Negotiating those windy laneways blind was too slow. The thought crossed Ben’s mind to divert from what they knew; to take their chances in the untravelled fields beyond. But was there anywhere they could hide that the villagers wouldn’t find them? Their tracks in the flooded clay trailed behind them like breadcrumbs.

His arm was suddenly wrenched downward, folding his leg and crashing his shoulder into the ground. In the stupefying seconds that followed, he heard Chloe cry out.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

They should have been moving. Every second counted.

‘It’s my ankle. I think I’ve twisted it.’

The voices were getting louder.

Ben imagined the feeling of wire slitting across his neck and the sound of bones popping out of their sockets like champagne corks. He tried to lift Chloe up. But she hobbled in his arms before letting herself fall back down.

‘Go,’ she shouted, pushing him away, ‘get out of here!’

So close were the Tír Mallachts now that their flames illumed the faintest outline of her face. Ben held her head in his hands and looked into her eyes. Only then did he realise that he was crying too.

The chase was over.

‘It’s going to be okay,’ he whispered.

Before she could shake her head, his arms were around her.

27

The villagers swarmed them like ants devouring their next meal. From their number they gleaned an impossible strength. Faces were even more frightening up close, leering and drooling as their many black eyes smouldered like hot coals amidst the flames. They gripped Ben from all angles, hoisting him up and dragging him wherever they pleased. He could hear Chloe’s cries but he couldn’t see her. All around them the villagers cheered and chanted, screaming at the night like a psychotic circus of horrors. There were children, too, and mindless idiots dancing outside the scrum, adrift in their own sea of madness.

Nobody knew where Ben was. Not his parents, not Jess, not a friend that he had ignored since signing Sparling’s contract. Nobody was coming to help them.

He thought of all those blood-spattered tools cast about that cottage. Would the villagers take their pick of them? There was no choice but to submit to the machinations of the inbred and deranged, even if that meant torture.

Night had fallen and, for what it was worth, they were still alive. But whatever death the creeper held in store for them couldn’t have been worse than what the villagers were capable of. In the sunlight they had masqueraded as victims of their own simplicity, eliciting from Ben a feeling close to pity. But the moonlight revealed the truth concealed beneath those elaborate layers of charade and subterfuge, leaving only their cruelty and their madness, and he pitied them no more.