Everywhere I ran was just me, only me. No one else there. So. So. So at last I stopped. I was alone, quite alone. In the long distance I heard one last, ‘Closing up!’

And then the noise of doors being shut, of hatches being slammed down, and then hammering, and then nothing, just a distant rumble. I understood it then. The first double doors, where I’d gone out to the courtyard, had broken through, bits of the cellar were being shut up now, they were blocking off the whole stairwell and if you were the wrong side well then, bad luck for you, wasn’t it. I was the wrong side.

That’s why I hadn’t been found. These rooms were empty now, empty of Iremongers who were all thinking themselves safe, barricading all the doors. I couldn’t get out. There was no way to get out. These rooms would be flooded by the heaps any moment. I could hear banging and pelting and smashing and rumbling, and I knew then that those sounds were not the Iremongers battening down the doors. Those were the sounds of the heaps, of the heaps coming in.

Think, Pennant, think you, Lucy, there must be a way.

Loads of them. Loads of them actually. All over the downstairs darkrooms. Fireplaces. Must have been ten of them at least down there. I’d climb up a chimney flue, that’s how I’d get out and get up.

There was a lonely, cold fireplace made of slate, a dismallooking thing, it was in the Prussian Blue Room, where old boots and shoes of London taken from heaps were brought and there cooked up to make the pigment called Prussian Blue. It was a dark, sticky room, all slip and shine and stink, as if the whole place had been lacquered and quite japanned over.

The Prussian Blue Room had such a sharp stench, like swimming in vinegar. I stood by the miserable fireplace. Its big mouth was wide open. Well then I let it swallow me, eat me up. In I went, in and up, between the walls, within the house.

Not much to see. Not much to breathe. No light, none at all. Slow progress. Cut all over. But shunting upwards, small ledges in the brick to scratch onwards with bleeding fingers. Storm noise whistling down from above, trying to spook me. A long wail, very human sounding, as if there were a broken woman stuck and screeching above me, wedged in the chimney.

‘Shut it,’ I said.

‘Whoooooowheeeeeeeee!’ came the answer.

‘Don’t scare me.’

‘Whooooowheeeeeeeee!’

It did.