'And they'll send what,' said Mr Garforth, 'twenty men? How long d'you think they'll take to get there two hours, three? What chance have twenty coppers got against an army?'

'Well, what should we do, then?' She slammed her palms into the side of the table, shoving her chair back. One of the legs caught a loose tile and the whole chair tipped; she dismounted and it clattered to the floor. 'What should we bloody do?' She kicked the chair and it skidded a couple of feet. She kicked it again. Several of the Little Gentlemen curled into spheres. 'While we're just sitting here, they're killing everyone and my parents are dying, they're dying and you won't even ring for a policeman!' She brought both fists down on the table. 'Damn you!' She kicked the chair again and this time it bounced, a leg snapping off, rolling to the foot of the fire. 'Damn you, you stupid old man!' She looked down at her hands. They were filthy, covered in tiny cuts. She was breathing fast. Her fingers felt numb.

'That's it,' she said. Florescent streaks ebbed in her peripheral vision. 'I'm getting my gun and I'm going back.'

'No you're bloody not.'

'Watch me.'

'Don't be selfish. You'll get killed.'

'If Daddy's dead I don't want to live any more. I just want revenge.'

'You're a child.'

'I'm thirteen.'

'Exactly.'

She took a couple of quick, shuddery breaths.

'Mr Garforth. I am going to fetch my gun and my hook and my good boots, then I'm going to walk back to the Hall and start killing.'

Mr Garforth slipped his rough hands together, rested his chin on his knuckles. 'How quick can you reload a shotgun?'

Delphine shrugged. 'About five seconds.'

'I reckon that's about how long you'll live.'

'Then . . . well, fine.' She folded her arms, glared into the fire.

'So you're happy to die, just like that? For nothing.'

The dying embers looked like a distant shining city on a hill, covered with snow.

'Yes.'

'I don't believe you.'

'Well.' She inhaled, tried to get the tremor out of her voice. 'I'm going anyway. So if you don't want me to die, you'd better come up with a better plan.'

The cottage was silent, save for the plop and trickle of proboscises.

'I have a better plan,' he said.

She looked at him over her shoulder. 'I'm listening.'

When Mr Garforth was finished, Delphine squatted on her hams amongst the Little Gentlemen. She dunked a finger in the sugar water and sucked it.

'All right,' she said.

'Not now.'

'What do you mean? I thought you said '

'The deal is . . . ' He lowered his voice. 'The deal is: you rest and you eat and then you decide.'

'I've decided. I want to go now.'

'You don't get to go now. For starters,' he jabbed a thumb at the window, 'there's a big ball of fire in the sky that makes little girls very easy to see.'

'But '

'I'll tell you what I think: doing anything but running away from here as fast as you can is madness, and it'd be a terrible sin, bad as murder, if I let a child give her life so cheaply, without at least trying to make her see sense.'

Her chest clenched. 'I've made up my mind.'

'Then you've nothing to fear from a little more considering.' He gripped the back of his chair and began to get up. 'Best-rested is best army you know that, don't you? Can't fight tired, can't fight hungry. Besides, if you want to do it proper, our friends here need time to do some spying.' He gestured at the lumps of living crimson armour.

'If it's too dangerous for me to go in daylight, why is it okay for them?'

Mr Garforth folded his arms. 'Gentlemen.'

The scarab-creature by Delphine's foot stood. Its dark red proboscis extended and started to vibrate, sending up a high, oscillating drone until it began to blur. The other scarabs rose and joined in. Delphine felt the buzz in her nostril hair, down the nape of her neck. She stepped back. The pale fluid in the creatures' eyes grew agitated; it began fluxing green, turquoise, magenta.

'What's happening?' said Delphine but Mr Garforth shook his head.

Flamelike, the blurring spread from each creature's proboscis, over its hinged mandibles, across its glowing eyes, its banded thorax, its spindly arms, the glossed maroon plates of its carapace. With each creature, the last things to be consumed were the bristled hooves of its feet, hooked foretalons smearing, fading.

The Little Gentlemen had not disappeared. They were enveloped in a kind of heat haze. Trying to focus on them made her eyes go funny. They were burgundy smudges, fragments of boulder glimpsed through steam.

'You see now why everyone and his horse wants them as spies,' said Mr Garforth. 'They know the tunnels, the secret passageways, the nooks, the dark spots places I doubt even a busybody like you's managed to unearth. They'll tell us how the land lies.' He ambled to an old pine cupboard. 'If you're still certain when the time comes, I'll do everything I can to help you. I'll lay down my life beside yours. That's my word.'

'Thank you.'

'Don't thank me.'

'I'm going to fetch my gun,' she said.

'Can't do that. They might have left lookouts.'

'They don't know these woods. I do.'

'Still.' The cupboard squealed as he opened the doors. 'If you get spotted, that's it, we're jiggered.' When he turned round he was holding a double-barrelled shotgun. 'Here.'

She accepted it. The muzzle was extended and slightly tapered.

'Nice.'

'Good goose gun, that,' he said. 'Full choke in the right barrel, half in the left. Throws a tight pattern at range. If you must go out and clear your head, head down towards the beach. I 'spect they won't have come that far, not out in the open.'

She broke the barrel and two cartridges popped from the breech, clattering across the tiles.

'Jesus. It's loaded.' She pushed them back into the breech and shut the gun: chuk.

Mr Garforth looked at her.

'May God forgive me.'

CHAPTER 24.

SO MUCH FOR OPERATIONS IN SALT-MARSHES.

Delphine gazed out across the acres of mud and flooded trenches. She thought of the Battle of Albert almost 20,000 British men killed in a single day. What was her life against all of theirs?

She glanced at the shotgun, cold and cumbersome in her grubby hands. Mr Garforth was right she was an idiot for wanting to go back there, for thinking she could make a difference. Dr Lansley had thought he could fight them had shown more bravery than she would have ever imagined and look how he'd finished up. Even wily old Propp had lost in the end.

She spat. Pink, coppery phlegm fizzled in the dirt. Terns swept past the sun, shrieking.

In The Art Of War, Sun-Tzu said: 'If forced to fight in a salt-marsh, you should have water and grass near you, and get your back to a clump of trees.'

Staring over the shining, treeless expanse, Delphine thought what stupid advice this was. How could you not be near water and grass on a marsh? And how were you supposed to get your back to a clump of trees when there weren't any?

She and Professor Carmichael had argued in roistering, passionate volleys over Sun-Tzu's reputation as a master strategist. The Professor had said that all modern military tactics were footnotes to Sun-Tzu. Delphine had said she didn't care, that Sun-Tzu was an idiot who said vague, obvious things like 'don't be too hasty, but also don't be too cautious', and why didn't he explain how to dig a pit trap so soldiers fall into it, or how to train hawks to drop vials of acid on enemy generals, or how to fight with blades attached to boomerangs. The Professor had said he didn't think they had boomerangs in Ancient China. Delphine had said that wasn't the point the point was it was stupid, boring book.

Professor Carmichael was probably dead now. Mrs Hagstrom too. She had watched them drop to their knees in a gale of black wings. What about Daddy, and Mother? Were they slumped against a wall somewhere, run through on javelins, heads hanging slack and grey, their hair matted with blood?

If she returned to Alderberen Hall, she would die.

She had seen the size of the swarm rising above Prothero Wood. There had to be more than a hundred of them. And who was that figure in the bone-white plague mask, the one standing in the door when Dr Lansley had been shot?

What had Daddy said about Mr Kung? The balance of his mind was upset. And so he had walked willingly into the sea, thinking he could travel to another realm.

Perhaps it had finally happened, just as Eleanor Wethercroft and Jacqueline Finks-Hanley and Prue Dunbar had said it would. Perhaps she had snapped. There had been no monsters. Daddy and Mother were safe. Dr Lansley was still alive.

But if she had imagined it all, where had she found the double-barrelled shotgun? She closed her eyes and pushed the thought away.

Behind the sound of her breaths and the rush of the sea rose another sound. A familiar sound. A sound that made her breath catch in her throat.

Ticking.

She wheeled round, scanning the sky. To the east, behind a poplar windbreak, a dark shape climbed in a slow, thumping spiral.

Delphine half-ran, half-fell into the trench. Freezing water splattered up her legs.

No, no, no . . .

She pressed herself to the trench's gooey wall and peered over the top. The thing was still there. It was using the heat from the cornfields to gain altitude. Any moment it might break back towards the Hall, or strike out northwards, over the marshes.

It's not real . . . it's not real . . .

A pulse galloped in her ears. It looked real. It sounded real.

But if this monster was real, then all the others were too. Daddy and Mother and the Professor and Mrs Hagstrom and Miss DeGroot were in mortal peril. Dr Lansley was dead.

If it was real, she could kill it. That was the final test.

She slipped her finger over the trigger. Terns screamed. The monster continued to rise.

The girl with the gun crouched waiting.

INTERLUDE 2.

Gideon smelled lemons again.

He pushed twists of tissue paper up his nose and pressed on with his painting, angry at the intrusion. It was all in his fancy.

The attic made a better studio than the stables. More compact. More focused. He added a little more dark sienna to the blue he was layering up on the cell floor. A splodge of Chinese yellow clung to the corner of the palette like pus squeezed from a boil. Perhaps that was where the scent of lemons was coming from. No. Don't be stupid.

The electric bulb dangling from a low rafter picked out the ridges of his brushstrokes, patterning the canvas with little glowing 7s. It reminded him of the evening sun bronzing the sea in Valencia, the rumbling wagons heaped with lemons, the feel of cool dimpled skin beneath his fingers, hitching a ride up into the hills with his easel and a couple of cocas wrapped in wax paper and a flask of iced tea. Lizards basking on hot flat rocks, shadows oozing from the silver lime trees. The blood-drenched sunset. The suffocating stars.

Enough. He sipped his tea. His lips puckered.

A phrase from Debussy's Preludes was repeating in his head. Was it in his head? Perhaps Mr Propp was playing piano downstairs.

Gideon tore up more tissue paper and plugged his ears. There, that was better. He massaged a crick in his neck. He rolled a cigarette.

He thought he felt an impact through the floor. Just a door slamming. He closed his eyes. Deep inside his stopped-up head there was only him and the thunder of blood.

He smoked his cigarette and the attic filled with oily meshes. The tobacco made his pulse race and he returned to the canvas with vigour.

Through tissue-blocked ears he was sure he heard gunshots. Was everything all right downstairs? He pushed the question aside. Dr Eliot said that phantom sounds and smells were like uninvited guests: greet them with a smile, but don't offer them a room for the night. When they see that they're not welcome, they'll leave of their own accord.

Gideon wiped a hand across his mouth. He could feel gems of perspiration clinging to his top lip.

Dr Eliot had said he was to do mental arithmetic whenever he felt his mind was out of balance. Dr Eliot said simple exercises helped to restore order. Mathematics took as its focus objective truth, and truth was axiomatically the highest form of mental health. Try reciting your multiplication tables, he said.

Gideon squinted at the canvas and saw 7s. Every brushstroke was a 7, the angle of the painted window frame was a 7, the fallen woman's hair was a writhing carpet of tiny tessellating 7s.

He multiplied 7 by 7 and got 49. If you rotated the number 4 clockwise by 45 degrees, it was two 7s mirroring each other. That made 779. If you subtracted the number of 7s (2) you got 777, the number of God. 49 and 2 was 492. 492 plus 777 equalled 1269. And if you took 1269 from 1935 you were left with the number of the Beast.