Out on the lawn, Flo joins Izzy and stands beside her. But this is Flo when younger. Freed from a wheelchair, her back is straight, her posture erect. The elegant Flo from the photographs in the bureau takes the little girl’s hand. Izzy looks up at Flo adoringly as if at her mother. Together they then turn their heads to the great and restless trees.

Haggard, beaten and trapped inside the old vicarage, Jess tries again to call but no sound exists here save the piping.

A glimmer of a figure enters her peripheral vision. Someone dressed in a white nightgown seeps from the darkness and appears behind Jess’s head and shoulders. From the sleeves of the gown, a pair of emaciated forearms extend and two veiny hands settle upon her shoulders. Flo again, but a woman with arms ghastly and aged enough to have just assisted in her rise from among the dead.

Jess looks up, and in the darkness above her there is only a gleam of dirty teeth where a face should be.

Pulled so fast that her breath is stolen from out of her broken mouth, she and the wheelchair are hauled backwards and into the unlit vicarage.

* * *

Pointing at the iron sky beyond the dirty glass of the storeroom, Izzy mouths the word ‘Erce’, and the light dims until only the bright edges and glimmering planes of the broken desks survive oblivion.

The confidence of the bullies drains with the light. Their tittering and chatter subside at the sudden onset of their blindness. In the dark they fidget, shuffle and bump against each other.

The dead bird between Izzy’s feet flaps awake as if emerging from a paralysing shock and explodes upwards into a flurry of snap-cracking wings. As if the risen bird’s panic is contagious, those in the rafters shriek in unison and careen in terror and a haste to escape their roost.

Whatever comes to settle upon the roof of the building eclipses what remains of the dimming rectangle of the skylight.

The room instantly fills with the intense swooping of the trapped, routed pigeons. Their dusty wings bat and flap around the heads of the children, their tiny bodies thump into unseen walls.

Heads down and screaming, the two boys dash from the room by leaping for a memory of where the door once was. The three girls remain behind, transfixed.

Izzy smiles at what has been instigated here and mouths ‘Erce’ again. The whirling birds part around her.

Somewhere in the dark, a girl screams and her face jerks as if she can’t breathe through the seizure of terror that has engulfed her. Passing birds scrape her face. Her hair is raked out in the turbulence of so many frantic wings. Urine spatters her black shoes and white ankle socks.