Holly, Eva and Piotr stood on the platform watching the empty train as it disappeared from view. There were no buildings. No information. The way out was through a small, empty car park, and beyond that: nothing. Piotr took a few steps into the night, hoping his eyes would adjust and give him some clue where to go next. Eva strode past him, locating a grassy track beside the road. The light of the station didn’t reach far into the countryside, but the sky – it felt bigger than any he had seen before. Layer after layer of stars between the silver outlines of fleeting clouds, on a backdrop of deep, limitless black.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, suddenly realising Holly was standing alone, looking uncertain. He took the phone from his pocket and turned it on as a torch. The thin white light lit the ground by her feet – an ineffectual guide, but it was all he had. ‘We’re going to have to walk.’

‘How long will it take?’ Holly asked. ‘Not that I mind walking,’ she added before either of them could reply. ‘I just want to know, that’s all.’

‘Maybe about an hour, I guess,’ Piotr said.

‘A little more, I think,’ said Eva. ‘But it’s possible.’

‘Everything’s possible,’ Holly said, as she planted her walking stick firmly on the ground. ‘Which way, then?’

Eva pointed. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Wait, for a few seconds, and look.’

And there, in the distance, after about ten seconds of darkness, came the guiding light that Piotr had forgotten about, and the warning – the warning of the dark treacherous rocks, the warning that beamed beyond the waves – that was the three distinctive flashes of light sent out, every thirty seconds, every night for the past two hundred years, from the Tarbat Ness Lighthouse.

Audio log

7 Feb 2016 18:32

—I hear the wind shaking the window glass and feel the air thickening around me. I know that it is no use. The dense purple clouds have reached the black rocks now and I made my choice a long time ago and I understand that the storm has finally arrived. It is here, after all my waiting. Here, in the middle of my last recording. Though it is not the storm I expected. It is internal, of course. Perhaps all the greatest storms are.

This is my final audio log, and I was talking about the indigo hamlets and I’m a bit worried now about them, about how they will survive if there is no one to check they have the right degree of turbulence. They are such extraordinary creatures, so much better than us, I think, in so many ways. I would love to be with them now, swimming through the warm salt waters of the Caribbean.