His was the only body on that deserted street. It was too spindly and disproportionate to be anyone but him. The streetlights overhead brushed his shape with the faintest gloss of copper, but the darkness kept the features of his form a mystery.

‘I told you,’ Chloe whispered. ‘And then the next night he’s closer. So close that you can see him, and he can—’

‘Stop,’ Ben interjected, so loudly that he startled himself.

They had abandoned Tír Mallacht at first light with the dawn still breaking over the rain-swept trees. By foot and by car they had travelled, leaving it all behind. Nobody could have caught them. The man outside the window couldn’t be there.

It was a cruel joke and it had gone on for long enough. Ben stormed away from the window, fists clenched, nostrils flaring like a warhorse at full gallop. Chloe reached for him, but he had already crossed the room, simmering with a rage that he couldn’t contain. Not while she suffered at the hands of the Tír Mallachts and their fucking creeper.

‘What are you doing?’ she shouted, following him into the hallway.

‘I’m putting a stop to this. It’s just a man, Chloe, and I’m going to prove it to you.’

Ben threw open the door and charged outside, never second-guessing what he was about to do. To think was to hesitate, and his anger wouldn’t allow it. Cold air raced into the hallway as the door handle knocked against the wall. The silence was broken only by Ben’s footsteps as he paced towards the pavement, and there he stopped.

The man was gone.

There was no sound to be heard or movement to be seen. The whole estate had the eerie air of an abandoned film set.

‘Where’d he go?’ Ben said, walking onto the road, his neck all the while turning, searching, but finding nothing. ‘He couldn’t have just…’ He stopped himself from saying it.

Chloe came to stand in the doorway. There she watched Ben walk out to the centre of the cul-de-sac, facing where the stranger had stood, where the memory of him still did. Ben had his hands on his head, scratching at its short hairs. Out there, alone, on that orange-coloured concrete he resembled an astronaut on some alien planet, seeking desperately for life.

‘What do you want?’ he shouted.

His voice echoed to nowhere. Behind a curtained window, a neighbour’s light came on, and then another, like dead souls stirring from their slumber.