He held his hand over his eyes, shielding it from the burn of the pale sun and waited for Daisy to walk through with those eggs. She didn’t come. He called out. But nobody called back. It was only now that Wyatt noticed something strange. The sun was so much lower in the sky than it had been a moment ago. It was still early in the morning, but just as sure as he was sitting there, the sun began to set. Not slowly in real time, but fast, like a sunset dropping over a vast horizon in one of those old nature programmes. He took a step closer, aligning himself with the foot of the bridge, and the sun travelled forward. He blinked to shake off the morning grog, and the sun was closer still. Only it wasn’t the sun at all, but a lamp.

Wyatt staggered forward. “Who goes there?”

Steam twisting up through cracks in the boards passed across the lamplight, diffusing the glare. Whoever was holding it remained out of sight.

“Sweetheart, don’t be playin’ no games, you hear me? I ain’t in no mood.”

The mist was still too thick for him to see anyone, but it became clear that the lamp was hovering about twelve feet off the ground. And it swayed. It wasn’t being held by a hand. It dangled from a staff. Wyatt’s eyes darted to the bridge’s little wooden winch. He dashed forward, taking the handle in both hands, and tried to hoist it round. But it wouldn’t even manage one rotation. Wyatt let go, feeling the frosted wood burn through both palms and tried again. But it was no good. The weight of the stranger on the bridge was too great. Wyatt bent double, gasping for breath, when a dark mass broke free of the folding steam.

The silhouette of a lone rider bearing a crown of antlers hung inside the mist.

The stranger was as thin as a crack in the wall, with a black robe cinched tight at the waist. There was no face to speak of, only a deer’s skull for a mask. Without the skin and fur to soften it, the muzzle was nothing but ragged bone, as sharp and cruel as a beak, with empty eye sockets to watch from and two hollow nares on the ridge from which to breathe. Wyatt couldn’t make out the stranger’s eyes, but those blank sockets held his gaze, freezing him to the spot like an unbreakable curse.

Wyatt staggered back, reaching for the holster on his hip. He realized he’d left the gun indoors and cussed himself. But the only thing that mattered now was that the stranger thought him to be alone. He kept his eyes on the stranger so as not to alert him to the presence of another life out there in the park and willed Mable to keep quiet in her crib.