In panic, Jess clutches at her cheeks as if to claw sleep, and what it made her imagine, from her skull. Disorientated and struggling to make sense of where she is and what’s happening around her, she turns to face the doorway and the distant sound of her phone.

Beside her, Flo sleeps peacefully.

Jess is out of her chair as if electrocuted. Stumbling on sleep-sedated legs, she weaves to the bedroom door.

* * *

Jess turns away from the sight of Izzy safely asleep in Charlotte Gardner’s old bedroom and focuses on where the phone’s ringtone cries out. From below.

Downstairs.

The realisation of such an impossibility leaves her swaying on the landing below the rusty sickle as if still asleep.

Forcing herself to descend the staircase, she pads into darkness.

In what ambient light seeps here, from the night-lights of the two bedrooms, the murk of the lower floor transforms Flo’s detritus into ominously indistinct humps and heads and silhouettes. Everything appears marginally animated. The dark energy of night suggests myriad presences. Flo’s enigmatic past crowds her, watching her every footfall through the vicarage.

Jess slaps on the hall light as if her life depends upon it and breathes normally again, unaware she’s been holding her breath on the stairs.

The ringtone rises insistent, louder, from somewhere in the murky lower confines of this cavernous building. Pursuing the phone’s growing trill, she picks her way about the obstacles on the hallway floor and closes on the dining room. The ringtone is definitely and inexplicably issuing from the midst of the landfill in this room.

Jess turns on the dining room light and edges along a faint dusty track of carpeted floor. She lowers herself to her hands and knees and peers into the black mouth of a tunnel fashioned into the disorder that is piled upon and around the vast dining table. At the mouth of the burrow, Jess reads the post-it note stuck to a box. Manes exite materni. And from deep inside this tunnel, the screen of her phone is glowing green and casting a dim light about the boxes, piled garments and the wooden ribs of the chair legs absorbed into the cave’s walls.

She goes in. Squeezes herself inside the chute. Around her crawling body the columns of Flo’s belongings shift uneasily like the unstable walls of a disused mine shaft. But towards her shrieking handset and along the tunnel she crawls.