Almost six-fifteen in the morning by now. Things felt wrong. The air was warm and windy, but the breeze sounded low to the ground, as if hunting something. Where was Whizzy? Hadn’t she waited for me? At Malusky’s Corner I looked behind me. Usher’s Place seemed far away. The sky was huge and I felt tiny.

And then I saw her near the bottom of Raven’s Rise, spiralling along close to the ground. I started running.

‘Whizzy!’

She whizzed on ahead of me and I had to run flat out.

‘Please wait! Whizzy!’

She did. She stopped outside the big house next to the bus stop and stretched herself up to about fifty feet tall. She was as thin as a piece of spaghetti and her insides glowed deep orange, and I lost my breath for a second – the sight was mind-blowing. Then she streamed off again towards Halfway Lane. I lost her, but surely she was going to Ash House.

I was at the turn-off to Halfway Lane when the first lights arrived in the sky. To begin with, I thought they were twisted shafts of very bright sunlight, but then the lights came together into one thick stem – and yes. It was Whizzy. And she was huge. Bigger than I’d ever seen her, and spinning herself around something. Something dark.

It took me a while to realise she was moving away from me. Away from Ash House. I kept my eyes on her until she was a tiny bright dot in the distance.

The white walls of Ash House glowed greyish in the strange early light, and the windows looked like black holes. I shivered.

The Bentley was still in the drive. The trees on the edge bent towards the house in the wind, and wisps of smoke curled around the side wall. I ran towards them, heart thumping wildly.

‘Mr Clemm?’

I shouted it again and rounded the corner to more smoke, coming from the cellar, through the grate at ground level. Thick, grey, loads of it, puffing out like someone was blowing it from the inside. Like the picture Whizzy had shown me on my phone.

I screamed Mr Clemm’s name again and hammered on the back door, then the front door. In the silence that answered me, and even over the sound of the wind, I could hear crackling. I called the emergency services, then ran away.

I ran till I couldn’t feel my feet. The wind was against me, blowing back towards Ash House, so I had to fight to run. Wind clogged my ears, but it didn’t stop me from hearing the explosion behind. I turned. Ash House was flaming along the wall closest to the trees.

Massive sobs broke out of me then – the kind where you gulp and gulp and every breath makes another sob. I had to stop running and bend over.