The trapdoor opens up onto a steep and narrow wooden staircase disappearing quickly down into darkness. I’ve already taken out my phone before I see the switch set into the brick wall. The resulting light isn’t just unexpected, it’s bright like daylight, enough that it makes me flinch. The cobwebs tickle my skin and get caught in my hair as I go slowly down the steps, trying not to lose my grip on the rickety old banister.

The cellar is bigger than a root cellar, but not by much. Its floor is packed earth and its walls white-painted brick, cracked and dirty. It’s cool and smells musty like peat. When I feel a slight breeze against my face, I glance up to where a vertical steel pipe disappears into a hole in the wall close to the ceiling. Strangely, it’s that hole – dark and ragged – rather than the tight windowless space that makes me feel most claustrophobic.

I wander slowly around the room, touching the walls, which feel dry and scaly against my skin. There are long wooden shelves the length of one wall and a workbench against its opposite, covered in tools and jars of nails and screws. I drag my fingers through the thick dust of the workbench, touch the long-rusted tools: a hammer, a wood saw, a yellow-and-black-striped screwdriver.

Despite the brightness of the room, I’ve almost reached its last corner before I see the large solid shape against it. I step back less in fright than surprise – although there’s no denying that, under layers of blue-weave tarpaulin, the shape is the height and width of a tall man. My heart is beating a little too hard as I reach out and pull that tarpaulin free. The dust makes me cough.

It’s a lighthouse. Made from plywood and soldered metal, the large bulb of what looks like a spotlight torch at its summit. When I step back again, look at it a little longer, my stomach squeezes. The tower has been painted white. With ochre trim. The lamp room is black. Surrounded by a large metal cage. It’s the Aird Einish lighthouse.

The back of the cage hangs open. I reach behind it to find the torch’s switch. When I slide it left and right nothing happens; the battery doubtless died a long time ago. Something on the white ceiling above it catches my eye: a pale-yellow shape that jogs a memory from my childhood. Mum reading me all those stories while I lay warm in bed.

There’s a second light switch at the bottom of the stairs. I hesitate only briefly before I press it and plunge the space back into darkness.

The breath catches loud inside my chest, my throat. The whole ceiling is covered in glow-in-the-dark stars. Hundreds of them. Enough in constellations that I recognise for me to suspect that this was the night sky above Kilmeray twenty-five years ago. My eyes prick and sting; the lump inside my throat makes it suddenly impossible to swallow. Robert.