I wonder if the place is as inhospitable as it looks in the photos. Most of the search results were about its rugged scenery and wildlife, or its history. The island has been a site of holy pilgrimage since the fifth century and there are meant to be thousands of saints buried there. Some claim it’s the site of Avalon, where King Arthur was taken after he died, and there was something about Merlin being trapped in a cave or glass tower. I came across so many peculiar stories that I began to feel unsettled and had to stop reading.

Tom taps rhythmically on the steering wheel and does a little shimmy with his shoulders, presumably singing in his head and making up the moves as he goes with Tay-Tay. I wish I could shake it off too, but I can’t. Today has left me feeling so unsettled; maybe talking it over with Tom would help me to make sense of it all?

I press my cheek to the cold window, my pulse beating in time with the windscreen wipers. No. I’ve confided in people before, like the social worker who said she had my best interests at heart, and I’m not going to make the same mistake. As a child, I used to fantasise that my mum would burst through the doors of whichever care home I was living in at the time. She’d say there had been a terrible mistake and take me away to live with her and my many sisters, who I would love and share all of my secrets with. Over the years, I got used to being alone, the way you do when you have no choice. And then I met Katie … I take a deep breath, refusing to think about what happened. The truth is that I haven’t had a proper friend since her, and I don’t think I ever will again.

The rain is coming down harder now. Tom leans forward and frowns at the road, the wipers squeaking in protest as they speed back and forth. I watch him, unused to seeing him so intensely focused, and then my gaze drifts back to the landscape outside. A patchwork of fields, rolling hills and woodland flashes by in a blur of green and brown, their vivid autumn colours dulled by the rain. With the swish-swipe of the windscreen wipers and the slosh of the road, it isn’t long before tiredness gets the better of me. I close my eyes and feel myself begin to drift when I hear a voice on the edge of my consciousness. Tom whispers, ‘Maybe when you wake up, you’ll tell me why I’m taking you to the arse-end of nowhere.’

Sleep wraps around me and pulls me under and I let myself be taken. I’m held within a vast darkness, cocooned in silence for the longest time – and then I’m somewhere else, called to a place veiled in white mist.

The swirling strands of vapour pull apart to reveal a gleaming tower. It stands defiant against a storm-ravaged sky, lashed by wind and lightning: impenetrable, unknowable, terrible. Something unspeakable is waiting for me within its walls, something strange and sinister and not of this world.