Two travellers in a lonely part of Ireland find a ruined house above a chasm, and in the rubble a water-stained manuscript — the diary of the Recluse who lived there, on the boundary where our world thins against others.

He is besieged. Out of the pit beneath the house come the swine-things, bestial and patient, and for nights he holds the doors against them with his dog and his failing nerve. When he descends into the pit to find where they breed, the house begins to show him what it truly is.

Then time comes loose. He watches, helpless, as the days blur and the years pour past — the sun swelling and dying, the earth going cold, a green sun rising over the ruin of the solar system. He is carried across the Sea of Sleep, where for one moment he meets again the woman he lost, before the tide draws them apart.

The manuscript breaks off mid-sentence. Whatever came for the Recluse at the end left no witness but the ruined house above the pit, and a diary the travellers should never have read.

A house on the border of everything — and a manuscript that ends where the words run out.