Fogbound Keepers of the Wailing Beacon
The night I arrived at the crumbling lighthouse, the fog pressed in like a living thing, a damp blanket that refused to yield even an inch of coastline. The town's stories spoke only of a lighthouse that would not die, not of the keepers who refused to leave. But the storm had a memory, and I could hear it in the hinge of the door and the salt-stained logbook awaiting my hands.
My task was simple on paper: fix the lens, refill the wicks, be gone before dawn. The actual job proved stubborn and patient, as if the tower itself wanted to audition me for a more stubborn audience. In the lantern room, the light glowed with a pale, almost human cough, and the stairwell walls carried a chorus of muffled footfalls that did not belong to me or any living crew.
- Fog thick as wool
- Whispers in the glass, counting the beats of our own hearts
- The light never dies, it only changes hands
I found the logbook under a loose floorboard, its pages damp and inked with a handwriting that was careful, almost ceremonial. Each entry seemed to be a vigil kept in shifts by someone who never slept. "Fog thick as wool," one said. "Whispers in the glass, counting the beats of our own hearts." Another: "The light never dies, it only changes hands." The handwriting grew shakier, the margins crowded with tiny, scrawled names—names I did not know but felt deep in the marrow of the room.
“The light is a living thing; it remembers every ship, every sigh, every lost breath that ever leaned into the fog.”
A draft curled around my ankles as I read, and the beacon hummed in sympathy, a swelling note that sounded like a horn blown beneath the sea. In the reflection of the glass, two figures coalesced—keepers of pale faces, eyes like storm-light, hands clasped in prayer or perhaps in warning. They did not speak in syllables but in the language of rust and tide and thunder, guiding me toward the next page of the log and toward a choice I could not name.
When I climbed higher, the fog pressed closer, and the wail began—a sound not of wind but of memory, the lighthouse answering a chorus it had long promised to forget. The beam swept across the room, revealing a third silhouette at the edge of the stair, a man who looked so like my father that for a breath I forgot where I stood. The apparition tilted his head, as if listening to a distant bell, and then vanished into the fog, leaving behind a chilling echo and a damp kiss of cold air on my neck.
By dawn the storm ebbed, leaving only a smear of light across wet slate and a ticket of quiet among the seaweed. The lens, now stubbornly clear, burned with a stubborn mercy as though the keepers still watched, still guarding what did not belong to the living. I tucked the logbook beneath my coat and stepped into the damp dawn, the beacon ticking like a heartbeat behind me, a stubborn companion that would not forgive a single unlit hour.
Outside, the fog waited. It pressed, and then parted, and in that brief breath I felt both watched and chosen. The lighthouse remained, not as a monument to failure, but as a covenant—between those who kept the flame and those who listened to the wail and learned to live with the light forever in the fog.