Where did it get him? Fast lane to the nut house? What now? Was he driving back to the detachment to tell Becker that they should be hunting down a malicious spirit as old as the earth? One that was going to destroy them all unless Sam Hunt sacrificed himself?

He stopped the car, watching the snowflakes settle on the glass between the intermittent wiper sweep.

What was his part in all this madness? He leaned his head forward and touched the wheel with a hot forehead.

Sylvia. The fucking thing had abused the memory of Sylvia. He hated it then, a hatred deeper than his grief. He pulled his head up and concentrated on that hate, pushing his fear aside with the intensity of the emotion. Because under all this stuff there was a pit of fear so profound he dared not peer over into its abyss.

The wiper-blades swept an arc across the snow-dusted windscreen, and in that two-second gap, Craig McGee saw him.

Sam Hunt. Running across Lynx Drive and heading for the railroad.

The tracks were easy to follow. Sam was a big guy. He left big, deep footprints. As soon as the tracks hit the railroad line, Craig hardly needed to look at his feet. The footprints ran straight up the centre of the rails, heading for the Corkscrew Tunnel. Craig slowed his pace, panting with the effort of wading through deep snow. He wasn’t going to lose Sam now. The dark holes in the snow his boots had left would take hours to fill up again, even in this storm. Craig hung back and took his time.

So he’d been hiding in the tunnel? Neat idea. Hardly any freight came through at night. Anyone in Silver knew that. Knew that the trains mostly stopped at the bunkhouse in Stoke first, then pulled out at dawn. Smart.

The perfect refuge from Becker and his useless posse.

But the thought of that tunnel made Craig’s spine crawl. That thing again. The thing in his brain he’d spent a lifetime ignoring. It had gone off like an alarm last week when they’d gone to collect the bits of the ski patrol boys who blew themselves up above the tunnels. Craig had walked down to where the landslide had partially blocked the entrance, just out of curiosity and to get a breather from the carnage, and he’d wanted to run. Very fast and very far away.

The tunnel was like a mouth. A great yawning, hungry mouth. Craig had stared up at the icicles hanging from the roughly-hewn arch and been repulsed by how much they looked like teeth. He had shivered and returned to his men, leaving the tunnel to drip and echo on its own.

Now Sam Hunt was running towards it. Craig sat on his fear again and walked slowly and silently between the tracks.