The Lighthouse Keeper
Day 16 of 30 Days of Fright
Good Ones,
Heed my prayer.
Ingrid scribbles, furiously, in the damp, leather-bound journal, the ink bleeding and smearing together. Her hands are stained black with it. She licks the tip of the pen, flips a soggy page, and continues to write, even as the sharp tip threatens to tear the page.
There is no time. She is coming.
The walls are shiny with seawater. The salt lingers in the air, stinging her nose.
Ingrid’s gaze snatches towards the lighthouse’s lantern. It is a bright star, slicing through the thickening fog; a star that will gutter. She knows this. An ancient prayer lays against her tongue, pressing into her teeth. Choking her. She utters it anyway, in a language that is gnarled and rough and scrapes her throat until she tastes the slickness of blood and bile. The light will glow for a while longer. She wonders how many more heartbeats she has, how many more breaths.
The pen tears against the page, muffled in her ears.
Seawater flicks onto the journal, smearing her words. Ingrid hisses a curse. The bricks of the lighthouse hum, a deep, droning note that rises, steadily. When it becomes a bellow, She will have arrived and it will be too late.
Scratch Her eyes out. Do not let Her see.
Stitch Her lips shut. Do not let Her sing.
Slice Her belly open. Do not let Her bleed.
Slit Her throat from ear to ear. Do not let Her scream.
Ingrid’s pen stammers to a halt. There. Whoever follows has their warning.
She claws at a loose brick in the wall. It clutters to her feet. She shoves the journal into the heart of the wall, holding her breath and counting backwards from thirty-three as she does so. The journal falls softly into the space behind the bricks, held like a secret. She hooks three fingers, crosses herself, and kisses her nails – a prayer to the Good Ones. The brick, she slips back into place.
The hum has become a high, warbling note. It slits through her ears, and draws a gasp from her lips. When she raises a scarred, gnarled hand to her throat, it comes back warm with her blood.
She is almost here.
Ingrid stumbles out into the smoky night, hands gripping the cold rail, silver hair whipping into her eyes and mouth with the ominous song of the wind. The fog is a thick white veil, wreathing the lighthouse. The sea is wild, black and swept through with stars, but they are not the constellations she recognizes, the constellations that hang in the skies above her. No, the sea no longer reflects the heavens of this world.
The hum deepens and distorts, filling Ingrid’s ears with strange, hollow sounds, not of this earth. It has become a bellow, a call for the siren woman from her siren world. Ingrid grits her teeth. She harbors no delusions – she knows she will not survive this night. Yet, perhaps, she has yet another trick to play before the siren woman takes her.
The lighthouse’s flame, which she has tended for forty-odd years, gutters out. Darkness washes over her.
Through the light of strange stars, Ingrid sees the woman that dissolves onto the sand.
The sea trails from her like black silk, dampening her pale, nude body and curling through her hair. It glistens from teeth that are long and sharp as needles, and glows in her eyes as she hooks her gaze onto Ingrid’s. Her smile is wide as the mouth of a well, wide as the hole between worlds.
Ingrid swallows once, tasting sea and terror. In her hand, she grips the sharp pen she used to cut her warnings into the pages of her weeping journal. The woman’s eyes… even from a distance, they beckon, pools of black water flecked with stars. Water Ingrid has never tasted, nor laid eyes on.
She mutters a prayer to the Good Ones to protect her, tightens her grip on the fountain pen, and steels herself.
You will not take me.
Her eyes become shreds of pain; they run through her fingers in trails of blood and whites. Ingrid sucks air and agony through her teeth, and the slick pen almost tumbles from her fingers – but she refuses to let go. As her sight extinguishes, her other senses heighten until the salt nips at her tongue and the siren woman’s enraged shriek bursts in her ears.
You will not take me.
The slap of wet feet against stone echoes in her bruised, bleeding ears. The woman – the thing – is coming for her, each hollow step ringing through the lighthouse’s spine and into its temples, where Ingrid waits for her death.
It is not death she fears, but the maw of another world closing around her soul.
The pen is warm and wet in her hands. Her skin has grown damp with sweat and with saltwater.
Her shriek comes again, frenzied and otherworldly and from right before her.
Ingrid smiles.
Welcome me, Good Ones. Your humble servant.
She plunges the pen into her own throat and tears through it like paper.
In the next heartbeat, the siren woman’s glassy teeth are closing around her neck. But Ingrid is already fading, her memories of that alien star-spangled sea, that crooked siren, fading, folding into the words of her final, whispered prayer to the Good Ones – that the lightkeeper they call to, the one who will follow, will find her journal and heed the words and banish the creature once and for all into that siren world of night and shadow.
Amen.
Through the light of strange stars, Ingrid sees the woman that dissolves onto the sand.- this has to be my favorite line. You painted a picture in my head so clearly. Thank you-Shain
So so so so so good! I loved how suspenseful and spooky it was!