Whispers from the Wailing Beacon
Storm-tossed and salt-stung, the island clung to the cliff like a stubborn memory. The Wailing Beacon rose from the mist, a stone sentry with a lantern-stare that cut the night as cleanly as a knife. They said the light never truly dies here; it only forgets a name and asks to be reminded. I came because a fault in the lamp should be a simple fix, yet the air tasted of old rain and older fear, and the door groaned as if waking from a century-long nap.
I carried a bag of tools and a stubborn belief that a lighthouse is merely a machine. The stairs twisted upward in a tight spiral, and with each step the walls exhaled a damp memory: oil and brine, the pulse of a shipwreck, the soft murmur of keepers who never fully left their rounds.
In the lantern room, the glass eye of the beacon glowed pale, then deeper, as if listening. The whispers began as a rustle in the seam of the door, then blossomed into a chorus: a sailor’s sigh, a mother’s prayer, the precise cadence of a keeper’s vow. The lamp clicked without my touch, bathing the room in a cold, green light. The words formed in the fog, clear as a chalkboard written by frost: “Stay with us. Light is memory. Do not forget.”
The lighthouse does not sleep; it keeps the living awake to listen.
On the desk lay the logbook, its pages damp with salt and time. The entries were crowded with names I recognized from stories and tides: Elias, Mara, and a dozen unnamed souls who chased moonlight out of the sea. Each line spoke of fog that climbed through the glass and a shore that forgot its own memory. Every hour the light moved a fraction closer to the edge of the world, and so did the keepers’ patience, until it felt less like a mechanism and more like a vow that refused to break.
- A rust-rimmed lantern wheel, ticking as if counting breaths in the dark.
- Footprints in the dust that circled the lamp and vanished when reached.
- A name written in condensation: Listen.
- Whispers braided with wind, echoing every failed rescue and every saved soul.
When I finally tuned the generator, the whispers pressed closer, not to scare me away but to test my resolve. The two keepers—Elias and Mara—stood behind the fog, their features only half-seen, their voices a harmony of rain and lacquered wood. They offered a choice: repair the light and join the vigil, or walk away and let the Wailing Beacon forget me. The switch hummed to life, a warm arc of certainty, and the room brightened with a certainty I had never earned but could not refuse.
Dawn slipped across the horizon, pale as bone. The island exhaled; the sea settled back into its old song. And yet the beacon burned with a patient, odd warmth—the memory of two keepers and the presence of a new one. I did not abandon the lamp; I became its whisper among many, the living memory that keeps the light from dying in the dark.