She burst outside. It was raining hard and she was glad for it. She ran through the courtyard below her own window and opened the arched gate into the garden. The bright, fiery colours seemed even more vivid in the wet as she ran on gravel paths past planted beds and high brick walls. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. If she could have caught her breath, she would have screamed, but her body could only fill with a silent, gaping horror.

She ran the width of the back of the great house, tall empty windows staring down on her with ghostly censure, the lawns rolling to a stop at a deep ha-ha, with sheep grazing beyond and the landscape rolling out to a distant haze. A voice in her head told her to keep running into it, to just keep going forward into obscurity and lose herself in an unknown land. She could still escape. There was still a chance to become someone new. Leave the past and the horrors it contained behind her.

Her legs couldn’t stop wheeling, carrying her past the formal gardens towards a wood densely planted with ancient mossed trees. It looked like somewhere to disappear into and she ran headlong into the shadows, never stopping. Her hands reached out to brush the trunks as she passed, an instinctive reflex she didn’t even notice at first, her heavy-booted feet continually catching on protruding roots and making her stumble. She could feel that something was chasing her, something at her back like a shadow she couldn’t unstitch. Because even as the ship had hauled anchor and the islanders had waved their handkerchiefs at a home they were deserting, she had known it wasn’t deserted.

Not then and still not now.

She stopped running at last, her legs giving out with the realization of what this meant, her hands falling into the mud as she tried to catch her breath. She sat back on her haunches and tipped her face to the sky, feeling the raindrops on her face as they fell in a chicane through the leafy canopies.

The tourist ship SS Dunara had been scheduled to make a planned crossing – the last of the season – three days after the islanders had left. She knew that high winds over the open sea could, and very often did, scupper the timetables, but the skipper would always be looking for any break in the weather so that the tourists could have their fill of what was now the ghost isle; the delay was usually only a day or two. But if the weather break hadn’t come . . . Autumn could be rolling in across the Atlantic this very moment. The seasonal switch was usually abrupt and when it came – if it was already here – there was every chance the seas would be too high now till next spring. And then what?

She knew what.