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soaking them through in moments.
    They debated taking shelter in the cavern in the cliff, but that seemed pointless – they were already as wet as they were likely to be that night– and the longer the shoe sat in the rain, the more water it would catch and the heavier it would be. So they slid it heel first over the timbers, all the way across and down onto the beach, where it pushed up a sort of bow wave of sand and lodged there, its sad, seaweedy laces trailing along on either side.
    ‘We need two more boards,’ Helen announced, and immediately all three of them went off searching, Jack carrying the lantern in such a way as to keep rain out of the shade, playing the feeble light over the dark beach. There were any number of snags of driftwood, none of which would do them any good at all, tangled as they were, with any useful boards trapped beneath stumps and branches and half buried in sand. Then, just when searching any farther began to seem pointless, Skeezix found a sort of graveyard of old railroad ties, tumbled from the ridge above. They dragged two free. With the rain beating into their faces and the surf roaring against the rocky edge of the cove, they hauled them back toward where the shoe lay beyond a veil of falling water.
    None of them questioned the foolishness of their mission. Here was a beaten and water-soaked shoe, after all, useless to anyone but a giant. But there were no giants living on the coast, or anywhere else, as far as any of them knew for sure. It was a shoe which, come morning, would still be sitting on the beach–had they left it alone – and so didn’t, perhaps, require their slogging through wet sand and cold rain at past midnight.
    There was something wonderful, though, in doing useless work. You could turn it into a sort of art. They’d spent the better part of a day and night once building a fortified sand castle on that very beach. Dr Jensen had promised an eight-foot tide the following morning, and they’d calculated how high to build the castle so as to assure its doom. There was no grandeur in a sand castle that was safe from the tide. They’d built a wall around it of stones carried in buckets from the rocky shingle to the south, and inside they’d dug a waist-deep moat, and then, between the moat and the castle, they’d set a line of stakes driven two feet into the sand and they’d woven kelp strands through the stakes, along with whatever sorts of flotsam looked likely to stop an ounce or two of encroaching seawater.
    They’d worked at it until late in the night and then slept above the beach in the cavern. All three had awakened past midnight to work again on the sand castle in the light of the moon, and they were still working – building a city of minarets and domes and trowelled avenues beyond the castle – when the eastern sky had paled with the dawn and the moon had disappeared beyond the watery horizon after lying for a moment like a smoky island on the sea. They had watched from the cavern as the tide swirled up the beach, but they were too tired by then to be anything but silently happy when the rocks and the moat and the wall held up against the first onslaught of waves. More waves had followed, marching up in long straight lines out of the dark ocean, nibbling away at the sand beneath the rocky wall, collapsing the woven sticks in a heap, filling the moat and cascading across the towers and spires and domes and flooding subterranean tunnels. In something under a minute there had been nothing on the beach but a vague mound of wet sand like the back of a turtle and a little fan-shaped tumble of smooth stones and sticks.
    They were twenty yards from the shoe when the shriek of a train whistle erupted from the hill above. Skeezix shouted in surprise and dropped the end of the timber he’d been dragging along the sand with both hands. Jack threw his down, too, and with Helen at his heels set out at a hunched run for the cavern. They climbed the sandstone slope,