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there for me. They’re going to hurt me. Air currents in the branches hissed . . . an impression that they murmured suggestions. Come into the bushes, Laura, dear. We’re waiting for you . Still being dragged along by Jay, her gaze was drawn to a seething mass of hawthorn. A figure in a bright blue dress stood there. ‘Maureen . . . Stop Jay! I don’t know where he’s taking me.’ Maureen wore an absurdly cheerful smile, only her mouth had been daubed so thickly in crimson lipstick it resembled the fixed grin of a clown. ‘Maureen?’ But Maureen’s dead. Crushed between two buses. Her body reduced to a sack of jelly. Every bone broken. Teeth squeezed from their sockets. Eyes ruptured . . . ‘Jay, stop this. I don’t want to walk any further.’ Terror became a peal of church bells. Panic, fear, distress, dread – all had a different note, but all clanged mercilessly inside her skull.
    All of a sudden they were running hand-in-hand across a lawn to a forbidding building. Its windows gazed coldly at her. Through one window a man and woman in green uniforms that suggested medical care writhed together on a sofa. Quickly, frantically, they were stripping one another. The man pushed up the woman’s top to reveal her bare breasts. Dark nipples against brown skin stood out as they hardened. The man kissed her nipples before moving down her stomach to a smudge of hair. When he worked her with his hungry tongue she writhed on the sofa in pleasure.
    Even though Laura closed her eyes she still felt herself slip through solid brickwork like a ghost.
    â€˜Here,’ Jay whispered.
    She swayed in a bedroom with green walls; vertigo tugged at her. A steel door with a peephole stood firmly shut against the outside world. Stuck to one wall, a huge poster seemed to act as a window to the Arctic. In the picture a polar bear swam in deep blue ocean.
    â€˜Why haven’t you visited me before?’
    A grey-faced figure sat on the bed with the edge of the blanket grabbed in his two fists. One eye was swollen from a punch; his face had bloated since she last saw it, but she knew the identity of this teenager.
    â€˜Tod? Tod Langdon? What happened to you?’
    He stared at her with blazing eyes. At last he choked out, ‘Laura . . . Why haven’t you visited me?’ His voice got louder. ‘I don’t like it here. I don’t!’
    She backed from him as his fear turned to anger.
    â€˜Don’t leave me! Don’t you dare!’
    As he stood up on the bed, still holding the blanket in front of him, Laura tried to push Jay behind her to relative safety. She knew the crazed youth had reached breaking point.
    â€˜You’re not leaving me again!’ He leapt from the bed. As he did so he threw the blanket over her like he would net a wild animal. ‘You’re going to stay and see how they torture me.’
    She cried out as she fought to free herself from the blanket. The light that struck her so forcefully made her blink until her room came into focus. For a moment she lay there, savouring the tranquillity. Sun shone through the curtains. She heard the gardener whistling as he trundled the wheelbarrow across the patio. The nightmare image of Tod Langdon hurling the blanket over her head came back so strongly she kicked her bedding off her entirely. For a moment she lay there, the cool morning air on her bare legs, just thankful to be free of the dream. Such a darkly terrifying dream, too. A shudder ran through her as she recalled it: Jay’s appearance with the promise he’d take her for ‘a little walk’. Then the stroll through the forest to the mental hospital where had Tod sat in his room, his face bruised from beatings and mad with fear.
    â€˜Stop it,’ she told herself. ‘You’re having bad dreams because you’re stressed.’ Chasing the remnants of the nightmare away,