‘Look! Look at what I must suffer because you shoot no seed.’ She squeezed both tits and oozing from them came clots of thick, sticky blood. It spurted onto the table, a great wet globule of it landing in his coffee mug with a slopping sound. Then she put her head back and laughed and her hands became like claws, ripping at her breasts until they burst with a thick tearing sound, splattering stinking black ooze over Calvin’s face.

He swallowed hot bile back in his throat, wrenched his eyes away to the couple with the ice-cream and concentrated on their love. The girl was holding her lover’s hand now, stroking the back of it with her delicate fingers. He focused on that act. What would it feel like for the boy? Her hands would be cold from holding the ice-cream dish and the boy would enjoy the coolness of it. Yes, he could feel that if he thought hard enough. Soft, cold fingers toying with the hand she loved. Small, well manicured nails, scratching lightly at the skin, fingertips massaging the knuckles.

‘He won’t listen to nothin’ you be sayin’, you old buttfucker. He fuckin’ hates you.’

Moses. Slumped over the table with half a face and a mutilated, decomposing body slick with slime, moving quietly with the work of worms.

Calvin faced it again, his eyes seeing the apparition but his heart concentrating on the pulse of life that meant people would always love other people. That girl’s fingers, they would probably stroke the boy’s face later, savouring every plane of his face, the feel of his rougher skin. Loving him. Longing to be with him, to share their lives and honour their own brief mortal spirits together.

The half-face leered up at Calvin, losing two green teeth to gravity as it did. They fell on the foul, stained formica table with a clatter before spinning off onto the floor. The thing cackled with a throat full of phlegm and pus, ‘Want a heart to love Sam with? Here!’

He pulled at the ragged shirt and burst open the thin putrefying flesh beneath it. The bony hand tugged at the strands of cartilage and sinew still attached to the heart and ripped it free. It put the still beating, blackened organ triumphantly on the table where it moved on its own like a skinned animal.

‘And how about a pecker to shove up his hole? You wanted to do that bad, huh?’ It fumbled beneath the table. Calvin gathered his strength.

‘We laugh at you. All through the centuries. Laughing loud at the thing with no name. No power of its own.’

It stopped its fumbling and fixed him with a searching black shaft of malice. The air was singing again, and once again Calvin felt fetid tendrils explore the circle around him.