She wondered how he’d found her. Not online. Meggy couldn’t be bothered with all that social media rubbish. YouTube videos sometimes for science projects, and there were some really funny ones on there. But it wasn’t like she’d been fooled by some old git trying to make out he was fourteen years old and looking for a girlfriend. She knew better than to give out her details over the internet.

A faint cough came from the end room as Meggy contemplated what her next step should be. She backed up against the door, her breath a hot lump in her throat. There were two options. Either the man had delivered her to someone for purposes best not considered in detail, or there was someone else here, like her, trapped and scared. If she were a delivery – Deliveroo! her brain screamed with inappropriate jollity – then she would be expected, and avoidance would be temporary at best.

Taking a shaky step forward, one arm reached out to the wall to keep her steady, Meggy walked towards the light. Beneath her fingertips, the sensation was of damp and crumbling paint. Her feet, lifting slowly as she went, registered the stickiness of old carpet. But the worst of it was the smell. In the near dark, with so little else to think about, that smell was everything, and it was getting worse the closer she moved to the room at the end.

Unmistakably, nauseatingly, she knew it was human shit. There was a proper word for that, a non-swear word, but her advanced vocabulary had gone on strike. Her imagination hadn’t. She had a vision of a genetically challenged half man, half beast, chained loosely to the floor, ready to pounce when she pushed the door fully open. A beast that needed freeing. Or that needed to kill. Or that needed to torture her first, then kill her, then eat her. Slow was worse, she told herself. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen. But she wasn’t going to creep towards it like some stupid slug sliding inevitably towards the salt.

The battle cry she released was half Amazonian, half William Wallace. Raising her arm ready to strike, determined to go down fighting, she charged. Kicking the door, she flew into the room, eyes scrunched, teeth bared as she prepared for the horror within.

It took her a moment to find the creature. Shivering beneath an iron-frame bed, face shoved beneath a pillow, naked and stinking with the matter covering her legs and the floor, was a woman. Meggy didn’t want to admit to herself that in spite of her terror, there had been a seed of hope that she might find an adult in there. Someone not evil, who would actually take care of her. This wasn’t that.

‘Is there anyone here who can help me?’ Meggy asked. ‘Please? I don’t know where I am.’