The moaning sounds continued, but now they sounded lower – guttural, somehow gleeful.

Couldn’t Lonnie hear that?

‘Hey, is somebody down there?’ she heard Lonnie ask. ‘Is there – oh! Hey! Jesus!’ And suddenly Lonnie screamed. She had never heard him scream before, and her legs seemed to turn to waterbags at the sound. She looked wildly for a break in the hedge, a path, and couldn’t see one anywhere. Images swirled before her eyes – the bikers who had looked like rats for a moment, the cat with the pink chewed face, the boy with the claw-hand. Lonnie! she tried to scream, but no words came out.

Now there were sounds of a struggle. The moaning had stopped. But there were wet, sloshing sounds from the other side of the hedge. Then, suddenly, Lonnie came flying back through the stiff dusty-green bristles as if he had been given a tremendous push. The left arm of his suit-coat was torn, and it was splattered with runnels of black stuff that seemed to be smoking, as the pit in the lawn had been smoking.

‘Doris, run!’

‘Lonnie, what…’

‘Run!’ His face pale as cheese.

Doris looked around wildly for a cop. For anyone. But Hillfield Avenue might have been a part of some great deserted city for all the life or movement she saw. Then she glanced back at the hedge and saw something else was moving behind there, something that was more than black; it seemed ebony, the antithesis of light.

And it was sloshing.

A moment later, the short, stiff branches of the hedge began to rustle. She stared, hypnotized. She might have stood there forever (so she told Vetter and Farnham) if Lonnie hadn’t grabbed her arm roughly and shrieked at her – yes, Lonnie, who never even raised his voice at the kids, had shrieked – she might have been standing there yet. Standing there, or… But they ran.

Where? Farnham had asked, but she didn’t know. Lonnie was totally undone, in a hysteria of panic and revulsion – that was all she really knew.