My cottage spat me out not long after that. Apart from my trip to the wood store, which I couldn’t really count, I hadn’t left the place all day. Besides, I had got the taste for beer, and I enjoyed it more in company.

It was dusk. It couldn’t have been more dusk. The sun straddled the horizon behind me and the sky, showing off, graduated in shades of orange, indigo and grey, all of which could have legitimately been marketed as “dusk”. I felt so good as I descended towards The Shipbuilders that I had to check inside my coat for a hanging axe. Nothing. The smell of its oil still lingered on my shirt, which I hadn’t changed before setting off.

The pub was quite full, and there was an unmistakeable feeling of the end of autumn about the whole bar. I spoke at some length to Bobby, who was orchestrating convivialities. The butcher, whose name turned out to be Klaus, was in with his wife, Hannah, and they invited me to join them for a while. They told me stories of past Winters and made me drink organic island schnapps with them. It was their son’s birthday, although the young man hadn’t actually made it this far in life: he had perished, I learned, falling through ice, a month or two after his fourth birthday. He would have been 15. She was a cheery, buxom type whose major concern seemed to be my welfare. To have commiserated with her for what struck me as a devastating loss seemed churlish, and I let it go. Her beauty grew with every word, every smile she sent my way.

When they left, holding hands like a couple of teenagers, the gala atmosphere was still in full swing and I spent some time in earnest conversation with Daniel, the greengrocer of plum and courgette fame, and his little brother, Martin. I lamented with them my inability to write, and that I was hoping the completion of my desk would help. I even suggested that the impending arrival of my container might spur me into a creative frenzy. Daniel suggested a strict vegetarian diet, and regaled me with a detailed meal plan that would spend a good part of the upcoming Winter working its way through the stocks he and his brother had assiduously built up. I listened attentively and took what mental notes I could. Martin didn’t utter a word, but continued to stare at me throughout. I learned that their parents were still alive, and lived down in the south-west meadows, so preferred to spend evenings like this at The End of The World. It was more their demographic, and there would have been scotch eggs.

I finished the evening back at the bar. Bobby, a man well versed in barstool diplomacy, suggested my time had come without making me feel like a drunkard. Indeed, I retained enough vestiges of sobriety to realise his prompting was entirely justified, if not just slightly late.

The moon was even more hypnotic after a night on the sauce. Helpfully, it sat directly above my cottage, like some Star of Bethlehem: I was probably in need of some celestial guidance. Although I noticed it didn’t confine its second-hand rays to my home: the tip of the Mountain shone like burning magnesium in the middle distance. There would surely be no new fall of snow on an evening this clear and still. I zipped up my jacket high under my chin and set off at a yomp.

‘Still full,’ I muttered to myself. I said it again, more clearly. It was a habit of mine to give voice to my thoughts when I was alone, and I had no idea why I was muttering under my breath. ‘Nobody around to hear me,’ I told myself. ‘I can e-nunciate quite safely, free from prying ears.’ I knew it was foolish, but, I questioned, ‘wasn’t this one of the very reasons I came here in the first place? So I can talk to myself when I need to without worrying about who’s listening.’

I stopped and considered the moon once more. Honestly, I had never known one stay full for so long. It had been that way since I arrived. Even when Penny had brought it up, I hadn’t been suspicious. What was it she had said? Winter couldn’t start until it had started to wane? And we had another few days at least? I had been too preoccupied with her to pick up on it, but she said it so naturally, it just seemed unremarkable.

But moons don’t stay full for whole weeks at a time. If I understood the movement of the various relevant heavenly bodies, there was no way that could happen. Although the evidence was right there in front of me, or above me, hovering over my simple cottage. I didn’t like it at all: the science didn’t work, even in my addled, post-Shipbuilders brain, and the alternatives were so unpalatable that I cast them aside without giving them airtime.

I searched through my memory: had the moon always been this close to the surface of my planet? I knew all about the illusion where it seems larger at the horizon than when high up in the sky, but I recognised that for what it was. This was something totally different: this moon was actually hanging in the sky, not orbiting in space. The details of its surface were crystal clear. I had to physically check to make sure I was viewing it with my naked eye, not through my binoculars. I looked around on the surface of the island for references. The Shipbuilders Arms sat unchanged in its usual position, down by the unbloated harbour; the Mountain lit up a distant, normal-sized prison fence with its third-hand rays; my cottage seemed just large enough for a man of my size. In other words, everything was normal. Apart from that damned looming satellite of rock. I could almost make out the flags planted on it. How did they make them flutter like that?

From a seated, or even totally prone, position, the illusion didn’t diminish. If anything, it got even worse the closer I pushed myself to the ground. I spread my field of vision as far as I could, but every time I managed to find some perspective, some distant starry background, it was soon filled with the overwhelming lunar presence. I covered my eyes with my hand, but it spilled around the sides before burning right through the weak flesh. I had to pull it away in horror. In the end I clamped them as tight as I could.

And it worked. For a while. The darkness bled into the silence and my agitation abated a little. I could smell the dampening grass flanking my whole length, and hear the echoes of the donkeys’ hooves from where they had made their satisfied descents, hours ago now but apparently on this very spot. I reached out my hands to feel the soft plush of the bank, but all I got was rock, and dust running through my open fingers. Nonplussed, I stretched my arms wider and found more of the same. I cast my mind back deliberately: no doubt about it, when I lay down, I had descended onto the springy grass verge. Had I drifted back down to the path somehow, without noticing? I opened my eyes and sat up cautiously.

All around was wasteland. Featureless and colourless, like the particulate detritus I now flung from my hands as if it carried a virulent disease. Around me was no harbour, no mountain, no cottage. In desperation I looked up towards the moon. It seemed shadowy, as though the sun’s light wasn’t reaching it direct. I looked closer. Directly above me, a small house, like a pixie’s, sat under a lightly pitched roof, set back from an immaculately tended lawn, split evenly by three freehand dead grey lines. In front, a larger winding path led down through low density undergrowth toward a cluster of lights. The detail was undefined and other-worldly. I could almost hear a buzz of lunar activity from the sources of those illuminations. Shadows danced from behind windows onto the smooth and silent pathways in front. The water in the harbour nearby gently rippled to the general hubbub. Further afield, another house, a house with the soul of a child, dwarfed by its neighbours: a silent, gently leaning mountain, wearing its cap of snow as lightly as a bridal veil, and a dark-faced complex of high and low, wide and long buildings, somehow connected but with no sense of belonging together. A white owl flew over it without looking down and skirted the mountain. I followed its progress.

The owl glided through the thin shadow of the mountain and across a low marshy plain. The view seemed somehow familiar, but distant and indistinct. A river waded through it. The bird skimmed its bubbling surface, searching half-heartedly for prey. Its eyes were trained further ahead on a direct line, where an empyrean crag climbed out of the surface and sent the river bending reluctantly left towards the sea. A few flexes of its mighty wings took it up across the face of the faceless rock. I could see into its nighttime eyes as it climbed, yellow and empty and screaming, but I couldn’t hear their cries. Reaching the top of the escarpment, it turned in on itself, flipped itself one twist like a high board diver and headed back inland, away from the disappearing river. I watched in awe as it flitted silently across pasture, swooping to snare an unsuspecting catch but barely breaking its stride.

My eyes were drawn back to the ridge, almost impossible to make out from this angle, so perpendicular did it fall away to the plain. It signalled the start of an enormous plateau, empty of landmarks or signs of life. I could feel the cold reflecting off the flawless granite, penetrating my unsuitable clothing. It brought tears to my eyes, although maybe that was the onrushing gale now sweeping across the surface. Never had a wind been so primed with shards of the northern winter. I searched past the shoreline for its source but the view to the distance was obscured by swirling clouds of ice and seaspray. Forms began to appear from the whorl, contorted human faces, made hideous caricatures by the ever-changing winds and snows. They were screeching at me too, but, unlike the owl’s, these voices came through quite clearly.

‘Beware the Winter’, one drooled. ‘Don’t take your eyes off that Mountain’, ‘Batten down your hatches’, ‘You can’t hide from your truth’, ‘Stay indoors’, ‘You should never have come’; they shrieked and howled from within the maelstrom; strictly in turn, to make sure not a single warning was lost to my ears; they spat huge gobs of freezing rancid saliva straight out of the hellish snowstorm. I couldn’t bear it any longer: I covered my eyes and ears with my hands, my forearms, whatever I could find, leaped up, flying high into the air of my gravity-deficient moonscape, and screamed at them to stop.

The dog jumped back with a yelp. I landed and dropped to my haunches. My hands steadied me, and I felt the welcome give of the bank’s turf under them.

‘Easy, boy,’ I heard a gentle voice just feet away from me. ‘Easy, easy, nothing to worry about. Good boy.’

I barely dared to, but inch by inch I looked up. On the path stood a man. He had his hand on the neck of a large, maned hound of some description. The beast looked terrified, panting hard while pressed against his master’s side.

‘Are you alright?’ he asked me. ‘You look like you’ve come around a bit too quickly!’ he grinned slightly.

‘Come around?’ I parroted.

‘Flat out, you were,’ he continued. ‘Rover found you there. I would have walked straight past otherwise. Sorry. Too busy looking at that moon. Isn’t it fantastic?’

I looked up at the sky, slowly. The moon was back where it ought to be. It was big, bright and full, but nowhere near as threatening as it had been before. ‘Yes,’ I mumbled. ‘Fantastic.’

‘I see it sometimes. Especially at this time of year. Most of us assume that the moon’s quite happy to keep to its usual path, round and round and round, month after month after month, never tiring, never departing from the purely ordinary, but every now and then it likes to sneak a bit closer and have a better look. We’d all do the same, I tell myself.

‘Looks like you were sleeping. I wouldn’t do that at this time of year if I were you. Sleep outside, that is. I thoroughly recommend it indoors, of course! Catch your death out here, though. You never know when the snow’s going to come. It can get swept in pretty quick on a northerly, you know,’ he counselled. It seemed like sound advice. All of a sudden I felt as sober as a judge.

‘You don’t want to be catching a chill now, either,’ he continued. ‘You need to be looking after yourself. Got a busy few weeks coming up, and you’ve not got into the swing of things yet. It’ll be a long slog just to survive in one piece.’

He must have seen something in my face, because he laughed and added quickly: ‘I’m talking figuratively, of course! Nobody is going to actually tear you apart. We’re not savages, you know! Not savages at all…’ his attention drifted off, to follow a small swarm of bats flying towards the harbour. Rover’s eyes followed his, and he let a small growl escape from deep in his voice box. They turned back towards me. I was standing by now, and felt more a part of my surroundings. ‘No,’ he started up again, charmingly, ‘all I mean is that you’ll be rushed off your feet and you’ll need all your physical resources to see it through. You’re certainly physically fit, that much is clear to anybody, and there’ll be plenty of help for you, as long as you ask, so there’s nothing too much to worry about. Just don’t start when you’re under the weather, that’s all. Sleep indoors, I say. It could be a motto of mine, in fact. “Sleep Indoors”,’ he repeated it with a theatrical flourish, and found it incomprehensibly amusing. ‘I imagine Santino’s place would be pretty comfortable. Is it?’

‘Er, yes. It’s perfect for me,’ I stuttered.

‘Found all his furniture, did you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Quite something, I bet. I’m not convinced I’ve seen everything he’s ever produced, but I’ve seen enough. It’s a tragedy, in some ways, that he’s not able to carry on with it. But that’s the way things are! Nothing any of us can do about that.’

We looked at each other for a few silent seconds. He on the path, I on the bank. I was a few inches higher, as a result, but that just equalised us. He must have been well over six feet tall. I couldn’t tell how old he was in that light, and there were no tell-tale signs in his voice or his bearing or his clothing. His dog had totally relaxed by now, as his right hand absently continued caressing the loose skin at its neck.

I started down the bank, heading for the path again. ‘You’re absolutely right. It’s time I was off home. I think I’m going to have a full couple of days coming up,’ I checked out the Mountain behind him as I spoke. His friendly gaze remained firmly on me. ‘Thanks for rousing me. I think you’ve done me a big favour,’ I smiled.

‘Hah! Don’t thank me, thank Rover,’ he chuckled. I looked at the dog and thanked him. He let out a small whine of acknowledgement. ‘Good boy,’ he comforted him some more.

‘Well, goodnight,’ I held out my hand and approached him. I wanted a better view of him under the peak of his hat. I peered under the best I could. ‘I don’t believe we’ve been formally introduced, although it seems everybody knows who I am already’ I added, and introduced myself.

‘Yes, you’re at a bit of a disadvantage here, I’m afraid,’ he confirmed, shaking my outstretched hand. ‘Everybody has been eagerly awaiting you, and yet everybody is a total stranger. It won’t last long like that. Don’t worry. Before long you’ll be sick of the sight of us. Especially me, I wager!’ his eyes lit up once more as he laughed wholeheartedly.

‘I’m sure I won’t. But I don’t believe I know your name. I’m terribly sorry.’

‘Don’t apologise,’ he added, still clutching my hand. ‘Everyone around here just knows me as The Child. Hopelessly melodramatic, I know. But I got stuck with it a long time ago and it seemed to fit. If I had a real name, it’s long gone by now.’

I swallowed hard. ‘Very glad to meet you,’ I said as I continued to pump his hand nervously. He squeezed just a little tighter, and drew his gaze deeper into my eyes.

‘It’s not about the moon, you know,’ he whispered. ‘You need to stop worrying about it. It’s about the people. Concentrate on what’s down here, not what might be in the sky, or across the Sound, or beyond those monstrous turbines, or under that ocean. This is where you live now. Meet the people. Become part of them. They need you. Have they not been welcoming?’

‘They have,’ I answered obediently. ‘Everyone has been great. I’ve met lots of them already. I know there are more, but I’m doing my best to get around them.’

‘Good,’ he nodded and let go of my hand. ‘They’re all very keen to make your acquaintance. But I should let you go. Like you say, things to prepare for. I’ll see you soon. I imagine the next time we meet will be in The Griffin. I look forward to it very much.’

I set off up the hill, and turned and waved meekly. His hand kept hold of the dog’s neck. ‘Good boy, good boy,’ he repeated over and over.