She was shaking like an injured hummingbird. He led her to their tent. Her tired body tried to edge back towards the stranger, too weakened now to hold the torchlight towards him but desperate nonetheless to see him gone.

‘Come on,’ he whispered, helping her inside.

Ben zipped the tent closed behind them and brought Chloe over to her sleeping bag. The shock – of the freezing temperatures and the fright combined – had shut her down. Snap seizures of cold tortured their bodies, but Chloe’s were especially severe. She was too thin, too light, to be standing outside and so exposed. He forgot his own pain, wrapping all that he could find around her as she slid her pale, almost translucent legs into the bag. She still hadn’t spoken. He had known the girl for only two days and Ben already knew that wasn’t a good sign. Cold as it was, it wasn’t the elements that had knocked her back. It was the man. The one who had watched them from the darkness of the far field and that Ben knew in his soul was watching them still.

Chloe’s body folded into a foetal position. Why hadn’t they thrown their jackets on? It’s not as though the cold had hit them as some surprise.

If the villagers meant them harm, then their tent wasn’t going to survive a siege. But why? They had promised to leave in the morning. The rules had been set and they’d followed each and every one of them.

‘Chloe,’ he whispered, ‘it’s okay. I’ll go and see what he wants.’

She didn’t reply. He rubbed what might have been her arm, listening to the nylon whish back and forth, too rapt by anger to even realise his hand was moving; a steadying action, more for his sake than hers.

Ben was sick of it. The charade never stopped. Every close-minded village guarded its stories like scripture. Ghosts, devils, phantoms, and fairies – muddied words cleaned and whetted as weapons for the young and the credulous. And trembling by Ben’s side, Chloe – their latest victim. Never mind the fright they had given her, luring a woman out into the night to spy on her was crime enough.

Ben reached for her parka; the warmest thing on hand. He sank both arms into its short sleeves and drew the hood over his head. There was no feeling other than the pain that throbbed hardest in his toes.

He zipped the tent’s door open. The night was, at once, a presence – an oppressor and a killer. There was no peace in its dead air. No splendour to its stars. It was as though an army ringed their campsite in darkness, tiptoeing in terrifying silence, swallowing them from all sides.