I have been talked by someone very persuasive into putting up just a little more... so here is Chapter 4, and then there will be 5 and then positively no more.

CHAPTER FOUR

 SOMETHING RATTLING AGAINST THE WINDOWS

The stone stayed quietly in Olly`s bag all night on the chair beside his bed at the Happy Traveller Inn, where they were staying because nothing would be ready yet at Gullywith.  Olly lay looking at the moon through the thin curtains and listening to the hum from the pipes and boilers running up to the eleventh floor, where the room was. He felt as if he was nowhere, like a person dangling in space and out of touch with real time. Real time was either back in London and 58 Wigwell Avenue, or it was tomorrow and arriving for the first time at Gullywith, but it was not here in the Happy Traveller Inn. Here, time was a little separate bubble in which Olly had explored all the cupboards and  drawers in his room, the lifts, the stairs, the front lobby, the lounge, the games room, the dining room and the doorway to the bar, had taken Lula for walks up and down the carpeted  corridors and round and round the reception area, put  a small spoonfuls of almost everything except beetroot from the salad bar onto his plate, eaten the whole of a lasagna and carrots, eaten half of a bowl of fruit salad and a quarter of an ice cream, drunk one whole glass of fizzy apple juice and played with the shower in Mum and Dad`s bathroom until the head came off and he got into trouble.

The hotel was full of other people, none of whom he had ever seen before or  would probably ever see again so that they were all in this out-of-real-life-and-time bubble together. Now, he watched the silvery beam of moonlight  climb the curtain and let the bubble rock gently with his bed rocking inside it.

He was not thinking about anything. It was safer that way.  He felt happy in the bubble.

But just as the rocking was making him slide sideways down into a dream, he heard it. It was an odd sound, like the thin, high whirring whine of a tiny electric saw or an angry insect. Olly switched on the lamp. The noise stopped.

He lay down again and waited. Nothing happened. Then the hotel pipes made a loud watery noise.  That was what it must have  been, something in the plumbing.  He put the lamp out and tried to think himself back into the bubble but just as he was climbing inside and the rocking had begun very gently, there it was again, a mean, angry, hissing, whining sort sound. This time, Olly didn`t move. He waited. The moon had gone in now but his room was not quite dark because the light from the corridor shone under the door. The sound went on.

It was coming from somewhere on other side of the room.

Olly wasn`t scared. He was interested. But he was also quite tired and the bubble had begun to rock again and after a few moments, the sound and the rocking blended together and he felt himself falling down and down into a soft warm dark velvety sleep.

But the sleep did not stay warm and velvety for long. It became a different, more uncomfortable and disturbing sleep, a sleep in which Olly was trying to walk along a path which at first was just hard and a bit uneven, but which then became stony and after a time, thick with shingle, pebbles in layers into which his legs sank with a crunching sound. It was very hard to walk. He had to pull his legs out one at a time with a great effort and the stones bruised his shins and dug into the soles of his feet. He could hear something through his sleep too, a sound like the thin, high, whirring, whining but much louder, as if the sea were crashing onto the shingle, and then as if the shingle were being thrown against something hard and quite nearby.

Olly came awake with a bump. The windows of his room were rattling and something was hitting the glass hard, as if it were raining not rainwater but thousands of tiny mean little stones.

Olly pulled the covers up over his ears and closed his eyes hard. But the noise went on and it was a very long time before he got to sleep again.