The Ghosts in the Lantern Room
On a night when rain hammers the rocks and the sea hurls itself against the cliff like a beast roused from sleep, I climbed the lighthouse stairs with a lantern in my fist and a fear I refused to name. The beacon, a coal-black thread of history, woke at my touch and spilled a cold green across the glass. It wasn’t merely light that came forth, but a memory: the ache of old tasks, the careful alignment of wicks, the hush of men who died standing at their posts and never left.
I was the new keeper, but I felt the tower already crowded. In the lantern room, two shadows moved with the precision of compelled mechanics. They wore coats stained with decades of salt and smoke, though no flame had touched their fabric in living memory. They counted the wind, watched the lens, and whispered amendments to a system I did not fully understand. The lamp’s halo widened, and with it, the room grew heavier with the weight of things kept in the dark—names spoken aloud only when the storm forgot how to listen.
Within the Lantern Room
The first hour passed as a lesson in listening. The clock’s tick became a tide, the wires hummed in a language older than the storm, and the two keepers—if they could be called that—guided my hands with a ghost’s insistence. Every rotation of the lens, every tug of the chain, felt less like maintenance and more like agreement. They wanted the light to stay alive, and so I learned to pretend that I, too, was part of their circle, pledged to guard the sea against its own forgetting.
When the beam swept across the dark horizon, it found not only ships and reefs but a history that refused to vanish. In the glass, I saw silhouettes that did not belong to this century: a captain’s jawline set in resolve, a keeper’s smile that never quite reached his eyes. The room throbbed with a rhythm I could not name, as if the lantern itself exhaled and then inhaled the stories of every man who had ever stood vigil here.
From an old logbook wedged between the glass and the frame: “When the lamp dies, the sea will know your name, and we shall keep watch—forever.”
Signs that the Watch Is Never Over
- A breath of cold air that rides the back of your neck, though no window is open.
- The soft click of a brass hinge, exactly when the lamp’s wick needs trimming.
- A ghostly scent of lamp oil and rain, even after you’ve scrubbed the room clean.
- A shadow that steps aside in the glass, revealing nothing but a glimmering gauge you swear you’ve never touched.
- Names spoken in a whisper when the beam wavers, as if the sea itself were repeating a litany.
By first light the storm relented, and the room settled into the ordinary quiet that follows a night of weather beyond the town’s poor courage. The lamp cooled, the silhouettes thinned, and the air grew almost ordinary again—except for the lingering certainty that I had not merely tended a light but joined a vigil. When I closed the door behind me, I did not hear the footsteps recede so much as the room remembering them, and the old keepers nodded, finally satisfied, as if a long, quiet oath had been reaffirmed: the sea would never forget its watchers, and neither would we.