As I swung the flashlight beam towards the stairs a shape leapt up from the chair – an enlivened shadow. I didn’t know how much longer I could bear to stay in the building, and to prevent myself from fleeing I climbed the stairs at once. Many of them gave way, some with a creak like a tree in a gale, some with a squelch of the carpet. I felt as if the narrow passage had extinguished the summer day, draining all the heat. Shadows mimed the instability of the handrails, which I refrained from touching once I’d nearly dragged the left-hand rail free of the wall with a crunch of sodden plaster. The passage turned back on itself at a boxed-in landing, and a second flight of stairs brought me to the middle floor. Corridors gaped on both sides of me, but the flashlight beam didn’t reach even halfway down either. There was no point in wondering what the darkness further down might hide. The footprints led to the top floor of the hotel.

I was at the enclosed bend at the foot of the last flight of stairs when I realised what I’d somehow failed to appreciate – that there was just one set of prints. Had their maker trodden in them more than once? More grotesquely still, had she walked backwards in them? The idea of someone moving in reverse put me in mind of witchcraft, a similarity I would rather not reflect upon just now. Or did the prints mean she was still upstairs? I held my breath, which had begun to taste of grime, but all I could hear was emptiness or its pretence. “Bella, are you here?” I shouted, and my voice came back flattened, reminding me how shut in I was. Only silence responded, and though it made me feel awaited I followed the tracks and my nervously unsteady light to the top of the hotel.

The footprints led beyond the light into the left-hand corridor. All the doors were open, revealing rooms where objects more shapeless than they ought to be crouched in the dark – beds with disarranged drooping quilts, unless the beds themselves were sagging. Beyond them a face peered out of the lightless depths at me, the same blurred face in every room. When the beam caught the first of them it flinched back before the light erased it. My reflection had recoiled because I had. I shone the beam into each room, where it roused shadows to dance a greeting. Perhaps I was searching for a reason why the corridor was growing so much colder as I advanced. A framed print hung between each pair of rooms, but the images were so obscured by stains that I saw just my own faint image, as though they were parodying Thelma’s portraits of me. The glimpses paced me to the end of the corridor, where the footprints disappeared into the furthest left-hand room.