to her leg. It was only when more drops fell on her head that Hayley realised the water must be coming from somewhere else. She looked up. The ceiling above her sofa was covered in upside-down puddles, with big dewy yellow drops forming in the middle of them and then plopping down. At almost the moment when she turned her face up, the puddles all became too big to hold together and water began coming down in streams, nearly as hard as it was raining outside.
Hayley jumped up. “Oh dear,” she said, collecting cushions and the pretend cat and dumping them into a dry chair. She tried to push the sofa out from under the flood, but it was too heavy for her to move. She simply got sprayed with water splattering up off the carpet. “I think I’d better tell someone,” she said doubtfully.
She ran out into the hall. No one seemed to be about down there, but there was a lot of shouting and running about going on somewhere upstairs. Hayley rather timidly climbed the stairs, past the small safe room she had been given and on up to the right.
A river of water met her near the top, coming down like a waterfall from stair to stair. The landing, when she came to it, was a small oblong lake, and the corridor off to the right, which must have been right above the lounge, was a dark tunnel filled with rain. Someone screamed, “Turn off that light! It’s dangerous!” Footsteps thundered and splashed somewhere out of sight, and voices from unseen cousins and aunts yelled, “Tollie! Where are you? We need you!” and “Bring that bucket here, quick!” and “Throw all the towels down there!” and in between, everyone yelled for Tollie again.
“I think they know,” Hayley said to herself. She stood to the side of the waterfall at the top of the stairs, wondering what she ought to do.
Aunt May and Troy, both of them soaking wet, burst out from the rain in the dark corridor and splashed to a stop when they saw Hayley.
“She’ll do!” Troy cried out. “She’s a lot smaller than Tollie.”
“Oh, so she will!” Aunt May gasped. Sheets of water sprayed round her wet slippers as she dived on Hayley and took hold of her arm. “Do you mind helping us, dear? One of the gutters is blocked and we’re all too big to get out of the window.”
Troy seized Hayley’s other arm and the two of them towed her across the landing. The lake soaked Hayley’s shoes and socks instantly. She was rather surprised to find that the water was not really cold. But then the whole of Ireland was not really as cold as London.
“Mercer’s tried getting to it from outside with a ladder,” Troy explained, switching on the big electric torch he was carrying, “but the wind blew him down, so it has to be unblocked by someone small enough to get out through the top bathroom window.”
“Will you do that for us, dear?” Aunt May said as they all plunged into the downpour inside the corridor. “We’ll hang on to you. You’ll be quite safe.”
“Yes,” Hayley said, “of course,” thinking that there didn’t seem to be much choice.
“Of course you will!” Troy said warmly.
With rain thumping and pattering on their heads and backs, the three of them rushed up a flight of stairs that was exactly like a waterfall, to where Troy’s torch glinted on choppy waves in another flooded corridor. Dark shapes of people churned about in it, shouting to one another to “Keep that door shut!” and then, “Where is Tollie?”
Aunt May and Troy wheeled sideways from here and pounded up another flight of stairs which were – confusingly – completely dry. Both of them yelled over their shoulders, “It’s all right. We don’t need Tollie. We’ve got Hayley instead!” and then wheeled sideways again into a little bathroom with a sloping ceiling. Someone had put a big flickering lantern in the washbasin there. By its light, Hayley saw a bath wedged in under the slope of the ceiling and above the bath a small square skylight propped open on a thin metal bar. Rain was spattering viciously in through the opening. Hayley looked up at it and thought, How do I get up there?
“Don’t worry, we’ll lift you,” Troy said. He picked up a bath stool and banged it down in the bath. “Hop up there and I’ll boost you,” he said.
Before Hayley could move, Aunt May scrambled into the bath, saying, “I’ll keep it steady.” Whereupon her sopping slippers shot out from under her and she sat down with a splash, sending the stool clanging into the bath taps.
“Oh, not again, Auntie!” Troy said. He put his shoulder under Aunt May’s waving arm and helped her flounder to her feet again. Somehow, in the course of the vast scrambling that followed, Aunt May’s necklace burst. Beads clattered into the bath and rolled about on the dimly lit floor. “Last necklace to go,” Troy said cheerfully. “Don’t tread on a bead, Hayley. The floor’s covered with them now.” He put the stool back under the skylight and squelched into the bath beside it. He held out both hands to Hayley. “Up you get,” he said. “Take my torch and get on the stool.”
“You’ll need the torch to see the drain,” Aunt May panted. Her hair was now out of whatever had held it together and fanned over her big shoulders like a lion’s mane. “The drain’s down to the left of the window.”
Hayley took hold of the torch and found herself being hauled up on to the stool. She stood there, wobbling rather, feeling Troy grab her from one side and Aunt May from the other, and cautiously took the metal bar off its spike and pushed the tiny window open with her head.
It was horrible out there. Windy rain stormed into her face. Worse still, when she worked the torch through beside her face and got it pointed downwards, all she could see was a sort of trench full of turbulent water just below her and the square shapes of the castle parapet beyond that. The drain was obviously deep under water. She was going to have to guess where it was. The only way Hayley could see to get near it was to ooze herself out of the window headfirst. And then grope.
“We’ve got you,” Troy said encouragingly as Hayley began to wriggle herself forward.
The frame of the skylight was only just big enough for her to get through. As Hayley wriggled onward, the spike that the metal bar hooked on to scraped its way agonisingly down the middle of her chest, while the bar itself hung down and poked her in the head. By the time her feet had left the stool and she was hanging half in and half out, she was still a foot away from the murky ditch of water and being stabbed in the tummy button by the spike. She was going to have to get all of her outside.
Behind her, she could hear the little bathroom filling up with people. Someone said, “She’ll never get to it like that!”
Oh yes I will! Hayley thought. “Be ready to hold my feet!” she shouted and thought she heard someone say “OK.” Then, clutching the torch in her right hand, she began to inch herself down the sloping tiles outside. Rain pelted across her. Before long, she had the feeling it was raining upwards into her pants. The skylight bit into her shins, the tiles scraped her front. The only comforting thing was that she could feel Troy’s hands warm and strong on her left leg and Aunt May’s hands, softer but just as strong, holding her right calf.
They were paying her out of the window like a rope.
The hands had reached her ankles before Hayley could even touch the water. Left, she thought. She had to stretch and ooze and extend herself sideways before her hand could go into the rippling flood. It was surprisingly un-cold to her fingers. The hands were holding her shoes by then. And she stretched and oozed and tried to lengthen herself again, until finally her fingertips met a rough, leaded bottom. She couldn’t feel any kind of
