The thirteen strokes of midnight

                                                                  Excerpt 

With her deep blue eyes, Abigaël might have passed for any Irish girl shaped by the ocean winds. Except she was neither red‑haired nor fair, but dark‑haired instead. A jet‑black mane, unusually straight and rigid. As a teenager, she had embraced the graveyard style, a goth, much to her mother’s despair. She wore Emily the Strange’s dark outfits and did everything she could to become the double of that young comic‑book witch. Very thin under her oversized sweatshirt with its blood‑red letters — “I want blood” — she had a thick fringe like her heroine and whitened her cheeks with pale eyeshadow. Werewolves, zombies, vampires… that was her secret world, shared with her high‑school friends. She was sixteen and told herself she would leave this island when she turned eighteen, because nothing ever happened here. Until the day everything changed.

Abigaël knew every corner of her island — Clare Island, a tiny jewel in the ocean, eight kilometres long and five wide. A small patch of land lost in Clew Bay, west of Westport. The girl loved climbing to the top of the cliffs overlooking the lighthouse. But that day, a violent storm had broken out within minutes. Abigaël knew those tempests too well, those gusts that could hurl you into the abyss. She knew those cliffs by heart — carved like grey lace, majestic yet terribly dangerous. When she felt the first drops on her face, she slipped into a small cave halfway down the cliff to wait out the storm.

And that’s where she saw him. The body of a man lying there. Middle‑aged, fair‑skinned, brown hair matted with salt. His clothes — a grey sweater and jeans — were soaked. His eyes were closed, but his mouth was open, as if something were stuck inside. Abigaël’s curiosity outweighed her fear. She dared to approach the corpse. There was indeed an object — a… large stone! A rock wedged into the man’s jaw.

How had he ended up in that cave? And who was he ?