‘Oh no, oh no.’

‘What’s happening, Lally?’ Alice screamed again. ‘I’m getting squashed.’

The ceiling. The bed had floated to the ceiling. Again, her mind told her this could not be true. The room could not be filling with water. It was not possible. Harriet fought to keep her voice calm.

‘Lay flat, Alice. You mustn’t get in the water. Lay flat.’

She squeezed her eyes shut against the horrifying blackness, then dived, Alice’s sobs fading behind, for the door. She found the doorknob and tugged at it. It slid from her grasp.

She swam up to touch the ceiling inches above her head. She took a breath of thick, rotten air, dived again, found the doorknob, twisted it and pulled. Nothing.

The window! She would smash the glass, release the deluge into the street. But the blackness was complete. If this room was underwater, so was the world outside.

She swam back up. Only a sliver, a thin crack, of air remained. She gasped, once, and clamped her lips together, clawing at the ceiling as the waters closed over her face.

Chapter 11

Silas was close enough to see the beast’s eye roll in its socket as they were carried helplessly along. A horse. It was going to kill him.

Silas’s naked body was being scraped against the stone wall, the animal’s muscular flank crushing his ribs, its long head too close to his, its lips peeled back in terror to reveal large teeth. Silas’s shirt and vest had been torn from his body by the iron rails of the steel works gate. He didn’t know when his trousers, stockings and drawers had been yanked away, but it might have been in the whirlpool of debris that had flung him against this wall. Now he would be crushed to death by this hysterical animal. He was going to die in this churning inferno, drowned before his life had even got started. The realisation deadened his panic and Silas was overcome by sadness.

He rose up a little in the water as the horse pushed against him. Stupid creature. Desperate creature. Silas’s head was out of the water, but he couldn’t breathe. He would suffocate. The stones of the wall were smearing the skin off his chest. It didn’t matter about his nakedness, not now the end of the world had come.

Shandy had been right to try to turn him back from this town after all. Was she in this whirlpool? Never try to rescue a dog from the water, his mother always insisted. The dog will eventually find a bank to scramble up, but you won’t. You’ll be carried off. Stay away from the river. He’d seen a river burst its banks before. Nothing like this. Perhaps the deluge had dropped from the sky. Judgment day. The end of the world. Or perhaps it was some sort of flash flood, a broken pipe, and if he wasn’t to be squashed to a pulp against this wall he’d be carried back to dry land. What if everybody he knew was caught up in an endless wave? Noah’s Flood. Somewhere, a giant Ark bucked and swayed, but Silas was not one of the chosen ones. His mind churned in endless circles and he sucked in each breath convinced it would be his last.