Relieved, I close my eyes once more but it’s no good. It’s there again. A subconscious prick of puzzlement which takes a few minutes to work through the fog in my head.

The wooden box is on the floor where I’d left it, its lid still smudged with a veneer of mouse goo, its contents strewn on the wooden boards – a small hollow silver cross and a roll of paper secured with a faded strip of cloth. I ease off the tie and carefully unravel the paper, half hoping for missing deeds or a treasure map, but it’s just a letter. Strange. Unable to face a single night on the pitiful excuse of the cabin’s resident mattress, I’d had our spare bed and bedside tables, along with some crates of books, shipped over from London. But neither this crudely made box nor its contents belong to me and whilst it’s a romantic notion that one of the full-bellied removals men should have stolen away to a dark corner of the van for a chocolate Hobnob and a perusal of his morning mail, it’s an unlikely one; the letter is written in Spanish and headed the University of California.

The Mexican then – had he slept here last night? Had he put on his pyjamas, waxed his moustache and thrown back the covers of the bed before turning his attention to the contents of the box, pausing only occasionally to glance out at the moon as it waxed and waned over the town? Perhaps. The paper is old and brittle, the ink so faded it’s hard to make out the words. Curiouser and curiouser. I trace my hand down the lines as though their secrets might rise up like Braille beneath my fingertips and inexplicably I’m overcome by a sense of foreboding. A deep chill, like the proverbial phantom, passes through my body, and I quickly roll the letter up again and stow it back in its box.