the bedroom, the voices were talking again. He didn’t make a sound this time, only listened. They were laughing. He could smell smoke now. The grate was dead.
Something smashed right next to him. There was nothing there, not a solitary shard of glass.
He thunked the door shut after him and locked it. Silence came down on the other side again. Then, very quietly, scratching. Someone was sweeping up the glass that wasn’t there.
Not knowing where he meant to go except that it had to be outside, he pulled on a heavy coat that the last keepers had left behind, and set out onto the path again, down through the rocks towards the stairs and the sea.
11
Joe found a rock and sat there until the cold got into his joints. The tideline was full of lacy frost where foam had frozen along the sand. Rather than splashing, stray water drops clicked.
There were no voices here, only seagulls. It could only have been two in the afternoon, but it was full dark again already, with the ghost of the aurora above the horizon. The lighthouse lamp cut through the thickening night and shone on the sea. There was nothing else here but a few isolated rocks where nothing grew. The red strip drew a line straight between the pillars.
He had brought the notebook out. He went back over the measurements and the sketches he had done to go with them, expecting an obvious mistake. He couldn’t find one.
No wonder the whalers had been uneasy about bringing him.
He was still too nervous to go back inside. He drew a little ghost on the corner of a page.
He caught the shape of a man in the water a while before he understood that it was a real man and not an illusion. The sea rolled in with a splintering of fine ice, and there was nothing.
The man surfaced and caught the edge of a rock. He lost his grip as the tide swelled again but, rather than struggle, he let himself spin. He must have been too tired to fight. Joe slid down to the edge of the rocks, balancing in the places where there was lichen instead of seaweed. He had never seen anyone swim before, or even float. He didn’t know what he’d expected it to look like, but not like this. It was strange, and not quite human.
Then he came back to his senses. The water was freezing, literally freezing; he had no idea how long a person could last in temperatures like that, but it could only have been minutes.
‘Hey – here.’ He caught the man’s arm. ‘Get out, come on. Are you all right? I didn’t see a shipwreck or I’d have come down straight away …’
The man stared at Joe’s hand, then looked up slowly. If he had been a murderer and Joe had banged down in an eddy of feathers and smoke, he couldn’t have looked more hopeless. The light painted cinders in his eyes.
‘I’m a mechanic,’ Joe explained quickly, in English. If all the whalers and the people in Aird Uig had been nervous about the lighthouse because it was haunted, it was reasonable for a shipwrecked sailor to imagine he’d just been snatched by a ghost. ‘I came to fix the lighthouse, it’s all right. Come on, let’s get you out—’
The man wrenched his arm away. He was still looking at Joe as though he much preferred to freeze to death than climb out on to the island.
Joe wanted to just haul him out, but he didn’t think he was strong enough, or sure enough of his footing. ‘Look, are you a selkie?’ he tried.
‘No,’ the man said, and it was a relief to hear that he understood and spoke. English too.
‘Then please come up now, you’re going to die.’
Joe had an itchy, wrong feeling that he was about to change his mind and disappear under the water again. In someone’s drawing room, being polite over fine china, the man would have been ugly. There were burn scars down one side of his neck and around his eye. He had turned his head away from an explosion just out of time. In the sea, he was different, and however damaged, he didn’t seem so much like a man as something else that only happened to be a similar shape, and perhaps one that belonged more in saltwater than on the land, but he let Joe help him out.