Alistair McCray, a seasoned police inspector, investigates the mysterious deaths of three lighthouse keepers—James Duckett, Thomas Marshall, and Donald MacArthur—on Island More, a remote rock in the North Atlantic. The keepers had gone without a light for 11 days amid severe weather, and when McCray and a relief team arrived, the station appeared untouched. Despite no signs of violence, their notebooks contain repeated entries of "three knocks" and sightings of figures, suggesting hallucinations or a hidden presence. A hidden cellar beneath the station is discovered with the bodies of the two men, untouched and unharmed, while a symbol matching one from an ancient grimoire describing a demon named Dantallion is found throughout the site. McCray concludes that the men experienced psychological distress, possibly influenced by the demon’s presence, leading to internal conflict and death. However, no physical evidence of a fourth person or external intrusion is found, and official records dismiss the possibility of a second individual. McCray privately believes the evidence points to a second person on the island, but this is omitted from the report. The case haunts him deeply, with recurring sensations of being watched and lasting psychological effects. He never confirms the cause of death or identifies the source of the demon, and the case remains unresolved, ending with the lighthouse relit and the station reoccupied, while McCray’s personal life is forever altered by the experience.
[MUSIC] The flannon light had been dark since the middle of December. That's a lighthouse on a rock 20 miles out from the west side of Lewis, on an island called Island More. And there's nothing on that island but the tower, the station buildings and 250 acres of wet grass going up to a cliff on every side. Three men keep it, changed round by boat. And when the weather is bad, nobody can get near them. A steamer coming up out of the Atlantic on the 15th reported it showing no light. The weather that month was the worst in 10 years and the tender couldn't get out to look until boxing day. So three men alone on a rock in the Atlantic, no light off them in 11 days and not a soul able to go and see whether they were alive. They sent me. Alistair McCray, Inspector, Ross and Chromarty Constabulary, stationed at Stornaway on the Isle of Lewis. 20 years in and nine of them with the word detective in front of my name, which in a county that size meant there were two of us and I was the one who lived nearer the harbor. I could walk into a house at Ness where a man had been a fortnight dead and tell you by dinner time who he owed money to and which of his sons had been in the room. The fiscal sent for me on the Monday, the Tuesday it would have been because the boat was the Wednesday. Robertson and I'd known him 14 years, three men were on that rock he said and would I go out with the relief and see. He said it might be a broken lamp and three men sitting around it with nothing to do and he didn't believe that. He was careful about words and he used the word see not look into. I went home first because the boat wasn't until four the next morning. We had a house on Keith Street then and Florence had the lamp lit on the stair the way she did whether I was in or out. Maggie was seven and she was counting the spoons back into the drawer out loud. I said I'd be away a day maybe two and Florence said a day is it and what else was there. She always came at a thing from underneath. I told her there wasn't anything else. I had a plate of herring and went to bed at nine. We were off brisklyt before daylight which in the last week of December means we were off in the dark and still in the dark three hours later. The Hesperus is the board's tender the boat that carries keepers and oil and stores out to the rock lights. They put us off at the east landing about ten. A landing on a rock like that isn't a pier. It steps cut in the cliff with a crane over them and iron rails up the face and you climb the rails with your hands on the sleepers when the sea won't let the crane work. More went up ahead of us with the whistle from the boat. He blew it twice and got nothing back then took the gate and the outer door. He was inside about a minute. He came back out into the enclosure and stood there and never said a word. The station was exactly as three men had left it and that stayed the strangest thing about it. The kitchen door was open. There was a pot on the range with something in it that had gone bad when the fire in the grate was cold ash and had been cold a long time. Their beds weren't made. Their clothes were on the pegs and folded in the chests, pipes, tobacco, a razor open on the shelf, nothing packed and nothing taken. Two sets of oil skins were away off the pegs and one set still hanging which meant one of them had gone out of that door in December in his shirt or hadn't gone out of it at all. The clock in the kitchen had stopped which is ordinary in a house nobody's wound in 11 days. We found James Duckett about an hour later in the upper part of the tower hanging from the structure. Duckett was the principal keeper and he was 43 years of age. I'm not going to describe him. Braithwaite was up there with me. My sergeant, an newcomer from Bradford who'd been six years on Lewis and still couldn't get his mouth around the place names and after a while he said that's him done it himself then. Four words was long for Braithwaite and it might have been. Everything in that room let you say it. I said we'd find the other two. We didn't find the other two. We took the station room by room and then the ground, the paths, both landings, the tramways, the top of the west cliff where the sea comes up over a hundred feet in a bad week and had been doing it all month. The rope store at the west landing had been torn about and the sea had done that. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to say Marshall and MacArthur had gone down to make the ropes fast and been taken off by a wave and about four men said it to me before noon. It's what happens out there. What I couldn't get past was that peg. It was Braithwaite who put a name to the smell in the lower buildings and by then we'd all been breathing it an hour without saying so. It got worse the lower you were and it wasn't anywhere in particular and I took it for a bird gone down a flu. There's always something dead in a building on a rock like that but we went at the lower part of that station harder after it and that's the only reason we did. I spent the last of the light on their papers. There's an official log at a station like that. The boards book whether hours the light burned oil used kept in duck its hand and saying nothing. Then there were the men's own notebooks which are nobody's business and there were a great many of them repairs a hinge somebody's boots. Marshall kept a count of the birds and a note of the wind against it which nobody had asked him for. MacArthur kept the most of the three in the untidyest but scattered through all of it and none of them explaining themselves were entries about three knocks heard from somewhere below and have sentences about things seen and about the three of them not agreeing. I read a dozen and set them by for the morning. The last thing that day was the object off the roof. One of the relief men called down from the gallery that there was something up on the top and it wasn't the boards. It was set up of the lantern where you'd have to want to go to put it. Tin about the size of a saucer cut and folded by hand with a figure scratched into the face of it. Before dark we found the same figure cut into a door frame inside. We came off at four in the black dark with a ducat aboard and two men still missing and I got the road over from Braselet and came in at my own door after ten. Florence was up. She asked had I found them I said I'd found one and I said the man had likely done it himself and we'd have the other two in a day. There wasn't a word in that account that was a lie. I said nothing about the notebooks and nothing about the mark on the door frame. We were back off the east landing by ten the next morning which meant four hours in my own bed and the road over twice. You go over the more from storm away in the pitch dark and a trap with a lamp on it and for two of those hours there's nothing on either side of you. Braithwaite hated that road he ate his bread standing up in the boat. There were twenty two notebooks some board issue some penny things bought ashore and not one of them dated in a way that made sense to anybody but the man who wrote it. I put them in order not the books the entries I built the last eleven weeks of that station out of three men's handwriting day by day with a pencil and a sheet of fools cap. And it took me until the light went the three knocks amount to less than you'd think. Nobody wrote a page about it no capital letters no exclamations nobody asking what it was it's a line and then nothing and then a fortnight later another line. MacArthur printed his in capitals knocking three below the stair and past eight MacArthur wrote the most of the three by a long way and the further in you go the more of them are his. 19 entries in eight weeks between them no pattern to the times and none to the place except that one word below the stair below the kitchen below the light room below. I had two of the relief men run the pipes and knock the walls with me for an hour the only record that such a sound was ever made in that building.
is 19 lines in three dead men's books. The marks were the second thing, and I found more once I knew to look. One in a doorframe on the lower landing of the stair, one in the paint of the store cupboard, one on the underside of a shelf where you'd see it only lying on the floor, one on a stone in the enclosure wall. They're spread through that station like a man's initials on his tools, and they're all, near enough, the same figure, an upright with a hook to it and a small closed shape at the foot. Breathway thought it was a maker's mark off the board's fittings, and I liked that for half a day until I found one on a stone that had been in that wall before the board came out there. The book was in Duckett's chest under his shirts. It was the size of a ledger and heavier than it looked. Quarter-bound, leather at the spine, boards gone the color of a boot, no title page. It had been written by hand a long time before anybody put a lighthouse on island more. Some of it was Latin, some English, and the English was old enough that I could read it, and still not be sure I had it. In the middle was a section of pictures, figures, circles, the sort of thing you see on a seal, and one of them was the mark off the doorframe. I'm not a scholar. What I could tell you at the time was that it was old and that a lighthouse keeper on 45 pounds a year had no business owning it. Guttick, a list of spirits and the marks that call them. There was no printed one to be had in 1900. You copied it out yourself, or you knew a man who had. The keepers had been over at hard. Three different hands in the margins, sections marked down the edge with a nail or a pencil, some gone over so many times the papers fered. The part they went at most is a page and a half about one of the things in the list, and the name at the top of that page is dantallion. It's an actual demon set down in the lesser key of Solomon, an old grimoire men wrote centuries ago to catalog the things in the pit. The book describes dantallion not as a monster with horns or claws, but as something far worse, it is a demon built entirely for psychological ruin. It knows every private thought in your head, and it has the power to reach into your mind and rewrite those thoughts until you can't tell your own memory from a lie. It can conjure the breathing, perfect likeness of anyone on earth right in front of your eyes. The thing shows itself in the form of a man with many faces, all of the men's and women's faces, and that it carries a book in its right hand. It says it knows the thoughts of all men and women and can change them at will. I came back to the notebooks after that and found the other entries, the ones I'd read passed on the first day. Marshall, 9th of November, saw d at the west landing at four. d was in the lightroom the whole afternoon, spoke to him after and let it alone. MacArthur, 23rd, saw tm on the stair below me, going down. Let it be, duket near the end in that small tight hand. I have twice now seen my brother who is in Dundee. I put it down at the time to three men with a book that told them they might see faces, shut on a rock in the dark for eight weeks, duly seeing faces. I've had a whole village see a light on a hill because two of them saw it first. What that doesn't account for is the counting. Marshall wanted to know what it was. MacArthur wanted to know where it was, which is a different question and a worse one. Not one of them said so to the other two on paper, and by the last fortnight they'd stopped agreeing. There's a line of marshals from the 6th of December. d says leave it alone now and he is right and I am not going to. After that the references are all downward, the store. Below the store candles twice and the mark. I came out onto the gallery a little after two to get away from it. That's the walkway outside the lanternroom and you can see the whole island off it, the enclosure, the two landings, the ground going up west to the high cliff. There was rain coming and the light was already going. A man was standing at the edge of the west cliff turned away from me looking out at the water. I took him for one of hours. There were nine of us on that island and men had been walking that ground for two days. I watched him for a bit, the way you do, and he didn't move at all, and then I went down. When I came up on the high ground, there was nobody there. There's no cover on that point, grass over rock, falling 300 feet on two sides, and the only road off it runs back the way I'd come, and I'd been coming up it with my eyes open the whole time. I counted heads at the station after. We were nine, every man where he was meant to be, and none of them up west since dinner. The light was nearly gone by then, and the rain had come on properly. I'd been up since four the previous morning on four hours and a plate of herring. A man at 400 yards in that light is a mark on the grass, and a mark on the grass can be a post or a bird or a bit of the wall you've never noticed. That's what I settled it as. I didn't put it in the report, and I didn't mention it to Braithwaite. That night, I wrote up nine lines about the notebooks, four about the marks, and one about the book in Ducat's chest, and nothing at all about the west cliff. I came in at my own door about eleven. Lawrence was up with her sewing, and she'd kept the lamp on the stair. She looked at me a good while before she said anything, and what she said was, "You're not in the room, Alistair." I said I was tired. Maggie came down for a drink of water, and asked, "Had I found the men on the island yet?" I stopped by the fire until about one. What I was doing the whole time was working out how far it was from that cliff to the gate. You could smell it from the gate on the third morning. Now it was in the enclosure, and in the kitchen with the door shut. One of the boat's crew got as far as the doorway of the lower store, went back out and was sick against the wall, and nobody said anything to him about it. We emptied the lower part of that station. Everything came out into the enclosure in the rain. Coils, cans, the spare lens crates, a tier of oil drums that took four men. I had the boards drawing spread on a crate under a bit of tarpaulin with a stone on each corner, and they show what's under that station, the oil store, the coal, and rock. Behind the drums at the back of the oil store, there was a door. Low, about four foot, painted the same buff as the wall, and painted that way for years. No handle on it. There was a scrape on the flagstones in an arc where the bottom of it had been dragging, and the arc was clean, and the flagstones either side of it weren't. The drums had been moved and put back. On the boards drawings, there's nothing there at all. Solid rock from the store wall out to the cliff. Braithwaite got it open with a bar. There were seven steps down, cut, not laid, and then a room. It's about twelve foot by nine, and the ceiling comes down at one end, and I couldn't stand up in it past the middle. It's older than the lighthouse. The stones different, and the courses don't answer to anything above them, and the only part of this whole business I'd call settled is what I think happened there. Whoever built the station in 95 came on a hole already in that rock, lowered over the top of it, and put the oil store down on the floor. Nobody drew what they'd covered, there'd have been no cause to. Along the near side, there were old tools rusted into each other, a barrow with no wheel, coils of rope gone to rot, everything under an inch of dust that hadn't been disturbed except in one track down the middle of the floor. Thomas Marshall and Donald MacArthur were at the far wall. They were both on the floor, and neither of them was near the steps. Marshall was on his side with his knees up. MacArthur was sitting more or less with his back to the stone and his head over. Their boots were on, their hands were empty. Nothing in that room had been used as a weapon, and nothing in it had been knocked over, and when Stanhope had them on the table it's torn away, there wasn't a mark on either of them he'd call a cause in front of the fiscal. The cold, the heart, gas out of the rock, then wrote that the cause of death in
either case couldn't be determined and wouldn't be moved off it. That was the third day, and that was the case turned over, three men on a rock. One kills the other two, then goes up the tower and finishes himself. I've had that case, near enough, twice in a craft. It wants a reason, and reasons between three men shut up together for six weeks aren't hard to come by, and I worked it for the rest of that day and most of the next. Here's where it stopped. I walked it four times, breath-weight at the top of the tower with a whistle and me down in that room, then the other way about. From the far wall of the cellar to the place where DuCat was, is seven minutes if you're moving and know the ground. That isn't the difficulty. The difficulty is what he'd have had to do in between, and the state of the two men, and the state of DuCat. I'll not lay a dead man's private business out beyond this. The way DuCat was rigged wanted two hands and a fair amount of time, and there was nothing under him he could have used and moved away afterwards. I never said DuCat was incapable of it. What I couldn't do was make it sit. Every time I set the three men in that building and moved them about, there was a place in it where I needed another pair of hands, which gives you the second thing and the second thing is that somebody else was there. That's not a wild idea. It's the ordinary idea. DuCat lets a man onto the island. You can put in at either landing if you know the water, and DuCat had the crane and the keys, and every reason to be believed by his own men. The two of them do what was done in the cellar. Then something goes wrong between them. DuCat ends up in the tower, and the other man takes the boat and goes. It accounts for the hands and the time and everything else, except that there is no such man. I looked for him for three days, so did eight other people. There was no second set of anything on island more, no clothing that didn't belong to one of the three, and I had every stitch in that station laid out on the kitchen floor and matched to a man. No fourth bed and nowhere a fourth bed had been. No extra plate, no extra cup, no fourth ration off the stores. The stores were counted against the board's own book twice and came out right for three men to the day. No boat and no mark of a boat at either landing that the sea hadn't made. Nothing in that building that said any man had ever been in it except the three who were posted to it and the weather. I went through the log of every vessel that put out of Locke-Rogue, Carlaway, and Brescleat that fortnight and talked to men who had been at the fishing. Their opinion was that a boat could have got out there in the second week of December if a crew were very good and very lucky that they had been mad and that getting off again in the dark would have been worse. Not impossible. That's the honest word and it's the word I used in the report. So there it's sat. I put it to Robertson in his office on the 4th of January with my hat on my knee. The evidence says there was another person on that island and the island says there wasn't. Robertson asked me which one I believed. I said I believed the evidence. He said then find him and I said I would. It was after that I read the notebooks again and they read differently. Two days earlier they'd been three lonely men and a book that had got into them. Now I knew the room was real that the knocking they'd written down for eight weeks was about a place that existed under them on no plan that they'd opened and gone into with a light. I should have set all this further back and I've put it last which is where it came to me. There's one cut into the north wall of that cellar about two feet across. Same figure as the door frame and the roof piece and the book only cut deep into the stone and cut well. I had a man out from Stornaway who'd been thirty years in the quarry at Gress and I brought him down those steps with a lamp and asked him one question. How old? He put his thumb in it. He was down there four minutes. He said the cut was old, not this year, not last year, not in his lifetime. And whoever did it had a proper tool and took his time. He'd not care to say more than that in front of a fiscal, so they didn't make it. They found it. I said as much to break weight on the boat going in and that it proved nothing. And he said I and ate the rest of his bread. It was a great deal harder after that to say those three had made the whole thing up out of the dark. I went down into that cellar eleven times on the fourth day. I'd have gone down more if there'd been more light in the world that week. What was in it once the two of them were away off it was nine candles. Common tallow burned right down into the puddle, standing on the flat of a stone a yard out from the mark. Not arranged, just put down where a man would put a light if he wanted to see what he was looking at and left and lit again, nine times are thereabouts. There isn't a candle of that kind anywhere else on the station. The board issues lamps. So three men had been coming down here with their own candles over some weeks in their own time to look at a mark on a wall. I put the notebooks against it that morning and the fit is close and it isn't clever. Every one of the nineteen knocking entries says below and every time from a room with this cellar under it or nearly under it. Marshall's last fortnight has candles in it twice, took two down, one back, and I'd read that a week earlier as a man careless with stores. MacArthur's columns come out below on 31 lines out of 38. One of it is in the board's log, which for that period is weather and oil and a hinge. Then there's the mark on the wall against the mark in the book. I had the book down there with me on my knees on the bottom step with a lamp beside me and I looked from the page to the wall and back. It's the same figure. The wall is older than the lighthouse and the book is older than the wall or it isn't and there's no way on this earth to say which. What I had was a mark cut into a rock in the Atlantic and the same mark in a manuscript in a dead man's chest 40 feet above it and no account of how either got there. I sat on that step twenty minutes. In four places somebody has altered one, a stroke through part of it or something added or the whole thing drawn again in the margin with a piece left off. A stranger who'd been using that seller for years would account for the whole of it and he'd have left bedding behind him or food or a bottle which puts it back on the keepers. Everything found in that room, those three did, except the mark and the mark was there before their grandfathers. The others went down to the boat about four and I stayed on. There wasn't a good reason. The work was done and I had the books in a bag and could have read them anywhere in Scotland. I said I wanted another hour with them and he left me to it. There's a thing that happens when that station empties. You hear the men on the tramway rails going down three or four at a time and the sound gets further off and thinner and then it stops. After that there's the sea and nothing else. It's not a quiet place. There's a hundred foot of water coming into the rock under you the whole time. I had the lamp on the kitchen table and the two books in front of me and I got almost nothing done in the hour. I'll tell you exactly what happened which is nothing. I read a page. I stopped and listened. I read another and stopped and listened. At the fourth time I caught myself at it and made myself go on. Then I turned round in the chair to look at the door behind me and there was nothing there and I turned round again a minute later. I did that nine times. I know it was nine because I started counting after the third being annoyed with myself. Twice I went to the window. The window at night out there is a black pain with your own face on it and the room behind you. The second time I put the lamp on the floor to kill the reflection and there was the wall and the rain going sideways through the light of the door. Nobody was there. I went out into the enclosure and round the tower with the lamp. There's no lock on that island but the ones the board put on and I had the keys to all of them. What I couldn't get out of was the feeling of being looked at. Any man alone in a building where three people have died in the last fortnight will get that.
I'd have said so to anybody who came to me with it, and I'd have been right. I was down at the boat by half five. I didn't stay the night, and I'd meant to. When I wrote that day up, I put in that I had left the island rather than remain overnight, and that I had formed an unfavorable impression of the place. That's what a man writes when he's decided in advance that somebody may read it. We were maybe 300 yards off the east landing, going out. And I looked back at the tower. There was a figure standing at the foot of the tower on the enclosure side. The light off our own lamps doesn't carry that far. There was rain between us and it, and the whole thing was maybe a second and a half. I put my hand on the rail and looked again properly. There was the wall, the corner of the store, and the dark. I stood there until we came round and lost it. I couldn't tell you it was a man in that light at that distance in that weather. I came in at my own door about 11. Lawrence was awake, and the lamp was on the stair, and both children were asleep. And she asked me nothing at all that night, which was worse than her asking. I stopped by the fire a while, then took myself up and lay in the dark and couldn't get off that island. MacArthur sitting with his back to the stone, the dust track going to the wall and back and to the wall and back. And then from somewhere under the house, three knocks, not loud. Even spaced the way you'd knock on a door if you knew somebody was in and weren't in any particular hurry about it. I was flat awake in a second. I got up and took the stair in my shirt with a candle. And I went through that house, the front door, bolted, the back door, bolted, the skullery, the coal, the press under the stair, the window catches, all of them. I stood in the children's room until I could hear them both breathing. There's no cellar under a house on Keith Street. There's a wooden floor on joists and 18 inches of nothing under it. I got down on the boards in the passage and put my ear to them. I'm a grown man and an inspector of police, and I lay on my own floor in the dark listening to it. Nothing. Just the house, ticking and settling on itself. I came back up and Florence was sitting up. I asked her, had she heard a knocking? And she said, no. She asked me, had somebody come to the door at this hour? Nobody had come to the door. She waited. She was good at that. I said it would be the wind, and that I'd been three days on an island with a bad smell in it, and that I was going to sleep. Then I lay on my back beside my wife for about two hours with my eyes open. It could have been the wind. I hadn't slept right since the 24th, and a house makes noise in December the same as any other house. Lying there, I couldn't get one inch further with it than that. The productions came ashore on the 5th of January, and by the 9th, I had them out on a table at the office at Stornaway. They had a book that came out there in somebody's kit. They found a mark cut in a wall in a room that isn't on any drawing. They started going down to it with candles in their own time and hearing three knocks and seeing each other in places where the other man wasn't, and none of them told the other two any of it. In the last fortnight, they stopped agreeing. Then all three died in about the space of an afternoon. That's the whole of it in six lines. In that January, I couldn't get a 7th out of it. I had one name to try, and I tried it. Joseph Moore had been jumpy with me from the first hour on the boat, and was the only man alive who'd been on that island in November. And it was a comfortable theory while it lasted, because it was about a person. It fell down flat. He'd been at his sisters at Brisklyt from the 11th to the 22nd, with nine people who'd swear to it. And on the days that matter, he was in a house with a woman in labor in it. He was jumpy with me the whole way through, and I never got it why, and it had nothing to do with this. Moore was the last candidate anybody ever produced. One man or two, it ends where it ended on the island, possible, and unsupported. Those two words together are the whole of my working life. Then the third thing. I had the book seen by four over two years, the minister in Edinburgh, a man at the university who kept it a fortnight and gave it back with a letter asking me not to mention his name and two others. They agreed about what it was and about nothing else, that they were seeing people who weren't there, and then two of them died of nothing in a locked room, and the third died in a way that wants two pairs of hands. Each of the three covers most of it, and leaves a hole, and it's a different hole each time. Whitfield came up from Edinburgh in March. Boardman, decent enough, apologized twice before he said anything I didn't like, which is how you can tell. He took his glasses off and polished them and asked whether the word occult was going to appear in anything with my signature on it. The board had a service to run, and 11 other rock stations with men on them, he said, and he'd be obliged. I told him it wouldn't, and I'd already decided it before he asked me. And the fact that he asked me at all bothered me a great deal more than the asking did, for reasons that had nothing to do with the board. What went in was the scent inside right again today, that the evidence indicates the presence of a second person on the island, and no evidence of any second person was found. Nothing about a figure on the West cliff. Nothing about a figure at the foot of the tower. Nothing about my own floor at Keith Street. I left all three of those out on purpose, and I'd tell you I left them out because they weren't evidence, which is correct, and it isn't the reason. The fiscal marked it in April. The chests went into the store, and in the spring the board put three men back on Ilean Moore, and the light went on again. I'd done my work, and I had two other cases waiting, and a wife and two children in a house on Keith Street with a lamp lit on the stair. I got the key to that storeroom, copied in June. I had no business with it. I told myself I'd want the notebooks for the report that was already written and lodged. I went down there on a Tuesday evening after the office had shut and sat on the floor in the dark with a candle in the 22 books, and I was still sitting there when it got light. That is the whole of what happened on Ilean Moore, and it is all I am able to tell anybody about it. What it did to me afterwards is shorter, and I can give it to you quickly. At the start, it was evenings. Lawrence would be sowing, and I'd have the books on the table, and I'd say I was only checking a date. She'd ask what I was at, and I'd tell her Flannin, and after a while, she stopped asking, which I took at the time as a woman being reasonable. Maggie got old enough to be told to leave her father alone. The drink came in around the third year. I'd be at the table with the sheets and a glass, and I'd hear myself putting the case to Robertson who'd been dead since 1907. It got into the work slowly, and then all at once. There was a morning in 1919 when I went into the office at Stornaway, not fit, and everybody in that building knew it. The chief constable was decent about it, which was worse. 39 years in, and I put my papers in myself. Florence went in 1921 to her sisters at Tain first, and then not back at all. She took the lamp off the stair. I don't mean that as a figure of speech. It was her mother's lamp, and she took it, and I came in that night and put my hand up to the shelf where it stood in the dark as I'd done coming in for 30 years. Maggie's 48, Norman's 45. Maggie writes at the New Year. Norman doesn't, and I don't hold it against him. I'm 78, I never found a fourth man on island more. I never proved there was anything in that book, but ink, and I never put a name to who or what killed James Duckett and Thomas Marshall and Donald MacArthur. I gave it everything I had, and everything that belonged to four other people. Alistair McCray died at Inverness on the 3rd of March, 1941. His effects were a bed, a chair, a coat, and a tea chest. Cause of death, not determined. [BLANK_AUDIO]
And that's where this one ends. I'm Rex. Thanks for giving me a corner of your night. I know your time is precious and I'm grateful you spent it here. If you'd like to join the Nocturnal Crew, subscribe and turn on notifications. I'm always curious to hear which moments stuck with you. Stay safe and I'll catch you in the next one.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Three lighthouse keepers—James Duckett, Thomas Marshall, and Donald MacArthur—were found dead on Island More after 11 days without a light, with no visible signs of struggle or forced entry.
A detailed investigation by Inspector Alistair McCray revealed inconsistencies in the notebooks, including repeated mentions of "three knocks" and sightings of figures, suggesting a hidden presence or psychological disturbance.
A mysterious symbol, matching the mark on a doorframe and a stone wall, was found throughout the station, linking it to an old grimoire entry describing a demon named Dantallion that manipulates thoughts and creates illusions.
A hidden cellar beneath the station, undetected on official plans, contained the bodies of Marshall and MacArthur, with no signs of violence, yet evidence suggests they had been there in secret over weeks.
The absence of a fourth person in clothing, food, or records contradicts theories of a fourth individual, while the presence of candles and markings indicates repeated visits to the cellar.
McCray believed the evidence pointed to a second person on the island, yet this was never formally acknowledged in the official report, and no physical proof of the figure was found.
The investigation revealed a deep psychological and possibly supernatural element, where the men experienced hallucinations, leading to internal conflict and eventual deaths.
McCray remained haunted by the sensation of being watched, and the case left a permanent psychological impact on him, affecting his personal life and later career.
Summary:
Alistair McCray, a seasoned police inspector, investigates the mysterious deaths of three lighthouse keepers—James Duckett, Thomas Marshall, and Donald MacArthur—on Island More, a remote rock in the North Atlantic. The keepers had gone without a light for 11 days amid severe weather, and when McCray and a relief team arrived, the station appeared untouched. Despite no signs of violence, their notebooks contain repeated entries of "three knocks" and sightings of figures, suggesting hallucinations or a hidden presence.
A hidden cellar beneath the station is discovered with the bodies of the two men, untouched and unharmed, while a symbol matching one from an ancient grimoire describing a demon named Dantallion is found throughout the site. McCray concludes that the men experienced psychological distress, possibly influenced by the demon’s presence, leading to internal conflict and death. However, no physical evidence of a fourth person or external intrusion is found, and official records dismiss the possibility of a second individual.
McCray privately believes the evidence points to a second person on the island, but this is omitted from the report. The case haunts him deeply, with recurring sensations of being watched and lasting psychological effects. He never confirms the cause of death or identifies the source of the demon, and the case remains unresolved, ending with the lighthouse relit and the station reoccupied, while McCray’s personal life is forever altered by the experience.
FAQs
The three keepers—James Duckett, Thomas Marshall, and Donald MacArthur—died under mysterious circumstances during a period of isolation. Their bodies were found in the station, with no signs of violence, and there was no evidence of a fourth person present on the island.
Yes, there was evidence suggesting a fourth person: markings on walls, candles left in a hidden cellar, and notes in the keepers' notebooks describing sightings of figures. However, no physical evidence like clothing or personal items was found to confirm a person's presence.
The notebooks contained entries about seeing figures, three knocks heard below the stair, and sightings of people who weren't there. The entries became more frequent and inconsistent in the final weeks, suggesting growing unease and disagreement between the men.
Yes, a hidden room was discovered behind a low, unpainted door in the oil store, which had been concealed for decades. It was older than the lighthouse and contained the bodies of Marshall and MacArthur, with no signs of violence or struggle.
The book was an old manuscript in Latin and English, containing a list of demons from the 'Lesser Key of Solomon,' including a demon named Dantallion, described as a being that manipulates thoughts and creates illusions through psychological torment.
Yes, he concluded the evidence pointed to a second person, but never confirmed their identity or presence. He stated that the evidence suggested a person had been on the island and left no physical trace, while the island showed no such record.
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