The Lighthouse Keeper

The storm had been building for three days, and Margaret knew what that meant. By the fourth day, they would come.

She stood at the top of Gulf Point Lighthouse, watching the gray-green waves slam against the rocks below. The beam from her lamp swept across the churning Atlantic, regular as a heartbeat. Thirty-two years she’d kept this light burning, ever since her father’s hands had grown too unsteady for the work. Thirty-two years of solitude of fog and salt spray.

And every seven years, for one night only.

The visitors.

Margaret descended the spiral stairs, her footsteps echoing against the curved stone walls. In her small cottage attached to the lighthouse base, she pulled out the trunk from beneath her bed. Inside, wrapped in tissue paper that crinkled like leaves, was the costume.

The jellyfish.

It had taken her late mother three months to make it, the summer before she died. Yards and yards of translucent organza in shades of pearl and lavender, sewn into flowing tentacles that caught the light like captured moonbeams. The bell-shaped dome for the head was constructed from wire and more sheer fabric, with long ribbons that would trail behind when Margaret moved. Her mother had even sewn tiny glass beads throughout, so the whole thing would shimmer and pulse like something alive, something from the deep.

“They want to see wonder,” her mother had explained, her needle flashing in the lamplight. “They want to remember what it’s like to be amazed.”

Margaret had been seventeen then, still young enough to find the whole thing magical rather than mad. Now fifty-three, with silver streaking her dark hair and permanent squint lines around her eyes from searching horizons, she sometimes wondered if the visitors were real at all, or just a story her family had told themselves to make the loneliness bearable.

But she’d seen them.

Every seven years since she was a girl, she’d seen them.

The wind picked up as evening fell, rattling the windows. Margaret made herself tea and waited. She didn’t bother with dinner—her stomach was too tight with anticipation. Instead, she sat in her father’s old chair that creaks with every rock and watched the clock on the mantle tick away the minutes.

At precisely 9:47 PM, the lighthouse beam flickered.

It shouldn’t have been possible. The lamp was electric now, running on generators with three backup systems. But it flickered all the same, a stutter in that steady rotation, like a skipped heartbeat.

Margaret set down her teacup and began to dress.

The jellyfish costume slipped over her clothes easily—her mother had designed it that way, knowing the October nights would be cold. Margaret fastened the dome over her head and let the tentacles fall around her shoulders and arms. When she moved, they rippled with an eerie grace, as if she really were floating through dark water rather than standing in her cottage.

She stepped outside.

The wind should have torn the delicate fabric to shreds, but it didn’t. The tentacles merely swayed and danced, defying physics the way they always had. Margaret made her way down the rocky path toward the small cove on the eastern side of the point. Her wellington boots crunched on the gravel, absurd beneath the ethereal costume.

The cove was glowing.

Soft bioluminescent light pulsed beneath the waves, turning the water into liquid stars. And rising from those waves, one by one, came the visitors.

They were tall—impossibly tall—with limbs that seemed to bend in too many places. Their skin had the texture of sea glass, smooth and slightly translucent, and it shifted colors in the strange light: now blue, now green, now the purple of deep-water trenches. They wore nothing but their own luminescence and their curiosity.

The first one to emerge tilted its head at Margaret, and she could see its face was almost human, if humans had eyes like tidal pools and smiles that seemed to hold the memory of every drowned sailor.

“Welcome back,” Margaret said, her voice steady despite her racing heart.

The visitor made a sound like water over stones, and suddenly there were more of them, a dozen, two dozen, hauling themselves onto the rocks with movements that were both awkward and graceful. They had no legs, she realized—their lower bodies were more like a dolphin’s tail, powerful and sleek.

And they were all staring at her.

Margaret took a breath and began to move. She raised her arms and spun slowly, letting the tentacles flow and ripple around her. The glass beads caught the bioluminescent light and reflected it back, creating patterns that swirled across the rocks. She swayed and dipped, becoming the jellyfish, becoming the creature of the deep sea that her mother had imagined.

The visitors made that water-over-stones sound again, but louder now, more insistent. Margaret realized they were laughing. Or applauding. Or both.

She danced for them in the way her mother had taught her, in the way her grandmother had danced before that, and her great-grandmother before that. Each generation of lighthouse keepers had kept this strange tradition, dressing in costumes of sea creatures to welcome whatever these visitors were. She’d heard stories of her great-great-grandfather dressed as a massive sea turtle, his shell made from an old boat hull painted green.

As she danced, something remarkable happened.

The visitors began to change.

Their bodies rippled and reformed, and suddenly they too wore costumes—or perhaps they became costumes. One transformed into a massive octopus, its tentacles longer and more elaborate than Margaret’s, studded with suction cups that glowed like small moons. Another became a school of fish, its body multiplying and separating and flowing together again like quicksilver. A third became a whale, somehow still enormous even though it should have been impossible on land, its whale mouth open in a silent song.

They were showing her their own magic, Margaret realized. Responding to her performance with one of their own.

For an hour, maybe more, they danced together in the cove. Margaret forgot to feel cold or afraid. She forgot that she was a solitary middle-aged woman whose greatest excitement was usually a particularly beautiful sunset. She was simply part of something ancient and strange and wonderful, a tradition that stretched back to when her family had first built this lighthouse and found they weren’t alone on this isolated point of rock.

Finally, the visitors began to retreat. The bioluminescence faded, and one by one they slipped back into the waves. The last one paused at the water’s edge and looked back at Margaret. It had returned to its original form, that almost-human creature with tidal pool eyes.

It reached into the water and pulled out a shell—a beautiful nautilus, spiraled and perfect, glowing with a soft inner light. It placed the shell on the rocks at Margaret’s feet, then gave what might have been a bow or might have been a wave and disappeared beneath the surface.

Margaret stood alone in the bay, the jellyfish costume glowing faintly around her. She picked up the nautilus shell and held it to her ear. Instead of the ocean’s rumble, she heard music—strange and compelling, like nothing made by human instruments.

She would keep it on her mantle, she decided. Next to the sea turtle figurine her father had been given, and the piece of coral her grandmother had received. Small treasures from the deep, payment for a performance, proof that the loneliness had purpose.

Margaret made her way back up the path to the lighthouse. The beam was steady again, sweeping across the now-calm water. The storm had passed while she was dancing, dispersed by whatever power the visitors carried with them.

Inside, she carefully removed the jellyfish costume and wrapped it again in tissue paper. Seven more years until she would wear it again. Seven more years of solitude of tending the light, of watching for ships in the night.

But she wouldn’t be counting down the days until human company came. She’d be counting the days until the next impossible night, when the sea would glow and the visitors would return, and she would transform once more into something beautiful and strange.

Margaret placed the shell on the mantle and made herself another cup of tea. Outside, the gulls were already returning, their cries sharp in the salt air.

Everything was normal again.

Everything except for the faint sound of music still echoing from the shell, and the lingering sense that wonder—real, genuine wonder—still existed in the world.

She just had to dress as a jellyfish to find it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​