Chapter Fourteen

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Wolf at the Door

If Miller’s garden was a tangled hotchpotch of junk, inside the shack was three times worse. There were spindly chairs blocking the narrow hallway, the boys having to navigate around them before finding themselves in a large living space littered with newspapers and magazines. Here and there buckets had been strategically placed to catch rainwater from the creaking, buckled roof. A table in the middle of the room appeared as though it would collapse if so much as a glass of milk were placed on it, and a small camping bed was under the large window, piled high with coarse, crumpled sheets and blankets.

To Lucas it felt as though he was in the belly of a pirate’s galleon; one that had been peppered with Royal Navy cannon balls and was a hairsbreadth away from sinking below the waves. The wooden walls were warped and split, deep grooves in the grain giving the unsavoury impression of bloated veins.

Over in a corner, lying on a coarse, grey blanket, Wo