He was – in horrifying reality, in flesh and blood – the creeper. His skull had been cracked; its bone remodelled. A blade must have been taken to his mouth, dragged through each cheek, where now crude fishing line held it together. The wounds were healing, retaining their ghastly new shape, mutilating the memory of what he once was – a man, and not the monster he had become.

Every tooth had been filed down to a point. Eyes beetled out of their sockets as though the very bone around them had been crushed in, squeezing them outward like balloons set to pop. Scabs glistened with a creamy pus where his ears had been hacked off, and his nose held no cartilage. Broken bits gathered like coral beneath the skin.

It was the creeper. But his disfigurement was not the work of some ancient evil.

Nu stepped out from the crowd. Ben hadn’t noticed her until then. She wasn’t like he remembered her. I don’t like wearing black, she had told him, and yet there she was. No longer crestfallen. No longer hiding her imperfections. The recesses of her skull were flooded with shadow and her once elfin face was wrought into the most devious illusion.

‘Now you know why the creeper would never choose me,’ she said. ‘I told you, I don’t look right. But he’s perfect. He’s the most perfect one I’ve ever seen.’

‘It was you all along,’ Ben said to the wasp. ‘All those murders, it was you.’

‘The creeper endures through us!’ he proclaimed.

The creeper was a man. He was many men. Each one chosen to carry out the curse in his name. He couldn’t magically appear outside his victims’ homes. Sparling had hidden away his entire life for nothing.

Aoife was safe. The Tír Mallachts couldn’t have known about her.

But the nature of their faith was deranged with contradiction. If the villagers deified the creeper as some otherworldly power, then why butcher their own into its image? Likewise, why hide away night after night, knowing that the threat was of their own making?

‘He’s just a man,’ Ben said, staring at the creature that couldn’t have looked any less human. ‘There’s no reason for—’

‘He is closer now to the almighty than you will ever understand,’ the wasp spat, cutting him off. ‘He is so much more than just a man. He has been chosen. It is fate, I know, that you should come here on this night to witness the festival of transcendence, when we stand safe beneath the stars, in the spirit of sacrifice, offering one of our own to the creeper’s eternal promise.’

Ben helped Chloe to her feet, crouching low so that she could reach an arm around his neck. Her foot hovered over the earth as she hobbled closer to the wasp, using Ben’s shoulder as a crutch.