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Contents (57)
  1. Prologue
  2. One
  3. Two
  4. Three
  5. Four
  6. Five
  7. Six
  8. Seven
  9. Eight
  10. Nine
  11. Ten
  12. Eleven
  13. Twelve
  14. Thirteen
  15. Fourteen
  16. Fifteen
  17. Sixteen
  18. Seventeen
  19. Eighteen
  20. Nineteen
  21. Twenty
  22. Twenty-One
  23. Twenty-Two
  24. Twenty-Three
  25. Twenty-Four
  26. Twenty-Five
  27. Twenty-Six
  28. Twenty-Seven
  29. Twenty-Eight
  30. Twenty-Nine
  31. Thirty
  32. Thirty-One
  33. Thirty-Two
  34. Thirty-Three
  35. Thirty-Four
  36. Thirty-Five
  37. Thirty-Six
  38. Thirty-Seven
  39. Thirty-Eight
  40. Thirty-Nine
  41. Forty
  42. Forty-One
  43. Forty-Two
  44. Forty-Three
  45. Forty-Four
  46. Forty-Five
  47. Forty-Six
  48. Forty-Seven
  49. Forty-Eight
  50. Forty-Nine
  51. Fifty
  52. Fifty-One
  53. Fifty-Two
  54. Fifty-Three
  55. Acknowledgements
  56. About the Author
  57. Also by Sharon Gosling

She stood on tiptoe and saw that there was a set of wooden steps folded away inside the hatch. Pulling on the closest rung persuaded another mechanism into action. Rachel jumped off the chair, moving it out of the way as the stepladder descended of its own accord. She hesitated, looking up at the hatch overhead. The void above her was very dark. She could feel a chill spreading down into her room from the attic, like ink dropped into water. There was no light at all.

Rachel retrieved the LED storm lamp she’d kept under her bed since the first time she’d experienced a power cut in the lighthouse. It shone with a cold white-blue glow as she turned it on. Then she took a deep breath and went up the ladder. She’d opened the can, after all, she may as well face whatever worms were inside.

When she reached the top of the ladder, Rachel put the lamp down on the floor of the attic but remained on the steps, looking around the domed space. The small room was empty aside from a circular table right at its centre. Rachel stilled for a moment, listening, but there was no sound of animal scrabbling. The floorboards were bare, coated with dust. She felt the grit of it under her palms as she climbed the rest of the way into the room on her hands and knees.

There was more space up here than she had expected. The table took up a good portion of the room, leaving just enough space for a person to walk around it. It was made of meticulously polished white marble that reflected her lamp’s artificial light like a huge moon. Around its edge was a smooth wooden rail. Rachel put out a tentative hand to grip it and found that it moved – it was meant to rotate. To her surprise it lifted, too, sliding up and down several inches. As she bent to look beneath the table, she saw that shelves had been slotted under the lowest point of its descent to make the most of the room’s limited space. Each was crammed with rolls and sheaves of paper, leather-bound books, ink bottles and pens.

Above her the dome extended higher than she would have expected, culminating in a very small skylight. There were two long, thin metal handles that connected to a hinge at the apex. These were obviously meant to make it easy for someone to open it from the floor, and Rachel reached for it, wondering whether the mechanism still worked. She pulled the handle and a small aperture in the roof opened above her head. There was glass, but she realized then that it was far too small to be a skylight, besides which it was tilted at a strange angle. Rachel stared up at it, trying to work out what she was looking at, until she became aware that there was something behind her, a new brightness that had not been there before.