Thomas is tall, broad through the shoulders, and built by years of carrying a working man's weight rather than by deliberate exercise. He stands with his feet planted as though a train might lurch beneath him, but when waiting he shifts his weight toward the nearest exit. His hands are square, blunt-nailed, and faintly ink-stained from account books; he rubs one thumb over the other as if checking an invisible tally. His dark brown-blond hair is thinning at the temples, and his dark blue eyes keep returning to reflective surfaces. At a glance he looks like a capable, ordinary English accountant. Then he pauses mid-sentence, his face changes by a fraction, and a younger, hungry attention looks out through the same eyes. The unexpected detail: he keeps a child's paper windmill tucked into his coat pocket, its bright pinwheel incongruous against his sober clothes.

Thomas is rough-spoken but honorable, and he will stand up for someone being cheated even when doing so costs him. At work he is methodical and almost stubbornly calm; at home he is awkward, warm in deeds but poor at saying what he feels. Fear makes him evasive and watchful, while a threat to his family can make him abruptly brave. Hunt pulls in the opposite direction: it is clear-minded and fervent, but its devotion to living things includes an unnerving acceptance of their deaths.

Thomas Arkell was a rough, decent man who took pride in providing for his wife and three children, even when he found it difficult to speak tenderly to them. He worked as a local accountant and bought the strange cliff-stone heart on impulse during a trip through Kent. Its surface resembled a fossil, complete with barnacles and dried sea grass, and its shape was too much like a human heart to be comfortable. After buying it, Thomas began to hear footsteps in empty rooms and voices in the house. The stone seemed to wake near seawater, turning a red-pink beneath its crust. Thomas eventually had it thrown into a river. He thought that was the end of it. Instead, something he calls Hunt began to speak from within him. It claims to be eighteen, remembers light, fire, riding, and the endings of living things, and sometimes moves Thomas's face before Thomas can stop it. The formative break came when Thomas saw his own reflection answer him with Hunt's expression. He was later arrested after a fight with his old friend Jacob Smith, which Thomas insists Hunt started. Now he is frightened that the thing inside him will prevent him from speaking honestly to his sons Arnold and Lestor and his daughter Mable before he loses control for good. His wife Clare knows something is wrong, but Thomas has not told her the full truth.