This last utterance of the name silenced the repetition in my head as if its power had been concentrated elsewhere, and at the far edge of the light a figure reared up from the mud. It might have been composed of earth or rotted vegetation or a teeming mass of insects or a combination of them all, but it had some ambition to look human. A version of an arm unstuck itself from a body that swarmed like a mass of hatching eggs, and produced an object reminiscent of a finger to point at Bella. I saw her struggle not to flinch, but I was more disturbed to realise that she wasn’t looking in that direction. I glanced in the mirror, and my innards quivered. The same figure had risen behind the car, blocking all escape. It was pointing at Bella, and I could have thought the identical gestures had pinned her where she was, frozen in the headlamp beams. “Let me come in,” she said, not quite admitting to a plea. “Roy wouldn’t want you to treat me like this.”

Was this desperation, or was she so alien that she didn’t grasp how it would provoke me? “We’ll see how your master does,” I said.

The shape behind the car glistened crimson in the glow of the brake lights. As it bent its featureless pullulating lump of a head towards Bella, so did its twin. Though neither figure had produced any kind of mouth, I heard words that seemed to close around the space the figures bounded. They were in no language I recognised, but Bella did. Her aversion to them was so violent that it released her from her paralysis, and she darted towards the car. Her smile was struggling not to collapse while she said “Please, Patrick.”

I almost relented. I found myself reaching to unlock the door as I saw the change that was overtaking her. Her wide eyes were growing dull as stagnant water, robbing her smile of all its force. She hadn’t reached the car when her eyes sagged inwards, and in another moment they were nothing but blank flesh. She stumbled forwards, and her fingertips thumped the car roof. Her nails scraped the passenger window as she groped in search of the door handle, but the sound was perceptibly dwindling, as if the nails themselves were shrinking into the flesh. She had just begun to fumble blindly at the handle when I heard glass smash – the jar she’d dropped – and she gave a cry of outrage beyond words. As she began thumping on the window I saw the cause of her distress. Her fingers were shrinking into her hands like snails into their shells. In seconds the hands were nothing more than lumpy blobs of flesh.