The Dark Giants by Cerberus Jones Read Free Book Online

hesitated for a moment, but with the aliens out there in the bush
(not to mention whatever they were tracking), it surely couldn’t be more dangerous
for them in here?
    Charlie swallowed hard and pushed the door open. Amelia followed him in. Tom’s place
was a disaster. It was always messy, but usually the mess had some kind of order.
This was the chaos of a house that had been ransacked. Boxes had been thrown across
the room, their contents scattered. The charts James had carefully organised were
strewn over the floor, and Tom’s lamp – the only source of light right now – had
been knocked over.
    ‘But where’s Tom?’ said Amelia.
    ‘He’s here,’ said Charlie, looking around the door into the gateway room. Tom lay
flat on his back, his eye wide open, unmoving.

Charlie squatted down and patted Tom’s cheek. When nothing happened, he put his ear
to Tom’s chest to check his heart was still beating, and a finger under Tom’s nose
to feel for his breath.
    ‘Unconscious,’ he said. ‘Totally out of it, but otherwise fine, I reckon.’ Without
warning, he peeked under Tom’s eye-patch.
    ‘Charlie!’
    ‘What? As if you’ve never been curious.’
    ‘Not that curious.’
    Amelia brought over an old crocheted blanket from the back of the sofa and Charlie
tried to roll Tom over onto his side. Tom, though, was completely rigid.
    ‘It’s almost like …’ Charlie said, grunting with the effort, and then giving up suddenly.
Tom rocked on the floor as though he were a statue, not an actual person. ‘… like
he’s been petrified.’
    Amelia winced at the thought, and spread the blanket over him – a useless gesture
if he had been turned to stone, but she had to do something. They returned to the
front room, searching for the box James had put all of Foxy’s confiscated property
into. Amelia was utterly unsurprised to see it lying empty on the floor behind Tom’s
desk. Whatever Foxy and his giant friends had come to do, they were now fully equipped.
    Amelia picked up Tom’s phone and saw that the spiralling cord that connected the
old-fashioned handset to the dialing part had been cut.
    ‘Look.’ She showed Charlie the severed wires. ‘We’ve got to tell Mum and Dad.’
    With one last look back at Tom, Amelia and Charlie raced out of the cottage and back
through the trees. They were right at the foot of the headland, looking up the steep
slope to the hotel, and the moon came out from behind a haze of cloud, casting a
clear light over everything. Charlie was about to run out onto the open grass, but
Amelia grabbed his arm – she’d spotted the three aliens bursting out of the bush
beyond the hedge maze.
    There was a blast of light from the scanner in Foxy’s hands, and then a piercing
scream from a completely different direction.
    ‘Oh, no,’ said Charlie.
    ‘Sophie T!’ Amelia was horrified to see her friend standing on the brow of the hill
– just where the rest of them had stood earlier to watch the fireworks. ‘What’s she
doing there?’
    ‘ Not being left out.’
    ‘What about her being afraid of the dark?’
    ‘Apparently she would literally rather die than be left behind.’
    ‘Don’t say that!’ Amelia moved out of the grove. ‘We’ve got to help her.’
    This time it was Charlie who held Amelia back. ‘Yeah, but not by being caught.’
    Amelia watched as all three aliens began running toward Sophie T. Her own heart was
racing – she couldn’t imagine how Sophie T’s must be. ‘OK, we don’t get caught,’
she agreed. ‘But then what?’
    The two blue giants were barreling up the slope like charging elephants, running
shoulder to shoulder, and then suddenly they split apart: one circling out to the
right, the other to the left, so that as they drew closer to Sophie T, they were
also cutting off her escape back to the hotel.
    ‘They’re rounding her up like sheep dogs,’ hissed Charlie. ‘Enormous rhino sheep
dogs.’
    ‘Charlie, what are we going to do?’
    ‘And