The little boy shakes his head. He is sat on a cold rock. It is dark here, save for the dull glow of the man’s pocket watch. They are in the part of the cave that you can only get to by crawling, the part the grown-ups have told him he must never go. But now he has to stay here.

Is he being punished?

“No. No. You’re a good boy. A good boy. You stay here until Daddy comes back.”

The man shoves the pocket watch into his son’s hands and closes them around it. A soft light slips out through the boy’s fingers. Then the man turns, leaves, crawls sideways to get out like a funny caterpillar.

The boy does not laugh.

The little boy is alone. He does as he is told. He is quiet. And in the quiet, every echo finds him. There are screams. Screams of men and women and of children. And he hears the ripping claws and gnawing teeth and the pleas for mercy that end mid-word.

And a roar. A vicious, echoing roar that seems to come from everywhere and from nowhere. It does not sound like any of the animals that the boy has learned about in school. It is not a displacer beast or a lion or a cockatrice.

At times it sounds like a horrible old woman who only thinks she is an animal, and at other times it sounds like Hell itself has been given a mouth.

And the boy does not move. He does not shift a centimeter, and he tries to keep his eyes perfectly still.

For he knows that any move or sound will summon her.

And in the watchlight he can see the hole at the very straining edge of his vision. The caterpillar hole where his father wriggled away.

The hole that she will come through if she hears him.

He tries not to breathe. Outside, the screams have died. He cannot hear her roar.

He tries not to breathe.

Silence echoes. His chest is heavy.

He tries not to breathe.

And then a scratching at the hole. Like a fingernail or claw against the stone. He cannot turn his head or she will get him.

“We can smell you, little one. Come out and play with Mama Alecto.”

And then he sees it from the corner of his eye. Her talon, long and black and sharp like a knife, reaching out through the caterpillar hole and dragging back against the stone.

“Come out,” she whispers, “for Mama Alecto has left space for you.”

Sit still, he said. Be quiet. Absolutely silent. And don’t move from this spot, no matter what you hear. The boy tries so hard, but his hands are shaking now, and his eyes are wet with tears, and it feels like his heart is ready to turn over in his chest.

“Come out, you delicious little thing.”

His small hands tremble and tighten over his father’s watch, the spaces between his fingers closing, and all is lost to darkness.

And in the darkness, he can hear her, clawing at the stone. Dragging her nails. Dragging herself through the hole.

In the darkness she pulls closer. Closer.

And then he hears her at his feet. “You shall know such joy,” she whispers, “in between our teeth.”