My breath catches.

Another set of human footprints joins up with ours. They’re coming from the tangle of reeds and bulrushes, just upstream. Barefoot footprints, but much much bigger than the boy’s. I fit my trainer inside one. These footprints are massive.

And they’re fresh.

FOOTPRINTS

My blood runs cold.

Ahead of me I can see the footprints running alongside what’s left of mine and Harby’s, right up the beach to the ridge and the forest beyond.

I suddenly remember the shadow I saw when we were sheltering from the storm in Deadman’s Cave. I picture the shadow person in my mind once more; whoever it was ran fast and strong across this beach. There’s someone else in this forest. Maybe it’s someone who could help us? I look at my trainer sinking slowly into the huge deep footprint. Or maybe it’s not.

My mouth is suddenly dry. I schlupp my trainer out of the footprint, staring nervously into the dark trees. Whoever made those huge footprints might still be up there now, in the darkness, out of sight, watching me from the forest fringe.

Harby comes out from behind the Pinnacle. I watch him in the bright moonlight as he hobbles towards me over the stepping stones, still limping a little from where he hurt his ankle when he fell.

‘Come over here, Harby?’ I say quietly. I want to show him the footprints, see what he makes of them.

But he’s stopped still in his tracks. Wide-eyed and alert, he looks at me; putting his finger to his lips, then to his ear, he points into the trees.

‘What is it?’ I whisper. ‘What can you hear, Harby?’ Weirdly, now I’m almost hoping it is a wolf or a bear he’s heard.

Harby’s eyes widen even more.

Then from somewhere in the dim I hear it too, faint but unmistakeably there, it’s that eerie call I heard before: the bird that sounds like a baby; the baby that sounds like a bird.

‘Mothga!’ we say together. We scramble up the ridge and plunge together into the forest, tearing through the vines and creepers as fast as we can in the direction of the cries.

Thorns rip at my clothes and scratch my skin but I charge on through the knotted green, following the sound of the baby’s cry. I clamber over a fallen log and into a little patch of dappled silver moonshine.

‘Stop!’ commands Harby, by my side. I breathe hard; the air is heady with an almost familiar sweetness. Looking around I see where the smell is coming from: there’s a weird kind of flower growing here, a bit like the wild honeysuckle that swathes through our forest, but these flowers are all massive and speckled and wrong, like tongue-out faces with wavering tentacles. I lean forward, panting softly in the too-sweet air, listening for Mothga’s cry.

Nothing.

‘Mothga?’ I breathe.

Harby doesn’t answer; he’s concentrating hard.

I listen too. We’re at the foot of a huge pale-trunked tree, I stare up through the net of its branches. This tree’s taller than any I’ve ever seen before in the forest, so much taller than even Gabriel’s Oak. My heart pounds. I peer nervously all around us. I imagine faces in the darkness, eyes watching, unseen: wolves, shadow people, bears, babies.