he kept his fingers just above the scars to keep from touching them. Joe gave him the deck of cards to deal.
Voices came from upstairs again. Joe stared at the ceiling. He looked down when Kite shuffled the cards, flicking two piles of them together with a zingy clatter. His eyes were on Joe, though, full of the silent recommendation to ignore whatever was happening upstairs. Joe settled down next to him, back to the wall, and arranged some matches into a pyramid.
Not long after that, the voices faded and left only the sound of the wind in the rocks and the sparse gorse, which made it whistle in a way that sounded morning-like, because it was just the pitch a kettle hit on the very edge of singing.
Joe fell asleep so quickly he was unaware of having done it. When he came to in the night to find himself alone in the blankets, it was disorientating, and he sat up trying to remember if the memory of the man in the water might only have been an over-hopeful epilepsy construction. But he heard voices again, then quiet steps on the stairs. When Kite slipped back in, Joe had a roll of sadness.
‘You’re a ghost too, aren’t you?’
Kite knelt down next to him. ‘Yes and no,’ he said. ‘Can I tell you in the morning?’
Joe agreed and sank back to sleep, thinking unhappily that whatever kind of ghost he was, he was at least a polite one.
12
Someone shook his shoulder. Joe opened his eyes.
‘What’s wrong?’ he said softly. It was still dark and at first he thought it must be the middle of the night before he remembered that it was almost always night here. There was a lamp close to him, and dense shadows among the living-room furniture, warped strangely on the curving walls.
‘It’s morning. The ice is solid. We can go.’
‘What?’
‘It’s six o’clock,’ Kite tried again.
‘You’re joking.’
‘No?’
Joe laughed, high with shock. ‘I haven’t slept properly for years. I’m taking you home with me, you’re medicinal. All right, let’s find some gear. There’s a cupboard by the front door.’ He paused halfway to the door, because he had a half-memory of waking in the night and feeling sad, but it was so brief that he was sure it must have been a dream.
After the wind in the night, the dark morning felt unnaturally still. There was no noise except the ice creaking. Sea spray had frozen on the stone jetty and on the steps, so getting down onto the ice took a fraught ten minutes.
Because the tower was so high above them on its rock, the light from the arc lamp cast the ice immediately on the shore into deep shade in a black hem all around the island. They had to walk through it for a good hundred feet before they reached the edge, where the light began to wink on the ice. Emerging from the island’s shadow, their own shadows were distorted and mutant, like those gigantic carnival puppets at Mardi Gras.
Joe looked up when Kite pointed him more to the left.
‘We have to take you back through the pillars.’ He spoke quietly, as though there were someone close by, listening for them.
Confused, Joe looked round. The deep red strip from the lighthouse’s stained lens traced an eerie, bloody road. A long way out of their way. ‘What? I know they’re interesting but I don’t want to be out here for any longer than—’
‘You sailed through them on the way here?’
‘Yes?’
Kite nodded. ‘If you don’t go back through them, the harbour won’t be the one you left.’
Joe slowed down. ‘What?’
Kite’s green eyes ticked over him and again they put Joe in mind of a hesitant wolf. ‘I can’t explain, I have to show you.’
It hadn’t been a dream, in the night. He had woken up and Kite had said he was a ghost. He could remember now.
He had been walking all this way with a ghost.
A kind ghost, though. He swallowed and nodded, and followed him towards the pillars.
‘Look at the land through them,’ Kite said, ‘and then look to either side of them.’
The ice was the same, the cold the same, the snow moving on the wind, but the harbour lights were different. There were fewer.
Lights that were there to the left and right of the pillars disappeared if he looked between them instead. It was like closing one eye and then the other and watching your finger move without moving. He did it standing exactly