Georgie nodded. She was terrified of the dark – terrified of what had happened in the dark and what could happen again. It was completely irrational, she knew that. But she still slept with the light on anyway.

‘It’s OK,’ Li whispered. ‘It’s OK. It wasn’t your fault, Georgie. You mustn’t ever think otherwise.’ And then Li said in a hardened voice that Georgie barely recognised. ‘We can put this right, you and me, can’t we? We can put this right.’

*

In darkness, the owner sat in a grey high-back chair in the corner of the pebble-dashed house.

There was a scratch mark on the owner’s arm that ran from elbow to hand. An angry, red gauze over split skin.

The owner waited and, when the time was right, flicked on a reading lamp that sat on a large metal safe to the side of the chair and picked up the red folder.

The key was weighty. Some of the pages were torn and dog-eared but they were all neatly packaged in clear plastic wallets, arranged back to back. The owner turned towards the middle. Some of the owner’s favourite entries were there where the diary’s author veered into an abstract world of dreams and imagination.

The owner hovered over one particular entry and read it, although it was already intimately familiar.

The girl sits cross-legged, staring up at the door. She wears the expression of a child much older than her eleven or so years. A long, endless look through large doe eyes that have seen too much and cried too little. A look that makes you wonder: is she the haunted, or the ghost?

She moves quickly, like the wind changing direction. She slides a bruised arm under the bed and pulls out a book. The front cover is worn, the pages are creased. The colours are old and faded like the memories the girl has of her time in the basement. She has trouble remembering things now. She tells herself that there is no room in her head to remember things; there is only hate.

She reads the title of the book and her head clears a little. Fairy Tales for Girls. The girl doesn’t know much about life outside the basement but she knows that the book is from a different time to now; she finds this a curious comfort.

She turns the page and for a short moment her mind is filled with images of freckled princesses and fairy godmothers waving wands, genies granting wishes and handsome princes climbing castle walls to rescue fair maidens. She cannot read many of the words but some of them are known to her. Apple. Castle. The wolf.

Dream.

Snow.

Evil.