She felt a heavy nausea rise up inside her, the fear of impending death.

Slowly, she edged backwards around the trolley to put it between herself and whoever was behind the dryers. She again squinted to try and see more.

In the shadows, silence. A flicker of movement in the darkness. A shadow within a shadow. It was big. It was no rat. That was for sure. It was a person.

She gulped. Her mouth was dry. She glanced towards the doorway. It was at the far end of the laundry. That distant metal door had never looked more appealing. Nor had it ever seemed further away. She glanced back at the row of dryers.

Tensing, she took a deep breath… and bolted.

She sprinted through the laundry, heading towards the exit… weaving through the laundry bins… running away from whatever it was in the shadows… running away from the glitter of razor-sharp steel.

She ran faster than she had ever run in her life. As if something had taken her over. As if there was an animal inside her.

Her breath tore in her throat. Adrenaline coursed through her body. Her trainers hammered on the concrete floor, the slap of her footfalls echoing through the big room.

She ran and ran. The doorway getting closer. Her portal of freedom. If only she could get there. So close now. She panted. Her lungs working overtime to power her flight.

And then a laundry bin spun out in front of her and she tripped over it, crashing onto the floor amidst a cascade of dirty linen.

‘Oh god!’ she gasped. Her eyes filled with tears, blurring her vision.

She tried to scramble to her feet, but she got tangled in the sheets, the white material having wrapped itself around her ankles with an almost malevolent will of its own.

As she reached down to extract herself from the fatal web of dirty linen, she felt a hand grip her hair roughly from behind. The strands twisting into the fingers, winding tight like a winch.

With a sharp yank, her head was pulled back. She gasped in pain as she felt the roots ripping out. Literally one by one. Pop. Pop. Pop. Out of her scalp.

She tried in vain to twist her head to see her attacker but she couldn’t, so tight was the grip. All she could see were her own hands clambering uselessly in the empty space in front of her.

‘Oh god!’ she choked. ‘Please don’t hurt me!’

But her words fell away unheard. Through tear-blurred vision she caught the flashing arc of the blade clutched in a black leather glove as it swooped down from above and sliced into the front of her scalp.

She screeched in agony as the cold steel carved the flesh away from her skull. The searing pain was beyond anything she’d ever experienced. A deluge of hot blood coursed down from the wound, transforming her face into a crimson liquid mask locked in a scream of terror.