Bones. Small bones, yellow-white and clean, looming large against the black shadows thrown behind them by the angled torch. I can’t judge their size—the torchlight and the shadows are skewing the perspective—but probably they’re no bigger than my hand. A cold thread of dread circles into my belly.

I pull back abruptly and sit up, almost dislodging Callum, who hasn’t relaxed his grip on my jeans. “Yes,” I say. He nods back at me, once, without displaying any satisfaction in having been proved right, his dark eyes enormous in the pale chalk of his face. “I can see them. I’m going to move the bed.” He nods again. Normally he’d be so eager to help that he’d be already moving the bed himself by now, but this time he just shuffles silently along beside me, always maintaining his grasp on my pocket, whilst I yank on the heavy bed myself. When I glance down at him, I see that the thumb of his other hand is in his mouth. After a couple of big heaves, I have moved the bed perhaps a foot and a half away from the wall that it was previously flush against. I have to lean awkwardly over the headboard to see if that’s far enough.

It’s far enough.

The carpet is heavily indented from where the bed normally sits, and a thick layer of dust covers the inch between the indentations and the skirting board. The bones—five or six of them, all small, not any longer than the main bone in a chicken drumstick—are resting on the hardy woven beige carpet in a loose pile, an inch or so farther from the wall than the indentations from the bed.

Maybe they are chicken bones. Though they seem a little thicker. And perhaps longer. I can’t for the life of me think how chicken bones—clean ones, with nary a strip of meat on them—would find a resting place on the carpet under a bed. And I can’t shake the dread that’s settled, coiled snakelike, inside my belly.

“What are you going to do with them?” asks Callum.

I turn back from peering over the headboard to face him. “I suppose I’d better take them to the police, just to be safe. Though I expect they’re probably animal bones of some kind,” I add quickly.

Callum looks completely unconvinced. “Why would Carrie have animal bones under her bed?”

“Honey, this has nothing to do with Carrie. They’ve probably been here from before we arrived.”

He’s frowning stubbornly. “How can you be sure? It could be a black magic thing. I saw it on the telly.”

“What?” I stare at him. “What on earth have you been watching?”