Bigger than rooms, howling and smashing, many mouths, a thousand thousand things all got together. It was all of the servants’ dining room, the kitchen, the polish room, the cold room, all of those places. A great creature taking over so much space. Hungry for more. So hungry, so hungry. So many mouths, so many dark deep holes in it, eating up. It’ll never have enough. And so sorrowful, so needing, so hurt and wronged, and mad with it all.

Serving Iremongers were about it, prodding it, poking this and that into it, some of them falling into objects even as they laboured, others maybe cutting a few things from it, but only ever angering it more. Wrong to do that, surely, I thought, to upset it so. Iremongers in brass firemen’s helmets with poles and hoses, with ladders trying to climb up it, into what exactly, and losing their grips, falling in, crushed by it. And the noise of creaking and snapping, of the house itself crying for mercy, cracking and breaking under the size of the great creature. The ceiling was breaking, great rents appearing, it will bring the whole house down.

As we came closer, close to that terrible end, we passed the butler’s Sitting Room. Sturridge was in there, he was just standing there. What’s he doing there, just standing like that, great bulk like his, why doesn’t he lend a hand? Then I saw that he was, he was doing his bit. Sturridge was holding up the ceiling, sweating so. Or was he weeping? Couldn’t tell. He had the weight of the house upon him, and was just, just, just keeping it up, what a pillar, what a column!

‘Clod! Clod! Look at me, can you hear me?’ I held his face to me. ‘Listen to me, Clod, if we get separated, if anything should happen, I will find you. Wait for me. I shall find you.’

‘Filth! Gut it out!’

Mrs Groom had seen me now down the cellarway and, raising her great cleaver in one hand, her jelly mould swinging from her belt, rushed at me.

‘Cut you! Cut you!’ she wailed, but then quieter, ‘Cut you?’ as she suddenly flipped over, swung a somersault, and tumbled exactly at my feet, a mere cheese grater, so many sharp holes in it, the cleaver useless beside it. The grater lay over a shoe of mine, I hurriedly kicked it off. Beside her, where her jelly mould might have been, was a fat baby, quiet and naked.

‘Ada Cruickshanks!’ cried Clod. ‘There she goes!’

The matchbox was ahead of us, rushing forward. I tried to catch after it but then suddenly came a terrible sound and I thought the whole house was smashing down.

Screeeeeeeeeech! Screeceeeechh! Scraaaaaaaaaaatch!

What was that? What was that? Even Clod heard that, even Clod turned to that. What was that? What was that?

‘Lucy,’ he cried. ‘Oh no, Lucy, no!’