Saturday. Thank God it was Saturday. Ann opened the door still wearing her robe.

‘Don’t ask anything. Just lend me your car. Please.’

Without speaking Ann disappeared inside and brought out the keys. She handed them to Katie, and as her hand touched her friend’s, she held it. ‘You want help?’

Katie shook her head. She blinked back a tear, retrieved her hand and kissed Ann on the cheek. ‘This is help. You haven’t seen me.’

Ann nodded, and stood watching in the cold doorway right up until Katie threw the GMC Jimmy into drive and was way out of view. She passed a patrol car on the edge of town, but the driver didn’t give her a glance. He was talking into the radio. Talking, she guessed, about an eight-year-old beat-up blue Toyota.

The viewing platform. That was the best place to get down to the tunnels. You could climb over the fence, scramble through the trees and get onto the track. But there were two tunnels. Long and dark. Katie would face that when she got there, right now she had to drive.

There had been no fear like it in his life. Not even at the hospital, seeing Sylvia the way he had. Once, a guy they’d cornered had levelled a shotgun at him and stroked his finger on the trigger. The thing that had happened in his guts then, that metallic taste of adrenalin in his mouth, the tightening of his neck, none of it was like this. It had taken him hours to find the courage, and now, at the moment he’d decided to step into the tunnel mouth, he knew what fear really was.

He could hear Hunt, but he couldn’t see him yet. The curve on the tunnel meant there was only ever light from one end at a time. Craig McGee had now walked away from that light. It was a cave, a long, dark, dripping, terrifying cave. And above the eerie noise of Sam Hunt’s nasal chanting, that echoed like a priest’s droning in a cathedral, there was that moving air that was soundless and yet screamingly, terrifyingly loud at the same time.

Craig stood inside the entrance, waiting for his eyes to adjust, and when they did, he was sorry to have been blessed with sight.

They were words that had been stored in his heart. They were chiselled into his brain, and to read them was like running a finger over braille. Solid words. Words that had dimension as well as sound. Words that were not of this time or any time man should know. They were more than vowels and consonants, pauses and breaths. They flitted like scurrying things from his tongue and the earth shifted as they tumbled out.