A few unlocked hatches knocked in the breeze as though trying to warn them away in broken Morse code. Tools rested against walls, slathered in mud. Weak streams of smoke snaked through some of the chimneys. Jugs had been filled. Footprints in the clay were flush with rainwater, deepest outside each cottage and on the worn trail adjoining them. All that was missing were the people.

It reminded Ben of the paintings that adorned the walls of Sparling’s study. Life and the colours of its making were absent. It didn’t make sense. Had the villagers finally surrendered to the curse? Ben imagined them with their hands held in solidarity, staring at the moon like a stranger in the sky.

‘Hello?’ Chloe shouted, standing in the centre of the common. ‘Tír Mallachts?’

And then they heard it – a groan; plangent and drawn out as though gouged from some wounded beast. A cry for help so agonising that Ben recognised it immediately. How could he ever have forgotten it? Before the interviews, as they introduced themselves, he had heard it. Pained and pitiable, and almost childlike.

‘What the fuck was that?’ Chloe called over in a shrill whisper.

Ben was already approaching the cottage where the old woman had stood, its door now unguarded and open. Daylight quit at its threshold, and the darkness gathered there like a wall of fog.

Chloe crept up behind him as he removed the torch from his pocket.

‘Remember,’ he said, ‘I told you I heard something.’

‘Something?’ she gasped, her hands gripping onto his shoulders. ‘For fuck’s sake, Ben. You didn’t say you’d heard that!’

He twisted on his torch. Its light revealed not a home, but something else.

A bucket on the floor brimmed with scarlet water. Congealed globs of blood could be seen splattered across the walls, constellating around the man atop the table in the room’s centre.

Cold wood and naked skin. His head had been rolled in bandages, tightened so many times as to make his skull appear misshapen and deformed in the torchlight. A perforation over his mouth kept him from suffocating. Eyes and ears – sight and sound – were lost to the cloth. Two holes had been carved in the timber board that was his bed, and through this had been looped some wire. It ran over his neck, pinning him in place, garrotting with the slightest press. The lightest film of skin clung to his bones, with every rib and hard part of him protruding. A blanket had been strewn over his legs, guarding his modesty, but offering nothing in the way of warmth. All his fingers looked freshly broken. Lengths of rope trailed on the floor from his wrists where the injuries hadn’t been allowed to scab over; lacerations repeated until they graced the bone within.