I rolled my eyes. Now I was the one letting my imagination run away. The windows must have been lit up all along. I stepped closer to the wall and felt a cold chill radiating from the old granite stones. It wasn’t just the light in the photo that I hadn’t noticed – there was also, quite clearly, a person standing at 117the window. Because the light was turned on behind, I couldn’t make out a face – just a dark silhouette as they stared straight ahead. I recalled the lighthouse photo at the youth hostel back on the mainland, and the dark smudge that had seemed like a person. Now the figure wasn’t only in one photo – it was in all of them.

There’s someone in my room…

I leaned closer to the nearest photo, trying to make out some small detail of the face or clothes. My nose was only centimetres away…

When suddenly there was a thump and a shriek behind me.

118

Chapter Ten

I jerked round in time to see a white bird falling from sight and realized that a gannet must have flown into the window. I breathed a sigh of relief and turned back to pull the photo off the wall and examine the back. The words: Lighthouse at Bird Rock, Summer 1972 were written there in tidy handwriting. I glanced back up, and that’s when I noticed that there was writing on the wall too, that had been hidden by the photo. Just two words written in block capitals in faded paint:

I frowned and reached for the other photos, pulling them down one by one until they fluttered to my feet 119in a heap. Every single one hid old painted messages on the wall behind. Just the same two words repeated over and over:

Forget what? Sometimes the words were tidy and uniform, but at others they looked like they’d been written by someone who was having difficulty holding the paintbrush or trying to use the opposite hand to the one they normally did, and then the letters wobbled and warped so badly that it was almost impossible to make them out.

Some of the words were written in such tiny letters that I had to squint to read them at all, but when I looked up at the ceiling, I noticed that someone had scrawled the words up there too in gigantic letters that took up the whole space and hurt my eyes to look at. The entire room suddenly seemed like it was shouting at me. I shivered as I recalled that some of the previous keepers were said to have 120lost their minds. Perhaps this was the handiwork of one of those tormented men.