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everything all right?"
    "Yes," I said. "Gunnar brought me here." This was entirely untrue, but it was all I could say because I couldn't otherwise explain how I had found the place without Magnus's help. As we set up the instruments, I rewound the journey in my head. Magnus had described a clearing, an anvil-shaped rock. I had been preoccupied with his creepiness. But if I concentrated hard, I could remember knowing where to go the instant he described it. So how had I known? Gunnar had certainly not brought me here. We were at least half a mile south of the route Gunnar had shown me to the beach. I stood up for a moment and looked around. Sensations washed over me: familiarity, fear, longing. Dizziness rushed down my body. I heard Magnus's voice. A moment later, he caught me under my elbow and lowered me to the ground.
    "Put your head between your knees," he was saying.
    I did as he instructed and the blood throbbed in my temples, my thoughts sharpened and became clear again.
    "Are you feeling better?" Magnus asked.
    "Ah… yes. Thank you."
    "Did you eat this morning?"
    "No."
    "Make sure you always eat something before you come out to do fieldwork."
    "Yes, I will in future."
    He crouched on the forest floor next to me, watching me closely. "Your color's coming back, but I think you should go to your cabin and rest. Carsten should have scheduled you another day to recover from those late shifts. It can be hard on the system at the beginning."
    I nodded, but didn't venture to say anything. I had an overwhelming urge to cry.
    "Here, let me show you something. It will cheer you up," Magnus said with his boyish smile. He opened his palm and a dirty fragment of metal sat on it.
    "What is it?" I asked.
    "I found it just now while making a hole for a transpiration sensor. It's a piece of the past."
    "I don't know what you mean." An inexplicable feeling of dread stole over me as I considered the object.
    "Forged iron doesn't just show up spontaneously in forests, Victoria. This is part of something left here by previous residents, maybe a thousand years ago." He considered the fragment carefully. "It might be a pot or a piece of jewelry."
    It's not a pot; it's not jewelry . I said nothing, watching Magnus, wondering what bizarre mental illness had gripped me.
    "I'll keep it for Gunnar." He slipped it into the pocket of his anorak and stood, reaching down to help me up. "He collects old bits of rubbish like this."
    "I'm fine," I said, as he put his arm around my waist.
    "No, let me take you back to your cabin."
    We left the forest behind. I had read that the feeling of déjà vu was caused by a misfiring in the part of the brain responsible for recognition, causing a sensation of memory that was not genuine. I wondered if the sudden change my life had taken, accompanied by sleep deprivation and anxiety, had caused a similar misfiring in my brain. I had never been there before. It felt astonishingly familiar, but I had never been there before. How had I found the clearing? Simple. Magnus had been tending in that direction; I simply kept heading southeast and the clearing was there.
    And the cold fear I felt looking at Magnus's "piece of the past"? Some kind of projected fear, which produced an uncanny certainty that I knew what that metal fragment was. A piece of a murderer's axe. On the Tuesday before the island became my own, I had difficulty falling asleep. I dutifully climbed into bed at nine o'clock and closed my eyes, relaxed my body and tried to clear my mind. But my concentration flickered from topic to topic, the way a dirty CD skips over snatches of music. I breathed deeply, but the sound of my own breath irritated me. My body felt awkward no matter which position I lay in.
    The empty hours of the night were upon me before I drifted off. Consciousness receded down sleep's dim thoroughfares. Dark blue enveloped me. A chill wind touched my skin; somewhere a pale blue light. Inky shadows surrounded me.
    I started; I was outside