With a meaty thwack, the ball hit the mother in the temple and she croaked and let go of the kid, reeling drunkenly. Blue bounded up the steps and finished her off with three quick blows. The little girl, meanwhile, was down the stairs like a startled hare and she ran straight into Ollie, who held on to her.

Jackson came down with the other kids.

‘Are you OK, Lettis?’ she said to the little girl and she nodded her head without saying anything. Jackson thanked Ollie, who simply shrugged.

‘We’ve done enough for one night, I reckon,’ said Jackson. ‘I can’t face any more dead meat. We’ll sort the bodies out in the morning. We should all get up into the minerals gallery. We’ll be safe there. But you’ll have to move some more beds in.’

‘Wrong,’ said Achilleus. ‘You are gonna have to move some more beds in. We just saved your sorry arses. We want to be shown a little appreciation, yeah, a little respect.’

With that he stood up, tilted his face towards the distant ceiling and yelled, his voice echoing and unexpectedly loud in the vast, yawning space.

‘Check me, Hogwarts, the SAS have just rode into town. My name is Achilleus. Don’t you never forget it. Achilleus. And I expect to be treated like a king. You get me? I ain’t taking no more crap from anyone. Ever!’

In the darkness of the balcony above, nobody had noticed Justin, the boy in charge at the museum, slip out from his rooms and come to look down at the new arrivals.

He leant on the balustrade and tapped his teeth with a fingernail.

He hoped this wasn’t going to mean trouble.

Chapter 7

7

Ella, Monkey-Boy and Blu-Tack Bill were sitting on a bed, huddled next to each other, their puppy, Godzilla, asleep in Ella’s lap. He was warm and very still, only now and then twitching and shivering. They focused all their attention on him. As long as he was quiet, they could tell themselves that there was nothing to fear. They took turns stroking him, careful not to wake him up.

The local kids had set up a little camp for them inside the minerals gallery. The gallery was divided by two rows of square pillars and between the pillars were long display cabinets full of rocks and crystals and weird lumps of metal. The museum kids had made some of the spaces between the cabinets private by fixing up sheets and screens and walls of plywood and cardboard. A couple of oil lamps and some scattered tea lights gave off a warm orange glow, so that the gallery had the feeling of a sleeping shanty town at night.

Everyone else had settled down, but these three, the youngest of the new arrivals, were too disturbed to sleep and they sat in their makeshift cubicle, whispering in the dark like kids at a sleepover.