Really, I ought to have asked why rather than what. I could see plainly enough what he was doing. He was eating his pet snails. The crunching sound I’d heard was their shells breaking between his teeth. Charlie jerked round at my voice. Tears were streaming down his cheeks, and there was a terrible look of shame on his face as snail juice dribbled down his chin. 247

“I don’t want to!” he wailed, bits of shell falling from his lips. “I don’t want to eat them! But I’m so hungry!”

Suddenly I remembered how he had tucked into the food during our picnic and that time he had asked me to bring him a ham sandwich in the middle of the night, and I realized that the food itself wasn’t the problem – it was being in the kitchen. My eyes went to the tank, but I saw that it was empty. He’d already eaten all the other snails.

“Look, I’ve got some crisps and chocolate bars in my room,” I began. “Would you like—?”

That was as far as I got before he leaped to his feet and rushed past me, straight into my room. As I followed him in, he was already grabbing the snacks from my bag and tearing into them.

I let him eat in silence for a few minutes. Then I said, “Once Dad and your mum are out of the kitchen, do you want me to go and make you a sandwich and sneak it up here? Perhaps a couple of biscuits too?”

His face brightened and he nodded eagerly. There was some colour returning to his cheeks already.

“All right,” I said. “I can talk to your mum 248tomorrow too and persuade her that you should have your food somewhere else. You won’t have to eat in the kitchen again. But Charlie, I’m only going to do that on one condition. You have to tell me why you don’t want to be in there.”

His face fell, and he immediately started shuffling his feet and avoiding my eye.

“It’s your choice,” I said. “But if you don’t talk to me then I’m not fetching you that sandwich.”

“It’s not the kitchen,” Charlie said miserably. “It’s the room underneath.”

“You mean the basement?”

Charlie nodded. “Something happened in there,” he whispered. “Something bad.”

“Is this to do with the secret friend you told me about?”

Charlie glanced at the doorway, as if afraid there might be someone there, watching us. Then he looked back at me and said in an even softer whisper, “There’s a boy. In the lighthouse. With us.”

Rosie’s voice echoed back to me.

I think I just saw Charlie in one of the tower windows…