“There’s nothing here . . .” answered one of the men looking forward into the darkness by the ruined window-hole, and as he spoke the intruding thing stepped out of the shadows and spread its incredible wings.

Both those whose eyes faced forwards looked aghast and opened their mouth to scream.

“Oh, Jabber fuck no . . .” one managed, and then both were silent as the patterns on the creature’s wings began to swarm like a pitiless dun kaleidoscope.

“What the fuck . . . ?” began one of the Remade, and flickered his eyes briefly in front of him. His face collapsed in horror, but his moan died very fast as he caught sight of the creature’s wings.

The final Remade yelled his comrades’ names, and whimpered as he heard them drop their guns. He could see the faintest shape out of the corner of his eye. The creature before him could sense his terror. It stalked towards him, emitting little reassuring murmurs in an emotive vector. A phrase circled imbecilically in the man’s mind: There’s one in front of me there’s one in front of me . . .

The Remade tried to move forward, his eyes fixed on his mirrors, but the creature before him moved easily into his field of vision. What had been in the corner of the man’s eye became an inescapable, shifting field, and the man succumbed, dropping his eyes to those violently changing wings, and his jaw opened and shuddered tremulously. He dropped his gun-arm.

With a twitch of a skein of flesh, the free creature closed the door. It stood before the four men in thrall, and slobber drooled from its jaws. A snapped demand from its trapped kin interrupted its hunger and humbled it. It reached out and turned each of the men to face the four trapped moths.

There was a tiny moment when each man was no longer facing those wings, when his mind clutched at freedom for a moment, but then the awesome spectacle of four sets of those scudding patterns violently wrested control of his mind and he was lost.

Behind them now, the intruder pushed each man in turn towards one of the huge pinioned things, which reached out eagerly with the short limbs left free to them to grip their prey.

The creatures fed.

One of them fumbled for the keys at the belt of its meal, tore them from the man’s clothes. When it had finished its meal, it reached up with careful movements and pushed the key delicately into the lock of the bolt restraining it.

It took four attempts—fingers clutching the unfamiliar key, twisting it from an awkward angle—but the creature freed itself. It turned to each of its fellows and repeated the slow process, until all the captives were liberated.