Through the darkness, she could hear the horses snickering in the stables that backed onto Hilltop House and the breath of the breeze through the trees. Beneath that, she could hear a faint scrabbling and caught the sense of movement. Mice.

She put her hands over her ears.

Sara started to count, the numbers appearing as bold outlines in her mind.

One. Two. Three.

She shut out the darkness of the shed and the bruise on her arm where her father had grabbed her, and the cold and wet pyjama bottoms clinging to her thighs.

Four. Five. Six.

She thought only of the numbers, precise and unshakeable, and found comfort in their familiarity.

Seven. Eight. Nine.

The last time her parents had locked her in the shed she had reached eleven thousand, nine hundred and forty-six.

The girl sat in the chair, counting, as the night deepened and clouds passed behind the moon. She could smell wood preservative, and manure from the stables, and the earthiness of her own urine.

Eighty-five. Eighty-six. Eighty-seven.

A feather-light sensation set off the nerve endings in her arm, all those tiny hairs standing on end. She jumped up, brushing at her skin, her heart knocking, panic spreading like fire, but there were no spiders, nothing there except the shadows of her imagination.

She slumped back down into the chair, worried about what was going to happen to Shannon when their parents found her. She strained to catch voices or the slamming of a door, but all she could hear was the night coming alive.

The air in the shed was so cold her breath was visible. She was shivering now, her thin pyjamas no protection against the dropping temperature. She wrapped her arms as tightly as she could around her body, trying to keep warm. The moon was rising, and through the slats, there was a glimmer of light. But for once, it didn’t help.

It made the shadows bigger, and Sara couldn’t help but wonder what was hiding in them. But there was nothing she could do, no place to put her fear. She stood up, deciding that moving around was the only way to keep warm.

But the darkness made her clumsy, and she tripped over the blade of her father’s shovel and stumbled against the shed wall. Splinters buried their way into her upper arm through her sleeve, and the pain disoriented her. She knocked into an old picnic blanket that was hanging on a nail, dislodging the arthropod life that had made its home within it.

As the falling spiders cast out their draglines, their groping legs made contact with the skin at the neckline of Sara’s pyjama top. They scuttered into the dark cavern, down her spine, towards the base of her vertebrae.

Sara screamed. An electric burst of fear. Her arms flailed, trying and failing to reach behind her. Urgent and afraid. Get them off me.