Fiona Hardingham: It is 1863. The winter winds shriek and moan around the castle turrets as the nightmare finds him, poor cat-boy John. He runs from room to room until he finds a place to hide. And then he hears but two things: the clattering and the ragged hish, hish from his own breath.

"Quit breathing so loud, you fool, or you'll never breathe again." His heart pounds in his ears and his chest aches as he holds himself still and silent. The clattering, irregular metal on stone, stops. And the dread silence that follows almost stops his heart too.

Now where is the blasted thing?

The only sound cat-boy John hears beyond the pounding of his heart is a soft jingle, as of light rain on a bucket or a bracelet on a moving wrist, or the whisper a falling star would make as it scatters broken across the sky. "Oh, the heavens help me!"

Then a click, rasp, click, like a clock being wound. And there it is again, not 10 feet from where he stands pressed against the wall behind the tapestry. The cold stone seeping through his thin shirt and up through the soles of his bare feet. The smell of wormy wool, full in his nose, suffocating him.

The horrifying thing only feet away now, and closing in on him. Metal on stone. Metal on stone. His heart, a-thump, thump. His eyes pressed tight, as the tears leak out beneath his lashes, his breath held in his tight, drawn chest. As one tear descends his right cheek and cleans a line down to his chin, he thinks again, "The heavens, help me!"

Except that heaven is far, far from this place of unearthly creatures. How we wishes he could have saved the others before him. The fishmonger's daughter, the hunchback boy, the singing girls. But he is only a boy. Brave, but not brave enough. More mouse than cat. And at the mercy of a monster, too dreadful too behold. No, he is not the first to be taken, nor will he be the last.

One of John's own cats, fresh from the night's kill, betrays him, cat-boy John. Poor lovey kitten drops a mouse on John's bare right toe before she speeds away to escape the monster. The last John hears is a string of accursed words in a voice that comes from the depths, perhaps from the devil himself, "My flesh and bone."

Outside beyond the thick walls, the frozen moat. The barren yard. The ringing stockade. The moon slips from behind a skidding cloud as the screams whisk away into the forest. Even the sneaking stoat hunkers in terror as the boy cries with the ripping pain of losing his very soul.