Halfway up the stairs, Rube stopped in her tracks.  “It was one of them!  The purple things!”

Jeanette looked at where she was pointing.  It was one of those colourful flecks she’d seen earlier, flying around the mountains.  “Sally went off on one of them?”

“Yes!”

It was strange to think that, half an hour ago, Jeanette had been worried that if she looked away from this view, she’d never see it again.  Now both of her sisters were involved in it, but somehow that didn’t make it seem any more solid.  The three of them were probably close enough to share the same hallucination.  “Did you see which way it was going?”

“Um…”. Rube squinted into the distance.  “Up towards the mountains, I think.”

Jeanette nodded.  The mountains behind the house.  The mountains that weren’t there until you climbed this staircase.  Those mountains.  “Do you want to go up to the top?  There might be a map, or…”

Jeanette was sure that Rube was going to say no.  She was sure that Rube was going to insist on going back down and trying to follow Sally on foot, even if that looked hopeless.  She was sure that they were going to have an argument about what would be the bigger waste of time, going upstairs and looking for clues that they had no reason to think would even be there, or walking towards the mountains they couldn’t even see and hoping Sally and the purple thing hadn’t got a thousand-mile head start.  But instead, Rube just sighed like a deflated balloon and said, “I… sure.”

(To be continued)