When the creatures’ terrible, desolate screams – like cries of agony, although they’d been physically untouched – had finally died away, the ones clinging to the window frames slumped and sagged, dangling from their stickish limbs. The rest had remained crouching, motionless, among the tombstones.

She’d waited for them to attack, but they hadn’t; later, a massive dull explosion sounded in the distance, making the church shudder as if something had stirred and settled under it. Then all had been still again, and as the night wore on she’d felt first hope, then certainty, that – surrounded though they were – no attack would come.

No sound and no movement from the creatures, all through the night. It still hadn’t been easy; the cold had been bitter, their few dying lights a pitiful shield against the dark. At times her conviction they were safe had wavered, and from the sobs and gasps around her she knew that some didn’t have it at all. But still the things didn’t move.

When the inside of the church began to lighten she didn’t believe it; thought it must be her eyes acclimatising to the dark. But soon she could see the churchyard more clearly, the landscape start disclosing itself in the grey-silver dawnlight, and still the monsters neither moved nor made a sound, even when the steam began rising from them.

The stench of their dying filled the church as the dawn brightened and the sun rose. The steam now boiled from them in clouds; their skin wrinkled, sagged and fell away. The worst part was the patient silence with which they let the sun kill them. In the end Milly looked away. The smell was bad enough; Reuben slunk away from it, whining, and hid behind her.

Head pillowed in Noel’s chest, Milly thought she might have slept, if only for minutes, here and there. At some point, anyway, the smell had faded, and when she looked up, the church’s shattered windows were empty with the sun shining through them, lighting the last curls of steam. Outside the door were scattered bones, cracking and crumbling as she looked at them, and a rime of bubbling scum upon the grass. Soon enough, steam, stench and bones were gone, leaving only a pale crusty layer on the ground where the last of the residue had dried out.

Noel helped Milly to her feet. Slowly she went to the doorway and stepped outside. The winter air was fresh and cold and clean. Her feet crunched briefly in the creatures’ remains, and then she was on the grass. Footsteps shuffled behind her as the others crept blinking out into the light, and stood silent in the day they’d never thought to see.

It had been a long night too in Barrow Woods.