Title Page

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Contents

1. Title Page
2. Prologue
3. Chapter One - The Day Before the Island
4. Chapter Two - Day One on the Island
5. Chapter Three
6. Chapter Four
7. Chapter Five
8. Chapter Six
9. Chapter Seven
10. Chapter Eight - Day Two
11. Chapter Nine
12. Chapter Ten
13. Chapter Eleven - Days Three and Four
14. Chapter Twelve - Day Five
15. Chapter Thirteen
16. Chapter Fourteen
17. Chapter Fifteen
18. Chapter Sixteen - Day Six
19. Chapter Seventeen 4
20. Chapter Eighteen
21. Chapter Nineteen
22. Chapter Twenty
23. Chapter Twenty-One - Day Seven
24. Chapter Twenty-Two
25. Chapter Twenty-Three
26. Chapter Twenty-Four
27. Chapter Twenty-Five
28. Postscript
29. Acknowledgements
30. About the Author
31. Frozen Charlotte Extract
32. Read More Red Eye
33. Copyright

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Prologue

It was Kenzie’s idea to play Truth or Dare that night. It wasn’t as if there was much else to do on Bird Rock. No cinemas, no cafés, not even any phone reception. The island was just a lump of jagged black rock in the middle of the cold, pitiless sea. Nothing but birds, a few stone bothies and the lighthouse.

Don’t go near the lighthouse…

The three teenagers had all been given the same instruction by their parents when they had come to Bird Rock for the gannet hunt. It wasn’t a question of superstition, the adults insisted, only a question of sense. The lighthouse had been uninhabited for years and might not be safe.

“I’ll go first,” Kenzie said, tossing another log on their campfire and sending up a shower of red sparks 6that made the shadows leap and dance around them.

“All right,” her friend Emily replied. “Truth or Dare?”

Kenzie smiled. “Dare. And make it a good one this time.”

“I’ve got an idea,” Will said, rubbing his hands together. He was Kenzie’s brother, and they looked very alike with their fair hair and grey eyes. “I dare you to go into the lighthouse.”

All three of them glanced at the old building. It stood tall and straight, like a finger pointing directly up into the night sky, its bright light flashing out a warning at regular intervals. The word lighthouse seemed to hang in the air, and it felt inevitable that someone had suggested it. After all, wasn’t that why Kenzie had wanted to play Truth or Dare in the first place? Wasn’t that why they’d chosen to build their campfire right here, practically in the building’s shadow? They could hear the invisible sea sucking hungrily at the cliffs below. The lighthouse towering over them felt like one of those ‘bad-influence’ friends – the kind that would lead you astray. The kind that wasn’t really a friend at all.

Will knew that his sister liked a challenge, that she 7wanted someone to dare her to go inside the disused building. “It’s haunted, you know,” he said, grinning.

“I don’t think we should joke about it,” Emily said, looking uncomfortable. “My uncle saw something in there years ago.”

The other two went quiet. Emily very rarely talked about her uncle. He was renowned in their village for the wrong reasons, always doing or saying strange things. Normally Emily seemed embarrassed to be associated with him and would try to pretend he didn’t exist. It was rare for her to mention him at all.

“I didn’t know your uncle ever came to Bird Rock,” Kenzie finally said.

“Just once,” Emily replied. “With the gannet hunters when he was our age. He refused to come back after that.”

“Well, what did he see then?” Will asked.

“He went into the lighthouse with his friends,” Emily said. “And he said he saw white hands pressing against the windows from the outside. But when the other hunters went to look, there was no one there.”

Their eyes flicked towards the dilapidated building once again. It was too dark to see in any detail, but they knew that the paint was peeling from its exterior, 8and the door was practically falling off its hinges. The windows were dark and the rooms empty. There was no one there. There hadn’t been for years.

“That’s not all,” Emily said. “My uncle said there are words you mustn’t ever say inside the lighthouse.”

Will looked delighted by this. “Go on,” he encouraged. “What were they?”

“I know you’re there.” Emily whispered the phrase, as if concerned that the lighthouse might hear her from a distance.

“What happens if you do?” Kenzie asked, looking more curious than frightened.

“He wouldn’t tell me,” Emily replied. “But it’s something bad. Especially if you say it three times. He only managed to say the words twice and … something bad happened, but he’d never tell us what.”

“Well, this just makes it an even better dare!” Will exclaimed. “How about it, Kenz? Is a haunted lighthouse too much for you?”

His sister snorted. “As if! I’m not scared of that old place. In fact, I’d happily live in it while we’re on the island. It’s got to be more comfortable than those damp bothies.”

“Please don’t,” Emily said. 9

“Come on, Em—”

“No, really!” Emily said with unusual sharpness in her voice. “I don’t think we should. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, people have died there. It’s … it’s disrespectful.”

Kenzie placed a hand on her friend’s arm. “It’s only a bit of fun,” she said. “But if it upsets you that much then we can do something else—”

Will immediately started making chicken noises. “You’re just looking for an excuse not to do it!” he said, pointing at his sister triumphantly. “You’re scared!”

Kenzie bristled. “I am not! Don’t be a knob!”

“There’s only one way to prove it,” Will replied. He offered Emily a smile. “There’s literally nothing else to do here, and it’s not like you have to walk into the lighthouse yourself. Kenzie will go alone. That’s the point of the dare. I haven’t even asked her to say those cursed words of yours – she just has to poke her head inside. What could be wrong with that?”

“We’ll do this one dare to shut Will up, and then we’ll go back to camp and toast some marshmallows, OK?” Kenzie said, giving her friend’s arm a squeeze.

Emily tried to protest further, but it was no use. 10Kenzie knew that Will would forever taunt her for chickening out if she didn’t go through with it now, and there was no way she was going to put up with that.

“I’ll go in, count to five and then come straight back out,” she said to Emily. “You won’t know I’m gone.”

“No cheating,” Will warned. “And no lingering in the doorway. You have to actually stand inside.”

“No problem,” Kenzie replied, rolling her eyes.

She turned to go, using her phone to illuminate her way over the loose rocks and gravel. She reached the lighthouse’s front door a few moments later, and the other two saw it open at her touch. Pausing on the threshold, she glanced back once, raised her hand in a wave and then disappeared inside.

“One…” Emily muttered under her breath, “two, three, four, five.”

She and Will both looked at the door, expecting Kenzie to emerge at any moment, her blond ponytail swinging as she bounded over to them triumphantly. But there was no sign of her. As the minutes stretched on, the lighthouse doorway remained a dark, empty rectangle. 11

“I don’t like this,” Emily said. “Something isn’t right.”

“She’s probably just having a look around,” Will replied.

“Why would she do that?” Emily asked. “She said she’d be right back. She promised.”

“Well, maybe she’s just messing with us then,” Will said. “Hiding to see if we’ll go in after her.”

“I’m not going in there!” Emily said at once.

“You won’t have to, Em,” Will replied. “She’ll get bored and come out eventually. You’ll see.”

But time continued to pass, and soon Kenzie had been gone almost twenty minutes. Emily was so fidgety by this point that she could barely keep still.

“Will, I’m really starting to get worried now,” she said.

She hoped he would be concerned too, but to her dismay he only laughed.

“Let’s just go back to camp,” he said, standing up and stretching his back. “She’ll be right behind us when she realizes we’re not going after her.”

“But we can’t just leave her in there!” Emily said, scrambling to her feet too. “She might be—”

She broke off just then because suddenly a light 12came on inside the lighthouse – a window near the top of the tower was filled with a sickly yellow glow.

Emily let out a cry of alarm, and Will frowned. “What the hell is she doing up there? She’ll break her neck on that rickety staircase. I suppose I’ll just have to go and fetch her after all.” He glanced at Emily. “Wait here if you want.”

“By myself?”

“Well, it’s either that or come with me. Up to you.”

“Fine, I’ll come,” Emily said, swallowing her dread.

Will was already leaving, his boots crunching loudly over the gravel. The lighthouse grew taller and taller the closer they got. Emily was certain the door had been open just a moment ago, but now it was closed again. Will pushed, and it swung forward with a loud creaking of hinges that made Emily jump.

“Kenzie!” he shouted. “Very funny, now let’s go! You’re freaking Emily out.”

There was no response, so Will went inside, and Emily reluctantly followed. A gust of wind blew through, and the door slammed closed behind them, swallowing them up. All was quiet outside.

Exactly fourteen and a half minutes later, the door burst open again, and Emily stumbled outside, 13gasping for breath, barely managing to remain upright. She couldn’t stay in that lighthouse another minute, or even another second, not for anyone. She didn’t look back, or speak, or pause. She didn’t try to break the deafening silence in any way. She just ran as fast as she could, desperate to put as much space as possible between herself and the lighthouse of Bird Rock.

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15

Chapter One

My dad’s work as an ornithologist took him all over the world, and ever since he and Mum divorced eight years ago, we hardly ever saw him except in the summer holidays. For two weeks a year, he would leave his new family behind in Scotland and deign to spend a fortnight with Rosie and me. He usually booked a hotel in London, and we spent the days traipsing around the city like tourists, visiting museums and doing different escape rooms.

Personally, I’d rather have been hanging out with my friends, but Rosie looked forward to the holiday with Dad all year. Perhaps the difference was that I was fifteen and Rosie was only twelve. I’d enjoyed Dad’s visits too when I was her age, but they felt weird and a bit flat to me now, like we were all 16pretending to be something we weren’t.

“Your father has a big project on the island,” Mum had told me. “Bird Rock is only habitable during the summer apparently, so the trip can’t be delayed and … well, it’ll be an adventure, won’t it? Staying in an actual lighthouse. I’m sure the island is very beautiful at this time of year. There’s all that wildlife, the rugged coasts and ocean sunsets. We thought it would be the perfect opportunity for Rosie to enjoy her photography and for you to do some stargazing away from all the light pollution.”

I hated it when my mum did this – made out that something was being arranged for our benefit when we both knew it was actually all about what was most convenient for Dad, but it seemed we had no choice in the matter. We were being shipped off to the Outer Hebrides for two weeks whether we liked it or not.

And as the day got closer, I dreaded leaving more and more. My friends all seemed to have tons of exciting plans arranged – shopping trips and music festivals, sleepovers and movie nights, glamping and sunbathing. All stuff that I would have to miss out on.

To make it even worse, Dad’s new family would be 17there this time. His wife Kate was an ornithologist too, and they had a six-year-old son, our half-brother Charlie. I’d only met him once before, a couple of years ago at an awkward Rainforest Café lunch. He’d cried because they’d run out of mozzarella sticks and then spilled his drink everywhere. It had been both embarrassing and annoying.

When I’d googled the island, I’d found that Mum had been playing it down a bit when she described it as ‘small’. In fact, it was one of the most remote islands in the entire UK. We’d literally be the only people there. There weren’t even any shops or cafés. The only buildings were stone bothies that had been built by monks hundreds of years ago. And, of course, the lighthouse itself. Rosie was very excited about the lighthouse.

The morning we were due to leave, she came bounding into my bedroom where I was trying to panic-pack and threw herself down on my bed.

“Guess what?” she asked.

“Would it kill you to knock?” I sighed.

Boundaries and personal space seemed to be 18concepts that Rosie really didn’t understand, despite my best attempts to explain them to her.

“The lighthouse we’re staying in is haunted!” She beamed, as if she’d just told me we were staying in a hotel, and that it had five stars.

Although there were three years between us, people often said that Rosie and I looked a lot alike, with our green eyes and honey-coloured hair, but the similarities ended there. Personality-wise, we couldn’t have been more different. I liked science; Rosie liked spooks. I liked telescopes; Rosie liked tarot cards. I liked shopping with my friends; Rosie liked holding seances with hers. Mum thought it was odd that Rosie was into all that spooky stuff given that she’d been so ill as a young kid, but I reckoned it was probably a big part of why she’d become interested in the first place.

Today my little sister was wearing a black T-shirt with a cartoon ghost printed on it, along with the words: I Believe. And as usual she wore a selection of crystal jewellery – her favourite rose-quartz angel hung on a chain around her neck, and she also had on a lace-agate bracelet. Thanks to Rosie, I knew a lot more about crystals and their meanings than 19I ever really wanted to. Rose quartz represented unconditional love, and the angel pendant had been my gift to her last Christmas. The pale blue lace agate was supposed to encourage self-confidence.

“The first two lighthouse keepers ever to stay there went missing, and no one knows what happened to them!” my sister went on gleefully. “Here, look at this!”

She thrust her phone at me. She’d been going on about a reported sighting of Bigfoot last week, and it had been UFOs spotted flying over Sainsbury’s the week before that. This time it was lighthouses. The lighthouse on Bird Rock in particular. The article read:

Finn Lewis and Niall Abernathy were both experienced keepers of many years. They’d been stationed at the new lighthouse on Bird Rock for only a month in 1807 when the unthinkable happened. Cut off from the outside world, no one had any inkling that anything was wrong until a couple of passing ships reported that the lantern wasn’t operating in bad weather.

The Northern Lighthouse Board attempted to communicate with the men via radio, but their calls went 20unanswered. Finally a relief team was sent to investigate. When they entered the lighthouse, they knew at once that something was terribly wrong. There was no sign of either Finn Lewis or Niall Abernathy. The men had simply vanished, yet their boots were lined up on the shoe rack, and their waterproof coats still hung from pegs.

Not only that but a long-cold supper lay untouched upon the table – a feast for the flies. There was no sign of any disturbance – it was as if the men had simply got up one day and walked out. There was no way they could have left the island without a boat, and yet there was no trace of them.

The Northern Lighthouse Board officially concluded that the two men must have been swept out to sea by a storm. But why would keepers of their experience head outside during such inclement weather in the first place? And without their boots and waterproof coats? And why were the final pages of their logbooks filled with such peculiar reports?

Both men had made entries detailing how the other had been behaving strangely. In addition, Abernathy reported hearing odd sounds coming from within the lighthouse itself – tapping, and knocking, and scratching at the walls…

The mystery persists to this day. Although no further keepers have vanished from the island, the lighthouse at Bird Rock certainly seems a fated and unfortunate place. Many 21of the subsequent keepers asked for transfers or were removed to asylums, unable to cope with the isolation, the fog and the thousands of birds.

We will never know what truly happened to those first keepers over two hundred years ago, but some say they’re still there. That they never left and are still committed to doing their duty, even in death, manning the light to warn passing ships away from whatever danger lies at the heart of Bird Rock.

“I’m going to be rich!” Rosie exclaimed gleefully, as I handed the phone back. “I just need one photo of a ghost in the lighthouse, and I’m bound to win that competition!”

It took me a moment to realize what she was talking about, but then I remembered the photography competition she’d been fixated on for days. It had been set up by the Society for Paranormal Research, or something like that – one of those weird groups she followed – and invited participants to submit haunted photos. Apparently, the winner would be awarded a £1,000 cash prize.

“It’ll be pretty tricky capturing a ghost on film,” I said, turning back to my packing. “Seeing as there’s 22no such thing. You’ll have to create another one of your fakes.”

Rosie had become pretty good at trick photography recently and knew how to make all kinds of special effects with her cameras.

“Well, you can look at the stars while I look for ghosts,” Rosie said. “And then we’ll both be happy.”

“Awesome,” I replied. “Now would you mind getting out of the way? I’m trying to finish packing.”

“You should have done it last night like Mum told you to,” Rosie said, poking her tongue out at me and then scooting from the room before I could whack her with a pillow.

No thanks to Rosie, I just about managed to finish before the taxi came to take us to the airport. The flight to the Outer Hebrides took three hours, including a quick stopover at Glasgow, and when we stepped out of the airport at the other end I couldn’t believe how much colder it was. It had been a sunny twenty-five degrees back in London, but here it was barely fifteen, and the sky was choked with thick grey clouds. 23

I flagged down a taxi and asked the driver to take us to the town. We were staying the night in a youth hostel before catching a boat the next morning. Rosie and I spent a very boring hour walking round the quiet little town and then headed back to the hostel for the rest of the afternoon. We had dinner in the canteen and hung out in the lounge for a while, playing table football. After a while, Rosie called it a night and went upstairs. I promised I’d be right behind her, but first I wandered into the small library, intending to take a look at the lighthouse photos I’d spotted from the doorway earlier.

Only there was someone already there, standing before the photos with his back to me – a tall blond man. He made a sound, which I thought was a snort of laughter at first, but then realized it was a sob. His shoulders were actually shaking. I froze, wondering whether I should ask if he needed any help, or if that would just be weird…

Before I could decide, a boy about my age walked in from the side entrance. I couldn’t help noticing that he was very good-looking, with fair, windswept hair and grey eyes. He didn’t see me – his gaze went straight to the man, and he hurried over. I guessed 24at once they must be father and son because they looked so alike.

“Dad,” he said softly, reaching out a hand. “Can I—”

I was shocked when the older man practically smacked the boy’s hand away. “You’ve done enough,” he snarled.

Now that the older man had turned, I could see the tears on his cheeks and that his eyes were bloodshot.

“Let’s get one thing straight,” he said, his voice shaking slightly. “I’m only here because your mother begged me to come with you. It’s breaking her heart that you’re set on this, so I’m here for her sake, not yours. If you cared about her at all, you’d be at home right now.” A pleading tone came into his voice. “We could leave tonight and be back in time for breakfast. It’s not too late.”

A carefully blank look came over the boy’s face, and suddenly there was a coolness in his grey eyes, but his voice was calm as he slowly shook his head. “It is too late.”

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