excerpt

TWO
Michael, wearing a warm, knitted jacket, left the others by the high, iron gate. As he bade them goodnight he slammed the bolt into a crack between two stones of the wide, circular, conical-topped gate-pier, then turned to the left into a narrow loaney between two dry-stone walls. The lane was rocky and steep and darker than the inside of a well. Over the walls old brambles trailed, and whin bushes grew in places, their yellow flowers, sparse at this time of year, glowing even in the dark. The black sky held no stars, no moon; only a thick canopy of cloud. The cloud probably rested on the breasts of the mountains invisible in front of him. Equally invisible behind him the sea rolled over in her sleep with a long, deep sigh.
At the top of the track, beyond the last walled fields and the rowan tree, the open hillside snuggled under covers of heather, thyme, and blaeberry. It pulled the covers tight under its jutting, rocky chin and did not feel the chill February breeze. Up there the sheep huddled in the lee of rocks. Occasionally Michael heard the bleat of one more restless than the others.
Here where the dark loaney opened on to the hills a low, stone cottage stood with whitewashed walls and a roof of weathered thatch. The roof had been thatched so many times, the chimney had almost disappeared. In one of the two windows a light flittered like a dying butterfly’s wings. Michael stopped. His heart pounded so loudly he was sure the noise of it would waken and scatter all the sheep on the mountain.
I left no fire, he thought. And if I had, it would have burned itself out long since.
He looked back down the narrow loaney, half resolved to return to Finn’s house. But now the blackness between the walls spooked him. A few flowers of whin glowed like eyes in the dark.
Finn would laugh till his head fell off if I was to go back down to the house, Michael told himself. Caught in the trap of old superstitious fear of the dark, he looked again at the lonely cottage. The night crept closer round it. Then the light flared in one small window and dimmed as suddenly.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1926763203