Will shook his head. “For all we know, it was still only a dream. Besides, there’s something I need to tell you—”

But that was as far as he got before the clouds above us finally burst, and rain poured down in sheets. The wind rushed back with a vengeance, slamming the lighthouse door closed and tugging the bloodied feathers from the gannets impaled on the broken windows. The storm had finally arrived.

“Let’s get inside,” Will said, raising his voice above the noise.

We ran back to the door and tumbled into the hall, where I quickly switched on the light. The less time spent in the dark in this place, the better.

“I have an idea about where we need to go,” Will 290said, pulling a piece of paper from his pocket. “I found this in the tower yesterday, just before my dad arrived and messed everything up.”

He held it out to me and I saw that it was an architectural plan. “We know that the lighthouse is actually a tower within a tower, right?”

“Right,” I said. “From when they strengthened it in the 1800s.”

“Well, these are the plans for how they intended to build the second tower. And look.” He pointed to a spot on the page. “It looks to me like part of the old basement is still there – the one from the original lighthouse. And it’s directly underneath the kitchen.”

“You’re right,” I said, staring at it. “But how do we get to it?”

And should we?

The words seemed to hang in the air, but neither of us spoke them aloud.

“They’ve labelled it cold storage,” Will pointed out. “As if they intended it to be used for food. So perhaps there’s access through the kitchen?”

Charlie’s words at the dining table suddenly came back to me.

I thought there was someone down there. I heard them 291scratching…

“I think I know where it might be,” I said.

We went into the kitchen and flicked on the light, to immediate shrieks of alarm. A couple of gannets had managed to make it into this room alive, and they hissed at us threateningly. Luckily they didn’t seem in a fit state to attack us. They’d both damaged their wings coming through the window, and when Will opened the door they were eager to escape into the night, despite the wind that howled in.

“We should move fast,” Will said, glancing at me. “There could be more gannets inside.”

Together, we grabbed hold of the big wooden table. The wind roared through the broken windows, plucking feathers from the dead birds and swirling them around us. I winced as one landed on my shoulder, leaving a smear of sticky blood.

I wiped it off, and then Will and I dragged the table across the wooden floorboards with a horrible screeching noise. But there was nothing there.