To my side, I see that Mola has picked up a discarded spear. She holds it in both hands and bares her teeth at the large, hairy man coming towards her, slowly, with a chilling confidence.

‘Mola! Come now!’ Susan cries.

‘No! Run, children, run!’ she shouts.

The big man takes another step and swats aside the spear with a massive hand as easily as if it were a pencil. Mola is defenceless, but stands her ground as the man reaches for her throat with one hand and a stone club with the other, his teeth bared in fury.

Kobi wriggles his hands free from his loosened bonds, smiling his thanks to Seb with a stuck-out tongue before taking the dirk and turning immediately to the one called Erin, beginning to free her in turn. Seb and I start to run, and I am trying so hard to ignore the increasing pain in my croc-bitten leg.

Then Mola is being lifted from the ground by her throat and Susan shouts, ‘Mola!’

At the same time, Mola shouts, ‘Wake up! Wake up!’ and the large man is left clutching at …

Nothing.

Before our astonished eyes, Mola has just vanished from Dreamland. There isn’t time to wonder at this, because the small crowd of Stone Age warriors have decided not to try to fight the mammoth any more, but to run.

And they’re running in our direction.

Chapter 82

I’m still reeling from the disappearance of Mola before my eyes. It was like some awesome magic trick: one second she was there, the next … gone. But I can’t think about it, as Susan, Seb and I run through the trees and out on to a large open plain leading to the river and, beyond, the open sea. We have come in a wide U-shape, and our pursuers are by now a fair way behind us. Far enough, in fact, that we slow down and get our breath back.

‘Look!’ says Seb, pointing at a clifftop ahead of us. ‘It’s the priory, I mean … it’s the cliff where the priory will be.’

He’s right. We’re standing exactly where Tynemouth will be, with its ruined castle and priory on the clifftop. A building that will not be built for something like nine thousand years and will be a crumbling ruin by the time I am alive. But the cliff is more or less the same. To our right is the Tyne river, to our left King Edward’s Bay and, beyond it, the Long Sands and Culvercot – all of them unnamed, at least unnamed in English. Beyond the cliff a massive grey storm is building up.

‘Let’s go to the cliff edge,’ I say. ‘We can climb down to the bay.’

‘And then what?’ says Susan.

‘We’ll get away,’ I say, but I already know what she’ll say next.

‘And then what? You have to make a decision, Malky. This is your dream, remember.’