When he opened them – moments or hours later, he couldn’t tell – he was lying under a comforting weight of blankets that covered his head, too. The room was quiet but he could hear shouts in the street, a clatter of bells and a whistle, clear and pure. No deafening roar nor giant’s gargling. A faint light penetrated the dense material and he wanted to close his eyes again and escape into the welcoming dark but instead he lifted a hand numbed by cold and pulled the blanket down from his face.

A woman lay propped against the headboard of the bed, a sleeping boy pressed against each side of her substantial bulk, her arms around them. She was staring out of the window at a sky lightening perceptibly from the black of full night. An older boy sat on the foot of the bed, looking directly at Silas.

‘What’s your name?’ the boy said.

He opened his mouth to speak but coughed instead then found he couldn’t stop and had to prop himself up to retch. He wrapped the blankets tightly around himself and glanced at the woman on the bed. ‘I’m sorry.’

She continued to ignore him completely.

‘How old are you?’ said the boy.

‘How old? Eighteen.’

‘That’s only five years older than me.’

‘All right, then.’

He clung to the blankets as he rose stiffly to his feet, aware of the eyes of all three boys on him, and shuffled to the window. He could hear bells clanging in the distance and two separate whistles were being blown insistently, like the sound of distraught birds. He nodded to the expressionless woman in the bed. Her eyes slid over him and slowly closed. Silas looked outside. There were people moving on the street below, their lamps casting brief light over shattered glass in a ground floor window, a dead dog in a doorway. A woman, wailing.

The bedroom door creaked open and Silas whipped his head round, sending pain shooting across his shoulders. His heart lurched in his chest. A man stood there. A ghost, surely. His face was curdled milk, his britches sodden. His shirt was ripped and his hair stood on end. Silas cringed when he opened his mouth but instead of screaming like the madman he looked, the being spoke in normal tones.

‘You’ll need some clothes, I think.’

Silas could only nod.

The man opened the door of the wardrobe and began to throw clothes onto the floor behind him. An undershirt, britches, a shirt and waistcoat, stockings. Even a pair of shoes. Silas quickly picked them up, then stood, uncertain. He couldn’t relinquish his blankets in this room with the woman on the bed and the boys staring at him. He wondered where the young woman was, the woman who had got him in through the window.

‘Adam,’ the man said, ‘take him to your bedroom so he may dress himself.’

He followed the boy onto the landing, peering over the bannister into the dark void below. The foul stench that rose up made the silence eerie. The boy pointed to a door and Silas let himself into a bedroom darkened by closed curtains. He barked his shin on the end of the bed and sat down on the mattress, resisting a childish urge to burst into tears. He pulled on the trousers jerkily, moving cold limbs that did not seem to belong to him. The britches were big around the waist but too short in the leg. Silas wiped his hand across his chest. It stung. He pulled on the vest quickly and then the shirt, his biceps straining against the soft material. A wave of nausea overcame him and he sat down again on the bed.