"Do you miss them?" Marcus asks. Even with everything they'd done to him, he misses his parents every now and then. Mostly his mother, his father had been too cruel for real love, but his mother had occasionally been kind, had been almost maternal. Those walks in the woods had meant something to him as a child and he does sometimes miss the feeling those moments gave to him.

"I miss my mum sometimes," he says. "Not so much my dad, but my mum... she's been gone a long time."

The demons he exorcises tend to bring her up, though, as if dozens of their rotten brothers before them haven't done the same. He sees her face two or three times a year, depending on how often he's working.