The Trickster was growing in size, its form defining itself. That swirling darkness was becoming brittle and solid, forming itself into the grotesque, deformed killer that it had decided to be so many centuries before. Gaping black jaws slavered a sticky bile from beneath a snarling snout that was pitted and diseased with crawling black vermin. Its body was almost formless, a hunched mass of shining black segments, shifting and oozing as they moved with the power of the dark, angry motor that drove them.

All the demons that man had drawn and painted and feared were found in this form. It was a composite of terror, a patchwork of fear. A totem that was alive.

Its huge razor-talons sliced into its own dark flesh as it flexed them, and a black-and-green slime trickled from the wounds, followed by glistening worms that fell onto the rocky floor and writhed with life of their own, opening and closing round mouths that were dark circles of needle-sharp teeth.

The Trickster stretched and arched in its pleasure at finding form, and an icy sheath that was growing over the black, putrid skin crackled as it moved.

But Sam felt that other thing coming. It was splitting his body. The cells that made up his tight brown flesh were rebelling, both against their owner and nature itself. For he was changing in size. He saw it in minute detail, each precious cell bursting and growing, doubling and doubling again, until the thing that was Sam Hunting Wolf was nothing like Sam Hunting Wolf. Nothing like a man at all.

But in this place, this bubble whose membrane was no more than his concentration, he could see things, understand things. Was this the pure place that he had worked so hard to make?

For he saw now what was coming, and it was something so dark and so ancient that it could have no name in the tongue of man. Its fuel was not from Sam. He knew that. And he understood why Moses had perished. It had fed on his father, for its fuel was the evil of man.

It was the darkness in all men’s hearts made flesh, and it was feeding now. The Trickster was writhing, waiting for it to feed on its host. But its tendrils were stretching out around it.

Above the tunnel, only a few hundred metres from the source of this great darkness, was all the fuel it needed.

It pulled that black energy towards it, sucking it in, making the earth tremble as its power grew with each dark force it sucked from a mortal.

There was the thought from Pasqual Weaver’s head. It was murderous. It was cutting a man’s penis off, making him scream, suffer, watching the agony on his face. The fantasy of the thick blood, the stench of his death. It sucked the thought in and grew.