Night fell with alarming haste. Alice placed a kettle on the stove to boil as she prepared the root vegetables she’d collected earlier for her dinner. The rain sounded like it was weakening a little, but not enough to calm her nerves. Something didn’t feel right about this storm, about this night. Something Alice couldn’t quite put her finger on. She’d already consulted her tarot deck twice in the last hour but the answers were confusing and inconclusive.

A gust of wind rattled the windowpanes and the heavy curtains that were pinned to the frames fluttered. At the same moment, the candle she was working by was extinguished by the draught. Only the faint flickering fire embers illuminated the room and the shadows were heavy and thick like melting tar. Through the storm, Alice heard an unmistakable noise: knocking. Three slow, deliberate knocks on her heavy oak door. Her head snapped towards the noise. Someone was out there on her porch, at her cabin that sat in the middle of a forest, miles away from the nearest town. There were no hiking routes nearby, no reason for anyone to be just passing through.

A chill crept up Alice’s spine. Standing up from the small table, she kept hold of the knife she’d been using to prepare her food, the ivory handle sitting uncomfortably in her sweat-drenched palm. She inched towards the door, the blade of the knife glinting in a sliver of moonlight. Gathering her frayed courage, she reached for the handle and pulled just as a thunder crack echoed through the night sky.

Alice squinted through the pouring rain into the oppressive darkness but saw nothing. She frowned, the wind whipping through her raven hair, raising goosebumps on her arms. Another roll of thunder rattled above and Alice stepped back, suspicious and frightened, intending to close the door and shut out the creeping night. Just before she could, she noticed a patch of white on her doorstep.

A letter.

It was crisp and bright in the gloaming, entirely dry even though it sat on the saturated floor, completely exposed to the weather. As she bent to retrieve it, she failed to notice the pair of eyes that watched her from a shadow-shrouded spot in the trees.

Inside the cabin, with the door firmly closed and locked, Alice tore open the letter. As her eyes flicked over the words written in an exquisite scrawl, she felt fear strike her heart. Yet, alongside the fear, a tiny glimmer of hope. Could it be possible that such a small thing, a simple combination of ink and paper, could give her the opportunity to be who she’d always yearned to be? Alice knew in her heart of hearts that, truth or fiction, she needed to discover the source of this letter; she needed to know where it had come from and what they knew about her, what they knew about everything.

Her heart pounded in her ears even more loudly than the rumbling thunder outside, but she mustered her courage, swallowed her fear, and clutched that sliver of hope like a lost child clings to a doll.