That last week at school before the Christmas holidays, death was in everything.

In Geography, the sea was eating away the coasts. In English, Juliet was stabbing herself with Romeo’s dagger. Even the school gerbil, Rafferty, was found stiff in his water bowl on Tuesday lunchtime. The skies above us bore a foreboding grey gloom, telling us snow was on its way to suffocate the land. In the dorms, everyone was packing up their trunks for the coming break and preparing to say goodbye to the year.

And in our last floodlit netball practice that Friday evening, I saw the monster.

The thing generations of Bathory girls had nightmares about. The Beast of Bathory.