Dawn brought sanity. Or was it madness? Craig wasn’t sure any more. He was frozen and numb, but his vigil outside that yawning mouth of darkness had been impossible to break. Sam’s chanting had been going on for hours. Stopping sporadically, and just when Craig thought about stepping through that black mouth and checking his quarry hadn’t fled through the tunnel and off into the night, it would start again. So he’d sat and waited, listening and watching.

And of course Sylvia had come back.

It was getting easier to bear. The trick was to look as if you hadn’t seen. That seemed to make it angry, and for that small victory he was grateful. After the fourth or fifth time, he forgot which, he didn’t look, respond or reply. He just let the thing do its sick and perverted business with the image of his dead wife, while he bit the insides of his cheeks until they became ulcerated and bloody.

And then there was dawn, that thin grey light that started to sketch in detail where there had been only rough form. He thought at first that it was another trick, but he was intrigued at its change of plan. The mound was obviously a body, but it didn’t look as if it was going to be Sylvia’s.

Craig McGee had walked very slowly over to the trees and waited to see if the horror would rise up to greet him. But there was no black thing moving behind this mound of dead flesh. No clouds of oily depravity. This was what it seemed to be. A dead man, an Indian, mutilated in a way he was nauseatingly familiar with.

Craig looked away, out over the tops of the pines, to where he knew the mountains were hiding behind the misty snow clouds, and he felt his reason cracking down the middle like ice.

Sam Hunt. One call on the radio he carried but had switched off and they would be here. They would come and they would have all the goddamn proof they needed to lock away Mr Sam Hunting Wolf, the most notorious serial killer Canada had ever boasted.

Here was the body. There was the killer. Here was the policeman.

So why was he standing alone outside this tunnel, listening to a crazy man chanting his dirge?