Charlotte. It had to be. He’d bring her into the main room, to Barbara, and make his stand there if he could, but if not, if it had to be one or the other, it wasn’t a choice. Barbara would expect no less of him, he knew that as he ran across the landing, but still felt a distant flare of self-disgust at the ease with which he’d written off his wife of more than twenty years.

It remained distant, though. Guilt and expiation were for the future, if there was one.

He already knew, in his marrow, that there wasn’t.

Joda reached Charlotte’s door and threw it open –

On an empty room.

He stared in disbelief at the unoccupied bed and shut, unbroken window, outside which snow swirled as two more white-spider hands crawled up the glass and another eyeless, shrouded head rose between them. His child was gone. His baby; they’d taken her.

The head rose into full view; the windowpane shook as its fingers clawed and scratched. There was movement on the landing behind him, but he couldn’t bring himself to turn.

And then he realised.

Barbara had always told Joda that he had a beautiful laugh, loud and rich and booming. Full of life and light, she’d told him once. He hadn’t laughed in a long time, but he did now.

Charlotte’s bedroom window wasn’t broken. The creature had only just appeared outside it. There was a fire escape on her side of the building; she’d used it to slip out, to meet the Chapple boy. Not the first time she’d done so, but the first time Joda had been glad of it.

And the last.

He stopped laughing when he heard the window give way in the main bedroom next door. And when his wife began to scream.

Sounds behind him, from the landing: stealthy, scuttling movement, but louder, and still he couldn’t turn.

Barbara screaming, more loudly than she’d seemed capable of in months. Things crashed and broke in the main bedroom.

And still he could not turn.

His wife would die alone, and for nothing, because his daughter had run away. He had failed her, and his family, in the profoundest sense imaginable.

He couldn’t turn. He couldn’t turn.

He must.

The window in Charlotte’s room began to crack, and that spurred Joda to action at last. The intruders were in front, below, behind, beside him. There was no escape, and so he’d face them. He’d be a man. Make his dead father proud.

He would fight his way to his wife’s side, and die trying to protect her.

He could do no more.

Joda Famuyiwa, always a quiet and contained man, now bellowed and whirled, lashing out with the cue, and struck towards the bedroom door only yards away.

He never got there.

There were screams, and other sounds.