The Last Guest Left at Midnight

Six friends. One tower. No signal until dawn. Nell and Sol have invited the old group back to the coastguard tower they bought with money no one asks about. The road closes at ten. The phones die at eleven. By half past, a man in wet clothes is standing at the bottom of the stairwell, and he will not give his name. He knows all of theirs. He knows what happened on a school trip twenty years ago. He has photographs, still damp, of a night none of them will talk about. He does not threaten anyone. He takes them one at a time and tells each of them what they have done since, and then he waits. By three in the morning the group has turned on itself, the photographs are gone, and someone is bleeding on the kitchen floor. By dawn there are five people left in the tower and one body at the bottom of the stairwell. The body is not his.