Natalie had managed to hold onto herself when she’d realised Paul wasn’t in, but she didn’t manage it this time.  Mr Miacca’s house.  It wasn’t fair.  They’d tried so hard…  If those boys hadn’t chased them off their path, they could have been at home by now.  Instead, they were in this horrible dark place where there were burns on the floor and the walls were hard enough to bruise you from an inch away.  It wasn’t fair.  It wasn’t fair.

She sat down, tears springing into her eyes.  She wanted Mum and Dad.  She even wanted Andrea.  She wanted to be at home, in her bedroom, with her toys and her books around her, where she was safe.  And she was probably never going to see any of it again.

She sat against the wall and wrapped her arms around her knees, as if she could make herself smaller and stop Mr Miacca from noticing her.  She could hear herself crying in little snuffly breaths, like a little animal in the woods just before it got eaten by a fox or an owl.  It wasn’t fair.  It wasn’t fair.

Natalie was suddenly surrounded by a sweaty, biscuity smell as Stephanie’s chubby arms went around her head and shoulders.  “It’s OK, Natalie,” she said, in that bright, comforting voice their mum and their teachers always used when somebody fell over and cut their knee.  “Don’t be scared.  They won’t find us here.”

She thought Natalie was crying because she was scared of those boys from the video shop.  She didn’t know how bad things had got.  And how was Natalie supposed to tell her?

“They were nasty boys, weren’t they?” said Steph, doing a perfect impression of their mum by now, “It’s OK.  They won’t get you.”

Natalie marvelled a bit at Stephanie.  She’d tried to stop herself from crying earlier because she didn’t want to set Steph off, but as soon as she actually started crying, she got a hug.  The same girl who’d been such a brat about her aching legs earlier had seen the person in charge crying and hadn’t worried or started crying herself.  She hadn’t thought of anything except cheering Natalie up.

And if Mr Miacca came by right now, he’d eat Steph right up, and she’d be gone forever.

That thought should have made Natalie cry harder, but instead, it set off that fire in her chest again.  How dare Mr Miacca try and eat her little sister?  How dare he do that to a little girl who wouldn’t hurt a fly and was kind to people when they cried?  And how dare he try and eat Natalie, after she’d tried so hard to get home tonight?  How dare he try and wipe that all out, just to get a meal?  He didn’t know that Natalie was good at drawing or liked watching Animaniacs or that she had a little walk-in cupboard in her room that had a picture of a guy on a motorbike at the back that she thought looked cool.  To him, she and Steph could have been anyone else in the world.  They were just here so that he could stuff his face.  How dare he?

Natalie took a couple of deep breaths, and wiped her eyes.  “Thanks, Steph.  I’m feeling better now.”  Stephanie moved her arms, and Natalie stood up and took her hand.  “Come on, let’s find a way out.”

They walked along dark hallways, some with holes instead of windows and some without even that, with cracked cement blocks in the ceilings and rusty metal panels bolted onto the walls.  Every so often, there were loose stones and bits of brick on the floor, and Natalie crouched down to pick them up and hide them in her tunic.  She thought about the little boy in the “Mr Miacca” story, who’d tricked Mr Miacca and his wife into letting him go, but she also thought about Jack, who’d cut down the beanstalk while the giant was still on it so he fell down and smashed his head open, and about Mollie Whuppie, who’d tricked her giant into killing his own daughters instead of her and her sisters and then got him to chase her over a sword and chop himself in half.  And the more stones she gathered, the more she thought of one of the Bible stories they’d learned about in Girl’s Brigade.  The one about David and Goliath.

The story hadn’t said whether Mr Miacca was a giant or a normal person who everyone knew ate children.  But either way, she knew she could beat him.

They moved through the dark hallways, breathing in the stony, sooty smell, and Natalie wondered when they might run into Mr Miacca.  She’d imagined his house as looking like a bigger version of a normal house, but this black, creepy labyrinth wasn’t too much of a surprise.  Obviously he’d want you to get lost if you tried to escape.  Obviously he’d want you to be frightened along the way, so that by the time he found you you’d be too scared and confused to fight back properly.  Well, too bad for him, because Natalie had a tunic full of stones.  She was ready for him.

They started to hear voices at around the same time as they saw the light up ahead.  They wouldn’t have gone towards the light if they could have helped it, but there wasn’t anywhere to turn off, and the last thing they wanted to do was go back into the dark.  Still, Natalie slowed down, clutching Steph’s hand in hers, and veered closer to the wall as she listened out for the words in the voices.  Men’s voices, and angry, by the sound of it.

“Hey, hang on, Dave…  Found it?”

“No…  I think they keep it over on the…”

Natalie and Steph inched forward.  Up ahead, the hallway ended, and there was a big room full of glowing light.  A tiny smudged window above a big glowing gap instead of a door.  And Natalie couldn’t see anything through it.  The light was so bright, she had to squint.

Mr Miacca’s kitchen?  Maybe.  But he didn’t know she had these stones.

The voices continued.  “…night watchman?”

“Nah, he’s over on…”

“How do we get it back to…?”

Those voices didn’t sound like she imagined Mr Miacca’s would be.  They were looking for something, and they were worried about the night watchman.  And that might mean…

They were almost in the big room now.  Natalie’s eyes had got used to the light, so she could look through the doorway and see what was in there.  It looked like a barn, like the one they went through when they visited Marsh Farm and saw the cows and pigs in their pens.  The same big, triangular ceiling over the big, empty space.  But the barn at Marsh Farm was a warm, dark place that smelled of hay and manure and animals.  This room was clean, cold, and full of light.

It looked like a barn, but it smelled like pencil shavings.  It didn’t make much sense, but not much had today.

They walked in and took a look around.  At one end of the room was a row of small buildings, like four tiny, one-room Wendy houses made out of brick.  Just to make it even weirder, they had blue stripes running down them, like pin-stripes on a suit, in the exact same kind of blue they used for the pens at Natalie’s school.  Natalie didn’t know what Mr Miacca used those buildings for, and she didn’t want to know.  The thing she cared about was on the wall just to the left.  A grey, metal sign saying EXIT, with an arrow pointing to a nearby doorway.

What if it’s a trick? thought Natalie, It’s got to be.  Why would he have an exit sign in his own house?  He already knows where…

A heavy, metallic ringing ripped through the air.  Steph put her hands up to her ears and cried out.

An alarm, thought Natalie, We tripped it somehow, and he knows we’re here, and he’s going to come right for us.  The exit sign might have been a trick, but Natalie only had a split-second to act and it was the only option she had.  She grabbed Steph’s hand and followed where the arrow pointed.

It took them into another dark tunnel, but Natalie was too busy running to care.  Besides, this time was different.  The air was cooler, and there was something up ahead.  A light?  Or was she just imagining it?

She wasn’t.  It got bigger as she ran.  The air grew fresher and fresher, and she knew this hallway led outside.  And the fence had gaps that they could get through, she knew that.  If they could just…

Footsteps.  Running behind them.  Chasing them.

If Natalie had stopped to think about it, she might have tried to work out how fast their pursuer was running and whether they could get away in time.  But she didn’t.  Instead, she stopped in her tracks, turned around, and took one of those stones out of her tunic.

A man came out of the shadows.  Natalie aimed the stone as accurately as she could, and threw it.

The man dropped whatever he was carrying (something heavy and metal, from the sound it made when it hit the ground), and grabbed his face with his hands.  It was hard to tell with the alarm going off, but Natalie was pretty sure he’d yelled out the F-word, the one those boys at the video shop had been so keen on.

He didn’t look much like Natalie had imagined Mr Miacca.  He was wearing scruffy jeans and a jacket that said “Adidas” on it, and he definitely wasn’t a giant- he was probably shorter and thinner than Natalie and Steph’s dad.  But that didn’t mean he wasn’t Mr Miacca.  The story hadn’t said he was a giant, had it?

Before he had a chance to look up and see them, Natalie threw another stone, hitting him on the forehead and driving him backwards, a few steps further into the dark.  Natalie turned round and ran ahead.

She and Steph burst through the opening (not a door, an opening, same as the windows earlier), going so fast that Natalie expected the soles of her shoes to catch fire, and took a sharp left so as to throw off the man from the tunnel when he came out after them.  Maybe he was Mr Miacca and maybe he wasn’t, but Natalie was pretty sure he was someone dangerous.  If he caught them, she didn’t know what he’d do.  Better just to run.

There was a barrier that was meant to keep cars out, but Natalie and Steph ducked under it and soon they were back on the pavement.  They weren’t in the same place they’d come in, which was good, because that meant those boys weren’t going to be waiting for them around the next corner.  But there was something even better.  Natalie knew where she was.  And she knew what she’d find if she went right at the zebra crossing and round the next corner.

In the story, Mr Miacca had captured the boy as soon as he’d got beyond the corner of the road where he lived.  Natalie didn’t completely let down her guard when she got to the corner of the road where she lived (the furthest she was allowed to ride her bike on her own), but she felt something in her loosen up.  As if she’d had a fist clenched inside her chest, and it was starting to relax a bit.

They strolled up to their front gate.  Natalie held it open and let Stephanie walk up to the door first, then locked it carefully behind her.  Stephanie pulled on the doorknob for a moment or two, then looked up at her sister expectantly.

“We can’t go in yet,” Natalie told her, “We don’t have the key.  We’ll have to wait for Mum or Andrea to come back.”  She wasn’t too worried about that- they’d be safe in their own front garden, even if it was getting dark.  If anything bad happened, they’d just ring next door’s doorbell and ask to stay in their kitchen for a bit.  But Natalie didn’t think it would.  “They won’t be long.”

Stephanie sat down on the doorstep, and Natalie joined her.  “Do you want me to tell you a story?” she asked.  There were a few in her head at the moment.

Steph nodded.

“OK.  Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived with his mother, and one day she told him to take their cow to market and sell it…”  As Natalie told the story, she leaned back against the door and looked out at their street.  She knew every brick of every house, every branch of every tree, every person.  It was safe.  But sometimes you had to go out beyond the corner, into Mr Miacca’s territory, and when you did, you needed to know what to do.

If she ever met Mr Miacca again, she’d be ready for him.

Natalie put her arm around Steph, and looked out into the street, feeling all the fear and anger of the evening drain out of her.  She was barely halfway through the story when she saw her mother’s car come around the corner.

The End