‘Not a one. Only the ghost lights moving about. At last they started going out one by one, but even when none were left I kept still, because whoever was responsible for ’em might still be poking about. Just as well I did, because all of a sudden there was a noise like a screech or a whistle, so loud I clapped my hands over my ears, and a flame shot up into the fog and was gone in an eye blink.’

‘Did you see what made it?’

‘Just the flame, rising straight up. White it was, like the coals in a smithy’s forge, and bright enough to cast shadows through the fog before it disappeared.’

‘Tell him about the fire you found afterwards,’ Righteous said.

‘It wasn’t a fire as such. More a kind of scorching,’ Mercy said. ‘A patch of stones blackened and still hot. Smouldering tufts of grass.’

Pilgrim asked the usual questions Master Able had asked those witnesses he had been able to question in person, but Mercy was adamant that he had not seen any figures, only the nets of green light and the white flame which had flung itself into the sky.

‘How did I do?’ he said, after Pilgrim had run out of questions and checked that the wire recorder had captured the interview.

‘I’m grateful that you told it so well. I believe that I explained in my last letter that the lights are a new thing.’

‘Reckoned they might be, given how you came all this way to ask me about them.’

‘Just one other thing – you said that you didn’t see any footprints, but do you recall seeing any fresh markings? Something like this, perhaps, scratched in stone or on the ground,’ Pilgrim said, opening his jotter to the first page, where he had copied the marking that several witnesses had found after sightings of visitors.

‘Looks like a bird,’ Righteous said, squinting at it.

It was drawn with a single continuous line: a long narrow beak and small round head, a spar on either side of the body for wings, and three more spars, the one in the middle longer than the other two, representing a tail.

‘We think it might be a flowersipper,’ Pilgrim said.

Mercy shook his head. ‘All I found was the remains of that fire.’

‘Perhaps we will learn something new when we visit the place,’ Righteous said.