The Great Malevolence had once thought about trying to recruit the Shadows as its allies, but the messengers it sent to their kingdom had never returned. They had been absorbed into the blackness, their eyes taken from them, and eventually they had become Shadows themselves. The Great Malevolence had learned that the Shadows could not be used, and it was better if they were not allowed to pollute the Multiverse or interfere with Hell’s efforts to dominate it.

But then the balance of the Multiverse had been disturbed by the actions of men. Humans were endlessly curious, and their curiosity led them to take risks. They had built the Large Hadron Collider to try to re-create the beginnings of their universe, and in the process they had opened a gateway between Earth and Hell that had almost caused the end of their world. They had also begun to investigate the nature of reality, and reality was a delicate business. What was unreal stayed that way only as long as reality and unreality kept to their own sides of the fence. If you opened a gate between the two, then all kinds of confusion reigned. That was how dwarfs ended up being chased by eyeballs, and tentacled entities got trapped in closets, and little girls with a fondness for spiders, and webs for skin, climbed down from walls to bother people.

But even all of the messing about with reality might not have come back to bite the humans had they not gone poking their noses into dark matter. It was all very well deciding that, yes, what they saw when they looked through their telescopes was only 4 percent of the stuff of the universe, and the other 96 percent had to be made up of something else. They called that something else “dark matter” and “dark energy.” Dark matter was the universe’s hidden skeleton, giving structure to universes and galaxies, while dark energy was the force changing universes, forcing galaxies farther and farther apart. Humanity decided that the universe was about 70 percent dark energy and 25 to 26 percent dark matter. Heigh-ho, problem solved, who fancies a cup of tea and a biscuit before we clock off early for the afternoon?

But that wasn’t right. They should have paid more attention to one important word: dark. The dark was where things hid. The dark was the place where unpleasant creatures that didn’t want to be seen waited until the time was right.

The dark was the place in which the Shadows were imprisoned.

By engaging in dark-matter detection experiments—including projects such as Multidark, the Dark Matter Time Projection Chamber, and the Cryogenic Dark Matter search—the humans had alerted the Shadows to their existence. Even in their isolated realm, they had been able to hear the humans: voices, music, rockets, wars, the Shadows had listened to them all. When the detection experiments had begun, it was the equivalent of someone tapping on the outside of a prison wall with a pickax—tap-tap-tap—except that the person doing the tapping didn’t know that there were entities imprisoned inside, entities that were very anxious to escape and smother every light in the Multiverse.