A few feet before her, an eruption of bubbles pulls her eyes to a suggestion of white cloth, barely visible in the murk. Jess heaves herself towards the flotsam, the water swilling under her armpits and shortening her breath even further. She snatches at the submerged fabric, her fingers grasping what resembles a long pale object, perhaps a bony forearm.

The limb seized, she hauls it free of the surface.

Dead wood.

And an old, stained garment is entwined around the blanched tree branch. It’s been there for ages but the stick is also caught on, or attached to, something larger. Jess pulls and tugs until the curved side of a vast ball breaks the surface. An intricately woven cage created from sticks and twigs, blackened yet preserved by the peaty water.

Jess backs away from the middle of the pond to the bank, the water’s depth decreasing, her legs returning, gleaming and sodden, to the unearthly light of the grove. As she returns to the bank, she continues to haul out the stick-ball. It grows larger as it emerges, and lighter as the water drains from it.

As more of the object appears she recognises the object to be similar to the effigy in the woodcut on the wall of the vicarage’s first-floor landing. It is also the thing that was half-made from hawthorn branches in one of the old photos of the women’s group in the vicarage garden. The pictures of Flo and her friends in the ‘70s.

In the shallows, the last of the water pours from the sides of the curious entanglement of sticks until the structure resembles a creel or large basket. Purpose-built, this is some kind of vessel or trap shaped like a beehive. About the ghastly container, rotting clothes are entwined and the quills of long decomposed bird feathers spike.

Jess turns the ball and a crude hole becomes visible, like a porthole wide enough for an occupant to peer out of. She seizes the spokes of the creel and rolls the aperture closer to her face.

Sunlight drops through the hole into the glistening container. Jess’s horrified vision follows the light.

A twig-wheel is fixed to the foot of the basket. A withered human hand, cut roughly from an arm, has been spiked into the hub of the spoked circle.

Higher up inside the creel there is a dangling object, a thing dull and glimmering. A skeletal foot.

Bloodless with cold and shock and smeared with grime, Jess’s face hitches and her eyelids twitch as if eager to close. Yet still she turns the woven nest to create a new angle to peer through the fissure.

Bound and woven within the interior of the strange twig-ball, more human remains become visible. Like a grub or black larva inside the imprisoning chrysalis of woven sticks hangs the tortured statement of what was once a man, with its genitals removed.