She was lying down, lying on something hard and flat. She couldn't move. All was dark around her, so dark she could barely make out even the tiniest prick of light from above. Mingled with the darkness was a silence equally as impenetrable. Somewhere within the void between light and noise she wasn't alone. There was someone there with her, standing over her in the darkness, invisible. Their breathing was shallow, almost unnoticeable. They were still; not moving in any way that she could detect. Despite their stillness she knew she wasn't safe. This was the person that had been calling her, the person that had dragged her into the dark depths of the basement in which she was now trapped.

The rustle of a sleeved arm being drawn up disturbed the silence. That sound was followed by a click and light flooded the room. It was so bright against the blackness she had faced for what could have been hours she was forced to close her eyes. Even with the protection of their closed lids her eyes continued to sting. As it began to lessen she opened them once again and attempted to look around while her eyes focussed in the change in light.

A high, lofty ceiling greeted her clearing vision. Its beams laid damp against it, supporting it, coated in cobwebs from which long deceased spiders hung in clumps, starved by a lack of food, caught by starvation before they could feed on each other.

Her eyes arched downwards, facing directly above her, an action that caused her to close her eyes again. The light filling the room was at an angle above her head. She had seen a light like it before, a light most often seen in operating theatres. It was this that frightened her more than the darkness, than the silence, and being trapped with no hope of escape.

A shadow passed over her eyes. It lingered, shielding her from the glare of the light. She opened her eyes slowly, using the time to examine her captor. They were a stranger to her, their face leant no clue to their identity and offered no match to the voice that remained trapped behind a pair of thin lips closed tightly in a twisted grin that contorted the whole face and made the small dark eyes glitter with menace.

The hand still holding the light some way from her face pushed it back more. When that hand fell away she could see it reach for something nearby. She turned her head to see what it was. The hand was holding a mask attached to a canister that stood at the edge of her bed. There was a word upon it worn away by time, scratched by years of use, but she could still read it and it chilled her.

She tried to struggle free from whatever was holding her but she was bound tight. She saw the man lift his other hand and watched as it clamped itself on her forehead, holding her head down tight. The other hand had lifted the mask from its hook on the canister and was slowly drawing it towards her face, making her more frightened. Even when she felt the worn rubber edge of the mask being pressed down hard over her nose and mouth her struggles continued futilely, she couldn't let them win.

What felt like a cool breeze began to blow on her face through the mask. She held her breath not wanting to breathe in, not wanting to be knocked out by the gas that would put her into a fatal slumber.

He knew she was fighting but he didn't seem to mind. Sooner or later she would have to breathe, sooner or later she wouldn't have a choice.

It became harder and harder for her to fight her body's natural instinct to draw in air. She kept trying to resist but her struggles were decreasing the time she could hold out. Her muscles needed the oxygen running through her blood stream to keep functioning, there was little choice and little time left.

Before she could stop it from happening her mouth opened and her lungs seized all the air they could come upon. With that single gulp of breath came panic. She tried to stop herself breathing in more of the gas blowing through the mask but the more she breathed in the more her body seemed to want.

She was growing sleepy. Her eyes were becoming heavy. She tried to hold on to whatever threads of consciousness she could grasp but they slipped through her fingers like grains of dry sand falling through an hourglass. Sleep swept her up in its arms and pulled her towards a dreamless oblivion, an indeterminable prison that would hold her until her eyes once more opened on the world and her lungs breathed oxygen into them.

Robbie sat on the bench he had so often tried to sleep on, alone and in turmoil. He wanted to know that Robyn was safe, that she had been found and was coming home but that was as yet uncertain. It was hard for him to tell himself that he had had no part in her leaving, that she hadn't left because of him, because of what he had said, but it just felt like he was lying to himself.

So many times they had hurt each other, so many times they had overcome their difficulties and built up a solid relationship that, despite their transgressions against each other, had survived and seemed to strengthen with every incident that may have destroyed it.

He loved her as a daughter and she loved him as a father but it felt to him that this was the final time she would ever look upon him with love. For those few moments he had doubted her, doubt he should have never felt in the face of his feelings for her and knowing her as he did. It was that doubt she would have felt from him, it was feeling that doubt that would have hurt her the most.

She had had her reasons for keeping the truth from him and he could see that now but now was too late.

Something wet was dripping onto her head. It beat a steady rhythm against her temple, rousing her from sleep. Opening her eyes she saw nothing but darkness broken only by a single light flickering unsteadily from above, a pale beam that stretched across the ceiling, hanging from the rafters high above. It sputtered like a candle drowning in its own wax, its light ready to be extinguished at any moment.

The drips continued to fall onto her. She raised a hand to keep them from her face and sat up slowly. It was then that she felt what was around her.

Death.

Lifting her eyes from the floor she saw the devastation all around her. The bodies lying on the cold tile, each one dismembered, not one amongst them recognisable, none fortunate enough to die a peaceful death, all tortured.

She was trapped in the middle of a crimson halo of death. They were all around her, glaring at her with their unseeing eyes. They lay there, some with their arms outstretched, pointing at her. It seemed as if they were mocking her, laughing at her with their contorted faces the colour the tiles they laid on had once been. She wanted to escape them, to be away from them and out of the damp prison that had been their tomb. As she looked frantically about there seemed to be nowhere to escape to, nothing that would lead her back into the light. All that she could see was fronted by darkness. She returned her eyes to the place where the light reached.

In the flickering light she thought she'd seen one of them move. Blinking to clear her vision she looked again. There was no sign of movement, she thought to herself that it had been a trick of the light but that thought was washed away by confusion when her eyes detected another of the bodies move.

She stood up quickly, almost stumbling backwards in her panic. They were all moving now, one by one they seemed to be waking from their eternal sleep. They were pulling themselves towards her. Their arms were reaching out for her, their fingers creaking as they opened and closed. She could hear their mangled jaws gnashing together wordlessly.

She tried to back away from them but she was surrounded. There was nowhere to go. She turned around to find an avenue of escape and was confronted with the grisliest of the corpses.

It was suspended from the ceiling by a rope tied about its neck. Its feet hung inches from the floor and it was unmoving. What was left of the mangled, skinless, torso was dressed in a nurses' uniform. Pinned to one of the lapels was a badge. She was drawn to it. The letters upon it were still faint but she could still read the word they spelt.

"Ellen." She breathed.

She was still looking at the badge when out of the corner of her eye she noticed something move slightly. Her head snapped round to look on it fully but it was too late.

She screamed as the bloody hand found her throat.

Lily looked up from where she had rested her cheek on Morgan's head when she heard the screams echoing through the house.

"I think Robyn's found the basement." She said before laying it back down and closing her eyes.