The ruins in Raughnen are very old. If you thought those sorry little Roman columns in places like York or Chester are impressive, you’ve got another thing coming. These things are older still; much older. Big shaggy tangled masses of wood and stone, right there in the park in the middle of town, between the post office and Gaz’s Sausage Wagon. If you keep looking in one spot and walk along one of the paths, you might even catch a glimpse of a face or snake in one of the weathered lumps of glass tottering on top. They must have been something, anyway, because I don’t think whoever built those spires had their minds set on soggy candlesticks.

The old temples or whatever they are caught my eye as soon as I pulled up in the little pit of potholes they call a car park along the far edge of the lawn. I hadn’t come to see them; I was here for the new museum with its giant flaming demon of unspeakable evil. But I guess I’m a sad case, because after listening to the news on the unreasonably long ride down, I decided I wasn’t going to cough up another five quid ‘exhibition fee’ to see the demon on top of the mandatory entry donation. Also, I like old decrepit things. Just ask my ex-wife.

So I went round the park instead, and peered through holes and crannies in the heaped frames, looking interested. There were no fences to keep me from getting close, but no signs either. Between that and the potholes and a naked pensioner across the road screaming obscenities through the shattered window of a corner shop, I was starting to get the impression that the Old Riding didn’t get much in the way of government funding. Demon museums aside.

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

Perhaps a sobering plaque giving me a date and the name of the king or warlord or whoever who’d built the buildings, not to mention what they bloody were, might have satisfied my curiosity and then I’d have just gone on down onto the high street to find a pasty. But in fairness, the Lord Mayor’s cocaine habit needed all the donations it could get, and the signs would have to wait. That meant that my loitering drew me ever closer to the tumbling structures, and to a pretty unhappy ending if ever there was one.

There was something glittering well beyond the leaning timber frame of the centre mound. Something deep in shadow where no light should have reached. And I just had to look, you see. The naked prune of a man had finished with his victim across the road and was lurching through the screeching traffic. It was absolutely imperative that I looked busy.

So I looked closer, and closer, and the glimmer started to move.

And so I fell victim to the first curse of the day: tourist’s detachment. If something started moving in a collapsing riverside warehouse back home in Boro... well I’d have legged it, wouldn’t I? I’d never be there in the first place. But down here, in the Old Riding of Yorkshire, hundreds more miles down the A19 than were ever shown on Google Maps, I was a tourist, and everyone knows nothing bad happens to tourists.

That’s why I stepped closer, and that’s why, when the two shapes of glowing darkness whisked suddenly from the doorway, they got me.