‘Hello, I’m Linus. I’m nearly ten.’ His arm rose like a lever, Hanna standing crooked and immobile beside him, like a twig caught in a frozen lake. The moment stretched out – elastic, expansive – as the small arm stayed pointing towards him until slowly, he lowered it again.

Linus looked up at his mother, a dawning look of panic on his face. ‘Did I do something wrong?’ he whispered. Bell felt a pinch of concern.

‘It’s okay, it’s fine,’ Hanna whispered, placing a hand on his head.

Another doctor, an Asian woman standing closest to them, crouched down and smiled at him encouragingly. ‘Don’t take it to heart, Linus, your father is still very weak –’

Silence cracked like a clap of thunder, a brilliant white light exploding in the room as the mistake was realized, and for several moments, the room was held in a suspended state. No one breathed, stirred, spoke. But then a sound started up – a sound made from fright, the moment before a scream – and the energy in the room shifted like a hibernating bear turning over in its cave, a great immobile mass suddenly moved and unsettled from position.

The sound yawned into the room, a moan that rapidly became a siren wail – and through the gaps, as the doctors suddenly converged, Bell saw the emaciated, atrophied body on the bed beginning to thrash with surprising force.

Linus gave a scream of fright and began to cry, but Hanna was rooted still, unable to tear her gaze from the unravelling scene on the bed.

‘Get them out!’ Dr Sorensen barked as the doctors all grabbed a limb and tried to restrain their patient. There were six of them, and still it was a challenge.

Hanna, somehow, bundled Linus to her and they staggered back two paces from the bed, watching on in horror as bed straps were buckled onto his wrists and ankles, pinning him in place. But it wasn’t enough. His body still writhed, his head banging against the pillow, screams and obscenities crashing around the room with frightening violence. The chaos bloomed into deeper colours, spreading wide its petals so that everything lay exposed and vulnerable, screams echoing in the stark space and raining down on them all, wails and moans and shouts blending into an indistinct maw.

Bell ran over to the mother and son, both of them frozen, Hanna’s body rigid in her grip.

‘We need to leave,’ she said, shaking Hanna firmly, wrenching her attention off the horror in the bed. ‘We need to get Linus out of here. Now.’ And she forcibly pushed them both towards the door, their footsteps stumbling and leaden.

She flung open the door and the screams and curses and profanities and moans escaped into the corridor with them, like a rush of ghouls. A nurse walking by startled at the tumult, silence dropping as suddenly as a velvet curtain again as soon as the door swished shut.

‘Can I help?’ she asked, seeing their ashen faces.