‘I’m your friend, Paul,’ it said. ‘Your only friend. And I’m going to help you, you miserable piece of dog dirt.’

‘How do you know my name?’

‘Don’t be stupid. I’ve always known it, snot-for-brains. I know everything about you. We’re the same, you and me. We’re predators.’

‘What do you want?’

The creature tilted its head, studying Paul. It laughed, the sound splashing inside Paul’s head.

‘Surely the question is What do you want?, my darling.’

‘I don’t know what I want. Leave me alone.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘No.’

‘You want to clean this museum, Paul. Get rid of the filthy kids. Now that you have a proper knife it’ll be easier. Isn’t that why you took it? Isn’t it, you pussy maggot?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘You have to do it, Paul.’

‘Yes.’

The bony thing was right in front of him now, the size of a dog. It reminded Paul of photographs he’d seen after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, of rescued pelicans covered in black slime.

‘I’m trying,’ he said. ‘I let the sickos out.’

‘You have to try harder, you useless little tit. How many of the bloody kids do you think will be alive in the morning? Will the sickos get them all, or will they fight back?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I don’t know … You don’t know anything, do you? When it’s light you need to go and take a look, finish off any of the brats who are wounded.’

‘Yes. Yes, I will.’

‘You can’t go to the palace until your work here is done. You understand me? You have to make sure that all the kids are gone. Then the museum will go back to what it was meant to be – a place for dead things, like me … seventy million of them. And when you have finished there will be more. More dead things. You can lay the kids out on display. The dead kids. Your collection.’

‘Yes …’

Paul swallowed. The bony thing, Boney-M, was almost upon him. He could smell it. It stank of death and decay. He fought off the urge to be sick. Closed his eyes as the obscene thing came right up to his face, probing with its tongue. He could feel its breath, on his mouth, his neck. Hear the creaking of its leathery joints. He flailed out with his free hand to push it away, but he felt only empty air.

His eyes snapped open.

It was gone.

He scurried over to where he had first seen it below the window, trying to find it. But there was nothing there except the half-decayed body of a dead pigeon.

He could hear Boney-M’s voice in his head, though. Laughing …

Chapter 9

9

‘The ones in here are for laying eggs and the ones in the pen over there are for breeding. We always need more chickens.’