The Dead Sector

I worked as a commercial electrician for Mitie Engineering in Southampton. Most of the time that meant office blocks, retail parks, perhaps a hospital if we bid low enough. Clean distribution boards, compliant containment, nothing more than twenty years old. I took side jobs when I needed the money and when someone else needed the kind of work ordinary contractors walked away from.

Old buildings, poor documentation, wiring that had not been touched since before anyone thought to label an isolation switch. In late August, Helen Pritchard rang me about Portland Bill Lighthouse. She said the beacon was developing nuisance faults on humid mornings. The public stair lights flickered between landings.

She said the museum wanted everything stable before the autumn half-term evening tours and Halloween events brought heavier crowds. She made it sound straightforward. Electrical fault-finding, some panel cleaning, perhaps a few replacement fittings. Three weeks, she said.

It paid better than anything Mitie Engineering had for me that month. I said yes because I needed the work.

On Monday morning I drove from Southampton to the Isle of Portland with my meter and tool bag. Portland Bill Road crossed the exposed limestone plateau towards the lighthouse, with the sea and the broken water of Portland Race visible beyond. The tower stood near the end of the road, a white stone lighthouse with red trim, approximately 41 metres high and still serving as an active aid to navigation.

The museum had grown around it over the years: the former keeper's quarters, the visitor centre, exhibition rooms and shop. But the tower was why anyone came.

Helen met me in the former keeper's quarters. She was perhaps in her mid-forties, with auburn hair clipped back, a museum polo shirt and a radio on her belt. She shook my hand and walked me through the visitor centre while I signed the contract paperwork as Daniel Mercer.

"Tourists ask about the Quarry Girls constantly," she said.

The 1874 drowning. Three daughters of the resident works foreman had been playing on a construction tram when a cart ran into a flooded excavation beside the unfinished tower. I nodded. I had heard the story vaguely, the way you heard about any old tragedy attached to a landmark.

"The guides lean into it," Helen said. "Ticket sales matter. But don't joke about hauntings in front of Miriam Vale. Miriam treats the tower as a preservation site first and a visitor attraction second."

"Understood."

"Good."

She handed me a visitor badge and a coded pass for the service doors.

"Miriam wants to meet you before you open anything."

Miriam Vale was waiting in the lantern room when we climbed the stairs. She was tall and lean, with iron-grey hair cut in a precise bob. She wore dark trousers and a linen blouse rather than a museum polo shirt.

She looked at me the way people looked at contractors when they were already expecting a problem.

"Mr Mercer," she said. "Helen tells me you have experience with historic systems."

"Some."

"Good. One instruction before you begin."

She gestured towards the massive Fresnel lens filling the centre of the lantern room.

"You are not to remove the black canvas sleeve fastened around the cracked section. It is a conservation measure, not part of your electrical scope."

I looked where she pointed. The first-order Fresnel optic sat in a brass frame, its stacked glass prisms designed to throw a beam visible for roughly eighteen nautical miles. Most of it gleamed beneath the lantern-room lights, but a narrow vertical prism had been wrapped tightly in a black canvas sleeve.

There was a brass clamp at the top and a modern tamper tag. Beneath them, a brittle strip of blackened leather looked older than anything else in the room.

"Understood," I said.

Miriam left. Helen stayed while I began the inspection. I walked slowly around the lens, checking the wiring feeding the lamp assembly. The sleeve bothered me.

It covered only one prism, perhaps 15 centimetres wide, not the sort of area you would protect if an entire section were damaged. Conservation work usually meant sealing the affected area properly or replacing the glass. This looked as though someone had wrapped one narrow crack and declared the job finished.

I crouched to inspect the sleeve's lower edge. Condensation beaded inside the covered prism, though the lantern room was climate-controlled and the rest of the optic was dry. The moisture formed patterns: tiny handprints low on the glass, where no visiting child could reach unless they crawled beneath the brass frame.

"Probably a guide's prank," Helen said behind me. "That old lens makes everyone see things if they stare at it too long."

I did not argue. I stood and moved to the beacon control panel.

The meter work took an hour. I clipped my leads to the main feed and watched the load. The lamp was off because it was daylight, but the circuit was still drawing power. Not much, only 0.3 amps, but it spiked every 57 seconds, regular as a metronome, for just long enough to upset the humidity monitor before falling back to standby.

It was too regular to be a short and too brief to be an ordinary fault. It looked as though the system were doing something deliberately.

I wrote the timing in my notes and worked my way down the tower.

The junction box was halfway between the lantern room and the base, inside a sealed alcove on the seventh landing. I opened it and found salt corrosion within. White crust lay thick enough to bridge two terminals. The conduit was sealed. There was no route for outside air and no reason for salt to be there at all.

Owen Harker came up the stairs while I was scraping the terminals clean. He was a big man with broad shoulders, wearing a navy security uniform and a security belt. He carried a clipboard and a replacement lamp for one of the landing fittings.

"Camera skipped again," he said. "Same as last time."

"When?"

"This morning. Twice. Always cheap equipment in old buildings. One frame drops, visitors complain and somehow I get blamed."

"When does it drop?"

He checked his clipboard.

"Right when the beacon system hiccups, as far as I can tell."

I looked at my notes. Fifty-seven seconds. The beacon spike, the camera loss and the sealed box full of salt all pointed towards the same part of the tower.

I did not believe in ghosts. I did not believe the lighthouse was haunted, or that condensation formed handprints, or that salt grew inside sealed conduit for supernatural reasons. But I could not explain what I was seeing, and that bothered me more than Helen's stories about the guides.

I closed the junction box and checked my meter. The beacon circuit spiked again.

Fifty-seven seconds exactly.

The Channel squall came in quickly from the south-west, the sort that turned the water around Portland Bill grey and sent tour groups hurrying back to their cars. It had been a humid August spell, and the sudden weather pressed against the lantern glass as though the whole sea had risen to meet it.

I was alone in the lantern room when the museum radioed to say the tower was closed until the squall passed. That suited me. I had the photocell relay out on the floor and three test leads clipped to terminals installed with the modern electronic controls.

The beacon motor was isolated at the panel in front of me. I had operated the isolation switch myself an hour earlier. The Fresnel optic should not have moved and the lamp should not have fired until I restored the supply.

The click came from behind me.

I turned.

The first-order lens had shifted one notch. The immense glass assembly rested in its brass cradle as though it had been waiting for me to look away.

I checked the panel. The isolation remained in place. The motor leads were disconnected. There was no mechanical route from any switch in the lantern room to the drive mechanism, yet the lens had moved.

The black canvas sleeve had loosened along its lower edge. It had not torn or been cut. It simply hung loose, as though someone had worked the brass clamp from within. A sliver of cracked prism showed beneath the fabric, no wider than my thumb. I expected light to pass through it as it did through every other section of the optic.

Instead, a wedge of absolute darkness slid across the lantern-room wall.

Its edge was crisp enough to cut the paint, and it moved opposite to the grey storm light outside. Where the afternoon should have filled the room, the black wedge erased a strip of it and left nothing behind.

It crossed the open hatch above the stairs.

I heard splashing below.

My first thought was a roof leak. The tower was old. The flashing around the lantern gallery had been patched in half a dozen places, and hard rain could run down the inner masonry and collect on the iron treads.

I stepped to the hatch and called down.

"The tower is closed. If someone is down there, answer me."

No one did.

Then I heard a child coughing water from her lungs.

The sound came from three landings below, wet and desperate. It was the kind of cough that followed breathing liquid instead of air.

I grabbed my torch and started down the iron stairs. I moved quickly because, if a child had slipped past the closure sign and hurt herself, I had perhaps ninety seconds before Helen's radio began asking questions I could not answer.

Wet footprints descended ahead of me. They were small, a child's bare feet, each clear enough to show five toes. Grey sand and strands of weed lay within them, as if someone had walked straight out of the tidal water around Portland Bill and climbed the tower without stopping to dry.

The water was darker than rain. The footprints left streaks.

I kept calling.

"The tower's closed. You need to come back up."

There was no answer, only the wet prints leading down.

I followed them through the seventh landing, past the museum display about the original nineteenth-century lamp, and down to the fifth. They did not fade. If anything, they grew wetter, as though whoever made them were shedding more water with every step.

On the fourth landing I stopped, because the coughing had stopped as well.

That was worse than hearing it.

The footprints ended beside a museum panel about the 1874 construction accident. I passed it several times each working day. It explained how a temporary narrow-gauge tram had carried materials from the Portland stone workings towards the tower, and how three girls drowned when a construction cart ran off the track into a flooded excavation before anyone could stop it.

The panel included an illustration of the unfinished site, the children's names and a brass plaque asking visitors to respect the memory of the dead.

The last footprint lay directly beneath the plaque.

I searched for the child. I checked the stairwell above and below, then opened a narrow access door leading into the space beside the inner masonry, thinking she might have panicked and hidden there.

Nothing. No child. No open window. No puddle large enough to account for the trail.

Then I saw the handprint.

It appeared on the painted wall beneath the panel, small and pale, pressed outwards from inside the plaster. The fingers spread. The palm flattened.

For one second it pushed against the surface as though the wall had become water. Then the print sank back and vanished as the plaster hardened again.

I did not wait to see whether it returned.

I ran upstairs, taking the iron treads two at a time, because the incident had begun when the sleeve loosened. If the prism remained exposed, I had to cover it before something worse than wet footprints came through.

My boots struck every landing hard enough to ring the old iron. By the time I reached the lantern room, my chest was tight and my hands were shaking.

The black sleeve sat tightly around the prism again. The brass clamp looked properly seated. The exposed sliver of cracked glass had disappeared beneath fabric that no longer seemed to have moved at all.

I checked the beacon circuit with my meter.

No draw. No spike.

The photocell relay remained on the floor where I had left it. My test leads were still attached and the motor was still isolated at the panel.

I stood there catching my breath, staring at the sleeve and searching for a mechanical explanation for a lens that moved by itself and a cover that tightened without being touched.

There was none.

I followed Helen down the stairs and out to the former keeper's quarters. My hands were still trembling, so I pushed them into my pockets before she noticed.

The wet footprints had ended three landings below the place where I first heard the coughing. I kept thinking about the palm pressing through the wall, flattening as though something beneath the surface were trying to break through.

Helen went directly to the security office. Owen was already there, leaning over the monitor desk with his radio turned down. He looked up when we entered.

"How many people came through after we closed?" Helen asked.

Owen opened the entrance log on his computer.

"Nobody. I locked the tower door myself at 14:15, just after the weather warning came through."

"Check it again."

He scrolled through the list.

"Museum staff only. You, Miriam and me. Daniel Mercer signed in this morning, but he's a contractor, not a visitor."

Helen rubbed her forehead.

"Any children in the building before closure?"

"Two families on the grounds tour. Both left before the rain began."

Owen glanced at me.

"Why?"

"Can you pull up the tower CCTV?" I asked.

Owen turned his chair and opened the recorder archive. Four fixed cameras covered the tower, one every third landing, each angled towards the stairs and nearest windows. He searched the footage from 14:30 to 15:15, when I had been working above. The timestamps passed in silence.

Every camera showed me alone.

I watched myself pass the second camera, stop at the third and then run back towards the lantern room. The stairs were dry. There were no footprints and no small figure descending ahead of me.

"There," I said. "Go back to 14:58."

Owen reversed the footage and played it again. I stood on the landing beside the accident panel, looking down at the floor. My head moved as though I were tracking something.

At 14:58:12, the video skipped.

One frame was missing, clean as a splice. When the picture resumed, I was crouching low and touching the wall.

"Camera fault," Owen said.

"Check the other angles."

He opened the second and fourth recordings. Both lost a single frame at 14:58:12. The same instant was absent from each view, and the stairs were empty when the footage resumed.

Helen leaned against the desk.

"That's the interval you wrote down earlier."

"The beacon draw," I said.

I nodded. At each 57-second pulse, all three recordings lost a frame. I had been standing in the middle of whatever the beacon was doing when the lens moved by itself.

"Equipment problem," Owen said, though he did not sound convinced. "Cheap recorder, power fluctuation, something like that."

"Three cameras," I said. "The same frame."

"Then it's the timestamp server."

Helen looked at me.

"What did you see up there?"

I told her. Wet footprints containing sand and weed. A child's cough. A handprint pushing from within the wall.

She listened without interruption. When I had finished, she turned to Owen.

"Don't put this in the incident log."

"Helen."

"I mean it. Write that Daniel heard a noise during the squall and checked the stairs. That's all."

Owen looked at me and then back at her.

"He just told you he saw footprints and a hand coming through the wall."

"I know what he told me."

Helen's voice went flat.

"And I know what Miriam will say if we submit a report about ghost children during bad weather. She'll cancel the contract and we'll be repairing these lights ourselves by half-term."

I kept quiet. Owen copied the footage to a backup drive and closed the archive without another word.

Helen thanked him and walked out. I followed her across the grounds towards the car park, where my work van stood in the contractor's space.

"You don't believe me," I said.

She stopped.

"I didn't say that."

"You told Owen to bury it."

"I told Owen to write a report Miriam won't sack us over."

She looked back at the tower.

"This place has a reputation. Visitors love it. The guides tell stories. If we start recording wet footprints and hands in walls in the maintenance logs, Miriam will think we're trying to sell tickets instead of doing our jobs."

"What about the cameras?"

"Power fluctuation. It happens in summer."

"Helen."

She met my eyes.

"What do you want me to say? That I believe you saw something? Fine. I believe you. I also believe Miriam will get rid of both of us if we turn this into a ghost story, and I need this job."

I let it go. She was right about Miriam, and I had no argument that would not sound mad.

I told Helen I would return on Thursday to finish work on the humidity sensor. She said that was fine, then went inside while I drove back to Southampton.

On Thursday morning I returned with a megohmmeter and a new voltage tester. The beacon faults were still intermittent, but the humidity monitor had begun reporting an error whenever the tower temperature fell below 26 C. Something in the environmental-control loop was failing.

I signed in at the former keeper's quarters as Daniel Mercer, collected my tools and climbed to the mid-tower junction box where I had found the salt corrosion on Monday.

When I opened it, I stopped.

The corrosion had grown. White crust now covered both terminals, thick enough to bridge the gap between them. It had spread down the conduit threads like frost.

I scraped it away with a flat-bladed screwdriver. It broke off in dry, weightless lumps. The copper beneath was black.

Then I saw the water.

It seeped from inside the wire insulation rather than entering from outside the box. Black water, the same colour as the seawater I had seen on the stairs, ran along the conductor in a thin line and dripped on to my glove.

I snatched my hand away. The water was colder than the climate-controlled air and left a grey stain on the rubber.

I heard footsteps below.

Arthur Keene climbed the stairs carrying a cardboard carton of replacement lamps for the lower exhibition rooms. He was in his late sixties, wiry and weathered, with a faded Trinity House cap and an old anchor tattoo on one forearm. He had once worked as a Trinity House technician and now volunteered on the lighthouse maintenance team.

He saw the open junction box and stopped on the landing beneath me.

"You're still working on that circuit," he said.

"Yes."

He climbed the remaining steps and examined the wire in my hand. Another drop of black water formed and fell. Arthur set the carton down carefully.

"Stop working on it until Miriam admits what the covered prism is."

I wiped my glove on a rag.

"What does the prism have to do with this?"

"The old keepers called it the dead sector."

Arthur's voice was flat, the way people spoke when repeating something they had said before and nobody had believed.

"Every lighthouse has blind sectors, places the beam doesn't reach. But Portland Bill's dead sector looks back at whatever stands inside it."

He nodded towards the junction box.

"That salt has been growing inside this tower since before the modern controls went in. Maintenance clears it and it comes back. Do you know why?"

I did not answer.

"Because it isn't coming from outside," Arthur said. "It's coming from inside the lens. From the water they keep covered up there."

I thought of the condensation within the prism, the tiny handprints and the wet trail left during the squall.

"What water?"

Arthur studied me for a long moment.

"If that black sleeve ever comes off while the lens is moving, nobody stands between the prism and the stairs. Do you hear me?"

Before I could ask what he meant, quicker footsteps echoed from below. Miriam came round the curve of the staircase and stopped when she saw us.

"Arthur," she said. "Downstairs."

Arthur picked up his carton and did not look at me again. He passed Miriam without a word.

She waited until his footsteps had faded, then climbed to my landing. Her gaze moved from the open junction box to the scraped corrosion and the black stain on my glove.

"What did he tell you?"

"That I should stop working on the circuit."

"And?"

"Something about a dead sector."

Miriam's jaw tightened.

"If you encourage his stories, I'll cancel the contract. Do you understand?"

I held up the wire.

"This is leaking black water from inside the insulation. That isn't a story."

She looked at the wire and then into the junction box. For several seconds she said nothing. Then she crouched beside it and ran one finger along the conduit threads where the salt had spread.

"We have maintenance notes going back decades that mention unexplained salt intrusion," she said quietly. "But they're contaminated by ghost-tour nonsense and useless as technical records."

"Contaminated how?"

"Keepers writing that the tower was haunted. Guides claiming they heard children laughing. Volunteers resigning after night shifts."

She stood.

"This is a historic structure with old wiring, poor ventilation and an optic that has been in service for well over a century. Salt intrusion happens. Corrosion happens. If you cannot separate the maintenance problem from the folklore, I need someone who can."

I capped the wire and closed the junction box.

"I can separate them."

"Good."

She took a folded work authorisation from her pocket and added a note.

"Trinity House contacted us this morning. Mariners in the approaches off Portland Bill have reported an intermittent lighthouse characteristic to HM Coastguard. Trinity House wants the beacon tested before the weekend."

"When?"

"Tomorrow morning. A 04:45 pre-dawn test."

She handed me the authorisation. The rate she had written was fifty per cent above my original contract.

"The beacon must complete a full rotation while it is dark enough for Trinity House engineers to observe it from the water. I need you in the lantern room before dawn to monitor the electrical load during the test."

I examined the authorisation. She had circled the start time twice.

"Just monitoring?"

"Just monitoring."

Miriam folded her arms.

"Unless you would rather I called someone else."

I thought about Arthur's warning, the black sleeve, the moving lens and the stairwell. Then I remembered that the beacon was an active aid to navigation. If the light failed, vessels could end up on the rocks.

"I'll be here," I said.

Miriam took back the authorisation, signed it and wrote the higher rate again at the bottom. She circled the pre-dawn start time once more, as though determined to make certain I understood exactly when I was expected.

I arrived at 04:45. Lights were already on in the former keeper's quarters.

Miriam Vale stood near the door with a canvas tool bag in one hand and her museum badge clipped to a freshly pressed linen shirt. Owen Harker leaned against the counter with his arms folded. His security uniform looked as though he had pressed it twice.

Helen Pritchard sat at the small desk in the corner, her back to the window, staring at her hands.

Nobody looked towards the tower.

"Good morning," Miriam said. "We'll go up together."

I set my tool bag on the floor.

"You said one test rotation."

"That's correct."

"And then I reseat the sleeve."

"Yes."

Helen shifted in her chair but did not turn. I noticed how carefully she avoided the window and how rigidly she held her shoulders. This was not routine for her.

Miriam lifted her tool bag and opened it just far enough for me to see inside. It held a prepared replacement cover made from new black marine canvas, a coil of brass wire and a padlock with its key still inserted.

She closed the bag.

"The original sleeve is failing," she said. "We need to determine whether heat from the lamp has worsened the crack. You'll remove the old cover, we'll run one test rotation, and then you'll fit the replacement canvas."

"Why now?"

"Because Trinity House wants the light tested after the reports made through HM Coastguard."

She placed the bag on the counter.

"Arthur's stories come from a keeper's log written in the 1930s, which confused ordinary lens maintenance with spiritualism. We are going to inspect the glass, fit a sound cover and satisfy Trinity House."

Owen pushed away from the counter.

"I'm here because Miriam asked me to be."

"Correct," Miriam said.

"And Helen?"

Helen finally turned. Her face was pale.

"I'm the facilities manager."

I looked at Miriam.

"What happens if the prism is worse than you expect?"

"We document it and arrange proper restoration."

She picked up the tool bag again.

"The beacon is active navigation equipment. A failed light is a real hazard."

That was true. I nodded.

We climbed the tower in single file: Miriam first, followed by me, then Owen, with Helen last. Nobody spoke. The stairs were dry, but the air smelled of salt and old iron. By the third landing, my shoulders had tightened in the way they did before weather came in from the Channel.

Miriam unlocked the lantern-room hatch and climbed through. I followed.

The Fresnel optic stood motionless in the grey pre-dawn light. The black sleeve was exactly where I had left it days earlier, clamped tightly around the cracked prism.

The brass clamp gleamed. The modern tamper tag hung from twisted wire. Beneath it, the old strip of blackened leather looked almost as old as the tower.

Owen came through next. Helen followed and remained beside the hatch with her back to the lens.

Miriam set her tool bag beside the brass frame and looked at me.

"Remove the original sleeve."

I took the cutters from my belt and snipped the tamper tag. The plastic dropped and clicked against the floor.

I loosened the brass clamp. The blackened leather flaked as the old sleeve shifted. Its canvas was rigid with dried salt, and white crust powdered my gloves as I worked it free.

I kept the split original sleeve in my hands. Miriam had told me to cover the prism again immediately after one test rotation, before fitting her prepared replacement canvas.

Under the sleeve, the cracked prism did not contain empty glass.

A narrow vertical pocket held dark seawater suspended within the optic without leaking. Three small objects floated in it: a wooden toy wheel, a strip of blue ribbon and a rusted nail bent into a hook.

Helen drew a sharp breath.

"Those weren't there during the last restoration."

Miriam turned.

"Stay back from the stair hatch."

"Miriam, those weren't-"

"One test rotation," Miriam said, cutting her off. "Then Daniel covers the prism."

I understood then. Miriam had expected something abnormal beneath the sleeve. She had not expected the new objects, and she had not expected anyone else to say so aloud.

The beacon clicked on before I touched the controls.

The Fresnel lens began to turn and a black beam sprang through the exposed prism.

It did not illuminate the room. It erased a strip of the present wherever it passed.

The narrow wedge of complete darkness moved opposite to the ordinary rotation, swallowing the lantern glass, the walls and the grey pre-dawn landscape outside. When it crossed a window, the visitor-centre car park vanished within the strip and a muddy construction site took its place.

Men shouted from a timber platform that no longer existed. A temporary narrow-gauge tram ran from the stone workings towards a flooded excavation beside the unfinished lighthouse. A cart rolled towards the open water.

Three girls screamed within the black light. Their voices came from above, below and inside the lens at once, layered as though they were drowning in three places simultaneously.

"Shut it off," Owen said.

I reached for the control, but the lens continued turning.

The black sector swung towards Helen.

"Move," I shouted.

She stepped back, but not quickly enough.

The beam crossed her left arm once. Her shirt sleeve became soaked instantly and her skin turned grey as far as the elbow. Raw red marks appeared around her wrist, as though hands beneath the water had seized her with strands of rope and pulled.

Helen screamed.

I thrust the salt-stiffened original sleeve over the exposed prism as she collapsed beside the stair hatch.

The lantern room snapped back.

There was no better way to describe it. One second the dead sector cut through the pre-dawn light and the muddy scene from 1874. The next, the brass frame and iron railings were solid again. The beacon motor had fallen silent and the first sunlight pressed through the salt-streaked glass.

I held the split original sleeve tightly against the prism until I was certain it would remain in place. Then I turned.

Helen lay on her side near the hatch. Her left arm stretched in front of her as though she had tried to catch herself. Her fingers were white.

The skin between her wrist and elbow was grey, the colour of something hauled from deep water. I dropped beside her and felt for a pulse at the wrist.

There was none.

I moved my hand to her throat and found one there, rapid and shallow.

"Helen."

Her eyes opened. She dragged air through her teeth and tried to pull her arm back, but it did not respond properly. The limb moved stiffly across the floor.

Owen came up beside us. He had been halfway into the stairwell when the beam crossed her, and now he crouched on her other side with his radio already in his hand.

"I'm calling it in."

"Do it."

Miriam stood against the railing with the tool bag still over her shoulder. She stared at the old sleeve as though checking that it held. She did not look at Helen until Owen spoke her name.

"Miriam, she needs a hospital."

"I know."

"Then call an ambulance."

Miriam touched her mobile but did not take it out. She looked from the covered prism to Helen and then to me. I could see her considering what the call would mean, the questions that would follow and what the paramedics would see when they reached the lantern room.

I stood.

"Call them now, or I will call 999 and explain exactly what happened up here."

Miriam took out her mobile and made the call.

Owen lifted Helen before I could offer to help. He carried her as though she weighed nothing, and the three of us descended with Miriam following.

Helen remained conscious all the way down. She kept trying to move her left hand, and every attempt caught her breath as if the effort hurt more than remaining still.

We brought her outside. The squall had passed inland, leaving the air humid and clean. A South Western Ambulance Service crew arrived in nine minutes. I counted.

Miriam stayed near the door of the former keeper's quarters, answering her mobile twice and speaking too quietly for me to hear.

When the paramedics loaded Helen into the ambulance, one asked what had happened. Miriam said there had been an accident during a lens inspection. Helen had slipped near the beacon housing and struck her arm against the brass frame.

The paramedic examined Helen's arm and frowned.

"This doesn't look like impact trauma."

"She was near the glass when it happened," Miriam said. "There may have been condensation."

"Condensation doesn't do this."

Miriam did not answer.

The paramedic entered something on his tablet, climbed into the ambulance and closed the doors.

Owen asked whether he should follow them to hospital. Miriam told him to remain at the lighthouse and secure the lantern room.

Then she looked at me.

"You should go home, Mr Mercer. I'll deal with the paperwork."

"I'm going to the hospital."

"That isn't necessary."

"I was up there when it happened. If anyone asks, I'll tell them what I saw."

Miriam's mouth tightened, but she did not argue. She drove away before the ambulance departed.

I climbed into my work van and followed the blue lights north along Portland Bill Road, across the A354 and Portland Beach Road, then on towards Dorchester.

Dorset County Hospital was a large modern complex on the edge of the town. I parked in the visitor car park and went into A&E.

Helen was in a curtained bay. I told reception I was a colleague and, after twenty minutes, they allowed me through.

Miriam was already there, standing at the foot of the bed with her arms folded. Helen was awake. Her left arm had been raised and wrapped in blankets far too thick for August.

A doctor stood beside her reading from a tablet. He looked up when I entered.

"Are you family?"

"A colleague."

"She's stable. We're treating her for localised cold-water injury and possible nerve compression, but the presentation is unusual. I'd like to keep her under observation."

"Observation for what?"

"The affected limb shows signs consistent with cold-water immersion, but her core temperature is normal. That doesn't fit any standard exposure profile."

Miriam spoke before I could.

"She was beside the lens when the beacon activated. There may have been a fault in the lamp-room cooling plant."

The doctor looked doubtful but did not press her. He added a note to the tablet and left.

Miriam watched him go, then turned to me.

"You don't need to stay, Mr Mercer."

"I'm staying until she's cleared."

Helen shifted on the bed.

"Miriam, let him stay."

Her voice was thin. Miriam did not answer. She checked her mobile and walked into the corridor.

I moved closer to the bed. Helen's left hand lay on top of the blankets. The skin remained discoloured, mottled grey and white like flesh frozen and thawed too quickly.

She saw me looking.

"It doesn't hurt any more," she said. "It just feels far away."

"What do you remember?"

"The beam passed through my arm. For a second, I wasn't in the lantern room. I was somewhere else. It was cold, and there were hands in the water."

"Hands?"

"Small ones. They caught my wrist and I couldn't pull free."

I thought about the wet footprints, the palm pushing through the wall and the sound of a girl coughing water from her lungs.

"Helen, what did Miriam tell you about that sleeve before we went up?"

She closed her eyes.

"She said it was a conservation measure. That the prism beneath it was cracked and couldn't withstand direct light. She didn't say what would happen if we removed it."

"Did anyone else warn you?"

"Peter Harrow did."

The name came out flat, as though she had been holding it back and had finally decided to release it.

"Who's Peter Harrow?"

"Miriam's predecessor. He was curator here before her, back in the 1990s. Peter warned me never to remove the sleeve. He said it plainly, and I thought he was only protecting old glass."

"When did he tell you that?"

"During my first month here, six years ago. He came to the museum for a volunteer event, and I mentioned that we were planning maintenance on the lens. He pulled me aside and said the sleeve stayed on, without exception."

"Did he say why?"

"Not then. But later someone told me Peter retired suddenly after a lens repair in 1993. People said he had lost his shadow."

I stared at her.

"Lost his shadow?"

"I know how it sounds. I thought it was a joke. One of those old lighthouse stories the guides repeat to visitors. But the way Peter looked at me when he warned me, he wasn't joking."

"What else did he say?"

"He said the sleeve wasn't there to keep the light in."

It was there to keep something from coming back through.

The blankets shifted as Helen tried to move her arm again. She winced and stopped.

"Daniel, what was that thing in the lens?"

"I don't know. Miriam does."

"Are you going to ask her?"

"Not yet."

Helen looked at me, and I could see that she understood. Miriam's story about a fault in the lamp-room cooling plant and ordinary condensation would not survive much scrutiny, but it would last long enough for the museum to bury everything beneath incident reports and insurance paperwork. If I wanted the truth, I needed evidence Miriam could not explain away.

"Where would I find records on Peter Harrow?"

"Dorset History Centre, perhaps. Or the Trinity House archive. The lighthouse was still an active aid to navigation when he worked there, so there should be maintenance records."

"Do you know where Peter is now?"

"No. He moved away after he retired. I heard he went inland, somewhere near Blandford Forum, but I don't know whether that's true."

A nurse came in to check Helen's observations. I stepped back and let her work.

Miriam returned a few minutes later, and this time she did not ask me to leave. She stood by the door with her mobile in her hand, waiting. The nurse finished and told Helen they would move her to a ward for overnight observation. Helen nodded, and the nurse left.

Miriam looked at me. "Mr Mercer, I'd like to discuss the contract."

"Not here."

"Then when?"

"When I'm done."

"Done with what?"

I did not answer. I walked past her into the corridor and kept going until I reached the lobby.

The reception desk had a bowl of visitor stickers beside the sign-in sheet, the sort printed with your name and the date. I took one, peeled off the backing and turned it over. On the back I wrote two things:

Peter Harrow. 1993.

Then I went outside, crossed the car park and climbed into my work van.

I spent the rest of Friday at Dorset History Centre in Dorchester, a county archive building with climate-controlled search rooms and local maritime collections. I told the archivist I was researching maintenance records for Portland Bill Lighthouse, which was true enough.

She brought me three cardboard cartons containing copies of keeper's journals, Trinity House forms and inspection reports dating back to the 1890s. The earliest journals were handwritten in cramped script on water-stained pages. Most of the entries were routine: wind direction, fuel consumption, lamp-trimming schedules.

Then I found a note from 1938 clipped to a lens inspection report.

The covered prism does not block light. It blocks return.

I read it twice.

The sleeve did not prevent the white beacon from shining normally. It blocked the black sector from completing its path. Whatever existed inside that prism, the sleeve stopped it reaching out.

I kept digging.

An hour later I found a maintenance form from 1952, typed on Trinity House stationery with corrections pencilled in the margins.

When the cover degrades, drowned persons visible from the tower become near enough to knock.

I thought of the wet footprints descending the iron stairs, the child's palm pressed through the plaster and the small hands floating inside the cracked prism. They had not been visions.

They had been contact.

The failing sleeve was not a historical curiosity. It was an active danger, and it was getting worse.

The phrase dead sector appeared in three separate documents. Each writer used it without explanation, as though everyone who maintained the tower already understood what it meant. I wrote the phrase on the back of the hospital visitor sticker, still stuck to my trousers, and continued searching.

One file contained an HM Coastguard incident report about Colin Marsh, a Portland fisherman recovered drowned off the Bill in 1988. He had been identified by a crescent-shaped scar beneath his left eye. The recovery notes recorded bladderwrack, shell fragments and a small shore crab lodged in his mouth.

A handwritten addition in the margin read:

Harker saw him standing below the tower after the first uncovered rotation. Marsh had been dead eleven days.

Owen had mentioned the incident during our first nights at the lighthouse, though at the time I had taken it for one of the stories guards told each other on long shifts. He had described seeing Colin beyond the visitor-centre windows, seawater streaming from his clothes and crab legs moving between his teeth. When Owen went outside, nobody was there. Only wet footprints leading towards the tower.

The 1993 report lay near the bottom of the third carton. It was one typed page, signed at the foot, with an instant photograph attached by a rusted treasury tag.

The photograph showed someone holding an old black sleeve up to the light. A human silhouette had been burned into the canvas from within, standing with both hands raised as if trying to push through.

The report was signed by Peter Harrow and witnessed by Miriam Vale, assistant curator.

I sat back and stared at her signature.

Miriam had known about the shadow transfer for decades. She had been there when Peter sealed the prism in 1993. She knew what the sleeve required, and she had hired me anyway.

The archivist asked whether I needed copies. I said yes and paid two pounds fifty for the 1938 note, the 1952 form and the 1993 report with its photograph. She placed them in a manila envelope, and I walked out into the humid August evening with my hands shaking.

I did not want to return to the lighthouse. I did not even want to be on the road back to Portland while I made the next call.

Instead, I drove to Nothe Fort and parked overlooking Weymouth Harbour. Tourists were leaving as the fort closed for the day. I sat in the van with the windows down and rang Arthur Keene.

He answered on the second ring.

"You found something."

"Yes. I found the 1993 report. Peter Harrow signed it. Miriam Vale witnessed it."

Arthur was silent for a moment. "Then you know she lied to you from the start."

"I know the sleeve has a silhouette burned into it. I know Peter sealed the prism that year. What I don't know is what it means to lose a shadow."

Arthur sighed. It was the sound of a man deciding how much truth to give me.

"Peter didn't lose his shadow in the way folklore means it," he said. "After the repair, he could still walk and speak, but cameras underexposed him. Dogs panicked around him, and his shadow always pointed towards the lighthouse, no matter where the sun was."

I looked across the harbour. The sun was lowering over Weymouth, throwing long shadows across the car park. Mine stretched east, as it should.

"How long did he live afterwards?"

"Twenty-seven years. He retired six months after the repair, moved to Chesil Beach and died in his sleep in 2020. But he was never the same. People who knew him said he felt cold to stand near, as if he were farther away than he looked."

I thought about Helen's grey arm, the rope burns round her wrist and the way her pulse had vanished below the elbow.

"The sleeve is failing now," I said. "Miriam knows it. That's why she hired me."

"She hired you because you're practical, employed by an outside contractor and based in Southampton," Arthur said. "If something changes in you after the repair, nobody local connects it to the tower. Mitie writes it off as an accident on a side contract. The museum keeps its hands clean."

My jaw tightened. "How does the resealing work?"

Arthur hesitated.

"Only a living person who has already witnessed the black beam can do it. They have to hold prepared canvas over the cracked prism for one complete rotation. The lens takes that person's shadow into the cover. The trapped shadow becomes a blind place the drowned cannot pass through."

I understood then. The new canvas in Miriam's tool bag was not spare material. It was a prepared replacement cover, and it required a human cost. She needed me because I had seen the black beam, and because an outside electrician gave her deniability.

"What happens if nobody seals it?"

"The dead sector opens completely," Arthur said. "Then everything that drowned within sight of the lighthouse follows the true beam inland."

I sat with the mobile pressed to my ear and watched the sun sink. The sky over the harbour turned purple. The fort's floodlights came on.

"I'm not doing it," I said.

"I know," Arthur replied. "I wouldn't either."

We ended the call. I remained in the van until it was fully dark, then drove to a budget hotel near Weymouth railway station and tried to sleep.

I could not.

Every time I closed my eyes I saw the child's palm flattening against the plaster, black water dripping from a dry cable and tiny handprints inside the cracked prism.

At 03:47, my mobile rang.

The screen showed Owen Harker.

I answered.

"Miriam went into the tower alone," he said. His voice was tight. "I found the split original sleeve on the lantern-room floor. Black water is running down the stairs."

I sat up. "Where is she now?"

"Still inside. I've locked the public doors, but I can hear people climbing above me. Miriam is the only person signed in."

I was already pulling on my boots.

"Don't go up there. Stay in the former keeper's quarters and wait for me."

"Hurry," Owen said, and ended the call.

I grabbed my keys and ran to the van. I rang Arthur as I joined the A354 towards Portland. He answered at once, as if he had not been asleep.

"Owen just called," I said. "Miriam is in the tower. The original sleeve has split."

Arthur swore quietly.

"Take Miriam's prepared replacement canvas. Keep the stair hatch closed, and don't let the black beam cross you twice."

"Why twice?"

"The first crossing establishes a link. The second uncovered crossing takes the marked person bodily into the dead sector. Giving a shadow to the canvas is different, but once you're marked, the lens can use you for either."

Portland Beach Road stretched ahead across the narrow causeway. The Fleet lagoon lay black to my right and Chesil Beach rose in the darkness to my left.

"If I don't seal it, then neither do you," Arthur said. "But if the sector opens fully, everything drowned around the Bill will come through. It won't stop at the visitor centre."

I thought of Owen's description of Colin Marsh, the crab lodged between his teeth and his eyes still open with seawater pouring from them.

"What do I do?"

"You make a choice," Arthur said. "The same one Peter made."

The lighthouse beam swept above the exposed limestone plateau ahead. From a distance it looked normal: white light, a steady rotation, no visible black sector. It should have been running before dawn, but now I knew what waited inside the optic.

I turned from the A354 onto Portland Bill Road, the sea and the white churn of Portland Race appearing beyond the dark fields.

Arthur's voice broke up in the wind noise coming through my partly open window.

"Don't let it cross you twice. Do you hear me?"

"I hear you."

The tall white stone lighthouse with its red trim rose ahead, roughly 41 metres high, its active first-order Fresnel optic sending a useful white beam towards the approaches off Portland Bill, visible for about eighteen nautical miles.

"Arthur, the light is running."

Static crackled, then his voice returned. "How long?"

"I don't know. I've only just got line of sight."

"Get to the coded service door. Find Owen. Don't go up alone."

The beam crossed the clouds, white and clean, the way a lighthouse beam ought to look.

Then the rotation reached a narrow sector on the north-eastern arc and the light turned black. Not dim. Not shadowed. Black, as though someone had cut a wedge from the present and left a hole.

When the black sector crossed the visitor-centre grounds, the car park disappeared. Rough limestone and flooded mud replaced the tarmac. A wooden construction platform stood where the former keeper's quarters should have been. Men in nineteenth-century work clothes shouted beside a narrow-gauge construction tram, its cart tilted towards an excavation full of water beside the unfinished tower.

Then the black beam moved on and the present snapped back.

I pulled into the car park and killed the engine.

The optic rotated again.

White light. White light. Black.

This time I saw them.

People stood on the grass facing the tower. Three children in soaked dresses, their hair plastered flat against their faces. Men in oilskins bent as though still hauling ropes. A woman held a lantern with no flame in it.

Farther back, near the edge of the tidal water, shapes moved that looked human until the black beam passed across them and showed me how their limbs bent.

The sector moved on. The figures vanished. The grounds were empty again.

My mobile vibrated. Owen's name appeared on the screen.

"I'm here," I said.

"Service door. Now."

I grabbed Miriam's tool bag from the van. Inside it, separate from the split original sleeve lying somewhere above, was the prepared replacement canvas. I ran.

The ordinary beam passed overhead, white and dependable, the sort of light that kept mariners clear of the rocks and Portland Race.

Then the black sector returned, and for three seconds the museum grounds became the 1874 construction site. The tram cart rolled down its temporary track towards the flooded excavation. The resident works foreman's three daughters screamed as the cart tipped.

The Quarry Girls vanished when the present returned.

I reached the coded service door. Owen opened it from inside. His security uniform was soaked down the front, and his radio hung from his belt with its aerial snapped off.

"She's up there," he said. "Lantern room. She told me to stay below and lock the doors, but I can hear people on the stairs."

"What people?"

"I don't know. Nobody signed in except her."

From above us, Miriam's voice echoed down the tower.

"I can fix it if everyone stays below."

The words were loud, clear and wrong. She was not asking for help. She was giving an order.

Owen looked at me. "She took tools up two hours ago. I didn't think anything of it until the light started behaving strangely."

I removed the prepared replacement canvas from the bag. Arthur was still on the mobile in my pocket, so I put him on speaker.

"We're inside," I said. "Owen is with me."

"Good. Don't separate, and don't let the beam cross either of you twice."

"What if it crosses us once?"

Arthur's voice flattened. "Then finish quickly."

The stairs spiralled upwards into darkness. Owen drew a torch from his security belt and went first. I followed, carrying the new canvas.

The iron treads rang beneath our boots. At the third landing my hand touched the railing and came away wet.

Not damp. Wet.

I shone my torch on the steps above. Black water ran down the treads in narrow streams, collecting where the iron met the stone. It was not dripping from the lantern room. It was seeping from the metal itself, carried out of the cracked prism through the connected framework and cabling.

"Arthur, the stairs are flooded."

"How high?"

"Third landing and above."

Something knocked against the underside of the next flight.

Owen stopped. A child's hand curled round the edge of a tread above us. The fingers were white and swollen, the nails packed with pale Portland grit.

Then another hand appeared. Then another.

We climbed faster.

At the fifth landing the black beam entered through a window and moved against the direction of the ordinary white rotation. The stone wall vanished inside it. For an instant I saw flooded excavation water where the stairwell should have been, and three girls beating their palms against the underside of a tilted tram cart.

The edge of the black sector crossed Owen once, from shoulder to hip.

He cried out and stumbled against the railing. Water burst from the seams of his uniform. A dark line appeared across his chest like a rope burn beneath the cloth.

"Once," I said. "That's once."

He stared at me, breathing hard, and nodded.

We reached the hatch below the lantern room. Miriam had wedged it open with a tool case. Beyond it the optic turned, its prisms flashing white, then swallowing the room in black at each 57-second pulse.

The split original sleeve lay on the floor. Its rotted canvas had torn from top to bottom, and the faded silhouette of Peter Harrow was divided down the middle.

Miriam stood beside the lens with both hands on the metal frame. The cracked prism, about 15 centimetres wide, held a pocket of impossible seawater behind the glass. Small hands moved within it. Black water pulsed from the crack and ran through the brass fittings.

"Give me the replacement," she said.

"Who were you planning to put into it?"

Her eyes flicked from me to Owen.

That was answer enough.

"Daniel, if the prism remains uncovered, people will die. You have seen the beam. You can seal it."

"That's why you hired me."

"I hired you because the electrical fault had to be diagnosed."

"And because an outside contractor would be easy to explain afterwards."

The mechanism clicked. The next 57-second rotation began.

Miriam lunged for the prepared canvas. I pulled it away, but she caught one corner and dragged me towards the optic.

"You don't understand what comes through when it opens," she said.

"You understood enough to lie to us."

Below, iron steps rang beneath many bare feet.

Owen looked through the hatch. The first drowned child climbed into view, water streaming from her dress. Behind her came men with crushed faces, sailors trailing weed, and shapes with limbs bent by currents and stone.

Miriam seized the canvas with both hands and pressed it against the cracked prism. The material bucked as if wind were blowing from inside the glass. For a moment I thought she meant to give it her own shadow.

Then she stepped sideways, trying to pull me into the canvas's centre while keeping herself beyond the black sector's path.

I tore free.

The black beam crossed the lantern room opposite the white light. It struck Owen once more in the sense of passing through the room, but because he forced the prepared canvas between himself and the cracked prism, the cloth intercepted the open path before a second uncovered crossing could take his body.

The new canvas ballooned towards him.

Hands pushed outward from beneath it.

Owen braced one palm against the cover and one shoulder against the lens frame. His exact outline darkened on the canvas.

"Hold it!" Miriam shouted.

The drowned figures entered the lantern room. One of the Quarry Girls caught Miriam by the wrist. Miriam screamed and wrenched backwards, striking the rotating lens carriage. The metal frame knocked her off her feet. Both legs folded beneath her, and black water poured over her trousers.

She reached for the control housing, still trying to govern the lens, but the turning assembly struck her again and flung her clear.

Owen remained against the prepared replacement canvas.

"Daniel," he said, but his voice came from the cracked prism a fraction before his mouth moved. "Fix it."

I drove the retaining clips into place one after another. The drowned crowded around us. Colin Marsh stood among them, the scar beneath his left eye white against his swollen skin, weed and shell fragments filling his mouth. A crab moved between his teeth.

The optic completed its full rotation.

Owen's shadow tore away from his feet.

It spread upwards across the prepared canvas, fixing the outline of his raised shoulder and braced hand into the material. The cover contracted against the prism as though all the air had been sucked from beneath it.

The black sector narrowed.

The Quarry Girls reached towards Owen. Their fingers stopped at his burned silhouette. The blind place held.

Then the drowned figures were dragged backwards, out through the lens and into the impossible water behind the cracked glass. The last child vanished with one palm flattened against the inside of the prism.

The black beam completed its final passage and disappeared.

At sunrise, the beacon shut itself off. One moment the optic was turning and the black sector was cutting through the lantern room at each 57-second interval. The next, the motor stopped. The white light went out, and the newly sealed prism stopped dripping.

Owen stood against the hatch with his back to the iron, breathing hard. When I aimed my torch at him, the light seemed to bend around his legs as though he were made of glass.

Miriam lay on the floor with both legs twisted beneath her. She was soaked to the waist and not moving.

I knelt beside her and checked for a pulse. It was fast and thin, but steady. Her skin was ice-cold where the beam had crossed her, and when I touched her shin she screamed.

I pulled my hand back.

Owen turned towards me. His mouth opened, but the words came from the covered prism half a second before his lips formed them.

"Is she breathing?"

I looked at the lens. The prepared replacement canvas was now the final sealed cover, drawn tight against the glass. Owen's silhouette was burned into it from within, one shoulder raised and one hand braced in the exact position he had held when the lens took his shadow.

"Yes," I said. "She's breathing."

Owen nodded. His uniform was soaked through, seawater dripping onto the floor in a slow rhythm that did not match his movements. He looked down at Miriam, then back at me. Again, his voice came from the lens before his mouth caught up.

"We need to get her down."

I took out my mobile. There was no signal. The tower always killed reception above the fourth landing, and I was not leaving Owen alone while I went below to call 999.

I looked at him, and he looked back.

I realised I did not know whether he was still Owen or whether something else was wearing his face.

"Can you walk?" I asked.

He nodded and stepped away from the hatch. His boots left wet prints on the floor. When he passed the covered prism, his shadow did not follow him. It remained on the canvas, burned in and permanent.

We carried Miriam down together, Owen taking her shoulders while I held her legs. Each time we passed a window, I checked whether his shadow was still missing.

It was.

Sunlight came through the glass and struck him squarely, but nothing darkened the stairs behind him. He did not seem to notice.

On the third landing I heard sirens.

Arthur had called 999 after losing contact with us, and the visitor-centre alarm had automatically notified the monitoring service when water reached the electrical controls. By the time we reached the service door, Dorset Police cars and a South Western Ambulance Service vehicle were pulling into the car park.

The paramedics took Miriam from us and placed her on a stretcher. One asked what had happened. I said there had been an accident involving the optic, broken glass and water ingress. Miriam had fallen.

It was all true. It was also all I could say without sounding mad.

Owen stood beside me, dripping, and said nothing.

The Dorset Police officers took statements. I gave them my contractor details and said Miriam had asked me to inspect the optic before dawn because mariners had reported an intermittent lighthouse characteristic to HM Coastguard and Trinity House. I told them the old cover had split, water had entered the lantern room and Miriam had slipped.

I did not mention the black beam, the drowned hands or the construction-tram accident from 1874.

The CCTV system had recorded everything, but when the officers reviewed the recorder, one frame was missing at every 57-second pulse. What remained looked like a maintenance accident: damaged material, water ingress and a fall.

Miriam was loaded into the ambulance and taken to Dorset County Hospital in Dorchester. I watched the doors close and the vehicle pull away.

I thought about Helen lying in a hospital bed with a grey arm and no pulse at her wrist. The beam had crossed only her arm once, marking her without taking her. I thought of the rope burns that had appeared on her skin. I thought about how Miriam had known the price of the repair and had sent us into the tower anyway.

Owen stood beside me in the car park, still wet and without a shadow. One of the police officers asked whether he needed medical attention.

"No," Owen said.

His voice came from his mouth that time, not the lens, but it sounded flat and vacant, as though he were reading from a script.

The officer asked whether he was certain. Owen nodded. The officer made a note and told us both to remain available for further questions.

When the police cars had gone, Owen and I stood alone in the sunlight.

I looked at him. He looked back. His eyes were the same, but the light did not sit properly in them.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

He did not answer at once.

Then his voice came from the tower behind us, quiet and distant. Half a second later, his mouth moved.

"I don't know."

I had no answer for that. I did not know what he was now, how much of him remained inside his body, or whether the silhouette fixed in the final cover was a copy or the original.

I nodded, told him I would see him later and walked to my van.

He did not follow.

Fourteen days later, Arthur rang me.

I was back in Southampton, replacing a distribution board on a Mitie Engineering job, and I had spent the previous fourteen days trying not to think about Portland Bill Lighthouse. I deleted Helen's voicemails without listening to them. I ignored three calls from the museum's main number.

I told my Mitie Engineering supervisor that I was finished with contracts in historic buildings. He looked at me as though I had lost my mind, because the lighthouse work had paid better than anything else I had taken that year.

Arthur's voice came through the mobile, rough and low, as though he had been shouting.

"You need to know something," he said.

I did not want to know. I wanted to forget the whole business. But I put down my screwdriver, stepped outside and asked him what had happened.

"I saw Colin Marsh," Arthur said. "At Bowleaze Cove. Low tide. He was standing out beyond the wet stones with that scar under his eye and a crab moving between his teeth."