“Or what?” I demand. I glance at the en suite bathroom, calculating my odds of getting in there and locking the door—if it has a lock?—and he smiles at me.

“Ailsa,” he says, shaking his head. The golden lamplight moves across his face and back as he does so. “You’re smarter than that.” He frowns a little. “I expected to have to gie you some time to adjust, but even so, you’re disappointing me. I didnae want to do this.” He reaches into the empty tote bag—the almost empty tote bag—all the while keeping his eyes on me, and pulls out something long and dark and metallic.

Dear God, he has a shotgun.

Adrenaline races across my skin in an electric wave. “Jamie, you don’t—”

“Dinnae presume to ken what I want to do. Shut it and get on that bed.”

I sit down on the bed, hard, then awkwardly lower myself onto my back, trying not to disturb the bones in the center, but my weight spills them toward me. I want to close my eyes, but I daren’t look away from Jamie. “That’s right,” he says encouragingly, the shotgun held casually in one hand. He seems very relaxed with it; I can’t imagine he wouldn’t know how to use it. I know absolutely nothing about guns. I can’t tell if it would shower me with pellets or blow me in half. Is it even cocked? How would I know? He leans over me and adjusts the skeleton; I can feel him placing some of the bones into a macabre embrace of my torso. A wave of extreme revulsion hits me, like the feeling I had with the fly carcasses, only one thousand times magnified. “Now, aye, that’s it . . . Now, turn your head.” I start to tremble uncontrollably, straining my face away from the bones. “The other way.”

I turn my head back to find that the skull is mere millimeters from my face. My own nose is almost in the gaping nasal cavity. There’s a roaring in my ears. My head is blocking most of the lamplight, but for a moment I think I see something moving within the eye socket, something glistening and white, wriggling and writhing like the larvae from the broken branch, and then I can’t help it: the roaring increases and the panic breaks through and I can hear myself start to keen in terror. And Jamie starts to laugh.

My father is waiting for me. I thought it was the other way round.

TWENTY-THREE

Breathe. And again. And again. Slowly the roaring recedes.

Oddly, it’s Jamie’s laughter that brings me back to myself. The skeleton is not the horror here. That skeleton is my father; he would not and could not hurt me. The horror is Jamie. There is nothing writhing in the skull. These bones can’t hurt me. They are just bones.