It happened like this. For a while we heard nothing from the steeple or from outside. Aiyshah and Scott had been waiting at the church doors, peeping out, ready to open them wide when the children were ready to come back in. They were by the church doors and guarding them. I’m sorry, I think I already wrote that – I don’t have time to check and make corrections.

At first the two door guards were giggling and laughing a bit, sort of overexcited like primary school children, turning their scaredness into laughter as if it might protect them. They were joking, saying they had seen something, and making each other jump and then cursing like mad. And then after a while one of them, Aiyshah, said no, she really had seen something and Scott mocked her and carried on messing about and teasing, but she got quite agitated and kept saying it over and over and saying ‘no, look!’ and pointing, and in the end Scott saw it too and they screamed and slammed the doors shut.

Caspar asked them what they had seen and they weren’t completely sure, but they were fairly sure it was sickos, three of them, in a pack, all dirty and muddy and brown, coming out of the trees. Now the children inside the church really were scared and they were running around, and Daryl came down from the tower and asked what was going on. ‘Didn’t you see it?’ said Aiyshah. ‘There were three sickos coming.’ Daryl said he hadn’t seen anything, he had been too busy watching the children who were trying to dig a hole for the grave. They were still talking about it when we all heard a sort of rattling and a scratching and banging at the door. Aiyshah shouted out to see if it was other children. We heard no voices back only the rattling and scratching.

We told Daryl to go back up on to the steeple and see what was happening and warn the others, and then we did hear voices outside, and shouting.

‘We have to open the doors,’ said Aiyshah, ‘to let them back in. We can’t leave them out there with sickos.’

‘But if we open the doors the sickos will get in,’ said Caspar, who is more frightened than the rest of us because he is already wounded, and can’t walk easily.

There were voices all talking over each other now, Caspar saying things like, ‘We need to be ready for them.’ And Scott saying, ‘Are you sure there were only three?’ Nobody really wanting to know the truth.