Two pairs of hands grabbed each arm. “Let me go!” Frances cried. Instead Vicki Durrant’s gang dragged her along in near-silence, the panting from their exertions casting barely enough light for Frances to get her bearings. 
 “Let me go, you bastards!” Frances shouted. Her shouts were met with jeers and catcalls that at least lit the neighbourhood; a run-down industrial estate on the edge of Hove, the ochre skeletons of rusting cars lying amid the rubbish, fag packets and paper blowing against chain-link fences in a late February wind straight from the Urals that plucked at them with icy, grabbing little fingers. Somewhere Spiller’s Groovejet was playing, Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s child-woman voice almost lost in the background noise of cars and trains on the railway line
Frances dug her feet in so that they were sliding along the bumpy, uneven pavement, half-crying, half-pleading for them to let her go. 
	Even three years earlier – when she’d gone blind -- her so-called friend Theresa had been a lanky, useless lump of a girl, half a head taller than the others in their class. Now she pratted around the edge of the group, wailing, “Let her go, yeah? Her Ma’ll be wild, you know.” She might as well have talked to a wall for all the notice the girls took of her.
Instead they dragged Frances into a building that smelled of damp, paper, cardboard and dust and mildew. “What is this, Theresa?” She called. 
“Don’t answer her, slag,” Vicki Durrant shouted. “Not unless you wanna join her in the pit.” Her relish in the last word was highlighted by the darkness of the colours flickering around her head as she spoke, a black that was more than just an absence of light, shot through with flickers of blue indicating an unhealthy lust for the terror that she was inspiring, and just the tiniest flicker of orange fear, maybe in case Frances fought back.
Hardly likely, as they outnumbered her maybe a dozen to one --or two, if she counted the useless Theresa-- who should have warned her that they weren’t alone as the gang attacked.
“Sod you, bitch!” Theresa shouted back with belated defiance, and said to Frances, “It’s an old warehouse with offices above! All probably derelict, goods entrance-”
	“Get her!” Vicki shouted, and with a shriek, Theresa was gone, her footsteps echoed by those of her yelling pursuers.
Frances stumbled and hung for a moment by her arms, but then she managed to right herself. "Please," she sobbed, snot and tears mixing on her face. "I'll pay next time, I promise."
"Oh, you will, bitch," Vicki said, adopting a street accent, her colours turning yellow and white, disgust and anger. "This is about re-spect as well as money. When we asks you for rep-a-ra-tions"—- she dragged the word out to four long syllables— "for allowing you to share our air, you pays. 'Cause not to do so is disrespectful, like you was, and we not only got to teach you a lesson, but teach all them other slags who might think of disrespecting us. Got it?"
Without waiting for an answer, they tossed her in through the mesh doors of a service shaft, highlighted by the black and violet colours of Vicki's laughter, joy and triumph, but spinning Frances around and around first so that she had no idea which way was which.
Then Frances was falling, falling, and the drop seemed to take an hour. She felt her chest tighten, knew that a panic attack was fluttering somewhere in the darkness, looking to find somewhere to roost in her mind. She landed on a soft surface and, groping around, felt the sacking and cardboard covering the floor that had cushioned her fall.
She fought back against the fear and felt her way around in the absolute blackness on hands and knees, realizing sheepishly that what had seemed like an infinite drop was really only about eighteen inches and had taken perhaps a fraction of a second.
"Hello?" Frances called and listened for the sounds of Vicki's gang breathing in the darkness. There was only silence. She had been abandoned.
Fear returned with a vengeance when a flapping sound made her jump. Even as she was thinking it's only a pigeon or something, dummy, her hands brushed cobwebs. She recoiled and slipped. Putting her hand down to steady herself, she pressed it into something soft and slick and retch-inducingly stinky. Chittering and scrabbling in the nearby darkness hinted that she wasn't completely alone. Something brushed her hair, and she screamed a long continuous shriek that echoed off the walls, which only served to feed her fear.
As she finally wound down and was reduced to mere whimpering, she noticed noises instead of the stillness that should have filled a derelict warehouse.
"Hello?" she called, but was only answered by distant bangs and crashes and an occasional shout of laughter drifting on the currents of air that swirled through the industrial emptiness. The men must have been working constantly not to have heard her screaming, and she wondered what kind of work brought men to a derelict warehouse on the edge of Brighton on a Saturday afternoon when most had finished for the week. In her overwrought state she imagined that it was nothing legal, and that therefore the men might be as much of a threat as a salvation. Maybe they're even part of Vicki's gang, she thought.
Common sense eventually reasserted itself, and she began to feel her way around for the mesh door that she knew would be there.
Then came a sound that chilled her to the marrow: the clanking of a lift, descending toward her.
Her breath came in ever shorter gasps as another panic attack— or the first returning— dug its nasty little claws into her.
"Help!" She tried to scream, but as fear took over, nothing came but a squeak. Her fingernails tore on the wall as she scrabbled for the door, the clanking, grinding of the rattling lift creeping nearer and nearer, with glacial slowness but also glacial momentum.
Then, there was a presence there at the back of her mind, ready to push her aside, but waiting.
The lift was coming and coming and coming.
She lay down, knowing that it would only buy her a few more seconds, but even seconds were worth fighting for. She could smell the stink of oil and hot dust in her nostrils, and when she stretched her arms out, felt the press of metal against her fingertips. The lift inched closer, pressing her hands back, then down into her shoulders, and then squeezing on her chest, until her bones and flesh were pressed into the ground and she couldn't breathe--