The men held the creeper not ten feet away from where Ben was pinned down, looking to the wasp for their signal. That naked monstrosity was salivating at the sight of him; this man who Ben had tried to comfort. Chloe had even hoped to somehow save the bastard.

‘Release him,’ the wasp said, ‘but tie back his hands. We don’t want him doing anything stupid.’

They did as they were told. Their fleshly shackles were released. Ben gasped for air as one breaking above water. His knees sank into the ground like two pillars. He cracked his neck musically from side to side and stretched his arms as though loosening up for a fight. But the fight was over. All he had to do now was make sure it hadn’t been for nothing.

The ring of bodies surrounding him had loosened. Escape obviously wasn’t a possibility anymore; even the idiots knew that without being told.

In the mud, Ben finally noticed the ridged tracks, flooded with rainwater, where a tyre had been rolled across the common. Of course, they’d had the means to follow them. Their creeper couldn’t appear, like Sparling believed. The villagers knew the route that his perfect candidates took every two years.

Ben had known the truth all along. The certainty that such horrors weren’t real; the lesson his parents had taught him as a child – the same one that his fears had made him forget.

He dabbed his neck as he always did when he thought of his Aunt Patricia. He finally understood what she had seen all those years ago. And then, voluntarily – as though he had a choice – he brought his hands behind his back. There was no technique to the knot. But it would hold. Not that Ben ever intended to break it.

The wasp knelt in front of him. His long legs would only bring him so low. Ben still had to tilt his head to meet him in the eye; squinted like the slimy innards of an oyster.

‘If you try anything, I’ll kill you myself. And it won’t be quick, do you understand me?’

Ben just stared at him. What exactly did the man think he was capable of? Hands bound and surrounded, only a miracle could save him now. And only a miracle could save his little girl. With all that desperation exhausted, Ben had finally cracked open the hope. Corked or not, he wasn’t going to waste a drop.

‘Bring him,’ the wasp said.

Ben expected to die as Chloe had – on his back, his face like a nail waiting to be hammered into the earth. But he was wrong. The creeper’s bones were adjusted to mirror his own. On their knees, facing one another, it would kill him. And not with a hammer or some tool handpicked from the selection box in the nearby cottage. He would die by the creeper’s bare hands.