And I see it. Squatting on the glass-littered road next to Mum’s bed. Next to Mum’s coffin. Bald and grinning with big, crowded teeth. Claws tap-tapping at the ground, scratching black wounds into the tarmac.

Maggie, make it go away!

I jolt awake, nearly fall off the sofa. When I open my fist, the pendant has left indents in my skin, and I push it back inside the collar of my jumper, take long, deep breaths. Massage my aching head. I’m okay. I should meditate. Or do one of Dr Abebe’s breathing exercises. Instead, I get up and retrieve the whisky from the dining table. Swig straight from the bottle as I wait for my heartbeat to settle again. I look across at the clock on the mantelpiece: the cartoon face of a ginger Highland cow. Five minutes past midnight. Happy birthday to me.

I hear a sound outside. Far too loud in the otherwise quiet. It’s an almost welcome distraction until I’m standing next to the front door and peering out of its small square window. I can see nothing except the silhouette of my head framed by the windswept frizz of my hair. I jump when the door rattles against a sudden gust of wind, and this annoys me enough that I find the courage to open it.

Even though I know there are no streetlights, the blackness of outside is so opaque that it’s a shock all the same. There’s no moon, no stars. I imagine the stone path and the grazing grass immediately ahead. The single-track road and the blanket bog beyond. The vast loom of Terror Mountain; the darker shadow of the Valley of Ghosts. Perhaps it’s the childish, who’s-afraid-of-the-Bogeyman nature of the names – or more likely that I am afraid – that makes me step out of the blackhouse without going back for either my phone or Kelly’s torch.

The wind howls around me as I stand on the path. I turn towards the welcome lights of the farm on the other side of the headland, and something shifts suddenly under my foot, making me lose my balance. I stagger backwards against the open door, grab hold of its frame. I stare down at the ground as I catch my breath, but the light from the mudroom isn’t strong enough to see anything but shadows.

I go back for the torch because I can’t just shut the door and leave whatever is out there on the path. I can never leave anything alone. I always know it’s still there.

The torch is bright. It exposes what I stood on, in alarmingly stark relief against the stone path.

‘Jesus.’

It’s two dead birds. Big dead birds. Crows. I creep closer and hunker down. They don’t look like the kind of dead bird you see lying by the side of the road. Their wings are stretched out, heads turned to one side, feet curled into claws. Their tailfeathers are black, but dirty grey everywhere else. Except for the naked shafts of their wings, fanned out like tiny ribs. Their beaks are curved and sharp, their eye sockets deep and oval and empty. I don’t see how they could have been here when Kelly and I first arrived at the blackhouse, or even when she left more than an hour later, because beak to tail, they take up almost the whole width of the path.