I shivered. Don’t know why I’m calling it mist, because it was like somebody had dumped a full, soaking cloud on to Ash House and all its grounds. After a few seconds, we could see a tiny bit more: the mist was moving. It travelled across the garden in one thick, chilling mass, making the stacks of mangled metal look even more strange and ghostly. And it was freezing.

The bleating noise got even louder, closer, and underneath it, we heard the rumbling of thundering hooves that couldn’t possibly belong to any animal that bleated. Cows? Horses? Bulls?

‘Come on!’ Sam yelled, and we turned back through everything we’d almost tripped over before, but this time covering the ground with desperate, panicked speed. I stumbled and crashed into Sam, blinded by the mist. He skidded on a fallen branch, and now a new noise blasted the air—

‘Naaaarr!’

—and before I could even blink, they were on us, and they were goats. Only goats. But they were humongous, with long corkscrew horns that stuck up in the air, and they weren’t stopping.

It was ear-shattering.

We sprinted back the way we’d come, but got lost and hit hedge. If there was anywhere to go, we couldn’t see it. The goats closed in. All my breath seemed to stick in my throat.

‘Naaaarr!’

I screamed at Sam, ‘WHAT DO WE DO?’ And he yelled back, ‘SOMETHING MUST BE STALKING THEM!’

How did he know? But a second later, I thought I saw a flash of something extremely fast, whizzing through their feet. There was definitely a whiff of warm rubber in the air.

‘Sam!’ I yelled. ‘I think I saw …’ But it ended in a cough as I got a goat shoulder to the chest.

The goats pushed and pushed till we were rammed against the hedge.

‘Naaaarr!’

‘Stay there!’ Sam bawled.

‘Won’t we get squashed?’

He didn’t answer. It was hard to think about anything but breathing. The goats’ bawling filled our ears. Their footsteps were heavy and panicked. Yellow teeth bared with each vibrating ‘Naaaarr’. Horns thwacked horns, far too close to us and far too colossal – their backs came up to my shoulder – and the air stank of wet goat. I tried to turn, desperate to get my face away from them, and eventually managed to get one arm out to cover my eyes, but it was impossible to move from the neck down AT ALL. We were pinned. The goats pressed us further and further into the hedge, and the sharpest bits of it stuck into our backs and legs. They were crushing us. We were going to suffocate.

My whole face was clammy with sweat. Wet seeped through my jeans. Breath floated around us, mixing with the mist, and – worse – some of them had let loose, in every way.