Soft notes from a woodwind instrument draw a naked figure out of the woods, a man, who appears at the edge of the grove. His back is ramrod straight, his flesh as pale as a cadaver. His hair is neat and shiny with brilliantine. He appears then disappears behind cover, then reappears. When he enters the glade, he stops and faces the still water of the pond.

One of his hands is missing from the wrist, the stump blackened with blood. Eyeless sockets within his handsome, even face hopelessly direct their missing gaze at the water. Tears of blood encrust his cheeks. Between his legs, a loin-cloth of dark gore hangs from where his genitals have been crudely removed.

He points his stump at the pond.

* * *

Jess wakes with a start and pants with relief at having broken from the nightmare. The first thing she sees is Flo in her bed. Sleeping. But Jess is soon frowning. Why is it so light? Surely it cannot be morning? She just dozed off. The night couldn’t have passed so . . .

Sunlight pours around and between the drapes in a shaft of ethereal light, just as it did between the boughs of the wooded grove in her dream.

From behind her chair, a naked male body extends into the space behind Jess and leans over her shoulder. The mutilated, naked man from the dream. The eyeless head, the hair perfect and face encrusted with blood, settles next to Jess’s ear and whispers. ‘My missing parts.’

Jess turns and her face almost touches the horrid, bloodless flesh of the figure. Black chest hair. Ransacked crotch, bearded with crimson ruin.

He speaks again. ‘Have you seen them? They took things.’

Only then does Jess scream.

* * *

Jess sits up, eyes wide, and she inhales with all of her strength as if she’s choking. Clutching at her face, she peers between her spread fingers and observes the empty bed in the darkened room. The bed of the elderly patient that she should have been watching.

She thrashes out of her chair, disrupting the contents of the side table, then bends to snatch up the tracking handset.

The screen indicates that Flo is thirty metres behind her. That would be outside. In the garden. Up the garden!

Jess turns and tears the curtains aside. A window is already open and cast wide. But through it she sees only darkness, a void. A palsy shakes her shoulders and overcomes her arms and hands. She steps back from the glass.

Bumping. Yes, there is also bumping. But coming from somewhere within the house, though not this room.

Charlotte’s room.

Izzy!

In moments, Jess is standing outside the closed door of Charlotte Gardner’s old room.

Another soft thump issues from the other side.

Jess throws the door wide and onto darkness. ‘Izz?’ She slaps on the light and peers into the veritable 1970s time capsule of a girl’s bedroom, her vision immediately groping for the bed.