And it wasn’t long ago or in the middle of nowhere: it was now, in one of the modern cities of the world. And all at once, he realised that what he could not stand was the closeness of everything. Yes, that was it. There would always be horrors, perhaps ... But the closeness of it: the fact that he could walk out of his clean, white apartment right now if he wanted and a few streets away...

He crawled around the polished floor: everyone, all over the world, knew these things happened and looked the other way and got the bus to work and collected children from school and at least those sickening soft ordinary people in Holland or England or America had the benefit of distance to blanket their ignorance. But him and people like him. They knew how close it all was. They knew what burned flesh smelled like. He heard Komang’s children, screaming.

And then the creatures started climbing out of the walls.