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I’ve spelt parapluie for you, may I go
home?”
     

Chapter 8
     
    Miley did not know why the
man suddenly burst into a raucous, villainous laughter. There was
nothing funny about her situation whatsoever. She suddenly disliked
Pork Pie even more than Bacon, despite his unexpected fondness for
proper grammar and interesting new words.
      “ Take no notice of
him,” said Bacon, trying to sound pleasant but managing only just.
“You can spend the rest of the night in the spare bedroom and
tomorrow we will take you home. After you’ve done one or two little
jobs for my husband and I, that is.”
    “ You should say: ‘my
husband and me’,” said the
    man. “It’s important to get it
right.”
      “ What a load of old
tosh!” snapped the lady. “Who cares about that sort of
thing?”
      “ Writers do,” Miley
was about to say but she was suddenly feeling far too tired to
argue. She simply
    hadn’t had enough sleep. Bacon led her to
the spare bedroom and allowed her to crawl into the bed, still
    wearing her day clothes.
      “ I’ll wake you early
in the morning,” she said. “When the factory begins its
work.”
      “ But I’m not a
factory worker,” said Miley. “And you haven’t told me what sort of
factory this is.”
      But Bacon had shut
the door, leaving Miley all alone in the strange room. Miley heard
her turn a key in the lock.
      She was shut
in!
      “ Oh, what must I
do?” was her last thought before she fell into a nightmarish
slumber.
     

Chapter 9
     
    Miley was having a nightmare. She was
trapped in a factory called The Devil’s Element. There was a
devil
    with a red tail chasing her, trying to set
her favourite dress alight with a match.  
    “ When I wake up everything
will be fine,” Miley told
    herself, in the middle of
the nightmare. “Nightmares don’t really bother me if they aren’t
real real.”
      But when Miley woke
the following morning, the nightmare was most definitely real real.
There wasn’t
    a devil with a red tail and Miley wasn’t
wearing her favourite dress but she was still in a strange bed (her
second strange bed that night) in a locked room in a strange place
with two wicked (not to mention rough) people she had nicknamed
Bacon and Pork Pie. This was the sort of nightmare Miley didn’t
like one little bit!
      She got up and
banged on the door. Bacon opened it and passed her a bowl of claggy
gruel with a dirty-looking spoon stuck straight up in the middle of
it, like a lighthouse that had stopped working.
      “ You’ve had the bed
and this is the breakfast,” she said. “Eat up. You have a busy day
ahead of you.”
      “ But I want to go
home NOW,” said Miley. “You MUST take me.”
      “ So I will, so I
will, but first of all you have to pay us back the money you owe.
As we agreed.”
      “ Did we agree?” said
Miley. She couldn’t remember.
      “ Follow me,” said
Bacon.  
    Clutching the bowl of gruel Miley followed
Bacon. She didn’t feel the slightest bit hungry, not even the
    tiniest bit, but she dipped
a finger in the gruel anyway and sucked it. It tasted as horrible
as it looked – the
    gruel, that is, not her finger, although by
now her finger looked nearly as dirty as the spoon.
      Down the stairs they
went, into a kitchen where Pork Pie was sitting reading a
newspaper, hunting out the tastiest words for his notebook while
eating his breakfast, which looked far, far tastier than Miley’s,
and then through some doors into a big space with a wide table and
two long benches.
      “ This is our little
cottage-industry factory,” said Bacon. “This is where you will work
today.”
      “ All day!” Miley
protested. “But it can’t take as long as that to pay back one
penny!”
      “ Children take
longer than grown-ups to earn money,” said Bacon. “They don’t need
it as much as
    grown-ups do.”
    Bacon hustled Miley to one
of the benches by the big table where some other children were
already at work. All