You scan for another way out – do you really want to see where this scene is going? – but the entire space around you is dark. At least there are three other audience members watching on with you, their crow faces perversely bringing some comfort.

Now there is another laugh. No, not a laugh – a stifled cry.

A bright light has come on, lighting up the thickening fog like toxic plasma. Thump thump thump; the boy is still hitting the dustbin with his stick. The second boy is slumped on the middle swing, his languid rotations mirrored in the sway and the creak of the third boy, who is hanging by the neck from the thick branch of the tree. His hood is hanging half off, crumpled to one side by the rope, revealing his buzz-cut hairstyle and his straw-filled sack of a face. It’s just a bloody scarecrow.

You laugh with the boy on the swing, prove you can take a joke – yeah, you got me – but the dead-eyed boy-actor just stares back at you.

10 Petra hadn’t had nightmares like this since she was a child. It wasn’t just the show’s images, the terrible things they’d showed her and the way they made her feel cycling through her overstimulated mind – sure, there was enough of that, too – but genuine perverted imaginings she was scraping up from some murky recess of her mind. Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, she’d immediately sink into a hole where the terrors lived; she wouldn’t even feel herself falling asleep and she’d be there, being shown things she’d never seen, couldn’t believe she was imagining. And then she’d start awake, the hair raised on her arms, a ghostly crackle receding down her back, as if something had been touching her.

Yes, the second Metamuse show was dark as hell, a sucker punch after the intense romance of Intimacy, but there was no reason it should be affecting her like this. Cabinet. And she could imagine some crazed collector watching from above as the audience wandered directionless and lost between the exhibits, the rooms, the stages, what they rather wankily referred to as ‘moral scenarios’. Caligari, Moreau – there was definitely a measure of social experiment about it. Which was why Suki was telling her about how Sheridan and King reframed Milgram’s obedience experiments by shocking a puppy instead of a person, who subjects might think is faking. And then about all the pseudoscientific techniques marketers have developed to sell you stuff.

‘You think you’re in control of your decisions, but you’re not. It can bend your mind, darling, when you realise just how easily you can be manipulated. There’s so much in common between what Metamuse does and what we do at Line Logic.’ Disturbingly, Suki seemed to offer no moral or ethical judgement on either the marketers’ Machiavellian work or her own.

While Petra entered stock invoices, Suki was decorating a front display table with a new shipment of Korean pop and soap paraphernalia. More expensive stock nobody bought. Not for the first time, Petra found herself suspecting that Needful Things was more than a simple vanity project to keep Suki quiet and happy. It could well be a laundromat for some of the Barlows’ iller-gotten gains. But she was no forensic accountant and there was absolutely no point in trying to upset a centuries-old apple cart pitched on an obscure foundation of caste and patronage. As long as the ruling classes were happy to have her here, she should just shut up and go along with it.