When Jack woke up, it was too quiet.

Obviously it was dark, because it was the middle of the night. And naturally the house was quiet.

But usually there was at least a bit of noise from the main road, and instead it was weirdly still. And dark, of course. A very strange time to wake up for no reason, in fact.

From the bunk bed, Jack only had to raise his head to see out of the gap between the curtains, and it didn’t look as though anything was moving outside, either. Just an orange glow round the side of the house from the street lamp.

… and a tiny light somewhere around where the edge of the lawn would be.

Jack lay back. This was a silly time to be awake.

A minute later, though, it became clear that he definitely was awake, so he sat up and pulled the curtain aside.

The tiny glowing thing, whatever it was, had moved, and was moving. Slowly, low down somewhere in the flowerbeds. For a moment, Jack wondered if it could somehow be a burglar, but of course it couldn’t. No burglar could hide among primroses and crocuses and … whatever else made up the greenery of the garden. And why would they?

Could it be a firefly? Was there anything else natural that glowed? Jack had been very interested in insects and creatures only a year or so ago. Now he felt that was a bit babyish, but he would like to see a firefly. He didn’t think there were fireflies in Kent.

He knew he might be just about to get in a lot of trouble, but he couldn’t resist. He quietly let himself down to the floor, picked up a hoodie from the back of his chair to go over his pyjamas, and slipped out of the bedroom door. His parents’ door was closed and there was no sound from anywhere, so he crept downstairs, avoided the creaky step near the bottom that usually let his mother know where he was, and took the longer way to the side door, knowing it was further from his parents and quieter to open.

Outside was cool, but even in the darkness he could feel the freshness of Spring. It wasn’t cold. And he could see the tiny light zigzagging at about dandelion height near the end of the garden.

Jack knew from trying to catch spiders and butterflies that it would flit away if he got his approach wrong, so he sidled up the garden, cat-like, moving without seeming to move, just … sort of being here, and then there, without a sound or any suddenness. He’d got good at it.

Just near the cherry tree, he stopped and looked. The light was coming towards him now, to the tree.

He squinted. It didn’t look like a fly of any kind. More like an animal. No animals glowed, did they? But something – with a light – was walking towards him. Taller than a mouse, a lot smaller than a cat, the light itself just above the top of the grass.

It wasn’t an animal. It was a minature man, holding a minature lantern in one hand and with some sort of tool in the other.

Jack blinked. Now everything made sense. This must be a dream. That would explain it all. It was a good dream, though, and he didn’t want to spoil it, so he held still. Didn’t breathe as the tiny man approached the other side of the tree.

It didn’t look like an elf or fairy, anything like that. Just a man, but tiny, wearing overalls and a toolbelt. Although the overalls did look as though they were made out of the same kind of thing as leaves are. That’s as clear as Jack could see, and within moments the man was part-hidden around the thin trunk anyway, fiddling with something at the base, between the start of two roots.

Carefully, Jack leaned around to see what he was doing … and that was all it took.

The tiny man saw him. He froze for one moment, little eyes wide in the glow of the lantern resting on the root, absolute horror washing over his face. Then he dashed away, back across the grass and into the bushes, amazingly fast, and was gone.

For a second, Jack was deeply disappointed. But this had to be a dream, obviously, so he tried to fix the detail in his head, hoping he’d remember it in the morning. Had that little face had a neat beard? He thought so.

Anyway, with him gone, he could see what he’d been doing. And that was odd enough.

In the light of the thumb-sized lantern, deep between the roots, was a door, even smaller than the man, who wouldn’t have been able to fit through it. Almost resting his head on the ground, Jack could see that there was no proper opening anyway, just a smooth surface inside. Sticking out of a hole in that was the tool the little man had been holding.

It was a bit like a key, but had a crank to it. Testing with the tip of his finger and thumb, Jack found that it turned, with a bit of resistance. There was no click and nothing unlocked, though. He turned it again, carefully. It was like twiddling a paperclip. And had no more effect, as far as he could see. He gave it a quick few spins, a slow one, backwards, and then a few more at a steady speed. Still nothing.

After quite a lot of turning, he concluded that nothing was going to happen, and tried pulling the little tool out. It pulled away more easily than he expected, and as it did so, the door snapped shut.

Once it had, Jack couldn’t find any trace of it, even with his fingernail digging into the tree exactly where it had been. Without the tiny crank between his finger and thumb, he wouldn’t have been able to tell the door had ever been there.

Jack straightened up. The lantern was still there, maybe slightly dimmer, but it looked as though this was it. He stared into the greenery in case there was any sign of the man, but it was very still and very dark. There was still absolutely no sound from anywhere, the surrounding world on pause. He closed his eyes, hands in his hoodie pockets, trying to tell his body that this was enough dreaming, time to sleep properly, but when he opened them again he was still outside. Not at all surprisingly, there was no lantern.

Shaking his head, he walked quietly back to the house.

When Jack woke again, it was not at all quiet.

There was a buzz of voices outside, and slamming doors. Something was going on.

It was morning, he could tell, but early, and not at all bright.

The night had been unusual, he thought, no wonder he was tired. The curtain was half-open. Outside …

He couldn’t see the house that backed onto their garden. What could he see? It didn’t make sense.

Sitting up and staring through the window, he wondered if this was another dream.

Where the cherry tree had been was a stupendously huge trunk that filled the whole end of the garden. Presumably it was a tree, still, just so enormous that Jack couldn’t see any more than that. He peered upwards as far as he could.

“Jack!”

“Yes, mum?”

“Are you up? There are some people here who say we’ve got to get out of the house. Something really weird …”