‘I know why you let me die like a dog without shaying goodbye. Don’t think I didn’t know, Shammy. Did you think that your dirty filthy fornication with Darshcy had been a shecret? Did you? You thought she’d be there at the hoshpital, and you didn’t come. In cashe she grabbed you by the shleeve and begged you to fuck her again.’ The figure that could not possibly be the Reverend Jenkins, laughed a coughing, slick and wet-sounding guffaw. No. This was not him. He had been kind and good and forgiving and cared about Sam. What was this thing that Sam stood beneath, staring up at it like a baby watching a mobile? It was real, and it was talking again in that thick, slurred slurping voice.

‘One fuck from a shtinking Indian and she was heartbroken. Nothing to you, Shammy, eh? You didn’t want to know after the deed. But she cried for you every night. You knew that. And that’sh why you shtayed away, washn’t it?’

And he would never have cursed, the Reverend Jenkins. No no. Not if he caught a finger in a car door, not if a coal fell from the fire onto his slipper, not even if his lascivious daughter had won herself an afternoon of clumsy pointless sex with someone he thought of as his son. Never.

The figure put a hand up to its face. ‘Well you misshed yourshelf, Shammy.’ It pulled away the blue scarf. Beneath the spectacles and the bridge of the nose was a void. There were upper teeth and part of a lower jaw, but the flesh was eaten from the cheeks all the way back to both ears. The obscenity grinned at him with its diseased half-face. Bits of the remaining blackened flesh moved around what was left of an ulcerated and rotting tongue. ‘Yesh, you misshed yourshelf, boy.’

Sam opened his mouth to scream and found nothing there. The horror grinned on at him, laughing in its wet throat. The message of panic from his brain that didn’t reach Sam’s mouth in time to scream, reached his legs instead and he threw himself forward with a lunge. The skis did the rest and in seconds he was accelerating down the fall-line with the sound of that wet cackle dying behind him.

A variety of creatures stirred in alarm from their evening chores as Sam crashed past their haunts in the high pines.

They were nervous creatures tonight. They could smell a fierce danger in the air. They lifted their snouts and beaks, cocked their ears, and waited until he was past, then resumed business in their secret places.