The battery on his phone beeps three times in quick succession and the light goes out. Tyler picks it up off the floor and stares into the darkness until his eyes adjust a little. He heads back the way he came, inching his way slowly back down the stairwell in the darkness.

Just kids messing about in an abandoned building. Nothing to worry about. Nevertheless, when he gets back to the flat he deadbolts the door and puts the chain on. He glances through the window at the building opposite where the familiar cut-out black flame has now gone. In its place, there’s a large, jagged hole.

—

Rabbani sits up in bed, staring at the off-white walls of the hospital ward.

There are four beds in her section. The woman in the bed opposite, Sandra, is watching television, but every now and then Rabbani catches her staring. She guesses it’s the ten o’clock news. She can only imagine what she looks like, laid out in the graveyard prematurely. But that makes her think about the vicar. She’s getting delusions of grandeur; as if the media gives a shit about what happened to her when they’ve got him to write about.

She’s sorry for him. She didn’t like the guy, and he was obviously some sort of perv, but still . . . When she thinks about how he must have died, how she nearly died . . .

She shivers. She doesn’t think she’ll ever feel warm again.

The woman in the bed next to her groans intermittently. They’ve separated them with a curtain, which seems to stay closed pretty much permanently. Rabbani can’t say she’s sorry about that.

The fourth bed is empty. And somehow that one unsettles her most of all.

She can’t remember much of anything after the church. Not the trip here in the ambulance, nor the night spent in intensive care, though occasionally she thinks she remembers puking up phlegm and pus into a bowl.

Her throat is sore and the water they’ve given her doesn’t seem to help, just makes her need the toilet all the time. She doesn’t think the coughing sounds as bad now, but every few minutes she has another fit of hacking up slime and Sandra looks across at her disagreeably from behind her TV.

The immediate danger has passed, it seems; she’s here for observation only now, arrhythmia of the heart. But what if they find something else? Who knows what other damage has been done? Maybe now that she’s here they’ll never let her go. Just like her grandfather.