I had a horrible feeling that my dreams were going to be full of birds for the foreseeable future – if I was ever able to manage to sleep again, after all that I’d learned today.

It was getting late, so I made my excuses to Will and slipped away, back to the lighthouse. As I approached the tall white tower, I knew at once that 227my family were already back. Not only was there a light glowing in the kitchen window of the keeper’s cottage, but Charlie was hanging from his bedroom window again, throwing out more paper.

He saw me as I got closer and immediately disappeared but there was paper flying about everywhere, all with bright smudges of crayon on them. He was ripping up his own drawings again. The gannets were swooping through the debris eagerly. Perhaps they thought the paper was food – many of them were gobbling down the little shreds, while others were flying off with bits of paper lodged in their beaks.

After what I’d seen on the clifftop, I didn’t want to be around those birds for long, so I hurried inside. Dad and Kate must have only just got back because they were organizing their equipment in the entrance hall. I said hello and then headed straight upstairs to Charlie’s room.

His door was closed, and there was no reply when I knocked, so I opened it, only to be met with an alarming scene. Every single inch of the walls was covered in crayon drawings. Not only that but they were stuck all over the floor and the ceiling as well. 228There must have been hundreds of them. When had Charlie had time to do these? And how had he got them on to the ceiling? My brother was tearing round the room like a little tornado, snatching up the drawings and scrunching them in his fists. There was a sort of wild panic in his eyes, and he looked a bit sick.

“Charlie, what is this?” I asked, walking in and closing the door behind me. “Why are you ripping up your pictures?”

I looked at the nearest wall properly then and realized that the childish drawings were all like the one I’d found outside my bedroom the other day. They were filled with gannets but the birds weren’t just flying around – they were attacking people. You could tell by the screaming mouths of the little stick people, who were also waving their arms over their heads, and the stark red blood splatters that filled the air. A couple of the gannets were flying off with an ear or a finger.

I thought of the bird attack from that afternoon, and the gash on my arm throbbed.

“Why have you drawn the birds like this?” I asked.

“They’re not my drawings!” Charlie exclaimed, 229echoing what he’d said that morning.

“Well, whose are they then?”