The Lighthouse Keeper

I have kept the lighthouse for sixty seven years.

The world has become softer around the edges. Cooler. The water rushes towards the shore, faster and faster. I change the bulbs. I walk the line where the salt meets the sea. I watch the ships. They come and they go, one at a time, sometimes with weeks between them. Sometimes I don't see a ship for an entire month. I practiced swimming, just in case.

I was taught to believe that the lighthouse is the only mooring a ship at sea has. The light to guide you home. To keep you safe from the shore. To be a watchful presence in the dark. The bulbs are the most important part. It was ancient machinery. A bulb in a socket. It was hard to mess up.

And then the ships began to change.

It was one at first. Turning away at the last minute–not away from the rocks, but into them. Crashing waves, crashing ships. Crushing ships. I watched from my lighthouse as I always did. The world shifted. I called out and no one heard me over the roar of the ocean. It was fierce, that night. Calling. Screaming into the ozone, a fight of water against air, salt winning, as always.

3:22am.

I called into the Guard, and I went to help. I always went to help. It was more than my job; it was my calling. For sixty seven years, I walked down those stairs, called out on the radio, and kept them safe. That night, the captain couldn't speak. He stared at me as if he saw a ghost.

The next ship came when the snow began to fall. I changed the bulbs, again. I cleaned the sockets, again. I swept the floor, in case the dust motes flickering in the light danced across the windowsill wrongly, giving them guidance that wasn't real. The world shifted again, as if the bedrock the lighthouse was held on had changed. The very stones beneath the steel moved. I stared at the aurora in the sky.

3:23am.

It hurt to walk down the stairs. To bend my knees, swiftly, to gather blankets and life jackets and prayers. It hurt to kneel in the night next to bodies that floated on the waves. The waves that I was supposed to protect them from. I was the silent one this time. There were only four men and a mouser. The cat had swam faster than the men. I kept her.

A third ship came. I watched, this time, from the catwalk above the bulbs. Three ships in six months was not a coincidence; it was a pattern. Something was happening. I did not walk down the stairs. I called the Guard. They gave me an award anyway. I kept it under the life jackets stained with salt. I had no use for it.

3:24am.

I began to take notes. The time kept creeping forward, one moment at a time. The ships kept coming. I walked back and forth, listening to the creek of my ankles and the crash of the ships. Ships kept coming. The world kept shifting. The metal began to creek on those nights. The bolts were rusted in ways I'd never noticed before. Something was changing.

At 3:27am, I finally saw it.

There was a shadow in the dark. A presence beneath the waves. Something that lurked in the water, just off of the rocks. I couldn't really see it. Couldn't tell its shape, couldn't take its measure. I saw it, though. The ship did not.

3:28am.

This time, I really saw it. The shape of the thing. It was black, not just a shadow, but the ink of the night that the aurora left behind. The darkness in the water that had no name. Its limbs moved smoothly through the water.

It was calling the ships.

I knew it was. There was no other reason for it to be here. No reason for it to have come. I didn't summon it. No keeper in their right mind would call such a thing. We knew about it, though. Kept a ledger. Compared our notes, long-distance, one letter at a time.

No one ever saw it more than once.

3:32am.

The monster rose out of the water, one limb at a time. No devilfish had ever appeared ten times. I knew that's what it was, but the Guard laughed. Smiled. Humored me when I showed them the photos, the diagrams, the letters.

I went to town, early in the morning, and purchased my first telephone. I asked for the simplest one. It had a flat pane instead of buttons. But I called anyway.

One at a time, they answered. Keepers my age, but none older. Keepers younger, who laughed, and then quietly admitted their own stories of near-misses in the dark. Every single one on both coasts, down to the mainland and back again, had a story.

No one had ten.

It wasn't consecutive nights. But they were coming faster. And if my ma had taught me anything, it was to be wary of patterns. Little things that others didn't see. Shifts in the world easily overlooked.

I sat next to the bulbs, and waited.

3:31am. I turned the light off, truly off, for the first time in sixty seven years.

It was the only idea I had.

I sent out a message to the Guard. No lighthouse tonight. Broken socket. Repaired tomorrow.

The date was 03/03. And at 3:33am, the world shook.

A pattern. A tale no one kept.

The creature roared from the deep, a sound never heard in nature. It was not from the depths, not from the natural world. It came from elsewhere. The aurora proved it.

I walked out into the catwalk with my shotgun, and waited. The seconds ticked on my pocket watch. The time was almost over.

As it rose, I racked the shotgun. Waited again. The aurora shined from above.

And then, the telephone rang.