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I move farther from the open bedroom door. She is shaking. She wants me to tell her that her brother has come back from the sea in some form and that grief bends the world, and I am the wrong creature to ask.

“Bar the door tonight,” I say. “When he comes, do not let him in, and do not say his name.”

“He’s my brother.”

“Your brother went into the water off the Sept-Îles nine years ago and I carried him over myself, in November, in the morning, and he was afraid, and I stayed with him until he was not.” Her hands come down off her mouth. “That thing downstairs in your kitchen drinking your tea is wearing him.”

I ride back the long way and stop on the causeway with the afternoon light lying silver on the water on both sides.

Eight people fed on and killed in a year. Guillou is the ninth, and the first I have reached while he is still alive. He is also the nearest to my own gate. Trevern is four miles from Kerlann.

Five weeks and four days of feeding on that man. It was in his house while Enora was still at her foundry, and while I stood in a fish market not buying the sale register.

It was there last night, drinking his daughter’s tea, while I stood in a corridor with a mask in my hand, deciding to be somebody else for an hour.

And I had the cause wrong. The Guillou house never sold anybody. It lost a son to the sea. The market is only one way for a house to lose a person.

I know what it does now. It finds a house with a hole in it. A death, a leaving, a sale. Then it goes and stands in the hole.

The fen is full of houses with holes in them.

Malo takes the horse at the gate.

“You will want the hall, sir,” he says. “Madam has been up the ladder since noon and she has been asking after you on the quarter hour.”

I stand in the yard with my coat wet to the knee and the smell of another man’s sickroom on my hands, and inside my house a woman is shouting at a wall about hooks.

In two nights, she said.

ENORA

He comes into the hall at three with the fen on his coat. I am up the ladder with the second tapestry over one shoulder and a mouthful of hooks.

“You’re late,” I say, round the hooks. “I told the tapestry you promised.”

“I was called to Trevern.”

“Malo said.” I spit the hooks into my hand. “Did somebody die?”

“No. That is the trouble.”

I wait. He is not a man who goes on by himself. Then he does.

“Something is killing people in the fen towns. It feeds on them, a little at a time, for weeks, and they die of it. Eight in a year. I carry them over, and I cannot tell what did it. The man in Trevern is the ninth, and he is still alive.”

I’m frightened, and my arms come up in gooseflesh under the tapestry. “Can you stop it?”

“I do not know what it is.”

He says it flat, looking up at me, and I have nothing to give him for it.

I hate having nothing for him. I have got hooks and a wall that is wrong, so I give him the wall.

“Stand there,” I say. “No. Further left, by the bench. There.”

He goes where I point and stops, hands at his sides, and waits to be told what he is for.

I clap once.