She opened her eyes and sat up stiffly from the back seat. She’d been badly bitten on the back of her knees and on her arms. There was no sign of day yet, but the night sky was clear and the moon trailed a cold radiance across the dark mass of trees and shone on the gushing water below her. She squinted at her watch, tilting it so that she could just make out that it was twenty past one. She had only slept an hour or two, and that fitfully, with the familiar razor-edged dreams snagging her awake. Someone laughing; a snickery, sly laugh licking around her brain. Children’s faces swimming like pale fish in her drowning mind. Someone calling ‘Mummy, Mummy’ in a high-pitched, broken-backed wail. Oh, she could pick up distress a million miles away. And she had lurched out of sleep, falling upwards, with sweat trickling down her neck. Awake, she could still hear the last echoes of the hiccuping cries, and she clasped her hands together, digging her nails into her palms.

‘What in the world am I doing in this place?’ she said in a whisper, just to hear the sound of her own voice. ‘Go back to sleep,’ she told herself, more loudly. If she wept, if she screamed and howled, no one would hear her. No one in the whole world knew where she was and there was no one to whom she could talk about this feeling that had ambushed her when she woke: as if inside her things were coming loose from their foundations, breaking up like one of those detonated tower blocks folding softly in on itself, room after room, floor after floor. She pressed a hand hard against her heart, which seemed to have swollen hugely in her chest so that it was like a football just beneath the surface of her skin. She felt it skipping and lurching under her palm, a warning drum beating louder and louder, an ominous booming that must engulf her. Her stomach had turned to liquid but her throat was choked solid, as if a thrashing eel had lodged there. Her sinuses throbbed; her eyes burned. Her body was a city under siege, battened down but splitting apart, and there was an obscene fluttering and clicking in her head: trapped moths with powdery wings in the mushroomy underground of her thoughts.

Irene leant forward and fumbled for the water bottle in the front. She gulped several mouthfuls, spilling it down her chin and her neck. It was almost impossible to swallow: her throat was a closed valve. She made herself breathe deeply through the shudders that gripped her, and waited for the crouching, snarling dread to subside once more into its cave, just the tip of a tail twitching, eyes gleaming out of the terrible darkness. Always hiding there. She gave a small whimper.