Hands on her cheeks, her eyes stricken with disbelief, she approaches the chair. The restraints are still closed, fastened into loops. The screen of the handset bleeps incessantly as it tracks the rapidly increasing distance between carer and client. A client that Jess cannot see, either in the living room or in what’s visible of the garden.

She rushes to the patio doors and peers outside. ‘Flo. Flo!’

In response, her client’s brittle voice travels from a distance. ‘Erce. Erce. Erce.’

Jess’s frantic survey seeks the origin of the voice and snags upon a flicker of red amongst the trees of the glade. Flo’s dressing gown. ‘Christ!’ She stumbles from the vicarage to the lawn, runs to the tree-line.

At the fringe of trees guarding the grove and its black reflective heart of water, Jess slows. She’s seen this place before but only in dreams. The reality of the pond in the glade is no different to the place she travelled to during sleep. Shards of sunlight spear the foliage and strike the ground. A profound stillness envelopes the sacred space. The distance to the end of the surrounding wood is hard to gauge. The trees appear to march forever. The air and light are ethereal, beautiful, but also forbidding, the atmosphere so uncanny that only a splash of scarlet at the edge of the pond is capable of breaking Jess’s bewildered trance.

Hesitantly, she picks her way through the eerily silent trees and draws closer to the still water. She identifies the red garment as Flo’s discarded gown. ‘Flo?’ A red slipper lies beside the gown. Jess peers at the surface of the black water. ‘God, no.’

Bubbles pop in the centre of the onyx water, the gentle disturbance sending circles to the surrounding edge. The outermost ripple guides Jess’s attention to the second slipper, waterlogged but still bobbing in a bed of reeds.

Too frightened to just wade into the lightless water in which no bottom is visible, she paces the soft shoreline back and forth before forcing herself to enter the pond.

When only knee-deep, the air is knocked from her by the freezing water, the surface reflecting so many trees, the sky, all set to a shimmer by her entrance. She wades on, and sinks to her thighs. The surface rises further, tightening her chest and making her gasp for breath as she stumbles deeper, her body disappearing below the waist. Through her panicked vision, the trees swoop and rotate.

Jess ploughs on, the water rising to her chest. Swishing her arms through the water in the middle, she rakes the lightless depths with her fingers and drags the darkness, seeking the body of her client.