Out in the corridor, all was dark and silent. Oblique shards of moonlight cut across the shadow, but everything else was black.

At night it looked much bigger and felt much emptier, like the vast emptiness of space, almost infinite in what it could contain.

She stood there for a moment outside her cell, enveloped in the murk. The concrete floor was cold and gritty beneath her bare feet. She was silhouetted in the doorway by the moonlight entering through the small window in her cell, her figure defined in a square of light cast against the opposite wall of the corridor.

Again, the faintest of breezes ruffled the hairs on her head. It was as if the prison was alive and the corridor a respiratory tract within this vast slumbering beast as it breathed slowly in its sleep.

She inhaled… exhaled. Relaxing now, accustoming herself to this new and unusual situation.

But then a noise…

The tiniest of scuffles… out there in the shadows. Indistinct. A scraping of something across the pitted surface of either the floor or the walls of the corridor.

She froze, her goose pimples rising up even further, the tiny hairs on the surface of her skin standing up. Her eyes narrowed, her pupils widening to let in as much light as possible onto her retinas as she strained to peer into the darkness to make out whatever it was that was out there, because there was definitely something out there.

She strained to listen.

Silence once more. Was she imagining it?

Again, a scuffle. No, there was definitely something out there. There was something moving in the corridor.

The rustle of fabric on fabric.

Her breathing became a little faster now. Her heart beat a little harder. She swallowed and squinted out into the darkness.

Suddenly a movement. Something cut through a shard of moonlight. Out of shadow and back into shadow, so fast that she couldn’t make out what it was.

She stifled a gasp as a jolt of fear went through her. She took an involuntary step backwards and bumped into the door frame of her cell. She grasped it for support, her palms slippery with perspiration.

Craning her head, her gaze shifted from one shard of moonlight to the next. But there was nothing.

A rustle of fabric, closer now, just a few metres from her. Something there. Someone there.

She retreated back into her cell, back into her comfort zone, away from the alien darkness of the corridor and whatever lurked there.

But she realised then that she was trapped in here. There was no route of escape and she could not close the door because it locked from the outside.

An intense terror took hold of her, rooting her to the spot. The segregation block, supposedly the most secure part of the prison, offered no protection for her now.

She stood there in the middle of her cell transfixed by the black rectangle of the doorway and what was about to emerge through it, for she knew something was coming.