When SIU consultant Mick Hargraves is sent to the Cambridgeshire Fens to investigate a cluster of disappearances in the small village of Moreton Drove — a retired schoolteacher, an elderly man, a nine-year-old boy who did not come back from an afternoon in the fields — he expects something manageable. What he finds instead is a dead zone: a two-mile radius from which every passive infernal entity has been driven out, the shadow network already claimed and occupied by something old enough to have been there before the categories for such things existed. For the first time in six years, Marchosias arrives diminished and without orientation, in territory that is not his.
The entity at the centre of the dead zone is Agnes — over thirteen centuries old, operating entirely from the material side of infernal mechanics, with a practise refined across centuries of survival. She can see the seam of Mick and Marchosias’s integration in a way nothing else has managed, and she knows exactly how to work it. The shadow network is hers. The flat open Fenland offers nowhere to operate from. Every tool Marchosias has developed over four thousand years was built for a different kind of opponent, and Agnes has had longer to prepare for this encounter than either of them has been alive.
The Gleaning is a novel about debt — what it means to sign something you don’t fully understand, what it costs to run from it, and what it requires to stay. Agnes’s history forces Mick to reckon with his own deal in ways he has spent six years not looking at directly, and the question the novel sits with is not whether the case can be resolved but what resolution costs and whether it can ever be enough.
Dedicated to Ozzy Osbourne - the Prince of Darkness