The snow isn’t too thick on the main part of road (where I’m guessing it’s been plowed fairly recently), but all along the sides of the road, and up against the hedges, the snow’s piled in mountainous white heaps and windblown drifts, some of which are higher than me. So I don’t have any choice where to walk. I have to keep to the middle part of the road. Which makes me feel incredibly vulnerable, and far too noticeable, and belly-achingly scared.

The middle of the road is for cars.

It’s their territory.

I don’t belong here.

At least the cars will be going quite slowly, Ella says. Even the dimmest monkem isn’t going to drive fast in these conditions.

“Yeah, I guess . . .”

So when you hear one coming, you’ll have plenty of time to get out of the way. Especially since it’s so quiet.

She’s right. It is quiet. The wind seems to have died away now, and there’s an unnatural stillness to the winter darkness, a muffled white silence that feels as if the whole world has been softened and hushed by the snow. The quiet whiteness is relatively comforting (both sound- and color-wise), but I know it’s only a temporary shroud, and that underneath it lie all kinds of horrors.

There’s a streetlight just across from the house. It’s not dazzlingly bright, but with the lightening effect of the snow, it’s enough to let me see where I’m going without the flashlight. I turn it off (to save the batteries), put it in my pocket, then set off up the road.

All I can hear is the crunch of my footsteps, the flutter of my breath, and the beating drum of my heart.

I keep going.

Head down, eyes to the ground.

One step at a time.

My shadow precedes me, a monstrous thing cast by the streetlight behind me, and as I move farther away from the light, the shadow changes shape — distorting, twisting, warping — and I can’t help feeling that it’s mocking me, taunting me with grotesque visions of what I really am, or could be, or will be . . .

I don’t like it . . .

I don’t like it.

Something takes hold of me then, a sudden strange fury, and I lash out in mindless anger at my shadow — lunging forward and stomping on it, cursing it, kicking it, jumping on it with both feet, desperately trying to obliterate it, destroy it, kill it . . . but it’s a shadow. You can’t kill your own shadow. It’s always going to get away from you no matter how fast you move. All you’re going to end up doing is stomping around in the snow like a lunatic. And if someone happens to see you . . .

“What on earth’s he doing?”

“Looks like he’s stamping on something.”

“Stamping on what?”

Joe and Olive Thwaite, an elderly couple from the village, were on their way to Darlington to pick up their daughter and granddaughter from the train station. It’s normally a half-hour drive at most, but because of the conditions — and Joe’s self-imposed speed limit of twenty miles per hour — they’d allowed themselves an extra hour for the journey.

“It’s what’s-his-name, isn’t it?” Olive said, leaning forward to peer through the windshield. “You know, the boy from the big house . . . the one who never goes out?”

“The crazy boy?”

“Don’t call him that.”

“Why not? I mean, look at him . . .” Joe shook his head. “Whatever he’s doing, it’s not normal, is it?”

Olive couldn’t argue with that.

“Do you think we should stop?” she said.

“What for?”

“To make sure he’s all right.”

“Does he look all right?”

“You know what I mean. We should at least let his mother know he’s out here. We can’t just —”

“He’s seen us.”

I would have seen the car a lot sooner if I hadn’t been so intent on trying to annihilate my shadow. As it is though, because it’s going so slowly that it’s barely making a sound, I don’t realize it’s there until the twin beams of the headlights sweep over me, and my shadow suddenly goes crazy — twisting around, splitting in two, before fading out and reappearing behind me.

I look up at the approaching car, shielding my eyes from the glare of the headlights.

It’s moving slowly, tires crunching quietly in the snow.

There are two old monkems in the front, a man and a woman. I can’t see if anyone’s in the back.

The car’s getting closer . . .

A ton of growling metal . . .

Heading straight for me.

I can’t think now. I’m too scared.

I can’t move, can’t breathe . . .

It’s all right, Elliot. It’s all right . . .

“I don’t know what to do. What do I do?”

You need to move to the side of the road.

“I can’t move.”

Yes, you can. You’re blocking the road. Just move over a bit and let them pass.

“I can’t —”

If you don’t move, they’ll have to stop.

My legs don’t seem to belong to me anymore. I want to move, I’m telling them to move, but they aren’t responding.

Hurry up, Elliot.

The car’s slowing down now, getting ready to stop . . .

Without really knowing what I’m doing, I lean over backward and slightly to the left, moving the top half of my body as far as it’ll go, and then a bit farther, and a little bit farther again, forcing myself off balance, until finally, just as I’m about to fall over, my legs react and instinctively do what’s necessary to keep me on my feet. And once they get going, staggering me backward (and slightly to the left) to retain my balance, all I have to do is use the momentum to steer my stumbling body over to the side of the road.

“What’s he doing now?”

“Do you think he’s drunk? He looks drunk.”

“Maybe it’s drugs.”

“He doesn’t look well, does he?”

“He looks dreadful.”

I’m standing at the side of the road now — head down, hands in pockets, eyes to the ground — and there’s plenty of room for the car to pass by. I realize the two monkems must have seen me stomping around in the middle of the road, then leaning over backward for no apparent reason, and I’m pretty sure they must think I’m insane. I hope so anyway. Because if they think I’m insane, there’s a good chance they’re not going to stop. You don’t stop your car for a stomping lunatic, do you? You don’t even make eye contact with them. It’s too risky. You never know what they might do.

Unfortunately for me, though, these two monkems are either incredibly stupid or incredibly kind, because instead of just driving past, they actually slow down and pull up right next to me.

I still can’t bring myself to look at them, but I know they’re there. I can hear the rattly old car engine chugging away. I can smell the exhaust fumes. I can sense them both looking at me. And as I hear the driver’s window sliding open, I can’t help thinking that if I don’t look back at them, I’ll be okay . . . they’ll go away . . . in fact, if I don’t look at them, they won’t even exist —

“Are you all right, son?”

The driver’s voice. Male, gruff, a North Yorkshire accent.

I can’t reply, can’t raise my eyes, can’t stop the desperate pleading in my head — please go away, please go away, please go away, please go away . . .

“Does your mother know you’re out here?”

My head snaps up at the mention of Mum, and I look the old monkem in the eye. “Have you seen her?”

“Who?”

“My mum. Have you seen her?”

The old monkem-man frowns. “I don’t understand . . .”

I don’t like his mouth. It’s kind of old and worn-out and a bit drooly, and he can’t seem to close it properly — it just hangs half open all the time — and his teeth are all stained and crooked and snaggly, like they’ve been fixed in his gums by a blind person in a hurry . . . and when he opens his mouth wider to speak, a string of drool gets stuck between his lips, and for a few hideous moments, his mouth turns into a dark cave full of bits of bone and clicky wet things and slobbers of foul liquid oozing from the roof and the walls —

“Are you looking for your mum?”

It’s a different voice, a female voice. I blink hard — once, twice — forcing the image of the cave from my mind, and when it’s gone, I can see that the old monkem-lady in the passenger seat is leaning across the monkem-man and looking up at me through the open window.

“What?” I say to her.

“Are you looking for your mum?” she repeats.

“No.”

I don’t know why I say that. It just comes out.

Ellamay doesn’t understand it either.

Tell them, she says.

“I can’t.”

They can help you.

“You can’t what?” the monkem-lady says.

“What?”

“You said, ‘I can’t.’”

They’re all right, Ella tells me. They’re just a nice old couple. You don’t have to be scared of them.

“He’s got a cave in his face.”

No, he doesn’t.

“He’s not right,” I hear the monkem-man say quietly to the monkem-lady.

Just ask them to take you up to Shirley’s, Ella says. They won’t mind.

“I think I’d better take him back to his house,” the monkem-lady says.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“We can’t just leave him out here.”

“What if we take him back and no one’s there? What are we going to do with him then?”

“I don’t know. But if we don’t take him back, we won’t know if anyone’s there or not, will we?” She stoops down and starts reaching under her seat for something. “Turn the engine off, Joe.”

Two things happen almost simultaneously then. As the monkem called Joe reaches for the ignition, the monkem-lady finds what she’s looking for under the seat and starts pulling it out. It seems to get stuck. She adjusts her grip on it, wiggles it around a bit, then pulls again. This time it comes out more easily. And when I see what it is, my heart turns to ice. It’s fairly dark inside the car, and I only catch a quick glimpse of this thing the monkem-lady’s pulling out, and I don’t actually see all of it, so I could be mistaken . . . it might not be a rifle, but it’s definitely a longish metal tube (like a rifle barrel), and it definitely has some kind of handle attachment near one end (like the trigger guard of a rifle), and when I hear the car engine being switched off, and I see the monkem-lady opening her door, and a split second later an ear-splitting BANG! rips through the air . . .

I run like a wild thing.

Blind and thoughtless and crazed with terror . . .

Heart screaming, legs pumping . . .

Staggering and stumbling through the snow . . .

And all the time I’m expecting to hear another gunshot . . . another crack of the rifle . . . and I can feel the terrible thud of the bullet hitting me in the back . . . I can physically feel it . . . it’s there, right there, between my shoulder blades . . . I can feel it. And no matter how fast I run, I can’t get away from it.

But I keep running anyway.

It’s all I have.

My mind’s so fogged up with fear that I’m not really aware of direction or distance, but when I hear the old monkem-lady shouting out from behind me — HEY! HOLD ON! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? COME BACK! — and I instinctively glance over my shoulder, I realize that I’m about thirty yards from the monkems’ car, and that I’m running up the road, toward the village, rather than back to the house.

I slow down, cautiously jogging to a halt, then turn around and look back at the monkems again. As I gaze down the road, my gasping breath misting in the ice-cold air, I see the monkem-lady standing next to the car, facing me, and I’m surprised to see that instead of holding the rifle to her shoulder and aiming it at me, she seems to be leaning on it, as if it’s a walking stick . . .

“DAFFY!”

The sudden shout comes from behind me, from up the road — a desperate yell that rips through the air and crashes into my heart.

“DAFFY! NO!”

I spin around, my blood racing, and I see a great black beast hurtling toward me.