There was the man she was dreaming of, thinking about how he would like to come in a dead woman’s anus. How would that feel? The pleasure. The dark, delicious evil of it. Make the bitch suffer first. Make her know it was going to happen. Watch her.

Growing. Growing.

The man just there was cradling the thought of torturing his wife with the knowledge of how he would hurt their son. How he made the terrified young man take his punches, made him bleed in front of her, her precious faggot boy, make him beg for his money and his mercy. Tell the cow exactly why her son wasn’t ever coming home if he left. Make her weep. How the money he gave the wretch, the money that paid for their pool and their ski trips and their third house in France, came from selling arms, so that Arabs could blast the balls off each other’s stinking asses.

Sucked it in. Growing ever bigger.

That woman. Here came her thought about the cripples she was skiing for. How she hated them. She wanted them killed. She was repulsed by their twisted limbs and their ugly faces, and she wanted them crushed and pulverized so they would never get in her face again. Some had children. It was too much.

Tear their babies from their wombs, these ugly monsters. She would ski until she dropped if only she could stop them living, stop them breeding. Kill kill kill them all.

Such a delicious, nourishing thought. Fuelling the darkness like gas on a barbecue.

And as the thing that was Sam grew with every thought, the energy was making the body strong. It was growing its own talons, its own huge jaws, a body that was so distorted a thing as to be almost a molten liquid. And Sam knew that the thing he had become was bigger, stronger, darker and more malevolent than the Trickster. It was an evil without purpose. Elemental and wild. No vengeance, no motive or malicious intention. A deviant purity that was so deep and black it bordered on white.

The Trickster was afraid. Sam could sense it. There was a vapour of fear from its foul bulk, and the essence of Sam Hunting Wolf rejoiced in the creature’s uncertainty. It writhed and crackled in discomfort before the darker force, but it was not about to flee. It waited.

And Sam knew what it was waiting for, and he prayed inside his bubble of a soul. Prayed for the strength that would stop its trick.

* * *

It started with a tremble, and then Baz saw that it was more. The snow was undulating. Like a white sheet with snakes trapped below it, it was moving and writhing and squirming up the slope towards the crowd at a speed he could barely follow.

He stood like a fool, unable to shout or speak or move.