20
Mandy opened her eyes. It took her a few seconds to realise where she was, then she remembered the house, and the two men standing on the verandah. They had guns and, at first, she thought they might be accomplices of the man driving, but there was something about the way they looked leading her to think they were police officers. The way the man turned the car and sped away indicated the two strangers were not people he wanted to see. She remembered staring at them through the rear window, and calling out, screaming at them, to help her.
She remembered the feeling of utter hopelessness which engulfed her as the man sped away from the house and the two men who could well have been her one chance of escaping the nightmare. A dark, heavy blanket of doom descended over her, cocooning her
