It’s twilight. In the glare of the street lamps dancing sprites play in the falling snow.  He stands; white as a ghost, the collar of his jacket turned up against the encroaching weather. There is no clapping of hands or shuffling of feet; just a stillness.  Hidden in the shadows his face seems grotesque; a bulbous nose, reminiscent of Punch and a phantasmagoria like breath emanating from his mouth.  He watches the children coming home from school. Mothers hurry past; shooing their children quickly to one side, careful not to make eye contact.

Something is stirring.  Something from before there were names.  Something once sated but growing hungry.

A woman stands looking at the piece of paper fixed to the lamppost.  A picture of a fat ginger tomcat, and printed underneath in wobbly crayonese,
‘Pleez help find owa cat.’
This is followed by less endearing but more practical information printed in Times New Roman.  She sighs, moving slowly to show some respect for aging joints.  A few lampposts later and another notice; this time a black and white cat, missing since last Sunday.  She sighs again, and continues her slow shuffle, her shopping trolley bumping along behind.

The Passage is an alley, just under a mile long it dissects the area known locally as the Harringay Ladder.  Built above a Victorian sewer, it lets the inhabitants of this gentrifying London suburb to rapidly traverse their streets, dodging the heavy traffic flow of neighbouring roads.  On rainy days the Old York paving stones glisten, sleek like an otters fur and on hot summer days the tall walls of the Victorian terraces provide some welcome shade from the sun. This is a constantly shifting almost alive conduit. From first light its users hasten through, checking watches as they rush to descend elevators linking them to trains deep in the earth.  Later, local school children flow first North then South, their scooters causing havoc at ankles as they pelt over the grey stone.  At night The Passage is illuminated by sulphurous yellow pools of light, and people hurry past, hearts quickening, back to their comfortable homes.

Deep beneath our streets the something is there.  As we live our humdrum existence, it waits. It lurks in the corner of our eye. It creeps from under our bed. It hides behind our curtains.  It stagnates in the shadow between the lights, festering and feeding on fear and anxiety.

Things start to happen.  No one notices at first.  The occupants of 53 Allison Road are happy that their incumbent rodent problem seems to have resolved itself.  They put it down to the new Tabby mouser that moved into the house over their back fence.  He would sun himself on their patio, bricks warmed by the sun. Prostrate, he would offer his soft and fluffy underside to anyone who dared to venture in for a rub. The family are sad when he stops coming round, and even sadder to see his mug shot added to the growing numbers of missing cat notices displayed in the passage. The mice don’t come back.

Karen at No 55 Seymour Road takes pride in being a modern informed mother.  She’s read all the books, based on all the latest research, and has decided that modern children are over protected. Their lack of personal responsibility – the result of over anxious helicopter parenting.  Her son Phoenix, so called because he rose up out of the ashes of a hard fought ten-year battle, will on her careful watch, be taught the skills of independence and resilience. This determination will ensure all his often-imagined future successes.  The weight of this imagined future is currently strapped to his back in the form of a blue rocket bag into which is packed a thermos of chicken soup, a loaf of home baked soda bread and at his behest, a small pat of butter.  He is ready to mount his trusty red scooter and deliver this care package to his grandmother who lives conveniently only one street over – a less than 5-minute traffic free journey away, thanks to The Passage.
‘What did I say?’ She gently prompts him.
‘I’m to go straight there. No stopping and no talking to strangers.’  His voice confident and full of four-year-old conceit. Giving him a quick hug and patting the top of his head, she watches him scoot determinedly away.  At the corner of The Passage he stops, turns and waves with exaggerated excitement, before disappearing out of sight.  She goes back inside, shutting the door firmly behind her.  Down the road, a man crosses into The Passage after the child.

‘He’s on his way Mum.’  Karen listens, but her sigh exposes this generation’s exasperation with the last. Her mum has a ridiculous paranoia about The Passage, something about a missing child from years ago, however this is something she is determined not to pass on.  ‘Honestly Mum, that was 50 years ago.  He’ll be fine, really – call me when he gets there. He’s wearing that red jacket you bought him for Christmas.’  She puts down the phone and prepares to wait for the return call, the anxiety heavy in her stomach.  Ten years of waiting can store up a lot of imagined fears.  After five minutes, she supresses the desire to call.  After ten, she answers the return call swiftly, before dropping the phone and rushing out of the house, door flung wide open behind her – down the street and turning into The Passage. The red scooter lies abandoned on the glistening flagstones. Her scream reverberates off tall walls.

The more we fear, the more fear we create.  The Good Samaritan becomes Stranger Danger. Young boys, scarfs over their mouths become masked robbers. Local parks become voids leaving space for panic to propagate. The insidious whisper of local gossip and news paints a blood red mark in its wake.

A fog has descended.  It appeared unexpectedly, a hindrance in the search for the missing boy.  A real ‘pea souper’, dense; acrid; yellow it swirls down the streets, filling every available space.  So thick you can barely see the pulsating blue lights of the police cars outside of No 55.   In The Passage, under a street lamp stands a man.  He is watching the fog as it pours out the brick Surge Tower built to prevent overflow from the sewer. Not long ago he answered a phone call from the grandmother whose chicken soup never arrived and now he waits.  A red town fox, glossy and well fed on the waste from No’s 55 to 67 stands with him and perched along the house eaves above, the barely discernable shadows of some ravens.  Coming down The Passage is the old woman and stalking behind her a battalion of cats.  It is time.

They exist. Guardians of our day and their night. They hide in plain view. An old woman, shuffling along with her trolley, returns home to her cats. A bulbous red nosed man on a bench mutters to himself, newspaper in hand, a parliament of ravens at his feet. They move between the spaces in our lives, watchful; waiting; balancing.

The man and the woman come to stand along side each other; the fog, increasingly thick and viscous surrounds them.

‘Give him back.’  The words are not spoken – they just move from non-existence to existing.  There is no response other than the tightening of the flotsam and jetsam of reality eddying around them.  ‘Give Him back.’  The fog contains shapes, amorphous and shifting.  ‘Give Him Back’.  The non-words in unison have become a non-scream and the churning fog now seems vastly lupine in its form. Yellow sulphurous eyes bearing down from above.
‘No’, the response is a low slow growl.  ‘I feel their fear.  It makes me hungry. There is not enough, there is never enough. I want more.’

‘We made an agreement long ago.  You must exist only in darkness.  You must exist only in the corner of an eye.  You must give back this child. He was not yours to take.’ The woman removes a silver comb from her hair and aims it towards the forms forehead, as it cuts through the fog it changes shape becoming a silver arrow that strikes true.  The man’s rolled up newspaper becomes an axe that he wields in an arc, sweeping a half circle through the fog.  The swirling mist changes into a cyclone and the man and the woman stand in the eye of the storm. There is a metallic chink as something hits the flagstones and then silence. The fog slowly dissipates away, leaving only a clammy cold drizzle.  The woman picks up the fallen comb and replaces it in her hair.  They look at each other.
‘Until the next time.’
‘Until the next time.’ And with a barely perceptible nod he turns and moves away down the passage, red fox at his side.

The boy is found at the foot of the apple tree in the garden of No 67.  He is limp but alive.  The police conclude that he climbed under a garden door and in trying to reach the rosiest reddest apple at the very top of the tree, slipped on the wet branches. He hit his head and broke an arm on the way down, but is otherwise unharmed. In the hospital his mother sits, holding his hand in thankful silence