I’m stiff, frozen to the bone. When I try to get up, my legs are dead weights. I fumble for the bottle, drink until I choke. Dread squeezes at my stomach. My heart beats a loud staccato.

I hear fishermen shouting. And an engine, deep and coughing. The Acair. My father. And I try to get up again, panicked now, scrambling around in the muddy grass. I need to hide. From their shadows like the cold tar black of the Atlantic beyond the continental shelf. Like nets dragged through a darkness alive with rock and wreck and death.

‘Leave me alone!’ My eyes blur; the tears feel warm. This is why I shouldn’t drink. Because I only pretend that I want to know the truth. Here, on these islands, in this thin place, there are no fences. There have never been any fences. Everything has always been beyond and never inside. And I’ve always known. What weight of will is inside a thought, a want, a rock. And what weight you must always carry after that will – that want – is done. And a lighthouse has become nothing more than a black tower; a shadow, like something burned against a wall.

I manage to get onto my hands and knees. Begin crawling away from the stones, back towards the dig. There’s safety there. A different kind, less spiritual than hopeful; closer to Norse talismans and putting a cat’s claw under the foundations of a house. But any port in a storm. The dark is lower. Closer. And I can hear them behind me now. Louder. Closer. The fishermen. Panic returns feeling to my legs, and I get up, the mud sucking at my boots as I run across the moorland. I slip and slide; fall and get up. The wind from the western cliffs roars through me. At Loch Dubh, I stop, my breath wheezing, icy cold, from my lungs.

There. Standing close to the loch’s eastern edge. A figure. Staring. Darkness all around him as if he is its centre, its source. My father.

He shouts. Words that are swallowed by the wind before they can reach me. But too loud, too angry. I can see his teeth. He moves closer, and still I can’t move. The loch water froths and churns like the sea; I barely feel its icy spray against my skin. My legs prickle and shake. And still he comes closer, closer. Until it’s too late to run. Until all I see is him.

Not my father.

Andrew. Weak and small. And never gone.

He shouts again. Andrew has haunted me my whole life. He’s the only bòcain I’ve ever needed to be afraid of.

I pull him down into the mud, where we slip and slide and he shouts and shouts. I put my hands over his mouth – wet and sharp with those teeth – and I press down. Still he struggles against me, flailing arms and legs, nails and teeth piercing the numbness of my skin, sending hot spikes of pain up into my wrists and elbows.