Lemmingsville was never performed, never announced, and had no listed audience — John had only ever hummed it while stacking glasses on the Middlewood road, in what he believed was solitude. Boggy Lomas of the Dark Peak District Council knew every verse, every lyric, and had drawn character conclusions from the bridge chorus alone. In Hellsborough, it seems, your songs know you long before you do.

Owlerton has always maintained a firm disinterest in itinerant performance; the tin whistle player who danced all the way from south Oxfordshire found this out at the Penistone road bridge, where he blew and capered for an entire day without a single door opening. He consoled himself by sleeping in the churchyard, and woke at midnight to a widow casting xin and corvid shadow figures against a lit sheet in the cottage window — all the audience he'd been looking for, though he still had to beg bread for the privilege of playing to her.

Somewhere above the source of the Don, where the Dark Peak gets seriously inhospitable, something very large moves through the wetland murk. Witnesses report striped flanks, a low-slung shoulder mass, a silence so absolute it reads as deliberate. Most compare it to a descendant of Dinofelis — a prehistoric felid between a leopard and a lion — though the contingent who claim it barks, once, twice, and then a third time, say that anyone who doesn't reach cover before that third bark dies of the fear itself.

clowns have been known to bury false memories with surgical patience — years of planted imagery, the same recurring room, the same staircase with the same corners — repeated until the dream arrives fully furnished in the waking world. By the time you sleep in the room you remember, the clown was never there; the infection entered through the hive-mind, wearing the face of a murk wraith.