Red Fever by Caroline Clough

Author:Caroline Clough [Caroline Clough]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780863159312
Publisher: Kelpies
Published: 2012-08-19T04:00:00+00:00

12. A Betrayal

A summer storm got up that night and whipped the village with a frenzied wind. Toby lay in his bed listening to the wailing and moaning of the gusts swirling around the lighthouse. Far below he could hear the crashing of waves breaking on the shore and on the rocks of the promontory. Nearby, in the room below, he heard his dad singing his mum’s lullaby to Sylvie, in a sweet sing-song voice he only used with her.

Toby thought about the dogs. They had been so like the dogs in his nightmare, it was scary. What if he’d had some premonition? What if the nightmare was going to come true?

Go to sleep, he told himself, turning over. That’s mad. You’re supposed to be a logical thinker — an engineer. It’s just rubbish about dreams and that …

He fell to sleep thinking about how great it would be to go to university and learn to be a real engineer, like his dad had been.

Woof! A deep bark woke him from his sleep. Belle was standing next to his bed. Woof, woof! She placed her paw on the duvet and scratched it back and forwards.

Toby sat up. It couldn’t be that late; his candle was still sputtering in the night jar beside his bed.

“What are you doing here? You should be in your kennel,” he said, yawning. The storm was still raging outside. The wind was tearing at the wooden shutters at his window, banging them back and forth.

“Come on,” ordered Toby. “Let’s take you back to Jamie. Downstairs with you!” He pulled an old hoodie on over his jammies, and crept down the stairs.

There was no sign of Jamie. He should have been asleep on the sofa but it was empty. Toby raced back up the stairs to the lamp room. That was the only other place he could be. The lamp room was full of the noise of the howling wind but there was no sign of Jamie.

He’s not gone outside, surely? Not in this weather? And why did he leave Belle behind?

Toby craned his neck to look out of the window and down into the compound. But in the dark, with the rain lashing the glass, he couldn’t see anything.

He raced in his stocking feet back down the stairs to the kitchen on the first floor of the lighthouse. To get to the ground floor and outside, Jamie would have needed to lower the wooden steps leading from the hatch in the floor of the kitchen. Toby’s dad put them in as a safety measure so that they could be drawn up every night and locked. He felt safer knowing that even if someone or something got into the compound, they still couldn’t get into their living quarters in the lighthouse.

The hatch in the kitchen was closed, but when Toby opened it he found that the steps had been lowered. Jamie must have gone outside.

Why? thought Toby. Is he completely insane?

He pulled on his wellies and went down the stairs, calling Belle to go with him.

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