“WE’RE NOT LEAVING, OKAY? WE JUST NEED TO FIND A WAY DOWN. WE’LL BE WITH YOU AS SOON AS WE CAN.”

There’s a part of me that hears the shouted voices drifting down into the valley, and it knows where they’re coming from and what they mean, but it’s only a very small part. The rest of me — the most of me — is in a different world now, a world of howling demons and insatiable beasts whirling around inside me, getting bigger and bigger all the time . . . bigger, faster, stronger, hungrier . . .

The Moloxetine’s worn off.

The lock on the cage has cracked and crumbled . . .

The door has swung open . . .

The beast is free.

I can feel it raging inside me, pumping raw fear into my heart, my blood, my flesh . . . sickening me, emptying me . . . shaking me to my bones . . . and I can taste its stinking breath rising up into my throat . . .

But it’s not pure fear.

There’s something else there too, something that’s almost indistinguishable from fear, but with one crucial difference — instead of every cell in my body screaming at me to run away, this time they’re raging at me to fight.

I am the beast. Its fury is mine.

And as the hillbilly crouches there beside me, still holding his knife to my throat — and still breathing his psycho-stink into my face — I feel the crazed fury taking me out of myself, lifting me up into the darkness . . . and now I can see him again, the me that’s down there, and I can see the monster squatting down next to him too. And the other one, the sidekick/brother, standing motionless in the dark, the dead deer hanging from his hand . . . I can see him as well. But he’s nothing.

The monster’s the one.

He’s got his knife in his right hand and his rifle in his left, and he’s watching the flashlights at the top of the slope, watching intently with his animal eyes as they head back along the path, back the way they came, and he knows exactly what the men are doing. WE’RE NOT LEAVING, OKAY? WE JUST NEED TO FIND A WAY DOWN. They’re going to cut down one of the tracks where the slope’s not so steep, then double back along the path through the woods.

The monster smiles to himself.

He’s happy.

He likes the thrill of the hunt. It doesn’t matter to him if he’s the hunter or the hunted, it’s the raw exhilaration that does it for him — the rush of adrenaline, the primal vitality, the sense of kill-or-be-killed — it makes him feel alive.

He likes having power over things too. Animals, people . . . he doesn’t care. They’re all the same to him. He likes to frighten things, hurt things, kill things. It makes him feel good. And that’s the whole point of everything, isn’t it? Making yourself feel good. What else is there?

I follow his sick-eyed gaze as he glances at the other-me beside him.

The other-me’s a mess — his dirt-streaked face covered in cuts and scratches, his sodden clothes ripped and torn, his right glove missing, fingernails torn and bleeding, his bare foot badly swollen. The bruising on his foot is an ugly mixture of purpled-black and yellow, and in places the skin is dead-white. The other-me’s complexion is almost bloodless too, his face white beneath the dirt and mud, and the eyes . . .

The other-me’s eyes.

The moment I look at them, they blink, and in an instant, they change from the desperate eyes of a frightened animal — staring, haunted — to the cold hard eyes of a survivor. As well as seeing this sudden change, I can feel it too. We’re together. I can feel what we feel, in our head and our heart . . . and I can feel the heavy rock in our hand. I can feel it right now, and I can feel us finding it a few moments ago — our hand cautiously scouring the ground, looking for anything to use as a weapon, our fingertips lighting upon the ice-filmed rock . . . then taking hold of it, feeling its size and weight — all the time making sure the hillbilly doesn’t know what we’re doing — and then, once we’re satisfied that the rock is big and heavy enough, but not too big or heavy to get a good grip on, all we have to do is keep hold of it, keep still, keep our face blank, and wait for the right moment.

We don’t have to wait very long.

The hillbilly-monster is waiting too, waiting for the flashlights to disappear into the darkness. And when they do — and after he’s carried on watching for another minute or two to make sure they don’t come back — he slips the hunting knife back into the sheath on his belt, transfers the rifle to his right hand, and with his left hand turns on the flashlight.

We act instantly, dropping our left shoulder and swinging our right arm as hard and fast as we can, and before the hillbilly has a chance to do or say anything, we hammer the rock into his head.