There was no food or water in the room. He’d thought being hungry was bad, but thirst was the worst thing of all. It burned him like fire from the outside in, until even his throat and tongue and lips felt scorched with it. I felt it all just as he did, and panic rose up inside me. This was what it must feel like to die, and dying was icy, sharp and so very lonely.

When the room became partially flooded, he still couldn’t drink anything because it was seawater. 311Seawater that brought the eel. Finally he sat down and used the last of the candle’s light to write a letter to his mother. Then he turned his attention to the eel. I felt his joy at seeing another living thing, his hopes of making friends with it, of not being alone in the dark any more. When it bit him the first time, Conall tried to escape by climbing up on the table. But he couldn’t stay awake there forever, and once he fell asleep he inevitably slumped and fell into the water. By then, he was too weak to get back up again. And so the eel could take as many bites out of him as it liked.

It was impossible to tell for sure whether it was dehydration, the eel or drowning that finally did it, but Conall was dead just a couple of days after his father left. And the great, awful rage he still felt over what had happened was like a ball of fire inside his chest, one that could never be extinguished.

Except … when he’d seen Charlie, he’d thought that here at last might be a companion for him. A friend to take the edge off his loneliness. But Conall had never been very skilled at making friends, and he had failed here too, frightening Charlie away in spite of his efforts – at least at first – to be gentle 312and careful. He hadn’t even allowed Charlie to see his face in case he scared him, but it had all been for nothing. Whatever he did, it was never enough…

The dark dreadfulness of the shared vision ended abruptly and I found myself back in the lantern room with Will, and Conall, and the dozens of dead birds.

313

Chapter Twenty-four

“Will you bring Charlie back now?” Conall asked, watching me carefully. “You do understand, don’t you? You know why I had to do those things, and that it wasn’t my fault? The lighthouse wanted me to kill him. It wanted me to be bad.”

“Of course,” I said, standing up and stepping over to Will. “Of course I understand. But Charlie is … he can’t come back here. He needs to go home. There were children in the fog,” I said, my mind working quickly. “I saw them. Can’t you make friends with one of them?”