Seconds after that, the whole village swarmed up Halfway Lane. OK, perhaps not absolutely the whole village, but most of it. They piled along like a pulsing wave, endless heaps of noisy, nosy people, all goggle-eyed, and all staring past me and Sam, looking for the weather display in Mr Clemm’s garden.

44

Deliverance

27th September

And now I know what Whizzy learned while she was here. She learned that human people are soft things that have to be protected from heat. She learned that they can be transported easily: you lift them by juggling with the weather around them – a bit of warming, a lot of violence, make the wind strong enough to ride. Older people need longer to recover after they’ve been lifted and carried out of danger. If you can take them to very high ground, where hardly any other humans live, they’ll stay safe and no one will bother them.

It happened after Sam went home. Mum came to find me in my room, where I’ve been happy and sad and crying and laughing about Whizzy since yesterday. She had a weird smile on her face – half frightened, half pleased – and I stopped stroking Julia, who was on my knee.

‘What’s up?’

‘Something very strange,’ she said. ‘Very strange. And very good.’

‘What?’

She gulped. ‘It’s Mr Clemm. He’s turned up.’

‘Alive?’

She nodded. I couldn’t speak. My heart thudded and thudded and I thought I might throw up. Turned up. Turned up.

Julia was purring. I confused her by setting her down on the floor in the middle of a loud one, then asked, ‘How?’

Mum shook her head and grinned like a zany clown. ‘He’s been halfway up a mountain in Scotland! Yeah. I know.’ She shook her head again and again. ‘He’s been out of it, like you. Unconscious, but not in hospital. Badly knocked about, but not burned, and no smoke inhalation, nothing. He’s very chesty, but that’s because he got cold. He’s been holed up in some out-barn with nothing but sheep and owls and goodness knows what. Nobody found him until a nosy hiker saw his coat flapping.’

I stared at her.

‘We should be fuming, shouldn’t we?’ she said. ‘All this trouble, all for nothing. All of it. But I can’t feel anything but relief.’

‘That’s where she took him.’ Up a mountain. I remembered that dark spot with Whizzy wrapped around it, disappearing over the horizon. I imagined Mr Clemm rising through the wind layers with dazzling, brilliant raindrops scattering behind them. Whizzy taking care, travelling further, keeping his soft human body safe. And then coming back across those hundreds of miles. For me.

‘Where is he now?’ I asked.