Orlen Drell cowered in the mouth of a storm drain, shying away from the touch of the glowing fungi that half-filled it. Even driven mad and hollowed out by hunger, he had not dared to remain out in the moonlight. He had grasped soon enough that its rays brought pain. Yet neither had he been fool enough to crawl far into the dark spaces beneath the city. He was a beaten and bloody fugitive, ­hiding in terror from the monsters that moved in the darkness, and in his more lucid moments he wondered how he had possibly survived this waking nightmare for as long as he had.

Drell had scraped off the fungal growths that had sprouted from his flesh. The process had left him shivering and bloodied, but he was too frightened to seek out any kind of medical supplies, nor even food or water. He certainly wouldn’t countenance trying to eat the mushrooms growing around him in the dark; that way led to a certain and horrible death. Instead he simply crouched, balled up and stiff in the dark, while he waited for the next horror to manifest itself.

Perhaps it was how far he had strained his senses in his quest to stay alive, but Drell felt the change coming before he saw it. Tremors shook the air. Drell tensed.

A dull rumble reached his ears, a sound that reverberated through air and stone alike and grew slowly but inexorably. The tunnel shuddered, and Orlen fumbled to steady himself in his awkward position. Then came a reverberant boom, and another, and another. The drain shuddered and cracks spiderwebbed its walls. Orlen was torn between paralysis and flight. He didn’t know where he should go – back out into the light that stung and sickened him, or back into the darkness where some terrible thing would surely take his life.

Orlen gave a whimper of alarm as the air pulsed. A thrumming pressure beat against his eardrums and made his heart flutter in his chest. The feeling increased, and Orlen’s whimper became a wail as a vortex of air funnelled along the storm drain and sucked him helplessly towards its entrance. He fought against it, digging his nails in until they splintered, but the pull of the air was inexorable. His wail became a frantic screech as he was dragged through a slimy mass of toadstools that themselves shuddered and tore in the howling gale. Orlen was a few yards from the mouth of the drain, almost back into the sickly pale light of the moon and fighting frantically, when there came another boom, this time so deafeningly loud as to leave his ears ringing. It was accompanied by a vicious pressure wave that replaced the howling vortex and shoved Orlen back along the drain like a ramrodded cannonball.