When John came to the inn, Fear was host. Fear that no one could describe or explain. Fear of a man upstairs, a guest locked in, who would not speak or eat or sleep or move; yet from outside whose locked door the silence moved with weird sensations of life growing within. Life that seemed to have come with the landing of UFOs in the river mist.
"You're a lemming, John," his father had told him. "You're rushing to your own destruction." But he bought the inn and the secret above him anyway; a secret he could not touch or see or hear. He bought the inn knowing it would destroy him, but as he came near to madness he began to realise that the thing upstairs was growing into a knife pointed at the belly of civilisation. He did nothing as he felt the knife pushing through him, skewering him as the first victim of a new invasion. He did nothing. But how can you get away from the edge when you know you must? Or does something push you on, closer, closer?