There were no doors, just gaping holes. Weeping came from inside, soft but insistent. Clara stood at the gutted window looking down upon the bed where three dolls lay – Hettie, William and Mary. The dolls were as stone. Their blind painted eyes were closed. Something shone on Hettie’s abdomen, something that drew my attention. I leaned in, expecting to find a jewel, but as I grew closer it was to find a piece of torn and bloodied skin. As I watched, it squirmed against her dress and Hettie’s white fingers came down and clasped it in an embrace. I leaned in even closer and her eyes flew open and saw me.

I was awake in an instant, gasping. The candles had died and the room was in darkness – I was not alone. There was a breath next to me, not soft but rasping, and the mattress fell away at my side. I turned with horror, the scent of rot in my nostrils. The scream in my throat did not come but I was out of bed and rattling at the door for escape. Once open, I ran into Mary’s room.

All was quiet. Mary lay asleep. When my heart had stopped its frenzied beating, I took a candle and returned to gaze at my bed. Perhaps I had not come fully awake and had been suffering the tail end of the nightmare? But when I put my fingers to the sheet there was dampness and some smell of the sea. I began to cry then, not for grief or for pain but for my insufferable terror.

When I finally stopped, the eye of the moon was on my face and I realized something else. I knew that I had shut the curtains before sleep, yet now they were open.

I went and stood at the glass and gazed out at the place I had come to hate and saw someone coming down from the ridge with a bundle. I gazed and gazed until finally I recognized her from her walk and posture and the way that she held her head. It was Greer. She was out at night when everyone else was asleep. Greer. And in my mind’s eye, I saw her lips upon the widows’ whistle, summoning Hettie from the cold soil.

I could not tolerate my own bed and so I went to Mary’s and lay beside her, and as I closed my eyes, I saw the dream again and the three dolls upon the bed – not just Hettie and William but Mary too, and fear lay on my heart like a stone.

The morning was sharp and unforgiving. I shivered as I dressed. I could barely look at the mattress. I recalled Greer coming down the valley with something in her arms. Whether she blew the whistle or not, I knew that she was here, in the weaving of the mystery, but her thread was hard to pull loose.