The Sea Serpent cut through the grey, listless water with a grudging efficiency. Elias Thorne stood at the rusted railing, the salt spray a cold slap against his face. It felt like an appropriate welcome. Penance Point rose from the mist ahead, a jagged black tooth in the maw of the ocean. At its peak, the lighthouse stood sentinel, a pillar of faded white and peeling red, looking less like a beacon and more like a tombstone.
“She ain’t much, but she’s sturdy,” grunted the boat captain, a man named Silas whose face was a roadmap of sea-weathered lines. He didn’t look at Elias, keeping his eyes on the treacherous approach. “Been standing for a hundred and fifty years. Seen a lot of keepers come and go.”
“What happened to the last one?” Elias asked, the question he’d been holding back for the entire three-hour journey from the mainland.
Silas finally turned, his gaze a flat, dismissive grey. “Thomas? He just… went. Supply boat came two months back, found the place empty. Light was still on, everything neat as a pin. Just no Thomas.” He spat a stream of tobacco juice into the churning water. “This rock has a way of claiming things. You watch yourself.”
The warning hung in the air, thick and cloying as the fog that was already beginning to coil around the island’s base. It wasn’t the first warning Elias had ignored. He was a professional ignorer of warnings. It was a skill that had cost him his career, his reputation, and the life of a woman whose name was a permanent brand on his conscience. A single name: Anna. He pushed it down, deep into the cold place where he kept all the things that could hurt him. This job wasn’t a choice; it was an exile. A self-imposed sentence on a rock where the only person he had to face was himself. He figured he could handle that.
An hour later, Silas had helped him unload his meager supplies—canned goods, books, a case of cheap whiskey—into the damp, stone-walled cottage at the base of the lighthouse. The air inside was thick with the smell of brine, dust, and something else… something vaguely metallic and unpleasant, like old blood. The cottage was a single room, furnished with the grim functionality of a prison cell.
“The generator’s in the shed. Light rotation is automated, mostly. Just need to keep the lens clean and the fuel topped up,” Silas instructed, already eager to leave. He pressed a heavy, ornate brass key into Elias’s hand. “This is for the lens room. Old Thomas was funny about it. Kept it locked.” He gestured to the covered walkway connecting the cottage to the tower. “I’ll be back in two months. Don’t go vanishing on me, Thorne. The paperwork is a nightmare.”
With a final, unsettling look, Silas was gone, the Sea Serpent‘s engine a fading cough that was quickly swallowed by the immensity of the ocean. Silence descended. Not a peaceful silence, but a heavy, waiting one. The only sounds were the mournful cry of a distant gull and the rhythmic, metronomic crash of waves against the shore. It sounded like a slow, failing heartbeat.
Elias explored his new kingdom. The cottage was spartan: a bed with a thin, lumpy mattress, a small table with two chairs, and a pot-bellied wood-burning stove. He walked through the covered passage, the wind whistling through unseen cracks, and entered the base of the lighthouse tower. The change in atmosphere was immediate. The air was colder, stiller. A spiral iron staircase clung to the curved wall, ascending into darkness. His footsteps echoed with an unnerving clarity.
He climbed, the world outside vanishing as he spiraled upward. Halfway up, a small, circular window showed him nothing but a swirling vortex of fog. The air grew colder with each step, a damp chill that seemed to seep into his bones. At the top, a heavy iron door stood between him and the lantern room. He used the brass key Silas had given him. The lock turned with a well-oiled, nearly silent click.
The lantern room was a cage of glass and iron, dominated by the magnificent Fresnel lens. It was a crystalline beehive the size of a small car, its countless prisms designed to catch and amplify a single flame into a life-saving beam. It was immaculate, polished to a perfect shine. And it was here, on a small wooden desk tucked into the curve of the wall, that he found it. A leather-bound journal. The cover was warped by damp, the name “T. Holloway” embossed in faded gold. Thomas’s log.
He resisted the urge to open it. He was a journalist, or had been. He knew the seductive pull of a story. But this was a story he didn’t want. He placed the journal back on the desk and descended, the silence of the tower pressing in on him.
He spent the rest of the day setting his things in order, a desperate attempt to impose normalcy on the abnormal. He lined up cans of beans and soup on a shelf, stacked his books by the bed, and placed the whiskey bottle in the center of the table like a totem. As dusk bled across the sky, turning the grey water to a deep, inky purple, he fired up the generator. With a low hum, the great lamp in the tower began to turn, its powerful beam cutting a clean, reassuring swath through the encroaching fog.
He made a small meal of beans and stale bread, washing it down with a swig of whiskey that burned a welcome trail to his stomach. He sat at the cottage table, the journal’s presence in the tower above a palpable weight. He would not read it. He would not indulge the dead man’s madness.
Night fell completely. The fog was a solid, white wall now, pressing against the tiny windowpanes. The world had shrunk to this single cottage, this single man. Elias felt a profound, crushing loneliness that was deeper than anything he had ever known.
And then he heard it.
It was faint at first, carried on the wind that moaned around the corners of the cottage. He thought it was just the gulls. But it wasn’t. It was a sound that didn’t belong. A thin, high-pitched wail. A woman’s cry of despair, snatched away by the wind.
He stood up, his chair scraping loudly against the stone floor. He held his breath, listening. Silence. Only the waves. Only the wind. His mind, he told himself. His guilty, exhausted mind was playing tricks on him. He remembered the screech of tires, the shattering of glass, Anna’s silent, surprised face. He shook his head, pushing the memory away.
He was turning to pour another whiskey when the sound came again, louder this time, clearer. It wasn’t coming from outside. It was coming from the covered walkway. From the lighthouse tower itself.
A woman’s scream, sharp and full of terror. And underneath it, another sound, metallic and resonant. The clang, clang, clang of a heavy, insistent bell. A sound that had no business being on this empty, godforsaken rock.
Elias froze, the bottle of whiskey halfway to his glass. His blood ran cold. The sounds were distinct, real. They echoed for a few seconds and then abruptly cut off, plunging the world back into the deadened silence of the fog. He stood there for a long time, listening to nothing but the frantic thumping of his own heart. The island was quiet again. But it had made its introduction. The echo of a bell, tolling for the dead.
