Break-in aside, I was intrigued by the Longing. As an artist, two of my favourite things were shadows and curved angles, and this place had both in spades. The shadows seemed alive, like the wings of a giant bird stirred by our presence. It was creepy, yes, but also elegant – I loved how the staircase whirled upward in increasingly narrower circles within the cylinder of the structure, how the lack of right angles gave every small edge extra significance, how the architecture drew my gaze upward.

‘Has the lighthouse ever been submerged?’ I asked. I could hear wind pummelling the stone walls, the loud suck and slap of the waves close by.

‘We get our fair share of storms,’ Isla said, and I could tell she was choosing her words carefully so as not to put me off. ‘But the Longing has been standing for a hundred years amidst all that Mother Nature and the sea gods have to throw at her, and I daresay she’ll stand a hundred more.’ A pause. ‘So long as you keep rowan on the door, you’ll be fine.’

It was as she said this that I felt a wave of déjà vu pass over me. Saffy, Luna, and Isla were beginning to head towards the door to leave, but the feeling of familiarity was so strong that I paused, as though someone had spoken and I was trying to understand what they’d said.

‘Liv?’ Saffy said from behind. I turned all the way around, moved by absolute certainty that something was in the corner by the stairs, just underneath it, as though I’d left it there.

‘Everything all right?’ Isla said as I sloshed through the oily water to the staircase. Her torchlight fell upon something floating on the black water ahead of me. The slender white limb of a baby’s corpse.

Luna gave a scream that bounced off the surfaces of the lighthouse.

‘What is it?’ Isla said, rushing forward.

Luna was still shrieking, clawing at me and crying, ‘No! No!’ She turned to rush out, and I grabbed her, reaching down with my free hand to scoop the little body out of the filthy water.

It wasn’t a baby. It was only a doll, one of those naked newborn dolls that Clover liked to play with.

As I looked down into the grotesque face of that doll, its eyes blacked out with felt tip, adrenaline flashed brightly through my body. I had known it was a doll. I had known it was there before I saw it, and that we’d mistake it for a dead child. Like a memory.

But that was ridiculous. I had never been there before.

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