I woke up inside the bothy with a start, gasping for breath. A nightmare. Of course that was all it was. Just a dream. Only it didn’t feel like one. There were no fragments of jacket inside my pocket but I couldn’t shake the feeling that what I’d just seen – whether inside a dream or not – was somehow real. There were surely a hundred different ways a person could meet their death on this island, especially if they were a guga hunter clambering down cliffs and hanging over ferocious open fires and skinning birds with very sharp knives. For my own peace of mind, I decided to check in on the hunters’ camp before heading back to the lighthouse.

The cliff path was thick with gannets, and I had to dodge round them as I went. It was almost 6 a.m. by 274the time I reached the camp, and I could see that the hunters were already up and about. It looked like they were busy storm-proofing everything, covering the bothies with weighted tarpaulins and moving away some of the equipment. A horde of gannets perched on the nearby rocks, watching the proceedings with interest, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary, and I tried to tell myself that all was well. I was just about to leave when I spotted Will. I waved at him, and he came over at once.

“Jess, I’m so sorry about my dad,” he began. “I hope you didn’t get into too much trouble with your family? I was going to come over first thing and explain to them that we were only—”

But I cut him off. “It doesn’t matter now. Dad’s threatening to call a boat to take us back to the mainland so I threw our radio in the sea.”

“He wouldn’t have got a boat here today anyway,” Will said, pointing up at the sky. “Another storm’s blowing in.”

“Oh. Well, at least he can’t call for one tomorrow then. Listen, something happened as I was leaving the lighthouse.”

I told him how I’d slipped away in the night and 275seen the white hands at the door, trembling as they bled through the glass.

He shook his head. “Jess, you’ve got to get out of that place. I know you want to find Rosie, and I understand that, but—”

“But nothing!” I snapped. “I’m not leaving Bird Rock without her. And there’s something else I need to tell you. I feel a bit stupid mentioning this, but I had a horrible dream about the bean nighe last night. She was washing a guga hunter’s boiler suit and she was … she was washing your jacket as well. I managed to snatch it away from her and tore off a small piece.”