The taxi’s taillights vanish into the haar, leaving the croft in a silence so heavy it feels like a physical weight against Iona’s eardrums. She stands on the narrow porch, her boots caked in North Sea grit and her shoulders aching from the strap of her equipment bag. The air here tastes of peat smoke and ancient, unwashed salt. She reaches for the iron key Margaret Hourston left under the mat, but her hand stops inches from the rusted latch.
Draped over the weathered wood of the porch rail is a heavy, sodden mass that should not be there. It is a sealskin, silver-grey and thick with dark rosettes that shimmer like wet oil under the moon’s thin light. It smells of deep-ocean musk and brine, dripping slow, rhythmic beads of Atlantic water onto the floorboards. Who would leave this here? The skin is warm, radiating a faint, impossible heat through the freezing mist, as if the life beneath it hasn't quite realized it's been shed.
Down where the garden dissolves into the marram grass and the dunes, the shadows begin to shift and churn. A shape larger and darker than the gorse detaches itself from the gloom, moving with a fluid, predatory grace. A large, salt-slicked hand reaches slowly out of the dark toward the porch rail.
