Archer silhouette behind the ear

The lamp came back on last night after three days of fog, and Mr Pryce went up the tower at dawn to see what had been knocking against the glass all week. It was not a gull. It was a bow of ash wood, strung with fishing line, lying on the gallery rail beside a single arrow fletched with jackdaw feathers. Pryce turned it over in his hands the way he turns over a bad barometer, then brought it down to the kitchen and set it on the table between the salt and the marmalade.

The bow belongs to Tomas, the boy from the cottage at Scarrow Head. He has been shooting at the sea wall every evening since his grandfather carved it for him, and he tells anyone who will listen that he is hunting the Hollow Man, a tall figure who walks the wall after dark and takes the careless. He stands on the slipway with his back to the village and draws as the beam swings round, so that for one heartbeat he is nothing but a black shape against the light. Pryce says he has never once seen the boy's face in those moments, only the bow and the lean of him.

The arrow had fallen short of the wall and wedged itself in the gully below the tower. When Pryce went down for it this morning, he found the brass tip had been stamped with a small mark, a circle with a dot at its heart, the same mark the Trinity House men put on every fitting in this building. Nobody here has ever owned such a tip. Pryce has been turning that over ever since.

I have told him he may keep the bow if he promises to aim at the rocks and never at the gulls. Tomas said he was only ever aiming at the light, so he could see what he looked like from the water. Write soon and tell me whether the tide has taken the cottage yet.

Your loving sister, Ada