There was her T-shirt. If she could only get her T-shirt. Somehow she found the strength to reach it, pull it on and roll from the mattress. She was not meant to stay in this room. She began to crawl towards the basement stairs.

The voices at the table fell silent. The pipe, she thought. The pipe makes them slow and stupid and sleepy. God bless the pipe.

There was blood in her mouth and her face hurt. Everything hurt. The blood was coming from her nose and it caught in her throat and made her choke back the sickness.

She stopped, gagged, then began to move again.

The muscles in her legs were heavy slabs of pain. Nothing worked as it should. Nothing felt like it would ever work again.

Everything was ruined.

She could have wept with frustration. But she bit back the tears and gritted her teeth and kept edging to the door, an inch at a time, no more than that, feeling the torn skin on her elbows and knees as she dragged them across the basement floor, doing it again and again and again.

There was evil in this room.

But she was not meant to die tonight.

She was not meant to die in this room.

At first she thought they hadn’t noticed. Because of what the pipe did to them. Because of the way the pipe made them slow and stupid. God bless the pipe. Then she stopped to rest at the foot of the stairs and she heard their laughter.

And when she looked, she saw they were all watching her, and that they had been watching all along.

Some of them gave her a round of mocking applause.

Then the one who had been the worst, the fat one who had talked to her all the time, and called her names, and taken pleasure in hearing her cry out, and left his marks on her from tooth and nail – the worst bastard in that bunch of rotten bastards – he yawned widely, revealing a mouth full of expensive orthodontic work, and said, ‘We can’t just let her go, man.’

She took a deep breath and placed the palms of her hands on the bottom step.

There was something wrong with her breathing. Because of her nose.

A single bead of livid red blood fell on to the back of her hand.

She ran her fingers across her top lip and with great effort struggled from her hands and knees on to her feet, leaning against the wall, closing her eyes and longing for sleep.

The pain revived her.

And the fear.

And the presence of the boy.

One of them was standing right next to her, a look of wicked amusement on his face. The one who had spoken to her first, and stopped her with a smile, and pretended to be nice, and brought her to this place.