Niall felt a sickening sense of compression as he left the truck (still softly hissing to itself, Royce still silent) and pushed through the weeds down the trail. It was the compression of time. For months they’d researched this long unseen beast from across the comfort of an ocean; another week for Johnson, the scout, to make his inquiries; days to prepare the equipment; hours to leave the hard concrete bustle of London upon roads which tapered and wandered the further they got from the city, like swimming upstream in a tributary of a mighty river; only minutes to see the county for themselves and interview its strange inhabitants. Now, the branches high above cradled them, focused them down a tunnel which would lead them to the awaited quarry in seconds.

“How far to the cabin?” he asked Holt. His eyes were failing to be everywhere at once quite spectacularly.

Holt glanced down at the map and said after a moment, “Three hundred.”

“Metres?”

“Yards.”

The compression was a physical pain behind Niall’s eyes as they darted to investigate every rustle, every cracking branch underfoot, every flickering leaf.

Seconds. And then it would be over.

The first hundred yards were slow. Thistles clawed at their ankles as they edged down the overgrown path, twigs raked at their necks. Through the foliage, the fields were as still as a graveyard. Grey and Simmons were looking for prints in the hard-packed earth until they brushed beyond the swaying curtain of a horse-chestnut and saw the thing that showed them how pointless it all was.

Howe was far ahead, his face grey in its light. It filled the way ahead, from verge to verge, soil to leaf, solid in its radiance. Niall felt the heat as he stepped past the gnarl of roots where the blaze abruptly begun. It was the heat of Hell.

The wall shimmered and sizzled, rays of colour breaking away to chase each other into the murk, but the image was clear. In the middle of the rainbow dazzle there was the silhouette of the charger, sucking cruelly at the light, a grizzled shape that none on the trail could forget. Dwarfed by its black mass, cringing by its side, stood the figure of a man. Its face was restless, liquid, could have been Howe or Niall or any of them. It had cast its rifle down by the path, powerless against the evil before it.

The only point upon the monster with colour was its eyes. They burned red with assured victory.

The message was clear.

“A warning!” Simmons whined. “To turn away, while we can.”

“No,” said a low, echoing voice. It was Howe, distorted by the vile field which danced around him. He looked back at his team, fearless though he stood but inches from the crackling light. His eyes glowed blue in the reflections, and even through his fear Niall found courage in the intensity, an equal force to extinguish the red of the unholy. “No. It’s a warning, alright, but it’s all about that man. It has a hostage. In the cabin. And if we get any closer, it means to make an example of him.”

The whistle of breath, the rush of air moving from tyre to lung. They looked at their leader with fearful eyes. The monster hung behind him, soundless, breathless, deathless.

“Is there anything for this, Howe?” Niall asked, and he was not surprised to hear the shaking in his question. “I mean, all our training’s for an open hunt. One against us. This puts everything up in the air. I mean, there’s another life-”

Howe smiled, and his smile chilled the feverish heat from Niall’s bones. “That’s what it wants us to think, anyway. Maybe it’s showing us a lie, to make us hesitate when we get it in our sights. Then we could all be in trouble. It’s a clever old bastard.” And at that he stepped back towards the hunters and looked, one by one, into their souls. “But it’s not some exhausted workaholic sicko in some office who’s decided to get the world to listen to his mewlings by putting a gun to his boss’s head. It’s a monster, and if it’s got someone up there, then they’re already dead. There’s no negotiating with something that can put that up. So we see it, we shoot.” Back along the line. “No questions asked.”

Soundless, breathless, deathless, the image stood, and Howe turned and struck out into the blackness at its heart with the butt of his rifle. There was a high-pitched tinkling, a stained glass window shattering from a cathedral high above. The thing winked out, the light a memory on the eyes of those who had looked into it. Slowly, surely, the dim greens and browns of the last stretch of woodland poked through.

Howe was already lost to the leaves beyond.

Niall almost screamed when he felt the claw on his shoulder. The weeds had wormed their way up into a twisted wall of thorns on either side of the path, the bare earth led on towards the lair, and it didn’t matter because it was behind him and it had got him and it started to drag him towards the grave. But just before he screamed, he turned and saw Simmons, white as the moon, inches before his nose.

“What is it?” said Niall automatically, but he already knew what the lad was going to say and his eyes slid to look at the undergrowth as it listened and watched and held its breath.

“It’s just...” Simmons stammered. He looked little more than a boy now, despite his cap and pack of equipment, just a boy lost in the woods. “It’s just... are you really going to let him talk like that? I mean, he’s already cut our retreat off and left Phil, and now if there’s someone up there with that.... thing -”

“There’s nothing else there,” Niall said confidently, looking straight into the boy’s eyes. “It’s like he said, it’s trying to trick us. So let’s move before it finds a way to flank us.” The second-in-command turned down the path, and as his eyes roved the tracks of trees, he tried not to think about the fact that if he had to be so certain about that then all was lost.

He met Howe coming back the other way. He had his rifle gripped tightly in both hands, and he did not look pleased. “What was that?” he snapped. He looked straight through Niall, back at the others, who shuffled reluctantly through the parched summer soil on their way to the end.

“It’s... just...” Simmons said again.

“You can leave the bait and the traps,” Howe said when the whimper had tapered away. “We’re dealing with an intelligent being here. But keep the electromag distorter, and keep it on when we reach the cabin. We don’t want any more smoke and mirrors.” His mouth quivered with the taste of victory as Grey put down a heavy bag with relief and took a transmitter from Holt. “We probably won’t need the strobes, but clip on the searchlights. A bag of caltrops each, too. This thing’s going to run when we lock on.” He gestured with the rifle, and the muzzle lingered on each and every one of them as it passed. It was not just the charger that tested them now.

“Come on, I’ll show you why.”

When they’d redistributed the equipment, they pressed on down the uneven path behind Howe. The trees were petering out now, and moonlight gleamed off the ears of corn to either side. An old fence hung on at the edges of the fields, and the sign of man brought back the image they had seen to Niall. Man. In his mind’s eye he saw a short, narrow line at the edge of a map, a line that represented a secret, weed-choked highway to the heart of darkness. The heart of darkness was in man, or at least a man’s home. It was close.

But closer still was the treasure, and when Niall saw it twinkling in the opal glow his thoughts twisted painfully and guiltily into something like hope, hope that his friend was still his friend and the end was thirty years of fortune down the line rather than two hundred yards into a scrap of woodland on a road to nowhere. Because Howe had been right. It was a deer, an eight foot tall mountain of muscle but a mountain which could still be taken down in a hail of bullets, and it was scared.

He stepped forward, forgetting to scan the fallen trunks and saplings and corn left and right. The treasure seized his mind with the stranglehold of joy.

It was in a chest, a sturdy trove of ancient and gnarled oak from before any but the far ancestors of the watchful folk that forever called this place home had walked the land. It sat square on the path, the ground about it neat and tidy, cleared of debris. Mounds of churned soil squirmed with worms a way behind. The warped lid had been thrown back, and inside, gold blazed out coldly, round medallions with kings of dominions no longer remembered etched into the metal. Niall made out crows, stags, snakes on the other sides, herds, heaps of them, for the gold pieces were many. The gold was legion.

There was no mistaking this sign.

Howe stood beyond it. He was smiling as Niall pushed through the twigs, but as the four other men came into view his features hardened, another grim unknowable face cast in an impression of life. The radiance of kings lit his chin from beneath. Niall looked down and felt the whispers of their names about him, and shivered.

“Tribute,” Howe said. “Bribery. It was hungry, perhaps, coming down to infest these people’s property again, crawling out from whatever filthy hiding place it’s had for the past forty years. But now, it only wants one thing - to live.”

He reached out one booted foot and pushed shut the lid. The wink of gold vanished with a dusty, rotten clunk. “There’s our tickets, all our expenses for the year, maybe more. Saxon gold, perhaps - hell, earlier.”

The men watched in silence. A thin warmth of excitement jumped from hunter to hunter. From somewhere up above, an owl marked the passing of the hour with a mournful hoot.

Howe pointed behind, the road not travelled. The warmth dissipated. “And up there? That’s our bonus. Our champagne. Our girls. So let’s get it. Navvy, Niall, Holt - with me.”

An uncomfortable shuffle on the path. The groan of a bough in a cold breeze. “What about them?” Navvy demanded, gesturing with his electromag transmitter at Grey and Simmons as they looked nervously for movement between the trunks.

Howe barked out a humourless laugh. “We need someone to secure the loot. Come on, move it. Get it out of here. Back to the truck.”

Grey and Simmons had already scurried gratefully forwards and had the chest heaved up into their grip by the time Navvy flung his transmitter furiously to the grass. By the time he spoke, they were hauling it back down the trail as fast as they could, the coins clinking dully within, towards the thicker trees.

“But we need every gunner we can get! If we’re going after it, we need ‘em all! And why can’t we just take what we’ve been given anyway? We don’t need to risk our lives now.”

“There’s no risk,” Howe growled back. “But once it knows we mean to finish it, it’ll vanish the whole fucking lot back into the ground and we don’t know how much we’ll get for the creature itself.” He started relentlessly once more up towards the cabin.

Holt shrank towards the smooth embrace of the bark lining the way. Niall said urgently, “We should stay together. We don’t know what it’s capable of, even if it is going to run.”

And by the time he thought to say, “What about Royce?”, and the monolithic complacency of Howe had crumbled and the fretful, furtive face which remained in the wreckage of his shattered control got out its “Oh shit!” and looked back for his prize, it was lost to the close vegetation, and somewhere in the gloom, the two couriers were crying for help.

The compression of seconds. The implosion of composure. The loss of hope. Now the beast was upon them, it was all gone in no time at all.

It was behind them and then it was in front and then snaking along the fence and then by Holt in his nest of trees. Grey and Simmons were shrieking and squealing. Holt vanished in a shower of splinters as his fortress tumbled down the slope towards the fence. Navvy’s gun thudded dully like a party popper as he fired blindly into the woods, a flash of blue light, the sudden absence of sound, the end of the celebration. Niall ran forwards, ducking instinctively even though he had nothing to duck from, and found the man groaning in a soft bed of nettles. Holt was nowhere.

A crash of branches to the left, and it was just like the goose that afternoon but instead of the goose it was a dark shape that swallowed the world, flashing out across the path, antlers like knives cutting through the leaves high above, Simmons dancing nimbly before it. And further along the path, Howe, in a sea of discarded trinkets, something proud and immovable cast in bronze, rifle aloft, then a roar of fire, a singing bullet rushing past Simmons’ shoulder.

The ground shook beneath the guttural howl as it struck home.

The beast, solid and ponderous now, rocked back on the hooves that rent the path to dust. It sucked in a harsh, grunting breath. Simmons, gunless, shoeless, babbled off for the fields behind the statue of Howe.

A moment of stillness.

Then it charged for Howe.

It charged for a second, rumbling up the path, until Howe fired again and it was gone, a blur of darkness off into the long grass by the side of the path, a sapling flattened to shavings in its wake. Another crash, and Howe’s head snapped sideways, weapon ready for the killing blow. Narrow, focused eyes, the white orbs of Navvy’s as he swayed from the undergrowth on his hands and knees.

Niall looked from the downed man to Howe. Chaos roared all around, the whipping black of the creature encircled them, impossibly fast. And even above that, Howe’s order cut through.

“It can’t flank us. To the cabin, Niall.” The head tilted towards Navvy, who’d paused to vomit into the thirsty earth of the path. “Leave the others. Come on!”

Then it came thundering out of the night again, root to sky, tree to tree, and Howe was gone too.

They’re not dead, Niall kept thinking. All through the quiet that followed, as leaves thrown up by the undeniable force of the creature whirled lazily to the ground, that was all that went through his shaken mind, again and again and again. They’re not dead.

Navvy had managed to get to his feet, and was off at the edge of the trail, staring off at the moon without interest. Grey had gone into the woods an innocent boy, and now wandered out a shell-shocked soldier, pale and drawn. Simmons was still running to anywhere but the beast’s lair. Niall could still see his scarecrow arms jabbing through the corn as he fled.

Only Holt seemed to be injured, and not badly at that. Niall found him curled, bruised and bloody, beneath a heap of shredded branches at the bottom of the slope leading down to the fence. His answer to everything was a simple “My God”, and nothing more.

The equipment was lying shattered and useless all around. Niall thought that perhaps it had been useless to begin with too. Certainly, there was nothing to help him now. As Grey nuzzled up to Holt like a lost kitten, the hunter turned for the path and walked on.

“Where... you going?” moaned Navvy, back on the ground, between retches.

Niall stopped more in shock than anything else, because he hadn’t considered there was any other option. “Round up the others, Jim,” he said, the sharp imperative of command rising up from somewhere among the bubbling pit of jumbled static that seemed to have replaced his head. “Get them back to the road. But stay out of sight of Phil, just in case. Any sign of... of it, get out of here.”

“We need to call the police,” Grey moaned. Everyone ignored that one.

Navvy looked only at Niall, as if he could see into that jumbled mess after all. “You're really going to risk your life for him?” The others blinked back, but Niall thought he could see through the act. They only wanted each other to see the horror, to play a part.

“What?” Navvy snapped, rising to his knees. His arm got caught in a cable from some blinking piece of tat in his pocket and he tore it away with a sob. “You think he’d go after you, any of you? Only if there was some bloody money in it! Everything about this has been inhuman. I mean, going after something like that with no training-”

“You can’t train for that. We’re the first in a long time,” murmured Niall, because that’s what he had to say.

“-and splitting us up, to get us picked off one by one, and ignoring that... fucking magic, and destroying the ride,” Navvy raged on. “Hell, maybe he wanted people to die. More in it for him.” He got to his feet. Grey cringed back, away from the dark opening in the trees into which Howe had vanished. “He’s less human than the fucking monster! And he’ll be dead now anyway. So sod him. Let’s go. All of us. Now.”

Niall stood through the writhing arms, pleading with himself to be convinced. But he had that part to play, and maybe that’s what being a human was. Animals did the best thing. But us, he thought, we do right.

“He mightn’t be dead,” he heard himself say. “And he’s one of us.” His eyes fell on Simmons like a wrecking ball made of cardboard. “You’d be dead without him. And we don’t know what our emitters did to it, so maybe we all would be.” They stared back, as unconvinced as a field of cattle. To compensate, he thought of the good times, the days before all this, when there were no parts to play, and he was grateful when the emotions came and drowned everything he couldn’t process.

If he died tonight, he would die a man.

“Back to the contact site,” he said.

It was a shockingly short way to the cabin. Only a few steps. It was screened by a dark hedge, suffocated in creeping vines, or maybe they were just keeping the roof up. It was at least a hundred years old. A tiny thing, not much bigger than a shed. No signs of a scuffle on the loose throw of gravel before its warped door.

If it was inside, if they were inside, it would be over in the blink of an eye.

He felt that compression again as he stepped up to the threshold, head cocked, waiting. Compression of time, compression of man. The scattering of horse-chestnuts, and the crops beyond, held their breath and watched. And beyond it all, the moon, his friend, bathed it all in its noble light.

Moonlight hadn’t crippled it, as they had hoped. But now he had to trust to hope again, that if there was any chance of seeing dawn, he had to get it out here.

There was no sound within. When he heard Navvy again, urging him to leave one last time from beyond the final twist of the trail, he went in before he could listen.

There was no blood, or stench, or disarray. He looked for them, suddenly remembering that he didn’t know how many them actually was, but instead he saw only the home. The giant rough-hewn table crowding the walls on all sides. The trough of rainwater on the far edge, an old stained county map pinned to the planks with a knife. The neat stacks of books, the antique tin lantern, the gardening magazines, the Bill Willingham comic, the cage of rats, whiskers twitching, paws held out towards him for scraps.

Howe was there, and he wasn’t dead.

Niall made him out slowly, as if his eyes were adjusting to reality the same way they did to a dark room. Apart from the streak of blood on his left cheek, he looked the same as he did leaving Royce or standing over that gift of treasure - the same smirking lips, the twinkling eyes, the smugness of control, back once more. Niall saw the wink even through the flickering shadows cast by the lamp on the table.

Then he took in the rest of his body: tense, stiff, drawn back against the bare logs of the wall. Rifle pointed straight ahead at Niall.

Niall froze, but his thoughts thawed. All those bitter things swirled to the surface, the arrogance, the greed, all these lives means to an end, Navvy whispering straight into his head. And yet something was wrong. Something didn’t make sense.

The air was shimmering, a flicker of migraine lights, and slowly, the Renham Charger solidified between them. Smaller, thinner, but its antlers still ground against the beams above, and it still looked like it could crush Howe’s head with one yellowing claw. Muscles burst from wire hair, bulged outwards as if to suffocate them. Animal stink choked the room.

It turned its slim, pock-marked muzzle to Niall.

Niall raised his rifle mechanically, eyes roving the wall of flesh and bone for weak points. Here, up close, it wasn’t the endless black it had seemed. The fur was peppered with grey, patches of bald brown hide dotted its rippling chest. It looked old.

It opened its deer’s mouth and spoke.

“Let’s paint a picture,” it said across the table, softer and clearer and more musical than Niall could have ever imagined. “An entity, living out its days in peace, its brothers and fathers slaughtered in the bloody fields of times long gone. An abandoned cabin, made into a home again. A quiet existence, watching the years go by, learning about you, the ones that came after. Then one day, the longest journey the entity had been on in many summers, out of this miniscule thread of cover, seeking the sweetness on the air. A man so horrified by something that didn’t look like him that his heart gives out. Guilt and regret and memories of violence.” A rolling grunt, ancient days of grinding tectonic plates played out in its chest. Niall and Howe stood rapt, erect, unmoving.

“And so it comes back to pay tribute, for it had come to see the other side of its old enemies, the life and love. And it had ended a life, regardless of intent. And when it comes, there is another.” It reached back with one great arm to point a claw at Howe, still standing with his gun towards its mighty midriff. “A man seeking what some men have always sought: glory.”

Out of focus, Howe was wiggling the fingers on the stock of his rifle. Rise and fall, one up, two down. It was code for something, some strategy they had devised in an air-conditioned office of glass and metal far from here. It meant nothing.

“We sought it too,” the creature sang on, light and wistful. It was looking somewhere over Niall’s head. “Long ago. But I seek different things now. And so I tried to show you. All of you. Visions of a future side by side. And when you shattered that hope, I resorted to giving you the riches you came for. It was truly yours anyway, or your kind’s, at least.”

Howe’s fingers moved again, in sequence, and this time the message was unmistakable.

A countdown.

“And still you came,” said the creature, deeply, sorrowfully. “Still you came, and so I had to defend myself. I hope your brothers understand. I tried everything to prevent this. And even then, still he went on.”

And then the eyes, pinpoint specks in that great hulk, came down into Niall’s, and finally, it spoke directly to him.

“And so, standing here now, I look back at everything I have learned about humanity, and I see you, and I ask myself this: have you come to redeem him? Redeem you all? Or was all that life and love, all this time, just an act, playing a part?”

Niall’s eyes widened. His arms fell heavily by his sides. He saw Howe, beyond the speaker, gesturing wildly.

He didn’t know.

He stepped back. And that was when Howe raised his gun, aimed, and fired.

It didn’t matter any more. There were no more parts to play. Nothing.

There was a small stab of pity as Howe watched his friend’s body fall. But Niall had been listening to the monster’s pleading drivel, and he couldn’t risk a complication. This was life and death now. The beast turned towards him in a wide, lumbering circle, but the hunter didn’t see it. He saw only the weakness that Niall had been too unfocused to find. It wasn’t on the target.

He fired again. The splintering beam gave way. Clouds of dust and debris rained down between them. The beast roared. And the moon bathed it all in its cool, withering glow.

Howe smiled, pointed the barrel squarely at the monster’s wide breast, and took the final shot.

The shrill screech of pain that followed deepened suddenly into the chugging, breathy huff that might have been a laugh. Then, through the swirling sea of dust that danced in the moonlight, Howe’s prey came to meet him.

He took the smaller one a way down the path and buried it under the watchful stars. He stood a while above the grave, drawing the soothing stillness of the crippled forest around him like a blanket. The earth whispered to him. He felt the pulse of life all around, things crawling through the soil and soaring through the open air, and wondered again if this one had been part of it. He thought it might. But he would never know.

Inside the battered remains of his home, he dragged what remained of it roughly across the jumble of fallen books towards the cage. A claw gouged two deep shavings of flesh from its arm, easily, so easily. His pets were grateful, whiskers flurrying in delight as they partook of this strange meat for the first time.

The claw hovered over the arm, pooling with sticky blood, considering. And then he lowered it. He looked over their writings, crumpled to pulp in the ending, all those words and feelings that might be felt in the heart or might be a mere mask for the savage thirst that some, like that one, wore openly with pride. It was all dim, the print and the feelings alike, in the moonlight that it had been so sure would turn the tide. Even though it had already tried. He had read, in their own script, that an idiot was someone who repeated the same action expecting different results. And though their own ancestors, just two or three short lives ago, had found the meaning of that moonlight and used it against so many of his family, still these new ones had not the time or effort to contemplate what their words actually said. It seemed there was time only to rush to the slaughter.

Yet, there was the one who now slept beneath the trees. The one who might have shown him once and for all what humanity was, if it had had the chance. And so, for tonight, he quelled his old rage against them.

He would not feast. He tumbled the carcass out into the darkness for the lesser ones, and watched jealously as the rats enjoyed their meal.

He watched again and again as it murdered its own. As it took his offerings and stormed on. As it lusted for his blood.

He would not feast.

A scourge on the earth. A bond of love. A playing of parts.

He would not feast.

Tonight.