Kenny barked out a laugh. “You mean the skin and, er, bits of bum?” he said.

“No, just the hole.”

“How can that be? You mean just the air where it was? How would you find it?”

“Because it’s your bum hole,” I told him. “It’s black and it smells.”

And then I couldn’t keep it up any more and I started laughing. Kenny joined in, and this time he managed to give me a good shove and I fell on my arse in a drift.

Eight

Eight

A bit later, Tina stopped dead and refused to budge. Kenny tried to pull her along, but she dug her feet in the snow.

“I think she’s too tired to walk,” Kenny said.

“Come here, then, girl,” I said, and picked her up. She was shivering but felt warm against my freezing hands. She was only a little dog and no effort at all to carry.

We came to another wall. This one was higher than the first, and I wasn’t sure I could climb over it while carrying Tina.

I looked along the length of it.

“There. There’s a gate,” I said.

We walked to the gate and scrambled over it. It seemed easier than scraping the gate open over the frozen ground.

We clumped down together on the far side, and then Kenny let out a scream of wild terror. He began to run at an angle across the field. At the same moment, I saw a flash of black fur, pointed claws and burning red eyes. The gytrash was upon us – I knew it, even though I’d thought it was just a stupid legend and that the gytrash didn’t live anywhere apart from in old books. I dropped Tina, her barks and my screams joining with Kenny’s. And I ran like a madman to catch up with him, Tina frantic at my ankles, the lead still attached to her collar and bouncing along after her.

Then I heard the unearthly sound of some wild thing and glanced behind me, still half expecting to see the slobbering gytrash bounding towards us.

Three or four black sheep bleated in alarm and skittered away from us along the line of the wall. Tina growled at them as they vanished into the whiteness. I thought she was going to chase them, so I grabbed her lead.

“Kenny, it’s just sheep!” I cried out, my words breaking up into laughter. Kenny ran on a bit more, then stopped and turned, and I caught him up. We were both totally out of breath.

“Just. Sheep. Kenny,” I panted.

“Yeah, I knew,” he lied, and we both laughed again.

“Don’t tell anyone we ran from the sheep,” Kenny said.

“Not likely,” I said. “I screamed louder than you did!”