Peat-tanned flesh glistens black and clings to the skeletal remains and contorted face, the teeth and tongue absent from the open maw. The eye sockets are also empty. The figure was mutilated, blinded and castrated, then encased within the hawthorn vessel. Ritual slaughter.

Jess screams and releases the basket. She falls. Pushing with her feet, then scrabbling, she noisily splashes and claws her way from the shallows to the mossy floor of the glade surrounding the black water.

The hideous creel settles into the water but doesn’t sink.

Once free of the freezing pond, Jess’s hearing is beset anew by the agitated birds and something far stranger. A distant bony piping. The woodwind music that she’s heard before in her nightmares. Or are these noises purely within her mind? She can see no birds, no piper. She clasps her hands to the side of her head to try and kill her hearing. But her hands fail to smother the sound of a little girl sobbing among the distant trees, cries that follow the lonesome notes of the pipe.

From the distance, the doorbell of the vicarage chimes and resonates through the still air like a church bell.

Too disturbed and witless to react to any of it, Jess can only shiver and blink. Her face so dirty, her expression a mask of shock and her hair straggling, she stands up and gapes at the great old trees of the grove. Turning about, she looks at the circle of trunks rearing like the columns of an ancient wooden temple, fashioned around the dark circle of water. And gradually, as a new perspective takes hold, she detects a set of faint, ancient tracks, their grooves barely visible as depressions in the foliage. They spread like spokes from a hub that is the black pond.

Golden shafts of sunlight carve the air, and – amidst a tangle of vines, weeds and nettles – the skeleton of a rotten wooden cart becomes visible, decomposing and returning to nature. Before she can begin to process what it is that she is seeing, Jess hears her daughter’s voice. From the lawn of the vicarage, Izzy is now contributing to the pandemonium by squealing with excitement.

Jess’s puzzled reverie is broken. ‘Izzy.’ Falling about like a drunkard, she runs from the grove in the direction of the vicarage, the lawn growing visible through the defensive palisade of trees.

Behind her fleeing back, the black nest of sticks is dragged into the pond from beneath the surface. But Jess doesn’t look back. Nothing matters but reaching her daughter who is inexplicably here, in this mad, sinister place.

And yes, there is Izzy. On the lawn, the vicarage rearing behind her. Sunlight shimmers upon the girl’s brushed hair, pulled into the bunches that her mother fashioned that morning and embellished with a pink bow. Definitely Izzy, wearing her school uniform and cartwheeling, perfectly but inexplicably. Cartwheeling like a trained gymnast.