‘It’s OK,’ whispered James, ‘It’s OK.’ I liked hearing him saying it, though even at the time I knew he didn’t know if it was OK or not. How long had it been? Two minutes? Ten? Or only two seconds? Lana squeezed my hand even harder, her nails digging into me.

That juddering came again, and we changed direction once more.

‘OK, kids,’ said Soldier John loudly. ‘You can get up now.’

James whipped the tarpaulin off and knelt up quickly. Me and Lana were slower, unfurling ourselves uncertainly from the protection of the deck and still holding hands. There, behind us, was the Jellyfish. The people on board were waving madly to us, but the noise of the wind in the sails and the water against the hull meant we couldn’t hear them shouting. I looked for a sign of those deathly, angry tentacles, but there was nothing. They were still waggling back and forth peacefully in the sea. It couldn’t be this easy. Could it?

Kate reached out her hand and I clasped hers too, each of us kneeling silently as we came closer, and closer, to the shore.

The tarmac in front of the row of houses was covered with crispy seaweed and dried debris from the sea. We’d been able to see the shifting sand which covered it in patches, until the wind blew it away, but we hadn’t been able to see that it was cracked, warped, and bending slowly towards the sea. Some of the cracks were larger, and filled with water from the high tides. Even from here I could see that they were like the rock pools I remembered from the old days, full of the gently swaying fronds of red and green seaweed. I wondered if they also had the small, darting fish and the scuttling crabs.

The row of houses behind stood silently with their decaying exteriors, peeling paint, and dark windows. Although they looked much as I had imagined them, closer up it was hard to avoid the feeling of life, of being watched, and the ghostly remnants of a mysterious society. The windows stared, gaping tears in the face of the grey pebbledash house fronts. The glass was broken in most of them now, jagged splinters slowly eating and shredding the few tattered pieces of curtain which still hung limply from the window frames. There was nothing moving up there, but I didn’t like the feeling there could be hidden things behind those walls. Where had those kriks gone?

‘We’re gonna ’ave to let down the sail now,’ said Soldier John. ‘’Elp me, James.’

Beneath us were dark shapes patterned in straight, organized lines in the water.

‘Were those houses too?’ said Kate.

‘Yes,’ said Soldier John. ‘Grab an oar each and get ready to push us away from them if we get too close.’

‘How far out do the underwater houses go?’ Kate asked.