There was a truck up ahead that had slewed off the road. The Ski Company pick-up his Dad drove around town sometimes. Billy had been in it plenty of times, sitting proudly on the long, slippery bench-seat, mucking around with the CB till his Dad told him to quit it. And he knew that his Dad was in there now. It was silent, the lights still on, its nose stuck harmlessly in a big soft drift at the side of the road where it had so obviously swerved.

Billy wanted to rush forward to the truck and check out his Dad but there was something in the way. All round the truck and in the truck. Something big and inky-black and bad. So bad he could hardly bear to be near it. The wolf was whining, its ears pinned back flat on its skull. And as they looked on, the bad thing, the big, black, dirty thing, felt they were there. He was sure of it. It was like a mad dog tearing away at a rabbit, suddenly swinging around and smelling you creep up behind it. Billy felt a nameless fear rise in his guts as the blackness round the truck started to gather itself. That was the only way he could interpret the thing it was doing. It was gathering.

And there was something worse. He recognized the core of the badness: a pulsating, dark energy that was swallowing and gulping and consuming, ripping and tearing at the night.

He could feel it flashing through his body like electricity, in every blood vessel and nerve ending, in every vein and muscle.

It was his father.

Blackened by this throbbing hate, his father was there right at the heart of the horror. An empty shell of a thing, yet full of bitter and acrid malice.

Billy thought his heart would burst. He struggled to make sense of the thing. So many sensations and dense, ugly, swirling veils of blackness to see through. But through the confusion there was still the truth of what he could feel. That it was the blackness, and his father, and they were intertwined like the hair in a braid.

Then a hissing half-thought, half-spoken voice sizzled in mockery through the blackness.

‘And who is this?’

Billy and the wolf were as still as the stones. They felt tendrils like the touch of limp dead flesh brush their fur, and the probing of that fur to see if there was a way inside.

The wolf was baring its teeth in a snarl of ferocity that Billy had never witnessed.

The black, the badness, the thing that was around and in his father, was trying to get into them, trying to take them over, to have them and be them.

It was all over them now. Everywhere. The wolf writhed and snarled and growled, thrashing on the snow as though pinned by a skewer. And it was so close, so nearly in them … and …