She was in a barn, with wooden walls and roof. A shrill wind blew through the slats, and beams creaked and groaned in the silent night. She clambered to her feet.

Beams of moonlight squinting through gaps cast pale illumination. There was movement above her. A raven settled on a beam and watched her with shining black eyes.

She was hungry and thirsty. Her last memory was of bright lights and the city streets. Of running away. How had she got here? She could not trust her own mind.

She staggered over to a small door and stepped out into the night. The ground was wet and her unsteady feet slipped on patches of mud.

The barn formed one side of a courtyard. On the other side was a low, whitewashed farmhouse, with a slate roof and a crooked chimney. At the end of the courtyard, a black abyss of water stretched away to the horizon, bordered by steep-sided rock-grey slopes.

She caught the faint smell of smoke in the air, the ashy aftermath of a fire that was dying. A weak orange glow dappled the edge of the black water.

Then she heard footsteps. Two figures emerged from the darkness. Were they wraiths? Ghosts? Spirits? Worse, they looked like men. Pale-skinned, heavy-set and dressed all in black.

As they drew closer, she recognised one of them. He had been at the hospital.

‘You’re awake,’ he greeted her. ‘Come in and get some coffee.’

They turned away from her and walked through the low doorway that led inside the farmhouse. She followed them. Unease crept over her.

An oil lamp lit a rustic kitchen. In the middle was an old oak table. A cast iron oven and hob sat in the corner, solid and unmoveable. The second man sparked a match, turned the gas on and placed a metal kettle above the flames.

‘A bit basic, I’m afraid,’ the first man said. ‘Take a seat.’ He pulled out a chair for her to sit on and sat opposite her. The second man remained standing.

‘Tell me, do you know who I am?’

She looked at her questioner. ‘You work at the hospital. Are you a doctor?’

‘Of a kind.’

She remembered. They had warned her about this man when she had first arrived at the unit.

The kettle started to whistle as the water began to boil.

‘You should not have run away from the facility. We are concerned that you may cause us some trouble.’

‘I chose to leave,’ she said.

A sinister smile spread across his face as he leaned towards her. ‘You were told when you arrived: No one is ever allowed to leave.’

‘I won’t tell anyone. You can trust me.’ As she said it, the memory of what she had run away from played out in a nightmare seared into her consciousness.

The kettle reached the peak of its scream. The second man removed it from the hob and placed it on the table. The sudden silence was deafening.

‘I wish I could trust you,’ the first man said, ‘but I only deal in certainties.’ He reached for the kettle, picked it up and threw it.

She managed to block it. She felt the burning metal on her hands. A split second later, the boiling water hit her face, and she screamed in sharp pain.

The second man grabbed her around her shoulders and pushed her hands down onto the table. She felt the rope slip over her head and go tight around her neck. Her skin crawled as the boiling water burned into her.

The first man’s face was next to hers. She could smell his rotten breath as he hissed at her. ‘All anyone will think is that you finally gave in to the demons in your head.’

The raven watched, the only witness to the murder. It took flight and circled around the object that hung in the barn and caught the smell of death. It had stopped moving now, stopped squirming and screaming. The demons had left. The raven returned to the wooden beam and hopped along it to where the rope was tied. It could sense the beginnings of decay radiating from the hanging body, which swayed gently in the gasps of wind that breezed through the gaps in the walls of the barn.

The raven would feed well this winter.