The figure was neither female nor male, neither human nor animal. It was … a creature, or perhaps a monster, its hideous grey face dotted with horrifying black holes, and its eyes were bulbous and completely black, save a yellow light that glowed, small as a pinhead, right in the centre of each pupil. Instead of hair, the head was draped with matted water weeds, the mouth open in a snarl, black fangs bared as though to bite her.

Aurelia opened her own mouth to scream, but the creature plunged under the water, and Aurelia’s breath lodged in her throat. For one eternal, terrifying second, she scanned the air bubbles that dotted the surface.

Something grasped her ankle. A sharp, tight hold. Aurelia opened her mouth to shriek, but just then it pulled her under, easily as a feather.

Beneath the surface, Aurelia kicked and thrashed like something possessed. Her body was being held under by a tremendous force around her ankle that she couldn’t fight off. Just when the shock of the plunge lifted, the fear that she might never see her girls’ faces again ripped through her like a bolt of lightning. The terrible pressure around her ankle stood between her and holding Gaia in bed when she woke from a nightmare, telling her it was all right, Mumma was here and she had nothing to be afraid of. It stood between her and Coco, her soft, gorgeous girl who lit up every time she saw Aurelia, who was beginning to laugh these days, a sound that lifted Aurelia’s mood a little higher every time. And when the burn of her lungs told her with harrowing certainty that she was never going to see her girls again, never going to witness their ascent to being women, that she would not be putting them to bed tonight or kissing their soft faces, the coldness of the water modulated to a strange but blissful warmth. She figured she’d broken the surface, that she was already home. That she’d been in the grip of a nightmare, and, at long last, had woken up.

On the far side of the bank, Derry slipped off her trainers and waded out into the fjord. Where had Aurelia gone? One minute she was there and the next … vanished. A fog rolled eerily across the water, and she shivered, sensing something sinister. It was the same feeling she had sometimes when she went for a run. Like inhaling contaminated air. She had felt herself change out here in Norway. She had had terrifying dreams about killing everyone in the house. She had woken up sometimes not in bed, but at the kitchen table, a pen in one hand, a red journal in the other. She had never sleepwalked before – only at Granhus. And she was writing things in her sleep. Vile things that emerged from that same darkness that made her glad at the thought of Aurelia disappearing.