The screams made Noel recall the legend that a mandrake had roots resembling a man and screamed, when plucked, so terribly it killed whoever heard it. Maybe the creatures – thin and pale as roots – were the source of that myth too, as well as those of trolls and goblins.

Appalling though they were, the screams meant victory, however temporary. Thin shapes writhed and fell amidst the flames, and the smell rolled out over the camp, sour and acrid and foul; it scorched Noel’s throat, scalded his eyes, and made him want to retch.

He looked away from the fire, back across the field towards Halliwell Way. At first his eyes were too dazzled to see anything, but at last he could make out the blurred pallid forms of the creatures that had been advancing across the meadow. They’d halted, at least for now.

It was the same story when he looked towards the High Street to the west, or south at Smithy Lane. More of the creatures had been advancing from each of those – he guessed they’d poured up the hill road from Thursdale and spread out to encircle the camp – all of whom had now stopped in their tracks.

Noel would have said they were watching, but they couldn’t do that; instead he guessed they were listening, or maybe scenting. God knew the reek from the fire was hard to miss.

The screams died down. Mercifully, the appalling stench from the fire also abated – that, or its sheer awfulness had killed Noel’s sense of smell.

The pale things kept still. As far as Milly could make out their shapes, they’d all subsided into their crouching postures. Maybe they’d had enough, now they’d seen the villagers could fight back.

What was the Harpers’ Family Bible, anyway? Not God’s Word, like the Bible Milly knew: just so many rumours, half-truths and speculations. Sleepers under the hill, prophecies, the Dance, the Fimbulwinter – myths, no truer than Goldilocks and the Three Bears or Jack and the Beanstalk. Whatever grains of truth they might have, it didn’t make them Scripture –

But even as Milly seized the hope, it broke like rotten straw. The creatures had begun moving again. They came from Halliwell Way, like a low but inexorable pallid wave; from Smithy Lane and the High Street too. Rolling slowly and steadily in towards the camp.

Ellie caught a brief glimpse of Charlotte’s terrified face in a stray flash of torchlight, and then there was only the blackness around them, which seemed endless. They’d been tossed like a handful of dust into an infinite void, scattering so far out through it that the others’ cries were barely audible. They’d fall and fall and be lost forever –