Whispers of the Hollow Lighthouse Keepers
On a storm-wracked night, the Hollow Lighthouse stands as a stubborn finger of light against the endless dark. I came by trampling rain-slick rocks, drawn by a rumor no map can confirm: a light that refuses to die, even as the men who kept it last did.
The stairs groaned like old bones. Lanterns hung with rusted chains, swinging without wind. In the lantern room, the beam cut through the spray as if it hunted something just beyond the horizon. The keepers were ghosts, yes, but not the pale, polite kind. They wore coats frayed and salt-stained, eyes that burned with a tide-borne glow, telling me I had trespassed into a duty I did not know I could refuse.
“Turn back,” the wind rasped through the glass, “or become a page in the ledger of light.”
When I spoke aloud of leaving, the air thickened with the breath of old sea captains and the rustle of maps no mapmaker could draw. They moved with the rhythm of the sea—one step, then a pause as if listening to something between seconds—and shifted the room's shadows until the lamp's halo touched my shoes. The keepers did not demand payment; they offered a bargain: to keep the loss at bay, I would keep vigil with them until dawn, and perhaps longer if the sea wove another tale.
The Ledger of Names
The wall near the stairs bore a ledger no mortal could finish reading. Names dotted the margins, written with a hand that did not belong to any living body. Each name was a ship saved or a life saved, a debt owed to the night. By the end of my visit, the pages grew sensitive to the wind; the ink bled and re-formed itself, spelling warnings I could not ignore.
- Bootprints that vanish when you blink, yet leave a frost on the railing.
- A brass key that opens nothing you expect but everything you fear.
- Salt-slick notes etched like runes, naming each soul the light could not forsake.
- A muffled bell that tolls for those who listen too long to the sea’s counsel.
When the first pale dawn pressed its fingers along the horizon, the lantern’s beam finally steadied on a single, unflinching point: the truth behind the hollow keepers was not their haunting but our own. I stayed, if only to translate what they whispered into a language the living could hear. The light did not falter; it learned to depend on me as it had depended on them. And as the storm loosened its grip, the hollow lighthouse breathed a last, grateful sigh, the kind that an old watcher makes when the sea finally remembers its own name.