I wake to the aroma of pancakes and fresh coffee. For a wonderful, fleeting moment everything is how it should be: Mormor is pottering about the kitchen, making breakfast. Then I remember and a fist squeezes my heart. I sit up, my head groggy as last night comes back to me. The chest is at the end of the bed, everything back inside and the lid closed.

Several journals lie open on the pillow next to me. I must have fallen asleep looking at them, though how I managed to sleep after what happened I don’t know.

‘Nei, Gandalf!’ Stig’s voice carries a note of laughter.

I throw a jumper over my pyjamas and brush my hair, then go to the bathroom. When I pad into the living room, Stig is in the kitchen, flipping a pancake. His hair is tied back and the sleeves of his black woolly jumper are pushed up. Gandalf wags his tail and stares at the food flying above his head.

‘God morgen!’

‘What time is it?’

Stig switches off the gas burner, then turns to me with a grin. If he has a hangover, it doesn’t show. ‘Eleven. I heard you getting up, finally! Here we are – pancakes as promised.’

He sets a plate on the table and I pull out a chair. ‘Great, thanks.’

I take a bite, but hardly taste it. The creepy doll and the books … it doesn’t seem real. I don’t even remember putting the rest of the journals back in the chest before I went to sleep.

I watch Stig sip his coffee. The spinning wheel moving, that was real. He heard it too. I want to tell him everything, but at the same time I’m not sure I should. Ever since the shadows rushed past me on the porch, I’ve had a strange sense of foreboding. Like in a dream, where there’s something lurking on the edge of your vision but you’re too afraid to look. Talking about it would mean having to admit there’s something in the cabin with us – either that, or I am seeing things.

Worries flap inside my head, pecking at me like angry birds. Before she started her medication, Mum would stay up all night painting and then scream in terror. When I rushed into the room, the canvas would be covered in black paint – whatever horror she’d seen had been in her head. After the second time it happened, Dad called the doctor out. She said Mum had been hallucinating. That’s when the bottles of pills appeared in the bathroom cabinet.

‘Notice anything different?’ asks Stig.

I startle at his voice. The room seems normal, though it’s odd he hasn’t opened the curtains when it’s light outside. Stig strides to the window and pulls back the curtain like a proud stage magician. The world outside is brilliant white.

‘Snow?’