She told herself it was shock – she was dazed and numbed from it – and the fear that she’d lost Noel. She didn’t want to accept that was possible, wanted to tell herself that God wouldn’t allow it, but terrible things happened every day, like Ellie’s little boy dying. Because it was, as she’d told Ellie, a fallen world.

Her faith was being tested. That was how she had to think of it. The fallen world was harsh; life was cruel. Faith didn’t exempt you from it. Other people had endured the same loss, or worse. So she had to endure, too. Endure. Hope. Believe. And live her faith: do good, and treat others with love.

She told herself that, but a horrible guilty fear nagged her: that she couldn’t feel God’s presence because it wasn’t there to be felt.

Not that the atheists were right – she’d never believe that – but in its way this fear was worse. It was the fear that God was no longer present, because the world had been given over to something else. That either God had turned away and permitted the world, or this part of it, to become the plaything of demons – because what else could those creatures be? – or, worse still, that the power of evil could actually overcome His.

To believe that was blasphemy. Milly didn’t believe it; she insisted to herself she didn’t. But it was what she feared.

Even so she continued to pray, in hope of answer, through all that terrible, lonely night. To pray, and feed the fire, keeping its light strong. Because only the light kept the monsters back. The cross couldn’t: Milly had seen Madeleine try that, and fail. Had her faith been weak? Or had God abandoned or been driven away from them?

She knew what Ellie would say: the creatures, however horrible and unnatural they seemed, were nonetheless things of flesh and blood, in which case a cross and Jesus’ name would no more keep them back than they would a hungry wolf. But, by the same token, they could be fought, and killed. For once, Milly hoped Ellie was right and she was wrong.

She didn’t know, but for the time being, that didn’t matter. She realised that in the darkest watches of the night, when even Ernie was asleep. She looked up and saw the creatures, massed on the lawn. They’d crept close, to very edge of the firelight: shoulder to skeletal shoulder, row on row. Dozens of them, or scores. There might even have been hundreds.

In the morning, in the sun, she’d practice who and what she was on whoever was left alive. She’d see what was to be done, and do it. Till then, she’d protect the people who slept around this fire. Her friends; her neighbours.