She glanced at the monitor above his bed. ‘Your fever’s down.’ Her fingers were cool on his wrist as she checked his pulse. He tried to get a look at her watch, but the angle was wrong. As she handed him a glass of water, her smile was kind as she waited for him to drink. Dark hair, dark eyes. A quizzical tilt to the head, reminiscent of a flamenco dancer who’d once caught his gaze on the streets of Seville. But he’d never seen this woman before. Was he really back at the clinic or was this all part of a massive game of deception? Pulling levers and twisting dials, to entice him into believing their version of reality.

‘Dr Gessen will be in shortly to see how you’re getting on.’

He watched her go and closed his eyes. So, it was true. He was back where he’d started. Would he never escape the hell he’d stumbled into? Behind his closed eyes appeared the outline of a face. Dark hair, agate eyes, a cruel smile. That man in the village… He explored the painful bump on his head. He was the victim here. The man had attacked him first. Anything Vidor might have done afterwards was self-defence.

Those eyes. Staring out from a face altered by time, but the same cold and calculating eyes he’d known all his life. The furious glare and curled lip, studying his infant son with a clinical gaze. As if observing a particularly strange and disturbing insect. Staring, wondering, waiting. ‘He’s not mine.’ The man’s voice vibrated with rage. In the background, a woman wept. ‘Whore! Did you really think you could pass off this pathetic worm as mine?’

‘Vidor?’

A face, colourless as the moon. Dark holes for eyes. ‘Vidor, can you hear me?’ Fingers snapped in front of his face. Go away. So tired. They must have given him something to dull his nerves and muzzle his thoughts.

After passing through a vast dreamscape of shifting terrain and monstrous shadows, it was still dark when he once again opened his eyes. The blinds were drawn across the window and he lay in bed, stiff and sore, hardly daring to breathe, wondering what new tortures they had in store for him. When he raised his hands to his face, he saw that his ring was gone. His mother’s ring. A keepsake all his life, and now they’d stolen it from him. A rustling sound in the corner, like dried stalks of grass. The stale air of exhaled breath. He stiffened. ‘Who’s there?’

A shadow detached itself from the wall and moved towards him.

‘Vidor?’