“Poor little boy. He cried and cried. Don’t you tell him now, will you?”

“No, Mother. No, I won’t.”

“Here. You can cuddle this one instead.”

“No, Mother. You keep him.”

It was the last time I heard my mother say anything that made close to sense; after my father died, she stopped responding, even to the animals. But that Christmas she was bright; beaming in her silver crown; fussing over the rabbit. And there I was, between them like Alice at the Mad Hatter’s tea party; pouring more orange drink; wearing a crown; cutting up my father’s turkey slice into tiny pieces.

I tell you all this so you’ll understand why my mind was elsewhere. Why I’d forgotten Nutter; why Harry Clarke was so far from my thoughts. Eric had invited me to his house for Boxing Day, but I decided against it, and spent the day alone instead, listening to the wireless and watching the snow turn to sleet outside. Kill me, please, I told myself. Kill me if I ever get old.

And then it began. Out of the blue, from that strange and sinister twilight that falls between Christmas and the New Year. In the Mayan calendar, the five days that came at the end of the solar cycle were “nameless days,” during which demons walked, and the portals between the living world and the world of the dead were left ajar. I am not superstitious, but the time between Christmas and the New Year has always felt the same to me: a limbo; the cigarette butt of the year; a time when nothing good can happen. Suicide rates go up; road traffic accidents multiply; the season of goodwill degenerates into a series of fistfights, breakups, quarrels, and burglaries. The local newspapers try to balance this with heartwarming stories of comfort and joy, but these are only the fires we light against the coming of the dark. Under the tinsel, under the snow, something bitter and bleak endures.

A squib in the paper. A child’s pet—a Christmas gift—vanished from a garden shed: a reward was being offered for the return of a brown-and-white rabbit. Three days later, another piece reported two more attacks, one in a henhouse in Red City, the other, the theft of a guinea pig from a garage on Abbey Road. Urban foxes, or maybe a dog, suggested the Malbry Examiner—although there was no explanation of how a dog could have opened the door of a henhouse, then closed it after stealing the hens. I remembered Newman’s rabbits, dead and damp in their dry pens, and felt a little uneasy. That’s why I don’t keep pets, I thought. They make you feel so vulnerable.