Jess frowns, stirs and nearly rouses but doesn’t wake. She sinks away instead into much needed rest, her face blank, near lifeless. Bound by fatigue, she is not alert to the rustle in the room. That passes onto the landing. Nor does she pay heed to the gentle bumps of someone who is on all fours outside the room and crawling through the dark.

Instead Jess dreams of the vicarage garden blackened by night. At the bottom of the lawn, great trees protect the glade – a mighty stockade that thrusts at a night sky dizzy with stars. A moon, so vast that it appears to be a new planet, presses the earth’s atmosphere. The tumult of the urgent wind grows. It roars and crashes amidst the primaeval woodland that extends forever; the spaces between the mighty legs of the trees, lightless fathoms of pitch. Threading through the turmoil, the bony notes of a woodwind instrument rise and fall, as if prospecting or searching.

Izzy runs out from the vicarage and performs a series of perfect cartwheels across the shorn grass.

Behind her, like an excitable dog scampering after its mistress, an old figure dressed in a pale nightgown capers swiftly on all fours. Flo. Together they bound to the border of the grove where old Flo rears on to her hind legs before the tree-line.

Izzy comes to a standstill beside her and together they face the moon-bathed glade. Facing the trees as if in wondrous subjugation to them, Izzy and Flo draw an identical but invisible wheel shape in the air in perfect synchronicity, their hands moving in an anticlockwise direction. In the middle of their imaginary circles they cross the spokes at exactly the same time and speed.

The sound of the mighty night wind rises to a critical mass and is dragged backwards like a spring tide pulled by a new moon. A whirlpool of violent air that retreats then gushes about the wood anticlockwise.

The faint piping rises through the scales and heralds the emergence of a large form surfacing from still water, somewhere nearby but hidden inside the trees. In response to whatever moves about that dark water, Flo and Izzy throw their arms wider, their palms upturned. Grinning, they both slowly rise from the earth and into thin air, lingering a few metres from the ground.

Before them, the tops of the trees sway then part as if to allow access to a vast shape.

Jess wakes suddenly, her sleep broken by a distant, urgent, repetitive trill. A ringtone. Her phone is ringing somewhere in the distance of the vicarage.

Turning her bleary face, she gapes at the side table where her phone should be. There lies a mug of cold coffee and the estate agent’s brochure. But no phone.