Cover

Dedication

Jennifer. Just for being there. At all the right times.

Prologue

3.03 a.m.

She wakes from a dream of drowning into a nightmare far more terrifying.

The dream ends abruptly, in the usual way: eyes snapping open, heart thudding, skin leaking sweat. The nightmare introduces itself slowly, though, and it starts with white noise.

It oozes from a baby monitor. The little lady in slumber in the other room is five, not a baby, but she’s got sleep apnoea and paranoid parents. Often, they’ve woken to terrifying sounds of choking. But now the monitor is emitting a crackly pattering sound. It’s closer to her husband’s side of the bed, and he’s a light sleeper, so clearly he’s already heard it, because on his side of the bed there’s nothing but a humanoid depression in the mattress, as if a heavy ghost sleeps there.

But seconds pass, sixty or more, and the white noise continues. And her husband doesn’t return.

One elbow in the ghost’s chest, she leans across to pick up the monitor, because this is obviously a fault with the machine, or a tuning issue, and that’s when she becomes aware of another noise. Her eyes, still adjusting to the darkness, latch onto the window, where the glass is soaked. Her waking brain makes the connection: the white noise isn’t interference at all but rain.

It’s July after all, the nights hot even when wet. At some point her husband has got up, felt the heat, figured it would make their daughter’s breathing worse, and gone into her bedroom to open the window. That’s why the noise of the rain is reaching her through the monitor.

But where is he? She rises, and grabs her mobile to check the time, and throws on a nightgown.

And takes her first step into the nightmare.

Around the corner of the hallway she hears the murmur of the TV beneath the throb of rain from beyond Josie’s door. It’s Nick’s go-to device for whacking the energy out of Josie when the little lady cannot sleep. But the living room can wait a moment.

In Josie’s room, the monitor’s receiver is on the floor, knocked there somehow, but thankfully out of range of the rain that lashes through the wide-open window. The sill, the undersheet at the foot of the bed, part of the floor, all sodden. Anna sticks her arm into the stinging downpour and drags the window shut. Something Nick should have done when he heard the skies rend open.