The two of them were standing alone together in a Devon churchyard. At midnight, of course, because that was when the beast was said to prowl. A stabbing, slushy snow had already covered the bracken to the base of the headstones. Worse, it had made a shapeless white mass of the venison sirloin they had placed on top of the churchyard wall: their bait.

Harper herself, this odd little woman, had collected a fair half-inch of ice on both the brim of her Borsalino and the shoulders of her cloak. Leaning staunchly on her stick, she could feel the cloak’s gray wool growing heavy as the melt soaked through. She could feel her old flesh growing clammy as the chill began to reach it. And there was no lull in the bitterly thick wind either. It rode to her continuous over hedge and hill. It reached her with a straining, dying note that made her recollect the pixies of the Dart. They were said to have lured a farmboy to his death in the river by crying his name: Jan Coo! Jan Coo! She could almost hear them now in the crying of the wind.

Comes the hour, she thought irritably, but not the thing.

And yet, cold as she was, cranky as she was, she was still able to stand through the long surveillance stock-still, so still she might have been one of the graveyard’s more eccentric monuments—had it not been for her eyes, ferociously quick behind her spectacles’ thick lenses.

Storm, on the other hand, was bouncing around like a bottle on the ocean waves. Like a neon-orange bottle: he was dressed in some fantastic downy concoction, some bloated anorak from Ski-Meisters Of Hollywood or someplace, with triangles of bright green and purple scattered chaotically across the front of it. What he really looked like, Harper thought, was a deflated weather balloon. But he had the cameras ready, one hanging in each armpit, both wrapped in blue plastic bags, and their black straps crisscrossing his chest like gun belts. With any luck, the next issue of Bizarre! would feature the monster on its cover.

Storm whapped his shoulders with his hands, puffed his scarlet cheeks under his woolly watch cap, kept hopping up and down, up and down to stay warm in the driving snow.

“For pity’s sake,” Harper muttered. Even her lips were motionless when she spoke.

“Wh-wh-what?” said Storm.

Harper gave another grumpy huff or two. But then she relented. “All right. All right. I know her. I know about her, at any rate,” she said softly.

“Sophia? This Endering girl, I mean?”

“I know quite a lot about her, in fact. Does she interest you, young Richard?”

“Me? Nah. She just popped into my mind.” He managed to chop the words out between his chattering teeth. “While we were standing here. I was thinking. That’s all. Really.”