The only one who had eaten of the monster and remained without complaint was Colca, but even he had been changed by his supper with the eye. Though only a child of five years, he developed strange peculiarities. His face displayed a perpetually vacant look, except for when he regarded animals, and then he betrayed so much confused emotion that the animals, no matter how domesticated, would flee. The boy forgot all the language he had previously known, and he no longer responded to his mother’s calls, or played with other children.

Raghnailt recognised intimately the change in her son. He had become selfish, fawning, a nervous dog in his movements. Society did not concern him. For a family as proud and respected as hers had once been, having Colca as its only and final representative was a burden that daily broke her heart. In her mind, he had ingested the properties of an unworldly creation and, in return for his life, had bartered away the better parts of his human traits. To her at least, he had never recovered.

‘Now,’ her father says to her, nodding his eye. ‘Now.’

The man storms in through the door, pulling at it so hard he upsets its worn hinges, and awakens her from her troubled sleep.

He stands where her own father once stood eighteen years ago when he returned from his journey, and for a moment she thinks it is him, but this man before her is formed very differently to her father, in both body and spirit. Rudely awoken, she grips onto Alannah in fear, who lies next to her, but Alannah pushes her away, turning on her side, still asleep.

‘Now,’ the man says.

It is patent to Raghnailt that he is already drunk. He sways slightly, surveilling the room with lunatic eyes until his gaze alights on Mary, where she lies curled up on her bed of straw. He moves towards her, knocking over one of the jugs of ground meal that are in his way, and lays himself on top of her, his wattles of fat almost suffocating the girl’s breathing.

The house, of late, has become very crowded, though not as Raghnailt had once hoped it would be, with the clamour of happy, drooling grandchildren, but rather with this one-man invasion of evil that rode into town on the back of the sickness and took it over, bringing his spouse in tow quick after him.

Colca had immediately taken up with this new arrival, this brute of a man who changes his name every other day, and one of his duties is to guard the young woman who the man claims is his wife, this lunatic child called Mary, whose insanity and violence are so great that she is kept in chains. Raghnailt does not believe the man is wed; though Mary is used as his wife whenever the fancy is taken.