It is empty. The sleeping bag forms an open mouth, its contents discharged, missing.

Jess stumbles inside as her little girl’s voice, the sound strained and thickened, speaks from the far side of the room. ‘She’s rising.’

Jess starts, then turns to the voice.

Her little girl is upended in a perfect handstand, her feet resting against the wall, her face reddening from the pressure of blood in her head while holding that position. ‘We have to give to the water,’ she says, upside down. Izzy then peels elegantly from the wall and stands like a trained gymnast, her hands extended from her sides. The girl’s eyes have a glassy faraway look and only now does Jess comprehend what her daughter is wearing. Another girl’s clothes. Little Charlotte’s clothes from the ‘70s. They must be. They are. It’s the very outfit that Flo’s daughter was wearing in one of the photographs Jess found in the bureau.

‘Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus Christ.’ Jess covers her cheeks with spread fingers and staggers backwards as Izzy approaches her. Frightened of her own daughter, she retreats, stumbling to the wall, where she cowers.

Izzy glides forward, smiling, and again assumes the pose of a competent young gymnast after a routine, her arms thrown back, chest out, chin raised. She stares through her mother.

Jess manages to raise a hand and wipes it before Izzy’s eyes. The girl doesn’t blink. Not even the rapid beeps of the SOS handset that is tracking Flo disturb her.

Forcing composure and moving on the legs of a sleepwalker herself, Jess leads her daughter to the master bedroom. Hurriedly, Jess settles Izzy on Flo’s bed then returns her attention to the handset. Flo must be right outside the house now, in the garden below.

Jess flees the room, only pausing to shut the bedroom door behind her.

* * *

Holding an unlit torch, Jess approaches the closed French windows of the living room. Only pausing to wonder how Flo got outside if the doors are locked from the inside.

She unlocks the doors. Pale, and trembling in anticipation of what she might see outside, she leaves the house. Her attempt to call out to her client hisses into a whisper. ‘Flo. Flo. Love.’ Jess can’t make herself walk any further than the patio edge. She flicks on the torch and white light extends around her.

Her face a grimace of fearful expectation, she scans the lawn around the rear of the house and peers up the garden towards the distant grove.

Nothing. No one out here. Flo should be right here, visible and now within ten metres of her position. But there is nothing. No one.