Sally smelled heather and fog. Under her back was solid ground covered in wet grass.

Her eyes fluttered open. Lavinia, naked body slick in the evening light, sat looking off at nothing.

“I’m back,” Sally said. “I’m sorry I crapped out on you.”

Lavinia said vaguely, “’s alright, just glad you didn’t crap on me.”

The wind pushed strands of fog over them. Lavinia looked especially beautiful with her hair tossed by a sudden gust. Slowly Sally sat up.

Before anything else, she could eat! Her trembling fingers pulled the coveted granola bar from her pocket … and fingers were too stiff to open it. Lavinia, body radiating blessed heat, ripped it open and fed it to her bit by bit. It was crumbly and crunchy and sweet as honey. And then the Dorritos, chip by salty chip. The most perfect meal she’d ever had.

At last, she was ready to look around.

They were in a green saddle between two peaks and nearby was the stone which had looked like a dragon’s head. Lavinia explained, “We went fifty, a hundred feet down and we came that close to bouncing all the way to the bottom but I dragged us to a stop. I carried you back up here while you were out.”

Her voice was hollow as she continued, “Dunno why we’re here at all. We’re off course, I know that. I felt this pressure building all day. We’re north of where we should be. Something dragged us here.”

Sally shivered and looked around. The left peak was a hard spike of rock but the right peak was softer and pillowed by grass. And she hadn’t imagined it: climbing the side of that lower peak was indeed an uneven staircase of ancient grey stone, weathered by wind and years but looking sharp as a dragon’s spine.

Partway up the steps a chain railing clinked in the wind. The railing at least was modern. Someone might live up there who would give them shelter.

As Lavinia dressed, muttering “butt-ass naked,” Sally stood, nearly toppling before she got shaking legs under her. She peeped gingerly down the eastern side of the island, where Lavinia had stopped them falling. Through the darkening mist she could see the dragon-back staircase switchbacking down; it must go all the way to the sea, which she could hear faintly hissing and slapping.

What a strange thing: who would build a staircase on such a desolate island? Sally thought of the pentagram: had that pagan symbol led her to some ancient gathering place of witches?

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Lavinia was dressed and standing like one of the crags. Sally tilted her head toward the steps which climbed to the peak and started walking.

The stairs were steep. They must have been tough, those ancients who had made this stairway to withstand the years. The steps themselves were wide slabs, each supported by a cobblestone patchwork of carefully laid rubble.

At the steepest place was the railing and Sally held onto the hanging chain without shame. The mist gave her an illusion of shelter but she knew she was hundreds of feet up as she neared the top.

She forced aching legs to bend a few more times and reached a narrow walkway beside a stone wall like the last remnant of an old castle. The mist didn’t hide the steep drop to the right. She shivered: the place looked deserted. But there was a low doorway about twenty feet ahead. Keeping a hand on the gray and white splotched stones she walked toward the doorway through the growing dark.

It suddenly occurred to her that the sun must have set while they climbed but no vampires had appeared. She stopped and Lavinia bumped into her. “What?” Lavinia asked, sounding spooked.

“Nothing, just, I realized, there must be islands all over the world too small or too far away from land for vampires to reach.”

“Hmp.” Lavinia sounded startled but not interested. “Guess so. C’mon. In. If we can go in.” She seemed to be thinking about something else.

It was hard to understand why the makers of this wall had built a doorway at all. The wall on their left jogged three feet to the right and continued unchanged. In the 90-degree jog the builders could simply have left a gap but they had felt the need to roof the gap with a large slab, topped by a thin layer of smaller stones. This made a doorway so low that even Sally had to tilt her head to walk through. Lavinia had to duck her whole head and she muttered accordingly.

Beyond the doorway, the skirting wall enclosed a sloping courtyard. In the pocket of clear air Sally saw a bulking inner wall that spoke of hundreds of hours of hauling stones. A tunnel pushed unevenly through that wall. Ducking their heads, they walked through the final passageway, Sally’s heart sinking with each echoing step. She gripped the wooden stake in her belt loop.

They emerged into a surreal, twilit world where odd humps loomed like hooded figures. Each hump was a dome of piled stone, a giant beehive rising to a pointed peak. The place was as quiet as a graveyard and the buildings were, in fact, like the cluster of tombs on the edge of a desert in a book Sally had read as a girl.

But somehow, she felt comforted. The buildings were so severe and at the same time so comically jovial. The inner yard was filled with rocks roughly shaped into kneeling men, which made her guess that this place was some outpost of Christianity from the Dark Ages.

And it hardly seemed like a ruin: it had been built stark and simple and it was still that way. They’d been good people, the builders, and they’d made this place to live good lives. Lavinia said something had pulled the two of them off the course to Germany. Had it been a force for good pulling them to this place?

Lavinia was hunched and skittish, eyes darting left and right. Then she hissed a sharp breath like she’d seen a snake. Sally gasped and whirled back to face whatever Lavinia had seen.

In midair, a white cross glimmered faintly in the gathering dusk.