner of the garden centre, furthest from the road where it borders the park.