The thing in the hall slithered closer to the living room door and I pulled the covers over my head trying to blot out the noise and pretend everything was all right.

Muffled noise insinuated itself into my cloth sanctuary; a voice perhaps, or maybe the scrape of claws on the floorboards. I listened intently: nothing that I could make sense of. Maybe it had gone away. Something hit my shoulder with a painful thud and I ignored that too, burrowing deeper into the nest I’d made on the couch. The room was freezing, despite the fact that my central heating had been cranked up to tropical.

A child’s giggle next to my ear almost cracked my resolve, but good things never came of that, so I huddled harder, willing whatever it was to go away. I should never have done that ouja session when I was pissed last night. I had done some stupid things in my life but this, this made moronic a state I could only aspire to with no hope of actually achieving. I risked peeking out and saw it was snowing outside, lending the darkened room a faint luminescence. A concentrated yet flickering spot of darkness appeared in the middle of the room and the hackles went up on the back of my neck. Another giggle devoid of humour hung in the arctic air and I could see my breath streaming from me in plumes as though trying to escape.

“Rose,” it whispered, echoes reverberating round the room as though we were in a vast cave rather than a small tenement flat in Edinburgh. How it knew my name, I’d no idea. The sound of someone walking through the room, feet striking the floor boards hard assaulted my ears, but there was no one there. No one apart from me and the spirit and whatever it had brought with it. I could make out the faint gleam of my mobile in the gloom and if I’d had someone to call, I would’ve.

“Rosieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee,” a child’s voice sing-songed. The duvet was pulled off me with sharp tug and I shivered in the pre-doom gloom from nerves or hangover, I didn’t know any more.