Extract from The Travelling Circus of Lacrimosa

In an instant, the shadows took form. No longer empty pits of darkness, they were silhouettes, thin, featureless shapes, writhing, twisting about the door. With long, exaggerated limbs, splayed in ungainly spasms across the walls, reaching, gripping, kicking at the door, the passage to death, which would not yield to them, they writhed, they jarred. In his heavy, docile mind, a distant echo of fear came clattering clumsily to the fore, and William thought to flee, for those knotted outlines w...