By the time she got to the front door, Rube felt s little calmer.  They’d deal with the staircase once they got back to it.  Right now, her only responsibility was to check on Sally and get her to come outside and enjoy the fresh air with them.  By the time they got back to it, the whole staircase thing would probably seem a lot easier to figure out.

As soon as she got through the front door (enjoying that lovely wood smell again), Rube heard Sally’s voice from upstairs.  “Is he really going to fly us there?”

That wasn’t alarming in and of itself- Rube remembered Sally playing imaginary games with her Barbies and Sylvanians when she was younger, and this sounded like that all over again.  She’d thought Sally had grown out of that over the last couple of years, but you never knew- sometimes kids her age went back to their old habits when they were feeling insecure.

But then, before Rube had a chance to call up to Sally, she heard an unfamiliar voice reply, “Yep.  Just climb on up.”

A stranger.  And a strange man, at that.  Rube felt her heart seize up.  “Sally?” she called up the stairs, somehow keeping her voice even, “Is there someone up there with you?”

No reply.  Stupid, stupid, stupid.  Alert him to your presence, why don’t you?  Now he’ll panic and start threatening her.

Or maybe not.  Maybe he’d panic and sneak out of the window before Rube called the police.  And, come to think of it, wouldn’t he have heard the front door close behind her anyway?

Maybe everything was fine.  Maybe Uncle Colwyn had hired a cleaner or a groundskeeper that he’d forgotten to tell them about, and Sally had just run into him and struck up a conversation.

But then why did he go quiet when you shouted up?  Why didn’t he just call down and introduce himself?

There was nothing for it- Rube was just going to have to go upstairs and confront him.  She looked around the hallway for something she could use as a weapon.  There were a couple of big, sturdy umbrellas in the stand by the door.  One of those might do.  It would be something to swing around in front of her, anyway, and that might be enough.

She picked it up and darted to the staircase, trying to take the stairs two at a time but worrying that that might not actually get her there any quicker, and the whole time there was a strange, loud noise coming from just beyond the door to Sally’s room.  A wafting kind of sound, like a giant fan, or the wind hitting a big bedsheet on the washing line.

She opened the door to Sally’s room, and…

Sally wasn’t there, first of all.  Not in the actual room part.  Rube’s first thought was, They’ve disappeared out of the window, but that wasn’t accurate, now, was it?  They’d left through the window, but Rube could still see them in the distance.  She could still see Sally, anyway.  She was about ten yards from the window when Rube got there, and about thirty feet above the ground.

The thing she was riding…

It’s some kind of zipwire, Rube told herself, because that was the only sane thing it cold be.  It was ling and thin, see-through in places and purpleish in others, and it was disappearing into the distance with Sally on top of it.

The sound hadn’t been like a giant fan after all.  More like a giant bird’s wings flapping.

Rube leaned out of the window and called to her sister, but it was no good.  The noise was too loud.  She’d got too far away.  A crazy part of Rube wanted to jump out of the window and try to grab onto the thing’s tail (It’s a zipwire, and zipwires don’t have tails, she told herself firmly), but she probably couldn’t have even if she’d tried.  Her legs felt like stone, bolted to the ground.  She cold barely even feel them.

As she looked helplessly out of the window, all Rube cold think was, What am I going to tell Jeanette?

(To be continued)