When a weight landed on his legs he raised his head from the violently crumpled pillow. The bed already had another occupant, and as Leo flung the quilt back so that it wouldn't hinder his escape the creature scurried up his body to squat on his chest, clutching him with all its limbs like half a spider.

The English town of Settlesham was twinned with Alphafen in Germany soon after the Second World War. During the war both towns were bombed, even though Alphafen seemed to have no strategic significance. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the postwar reconciliation, pupils at the local schools were set to correspond with their opposite numbers. Leo Parker has been in touch with Hanna Weber ever since but has never previously visited her. As an adult he's welcomed in Alphafen, but his stay seems idyllic despite the odd incident-a local who blames him for a hostile letter a schoolmate of Leo's sent, a glimpse of an uncanny figure on an Alpine walk, a flapping intruder that seems to embody Hanna's night fears, an encounter in a mountain restaurant with an English tourist who turns out to be there for his own disturbing reasons.

It's only after Leo leaves the town that the nightmares begin: an airport turns into a labyrinth, his own words become treacherous if not lethal, a family meal grows unnaturally active, and what are those creatures that have appeared in the photographs he took? The man he met in the mountain restaurant hasn't finished with him, and he has to deal with the town councillor who sent the warlike letter when they were teenage classmates. A local police inspector has reason to suspect his actions, even though the policeman is a friend of Leo's parents. Even the therapy Leo undertakes becomes a source of menace. In his bid to cement international relations, Leo may have roused the source of an ancient Alpine legend and brought a supernatural infection home with him. Even once he understands what has travelled with him, his attempts to overcome its influence may lead into greater nightmares still.

The Ramsey Campbell Special Editions. Campbell is the greatest inheritor of a tradition that reaches back through H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the early Gothic writers. The dark, masterful work of the painter Henry Fuseli, a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft, is used on these special editions to invoke early literary investigations into the supernatural.