From the beginning of It So Happens:

A dark night, blacked out: a night for murder.

Even inside the house, behind the curtains and closed shutters, there is little light. The man coming slowly downstairs holds the banister for guidance, and at the bottom gropes one-handed along the passage, turns, and passes down another flight of stairs.
He checks halfway, waiting. There have been movements, a squirming beneath his other arm. The banister pauses beneath his hand, the stairs below him hold their breath.
Seconds pass. No further movements reveal themselves. The man continues, awarding each tread in turn, coming at last to the door at the bottom of the stairs.
Opening it the light dazzles him. He screws up his eyes as he enters the kitchen, where an oil lamp glows above the table. There is a secondary glow, of red, from the range.
The man lifts his head, listening. Light demonstrates his facial bones, the sheen of his forehead, and the stubble along his starveling jaw. He crosses the kitchen to the range, and slowly kneels before it, resting his free hand for balance on a kitchen chair.
He listens again, but still God sends him no word. Leaning forward he places the bundle he carries down on the floor, where warmth will placate it while he undertakes the next task.
Beside the back door, on a hook, the key awaits his hand. Outside the air strikes chill, he must hold in the cough, and for a moment he stands still, steadying himself. He is in a small flagged area. Several items stand here, exposed to sun and rain, purposely untended: a delicate chair, swollen with rain, its striped seat mould-blackened; a dining room table, its buckled veneer almost hidden beneath piles of rotting material, a brownish tweed greatcoat, curtains of once plum-coloured velvet, and, in one corner carefully arranged in pairs at attention, shoes: stiffened purulent brogues, swollen black oxfords, high heels of slack mouldering leather lined with the peeling slime that had once been kid.
All these things are being punished. They are to rot, to disintegrate helplessly at the man’s will and by his hand and in his sight. He feels their essences, emanations of despair, of pleading, as he passes, but pretends to notice nothing, so that the dying items will feel yet more fully his power and their own abjection. Opening the outhouse door he takes up the shovel waiting inside. It is a good shovel, it will do as he wishes, he can feel its assurances in its smooth handle.
A faint moonlight illuminates the garden. The man stands for a moment, the willing shovel in his hand, peering through the waving darkness of trees for a glimpse of the river beyond. Then he makes his way slowly down the flagged path, past the little square of grass, past the two apple trees, through the vegetable patch, past the quiet henhouse, and right up to the fence. Here he can hear the water, quietly going about its business. This will be the place.
He digs quickly, with the expertise of practice. Every so often he has to stop, to calm his own breathing, and to drag his sleeve over his brow, mopping at the water that streams into his eyes and down his cheeks like tears. The hole is soon deep enough, wide enough. He stands by it for several minutes, until his breathing slows down and he can walk again.
In the kitchen the creature is awake. He observes its hairless reptilian languor. As he picks it up it flexes, its back arching vigorously, but he does not let go. He carries it in front of him, holding it firmly. There is still a chance it will reveal itself, perhaps take on its truest form, in order to engulf him.
Outside it at once raises its voice. The man is alarmed at how much like a real baby it sounds, but he is not fooled, not for an instant.
The place he has made is fitting. It fits. He places the creature into it.
For a moment, then, memory informs his fingers, like an electric shock. His hands remember tucking a child into a cosy bed, and rise up in perplexity at the cold crumbly soil, rise of their own volition to his head, to grasp and pull in panic at his hair.
But the moment quickly passes. This is his duty. He has no choice. He covers the creature’s face with blanket, and steadily lays the earth, cleansing, bountiful, upon it. Finished, he does not firm the soil with his boot, as he would after planting anything else. Instead he addresses the quietened being beneath its earthy covering, and speaks aloud:
“There was no light,” he tells it, and then turns, and goes back to the house.