“What the hell was that?” Erica shrieked “Peter! What's going on?”

  “It is open,” Peter replied.

  “What does that even mean? Sodding great. Mr. Rasmus, wait here with Sarah, I'm going to have a look out the window.” Rasmus held Sarah tightly to his chest and nodded. Erica quickly and clumsily unlaced her boots and tossed them into a heap by the foot of the staircase. She took a deep breath and ran up the hard wooden stairs as fast as her legs would allow, her stockinged feet touching each stair for only a second and carrying her soundlessly to the door. She turned the handle so carefully and slowly that it hardly seemed like the door was going to open at all. Click. First she slid her hand around the side, then slowly widened the gap to allow her head to follow. The house was still and silent and all the clutter and ramshackle decorations lay undisturbed, or at least she thought that was the case – it was genuinely hard to tell at times. Erica slipped out from behind the door and closed it just as carefully as she had opened it. Another deep breath took her upstairs, this time she took two stairs at a time and didn’t slow down for the corner landing.

  ***

  A scarlet trickle snaked its way down Bosco’s forehead, his fur quickly became matted and slick with blood and generally kept his eyes out of the whole sorry affair. Brandon stood in a panicked, breathless silence, his rifle shakily aimed at his target with one hand while he fumbled with a small canteen on his belt with the other. He unfastened the stopper and poured the entirety of the canteen along the length of the barrel, the water vaporised upon contact with the scalding metal. The copper hissed and groaned as it started to crack and contort from the extremes of temperature. He snarled and slammed the rifle to the ground and brought his hand across his chest in a jerky, unpractised motion, to pop open the press-stud that kept his knife in its sheathe. He gripped the hilt tightly and ran at the creature. It took him almost a full second to realise that the bestial snarling he could hear was in fact his own panicked screaming.

  Bosco swiped at the inside of Brandon's arm, the blade carved a neat line up his own as he clasped his fingers around his attacker’s wrist and tightened his grip. Brandon braced his feet and tried to disentangle himself from the creature with little effect. He felt two bones in his wrist break from his own futile effort before the creature further tightened its grip. Another four bones shattered and his hand momentarily went numb, that numbness rapidly being replaced by an agonising chorus of needles as splinters of bone struck his nerves and sent his hand into a violent spasm. Lost inside his own screams and overwhelmed by nausea, he didn't hear the sound of his knife hitting the cobbles as it fell from his grasp. Bosco redoubled his effort and tightened his grip further still and turned his head towards Harry. “Run, hide.” Harry ran backwards and forwards but could decide best where to run, one hand clasped over his mouth to stop the hysterical screams that tried to escape his chest and the other clasped even more tightly over the first in case it had any ideas of its own. Harry ran.

  Bosco clasped his free hand over Brandon's helmet and extended his arm as he surged forward and pulled down on his attacker’s own arm. Brandon’s feet left the ground and his screaming abruptly stopped, the last thought that passed through his mind before his helmet impacted the cold, hard cobblestones and he lost consciousness was, “Bugger.” He wasn't proud of it, but it would have to do.

  “Papa!” Bosco turned towards the cry. He snarled in raw fury as a combination of his own blood and saliva dripped from his face, he looked like a very angry surrealist painting about melted clocks. Edevane pressed the toe of his boot firmly into the diaphragm of the small dog creature, eliciting a pitiful squeak, and trained his rifle directly at its head. He looked towards the snarling, hellish beast and quietly compartmentalised his fear, loathing, and begrudging admiration. “Surrender now, and it remains unharmed. Resist, and regardless of what you do to me afterwards.” He lifted one hand from his rifle and pointed to his forehead. Edevane smiled to himself as the creature slowly put its hands on its head and locked its fingers.

  Martin kicked Brandon in his mangled hand, the young man startled awake with a cascade of muffled screaming and vomiting. He awkwardly unclasped his helmet with his good hand and rolled to his knees, emptying both the remaining contents of his stomach and his helmet out onto the cobbles.

  “If that's the worst you get today, you'll be lucky,” Martin said. “But I doubt it.” Martin grabbed Brandon by the arm and wrenched him to his feet without any particular effort or concern for his well-being. The Private stood shaky-kneed and disorientated, the colour gradually making a return to his vomit-stained face. Brandon shook the vomit out of his short, blonde hair and wiped his mouth with the back of his glove. He was as fresh-faced as the world would allow a twenty-year old to reasonably look these days, but he had aged terribly within the last five minutes. He wasn't dead – regrettable choice, really.

  “Private Brandon, attention!” Brandon straightened his spine and saluted, only hesitating slightly to change from his mangled hand.

  “Sir, yes, sir.”

  “Please help me escort our prisoners to extraction.” Edevane gestured for the large creature to start walking back in the direction of the woods, and in turn the large creature gestured to the smaller one. “Lieutenant Martin,” Edevane said as they slowly filed past him. “There's someone in the upstairs window of the large house. Wait until we're out of sight, then secure the premises.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  Erica stood transfixed in the bedroom window as Harry and Mr. Tirren were escorted out of the village. The weapons the men had were pitifully unreliable, she thought, but still unfairly dangerous. Her initial idea of perhaps retrieving and repairing the broken one was dashed when the man that remained behind picked it up and slung the strap over his shoulder. She watched trepidatiously as he finished his circuit of the village centre and doubled back in her direction, straight for the house.

  She slipped away from the window as slowly and as carefully as she could, a task made more difficult by the multitude of books and pieces of shelving strewn across the floor, and moved towards the top of the stairs. Had someone made a noise in the workshop? Had they come upstairs and been seen. “I bet it's that bloody Peter,” she asserted to no-one in particular. The front door creaked open while Erica stood like a statue atop the stairs, afraid to even breath. Cupboards swung open on creaky hinges and then clicked shut. The man came back past her limited view through the balustrades, a moment later the workshop handle clicked. Erica consciously coughed, then ran back towards the bedroom, her really quite terrible plan had worked terribly well, and the man followed her. He made it to the top of the stairs just in time to see her disappear around the corner and into the bedroom. She ran to the window and reminded herself of exactly how far a drop it was, then immediately dismissed her next idea of jumping.

  “Stop running, I'm not going to hurt you. I promise.” The man stood in the doorway, the broken gun slung over his shoulder and his own hung loosely from his neck. Erica backed away from him and stumbled onto her bed. She crawled backwards over it and dropped off the other side with a bump as her banged head against the wall. The man approached slowly and continued talking. “What's your name?” he asked. “I just want to talk.” She grabbed her alarm clock off her night stand and pressed her back to the wall.

  “You first, then,” she said.

  The man stood at the opposite side of the bed, his hands raised in a placating gesture. “My name is Lieutenant Martin. Do you know what a Lieutenant is?”

  “I'm scared,” she half-lied. “Please help me, there are monsters everywhere.”

  Martin knelt on the bed and extended his hand towards her. “I can help you. Just tell me your name and you can come with me.”

  “Wumph,” said Erica. She threw the alarm clock under the bed.

  “Wumph?” asked Martin. ‘Wumph’ went the bed. The spring under the bed uncoiled with such a display of force that it tore itself from its mountings and took large chunks of the floor with it. Martin was ejected suddenly and violently out of the window and to the ground below. Erica covered her mouth and tried hard not to scream at, well, everything about the last several minutes; the fear, the guilt, the absurdity of it all – just all of it.

  She picked her way around the wreckage of what was once her bed and carefully avoided the sharp bits of debris that now littered the floor and looked out of the window. Lieutenant Martin lay in a crumpled heap, his limbs twisted into multiple anatomically impossible positions, his neck along with them. She retched out of the window and fell to her knees in an uncontrollable sob. She crawled to the top of the stairs, and deciding this made everything much easier, continued to crawl all the way to the workshop door. The basement door clicked behind her and she ploddingly headed down into the workshop. After a minute, Sarah cautiously poked her head up from her hiding place from within the crate maze, then signalled down to the others, who then emerged from their own. Peter quite liked his hiding place, so he left the lampshade on his head.

  “We need to leave, we really need to leave right now,” Erica said. There wasn’t a space between even a single letter. “They took Mr. Tirren and Harry. Three men, with guns, I killed one. I didn’t mean for it to happen, but I killed one.” Just saying it out loud was a punch to the stomach that would have taken her out of her boots had she been wearing them.

  “What do you mean you killed one? How?” Rasmus gasped.

  “The window, that stupid spring. He’s outside, his neck is all horrible, and I did it,” she sobbed. Sarah wrapped her arms around her sister’s neck and pulled her awkwardly towards her for a hug.

  “It wasn’t your fault. I put it there. You told me to move it but I didn’t. I’m not sorry it saved you, but I am sorry,” she said.

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  Erica kissed Sarah on the forehead and stood up. “We're getting them back.”

  “What's the plan, then, Ms. Erica?” Rasmus stood propped up against Peter, his face etched in one-part grave concern and one-part agonising pain from where he forgot his age and tried to climb into a crate.

  “I need you to warn everyone, though I suspect they already know something has happened. Those men will come back, maybe even more of them and-”

  “-I understand, Ms. Erica. Please don't fret. I assume you're both presently heading to retrieve our dear friends?”

  “Too bloody right we are. Peter, can you ask the other Pilot Fish for help? I don’t know how much help they’ll be, but you’ll think of something, I’m sure.”

  “Peter says affirmative.”

  “They headed to the woods, we can probably follow their tracks. There's a gun outside with the-” she hesitated. “-Man. I think you'd better have it, Mr. Rasmus. Just be careful, it gets very hot and you have to wait for it to cool.”

  Rasmus hobbled over to Erica and placed a hand on her shoulder. “I'll take care of our home, but you need to move quickly now. No more planning, action,” he said. Erica retrieved her boots from the foot of the stairs and laced them up, then she and Sarah left the workshop.

  “When we leave the house, promise me you won't look to the left. Keep looking to the right or just maybe keep your eyes closed, I don't want you to see that poor man. Promise me,” Erica said. As she guided her sister down the path, she realised she had to be sure. What if she'd been wrong and the man had gotten up and walked off to tell the others? She turned her head just enough to see the grey-clad mangle of limbs in her peripheral vision, then snapped her head forward and continued walking. “When we get there, I need you to be quiet. The men are very dangerous. Mr. Tirren hurt one of them very badly, but the other one is fine, and there may be others.”

  “Then what are we going to do?”

  “Unless you have a better plan, my plan is to find them and just run. If Mr. Rasmus can get the Pilot Fish to co-operate, all we need to do is get home and hide. They can take care of everything else. Probably.”

  “I don't have a plan, I just want Harry.”

  “I know, sweetheart.”

  ***

  The sisters followed the tracks into the woods and kept their heads down and their bodies low to the ground as they went. This proved to be incredibly impractical and somewhat painful, but they supposed it was a lot better than the alternative. Erica was aware of just how dangerous those rifles could be, even when operated by a complete idiot that didn't understand the Linear Thermal Expansion Coefficient of whatever shoddy material it was made of. The point was, she had to remind herself, that it would be very hard for the other man to be less competent without pointing it the wrong way by mistake. The half-wit had taken a sound thrashing, even with his rifle, but Erica thought it prudent to not discount him fully, though she reasoned it entirely possible he may just accidentally set himself on fire before they get there. He still had one hand to go with his one brain cell after all. There were four sets of tracks; a small set of boots, a very large set of boots, and two medium-sized sets of boots with enough treads and grips to donate to several less well off pairs of boots without missing them too much. After a quarter mile-or so, Harry's footprints disappeared, in contrast, Mr. Tirren's became noticeably heavier. Then the tracks disappeared altogether.

  “They’ve stopped,” Sarah said. She stopped herself abruptly and caused a one-Erica pile-up by a tree stump. “The tracks have stopped.”

  “They've been covered, they've bloody covered them.” Erica angrily flopped down onto the tree stump and tried to think. Well, there goes the other man being as incompetent as the first. She busied herself with the important task of staring intently at her boots. After she had satisfactorily completed that task, she moved on to scuffing a furrow deep in the decaying plant-matter and soft, damp mud of the forest floor, her lungs filled with the strangely pleasant petrichor. She completed the trifecta by unearthing the largest rock she could move with her toe – this upset a very vocal woodlouse, who told her in no uncertain terms that she should piss right off and generally just stop being a nuisance. Erica took a deep breath and slowly redirected her eyes back towards her sister, who now stood at the crest of a nearby hill. Along the route Erica’s eyes took, a bright red object glistened in the sun. Round, like a cherry, or a weird mushroom – or a, “Small rubber ball, you clever little sod!” she said aloud. She bounded towards it, the woodlouse left mid-lecture. “Sarah,” she rasped to keep the sound from travelling too far. She held up the ball. Sarah gasped and immediately scanned the vicinity for more of the same.

  “Yellow one!” she exclaimed. She dashed over to it and held it up as Erica had, it lay ten or so feet away from the first one, and a blue one twenty or so feet from that. The trail continued along the expected route for several more meters before it curved off to the right and down a steep embankment, any footprints being lost within the dense covering of leaves and rotting foliage.

  They followed the damp, generally unpleasantly smelly diversion for a further ten minutes. The trail sown by Harry brought them back onto the path half-a-mile or so from where they started, the footprints beginning anew. A small clearing ahead of them glimmered with a familiar yellow glow. It was almost like a painting surrounded by a burning, ethereal frame. They couldn't quite make out everything from their heroic position of hiding in a bush, but between them, they were sure it was some kind of metal room filled with banks of glowing cabinets, and people.

  “How are there people?” Sarah said.

  “Maybe it's a window.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “It doesn't matter what it is, we need to get closer.” As they inched their way closer to the clearing, bush-by-bush, excruciating step-by-step, a man stepped into view.

  “Look, there's one of them from before.”

  “How do you know?”

  “His hand is all horrible. That was Mr. Tirren did that. That means the competent one is nearby, and so are the Tirrens.”

  “Move, please.” The Tirrens moved into view, flanked by a man that Erica was almost sure was the other man from the village. Mr. Tirren, Harry sat atop his shoulders, approached the picture framed by the blinding yellow light. A large man stepped towards and, while attired as the others were, Erica was certain she could have gone camping in his shirt and still have had plenty of room for guests and a barbecue – large didn't really begin to cover it. He shoved Mr. Tirren in the shoulder and nudged him into the light, the other two stood with their guns pointed at his back. The Tirrens grew smaller and smaller, like they were trailing off into the distance, then emerged into the unusual room at the other side, surrounded by more men dressed like the ones they'd already encountered. It was hard to make out from where they were, but they saw the Tirrens led out of view by a grey-haired man in a white coat. Both the competent one and one-hand followed behind. The light of the frame flickered and disappeared out of view, eclipsed by the inexplicably large man. He stood in front of the frame, his rifle suspended like a child's plaything around his neck, his hands clasped in front of him. He was a man that you shouldn't, or indeed couldn't, cross without a map and a compass.

  “We need to get past him, into the, I don't know, thing,” Sarah said. She moved closer to him and now sat in the last row of bushes before the clearing. Off to one side, the Pilot Fish sat like puppets with their strings cut; they busied themselves with important tasks, such as digging holes large enough to fit their head in, or feeding rocks to particularly dumb squirrels. Sarah picked up a rock and threw it at the man’s helmet, it sailed over his shoulder and into the gateway behind him. There was no ripple, the rock simply disappeared.

  “What do you think you're doing?” Erica growled in her ear.

  Sarah picked up another rock. “We need a distraction.”

  “What we need is to not upset the bear-sized man.” Erica pushed Sarah’s arm down and took the rock from her.

  “Do you have a better idea?” Erica thought about it, then she threw the rock at the man's head. The rock struck the side of Bracknell's helmet with a clunk and bounced off towards the Pilot Fish.

  “I told you not to do anything, you little shits!” he barked. He spun towards the Pilot Fish, who were in the midst of feeding each other rocks after having killed several dumb squirrels at this point, and marched towards them. “Which one was it, then?” He brought his boot down on the closest Pilot Fish. It beep-booped in an alarmed fashion and pointed to the Pilot Fish next to it, that one in turn let out a shriek and pointed to the first one it saw. What followed was six Pilot Fish each pointing at one another, and one that was pointing at a pile of dead squirrels.

  Erica took Sarah by the wrist and ran for the gateway. The grey-haired man sat at a desk, old, haggard and tired, but he still took pride in his appearance, like Mr. Rasmus. His thin grey hair was neatly combed and his lab coat lay lovingly folded on the desk beside him. He tapped away on some kind of electronic typewriter, his eyes periodically drifted from the clipboard in front of him up to a screen. Then a rock struck him in the side of the head. The man spun from his chair and fell to the ground with a startled grunt. Unhurt, aside from a small gash on the left side of his head, he pulled himself to his feet. His eyes snapped towards the source of the rock, the coldest eyes they’d ever seen, and they gazed unblinkingly in their direction. The man reached for a small speaker-box and screamed into it, his free arm flailed away at nothing and impotently visualised his soundless fury to an empty room.

  Bracknell pivoted towards the girls. He reached down towards his gun and fumblingly tried to get his finger through the tiny trigger guard, then fired. The bullet struck the ground at Sarah’s feet and she stumbled towards the glowing window. Erica insistently pulled her forward and made it impossible to regain her balance. She fell to the ground, her limbs splayed in every direction before Erica gave her one last pull, to her feet into the gateway. With one last stumble, Sarah’s leg brushed against the Anchor and unearthed it.

  The room that had just been in front of them trailed off into the distance, like they were in a race against it and were losing. What had been a few short steps quickly became a blinding, glowing abyss with no clear path forward or back. No matter how much Erica wanted to close her eyes or shield them, she couldn’t; she couldn’t feel her arms or her legs, and if she wasn’t looking at them, it felt like they simply weren’t there. Maybe they never had been, she couldn’t tell.

  The room disappeared, in its place a silhouette of a person. It was like when someone is far away, and for a second you can’t tell if they’re walking towards or away from you. It was like that, Erica thought, but she was looking at herself doing it. “Oh, that's nice,” she tried to say as Sarah slowly spiralled past her, but it felt like her lungs were full of sand.

  Each strand of Sarah’s hair floated in its own direction, as if she were underwater. She had never done a cartwheel before, nor had she ever been able to levitate, but here she was doing both. She was very proud of herself, though she couldn't quite remember her own name or what the clasping things at the ends of her shoulder noodles were called. She couldn't remember much of the reason she came here, but she was quite happy she did. And another thing, she thought, she’d never taken a nap upside-down before, so she closed her eyes.