Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. Audio Diary Entry one. You wouldn't
expect it walking up out of the night toward the
old Hawthorne Place. But the stone's hum one is a storm.
That's the first thing I notice. It's not to sound
so much as a presence, a vibration in the soles
of my boots and a metallic shimmer behind my teeth.
One presses hard against me, and spray rides the air,
tasting of distant salt and cold. The lighthouse rises from
a tumble of black rock, wrapped in shuttered windows, in
a steel skeleton that's lost its shine under canvas windows.
If the world ended to night, I think no one
would find me for weeks. The beam sweeps out every
forty seconds or so, slicing through the blowing mist. With
each pass part of me waits for something to interrupt
the lightsome flicker, a movement, a silhouette that shouldn't be there.
I forced myself up the track, where corder clutched in
my gloved hand. Behind me, the sea detonates against the
cliff and retreats in a wheezing predatory hush at the door.
My heart is galloping. I NA because there's protocol, even
at the edge of nowhere. The door swings an on,
a moth eaten man with a battered flashite and a
battered temperament. He says nothing for a long moment. J're
working the stub of a toothpick. You the reporter. His
accent comes out mangold by tiredness and caution. That's me,
Miriam Lane. Come on. Then he steps aside, turns up
his collar, don't track sound on the mat. He doesn't
bother to shake my hand. Inside the aar saddles around me,
musty edged with the copper tang of old machinery and
subtler notes of mildew. Everything's aged. The larmps stutter in
their cages, casting shadows over brick and shalk fire doors.
Somewhere above us, the lens kanks and squeals, answering each
blast of wind, which shows defiance. Calum, the night manager,
as the memo had said, leads me through a cramped corridor.
His keys thump at his hip. He walks as if
he's still not sure how he got here, movements all
stiffness with something shut away just behind his eyes. He
will set up here, he says, stopping by a heavy
wooden dust jammed under the main window. He wraps his
knuckles on it, then gestures at a half dead lamp,
night desk. All shift logs go here, don't unparg anything,
don't touch the radio unless the trouble He hovers near by.
But a sense he's measuring every question I might try.
I do my best impression of an unobtrusive observer taking
in the scene. Layers a scufflinolium on a foot, the
dust frow to take a long window ledges, see sharps
curling near the edges. Equipment part analog, part digital. Hums
and clicks, symphony of patients and unrecorded years. My finger
tips greeze the night disk's battered surface. There's a line
where the varnish never quite set, swollen with some dark
old stain. Callum rifles through battered log book, tapping entries
with one chip nail. His instructions are clipped, and rode
iroly check hints the phone to the coast guard, which
circuit was as if the jenerator hiccups, And remember you
see something outside? Ye keep the door shut. Some folks
out here get brave in the storm, but mostly it's
just birds. I sit oblige him by starting the audio recorder,
just a faint click. A shiver runs up my arms
and into my neck, a sensation only partly from the
restless jill. The room contracts and expands with each flash
of lightning. For a moment, the two of us sit
in uneasy silence, listening to wind in the slow percussive
crone of the tower, between one roll of thunder and
the necks. My hand eyed the traces beneath the edge
of the desk. The wood old at the rest feels uneven, warped.
Something gives a hollow place. My thumb snags on a
slot that shouldn't be there. With a gentle nodge, a
hidden drawer slides forward, the action surprisingly smooth. Inside. Velvet
lining is warnter at the corners, half buried in the
nap A handful of dischooked Haidia cards plastic cracked at
the edges. Each bears a photo, a name, and a
date identical down to the month, but spaced exactly half
a year part. There are other relics. A dog, a
piece of a journal entry writing feverish across the lines,
flashes at three thirty, couldn't sleep after a wristwatch with
a shattered crystal, hands frozen. At five past three, I
find a seepy photograph five figures posed in front of
the tower, faces obscured by grain and time, but the
faintest numeral again the same date as the id cards
cold along the bottom. Before I can examine fur there,
Callum's shadow looms over me. Sudden, efrocious. He slams the
drawer shop with a force that makes the lamp shudder.
Suddenly his eyes are all edge of warning, not displeasure.
You want a story for your little project, You'll find
enough without those. His fingers hesitate on the lock, before
turning the small key, then pocketing it. A silence thickens,
edged with finality. Best to leave old gost alone here,
he says, voice flat and almost apologetic, and stalks back
down the corridor, beats ringing hollow. I hear the click
of his office lock. I sit in the deep and quiet,
recording a whispered memo, my lips barely moving. Why would
so many staff leave something behind, all marked of the
same day? Why hide this? And what happened to all
of them. It's nearly an hour before the wind slackens
enough from my pulse to finally slow. My first night
at halfone is smothered in Strange's not the lively threat
of gossip, but the feeling of tangled roots beneath stony
soil waiting. In the morning, the clouds have broken, but
the fog remains pressed low to the ground, swallowing the
base of the lighthouse and muting every sound. My bag
is still zip where I left it, the recorder's battery
blinking amber. For a moment, I'll listen to the playback.
My own voice, low heartp beeat audible behind the words.
My reason for coming here isn't just a by line.
I'm ten months into a freelance contract that's more about
insurance payet and rumor than real journalism. But Hafforn drew
me in separately and ache the traces back to her
brother lost years ago somewhere off this very coast. No
one ever found the wreck. The last signal came in
from near these cliffs, a tone sequence that the coast
Guard filed as in conclusive nose on paper. I'm writing
about staff shortages and old machinery. Unofficially, I want to
know why people leave this place without warning, why the
locks of gaps, and why month after month the same
stale stories seat from everyone's lips, technical difficulties, a tet lip,
need to move on nothing more. Mornings begin with the
slow ballet of switching shifts. There's no camraaderie, only perfunctory exchanges. Marta,
the day manager, hands over the log with a warning look.
She keeps her discourse limited to how was your knight
and mind the upper landing still slick. A flicker passes
between her and Callum some pack to avoid talking. When
I'm present, I try to fit in. The night desk
is my assigned station, and to track I early ready
check ins with the Regional coast Guard. At Port Black.
There's a script taped up of the transceiver coal sign,
weather light status all delivered and code more suited to
the nineteen fifties than now. There's a brass wind up
clock on the desk, never in agreement with a cheap
plastic digital beside it someone's idea of redundancy, or maybe
in inside jerk about time meaning nothing. At Hothorn, the
rhythm of each shift bills itself, from the weather reports,
the maintenance checklists, the endless looking of temperature, went beacon sweep.
Radio discipline is absolute, and yet between responsibilities, I find
myself wondering about every little gap, every staffer who avoids
looking me in the eye. Touring the tower, a count
that turns up the spiral staircase. The metal is once
moved by a hundred years of dutiful footsteps. Occasional portholes
show only fog and smout seabirds. At the top, I
open the hatch and let the wind bat in me
until I can taste the salt in my sinuses. Each
landing has a share of patch pats and bolted doors
closed off for what not calls structural reasons. The main lens,
battered but still brutally bright, were is at its stately pace.
The machinery room his click beneath it, oiled gears and
finely balanced weights fighting for another night's precision. Back at
the desk, I kept snippets of conversation between the others
as the clock in the tone is always delicate, strained.
Even on break, no one lingers. When I press gently,
I forget the feeling the old place is watching you.
To one of the younger night keepers, Sam just grins
without humor and shakes his head. You get used to it,
or you leave. Someone always leaves dinner at the nearest pub.
Pin Colkeith offers no relief. The locals, wary to a fault,
treat my questions with the kind of half polite silence
usually reserved for task collectors. A man at the bar
broad shoulder as nicotine's stained fingers, slides his glass away
and murmurs nights at halforone are different. Too. Many stores
end with someone catching the early fairy comes sunrise after
a few drinks. In another week's attempt at small talk,
I managed to pry half a story from Captain Donnelly,
the retired coast guard. He turns the beer glass in
his hand reluctant. Years ago, he says, there was talk
of two signals from Hawthorne, the one for the boats,
sure and another justice regular nobody could pin down. Folks
said it was nothing bad wiring, but every time someone
talked about it that someone didn't last it the light
much longer. He eyes me directly, as if to be
certain I believe him. I nod, letting the silence fill
the rest in back in my rented room. The wind
press is against the glass, riffic as a slow pulse.
I tap my note becllist of staff, names, dates, re resignations,
all open secrets hiding beneath stacks official paperwork. The gap
between reported boredom and unexplained anxiety widens by the day.
In the margins, I write, is it just the boredom,
the endless dark? Or is something else here? For a
few days, the rhythm almost reassures. I call in the
status updates, run checklists, fill the locks with neat, businesslike handtwriting.
But even the way routine settles feels artificial, brittle, is old, varnish,
ready to split. On the third night, I decide to
review the weekly radio locks. Ostensibly its research for safety statistics.
In practice, I'm looking for anything that doesn't fit. The
half one locks are ancient, written by hand until the
late nineties. Since then, scores of digital time stumps take
over the script sheet down to minimum effort. I expect
bored him and find confusion. Nice labeled routine. No incidents
stretch on for weeks, yet the time stamps leave out
entire rows. Most radio sessions a line, except for scattering
of shifts where critical interests are missing, always marked with
the same hand with an excuse about backup protocol. I
ask Callum for access to the old audio backups. He frowns,
but obliges, shoving over a battered case of tapes and
digital files. We don't use those much. Digitals patch out here,
he says. When I attempt to copy and catalog. Then
certain nights, almost two dozen across the past decade, are
simply gone inexplicably. Others include nothing but static, with hiccups
and cuts falling at oddly regular intervals. I isolate two
clips for closest study. The first is mainly his intel
a too a voice strained and familiar whispers. Count the pulses.
Count the pulses. It repeats, almost hidden under the static.
A second file from a night six months later features
similar distortion, but the phrase returns a different voice, same
cadence in time. Count the pulses. My skin prickles, and
I playate back at low volume in my headphones late
one night, unsure if I have imagined it. The next shift,
during the handover, I bring it up. Callum listens with
his jaw set refusing to meet my eyes. The usual
exhaustion falls away, something cold, flickering beneath his words. Ocean static,
he says, closing the lob book. Sometimes some one talks
in their sleep. Don't waste your time. But the drawer
from the first night begins to gnaw at me. The
id cards, the fracturic watchhold, tied to the same cyclical date,
start feel not only like accidental keepsakes, but artifacts meant
to one or more, chillingly to remember in case someone forgets.
I start digging in earnest shadows lenten in the corridors.
Routine interactions grow tense, Staff avoid me now, no more
nervous balanter, just sidelong glances and truncated shifts. Even marta
huge offered a thread of solidarity, becomes circumspect when I
join her for coffee in the galley one night, with
the wind rising and the surf pound in the cliff below,
I sneak back to the desk while Callum is upstairs
with the electrical panel with tweezers and patients. I work
loose the hidden drawer again, pushing aside velvet lining. It's
more than a curiosity. Now I examine the objects one
by one. A badge Oliver James, assistant keeper, resigned two
years previous, ex ominated but cracked. The photo faded, smile
uncertain folded. Inside is a crumbled slip of paper March eighteen,
flashes four five six, then silence, door didn't open. The
writing trails off, as if heard the letters call. Toward
the bottom margin a tangle of handriton notes, each angled
with increasingly chaotic script contained I of warnings. Listen for
the gap between pulses, or if ye hear your own voice,
you're too late. A chronological order emerges. Each item corresponds
to the common date every six months, always on a
stormy night. The tone of the notes and objects becomes panicked.
Staff and very betender resignations are simply vanished. Within a
day of these annotated enters, I cross reference names those
who left abruptly line up with missing oustati corrupted radio
looks when night shot the sequence against weather records. Every
anomaly coincides with heavy storms and gale force winds, as
if something in the air is necessary for the event
to manifest. The main logbook grows suspect it sneatness now
looks sinister at the missing ires, a calculated gap. I
flip over a half dozen res ignition ladders, brief, apologetic,
never giving reasons, just enough plausible deniability. I try the
local records next Kokee Eatstown Library, A clotted post were
building maintains, a musty newspaper archive. I find dim typriton columns.
Keeper depart's post after health concerns, A technician quit after storm.
Site's personal emergency, official explanations always, even when there's no
police report or witness. The librarian is a careful woman
with good instincts. When she finds me skyrin old editions
sh lingers in the aisle, I ask about the old
light housekeepers, those who left in the night. She presses
her lips together, straightening her cardigan with trembling hands. Fox
used to see lights in the beach during storm, strange
regular not lanterns of boat. Some said it was just reflection,
others that it was the light calling to some one else.
Act at the lighthouse. Tension escalates. Callum catches me in
the maintenance corridor, and his voice is sharp, fierce as
he corners me in a thinning light. You keep digging
you'll go like the rest, he says, and though his
tone is cold, I hear something almost pleading underneath. In private,
Matt confesses her own dread over the desk, her knuckles
widening as she cleans a mug in the staff kitchen.
We're not alone up there at night, she whispers, glancing
at the closed door. You think the rocks just eat
the wind. That desk isn't the only thing hiding secrets.
Sometimes I hear it, something walking past, tapping on the pipe.
Sometimes I hear it myself. I ask her what she means,
what does she hear? She just shudders, shakes her head,
and refuses to say more. I need proof, not just rumors.
That night, I set up my personal recorder beside the radio.
I check the time two ten IM a few minutes
before the anomalous enters. The wind howls, the power flickers,
but nothing intoward occurs during the shift. But when I
play back the audio, a deep from me undertone runs
beneath the storm, a slow, almost palpable code into caapatans
that shift and loop. At first, it could be the
generator then had exactly to while in a sharp whisper
the phrase slips in layered under my own voice. Count
the pulses. It's shilling because in my memory I said nothing.
Every coil of my investigation tightens around the night desk.
The warning isn't just a phrase in an old Locket's
a repeating instruction, a compulsion looping from staff or to staffer,
entwined with every flowed record and resignation. Days blur into nights.
Attempts to gather more day to become acts of espionage.
Other staff find excuses to leave a room. When I enter,
there is an unmistakable sense of being watched, not just
by worry coworkers, but by something older. Storms return, the
sea hurls itself at the land. On the fifth night,
the lighthouse growns under the pressure that towers, window panes trembling.
I'm on shift alone. After Sam reports sick and mart
excuses herself. Early lightning reveals the battered desk in its
stubbornly lock secret drawer. The night swells with a knease.
I check the clock just past one thirty one 'm
minutes take onward, rain strafe the glass. I precisely too.
While the radio crackles, no voices, just a rising static
then in the space between two thunder collapse, my own
voice played back with a subtle distortion. Count the pulses.
I freeze my cleaves of the roof of my mouth.
Callswat trickles down my back. I scan the equipment, the
lamps flicker. Is something in electrical search or also disturb
and stand in the heart of the tower pervades the room.
I can scarcely breathe as Ellison again, watching the recorders
read up, blipin' time with the static. Suddenly a metallic
screet echoes from the stack. Is I bowled up? Heart
in my mouth. The lens of shutters its rotation, skipping one, two,
three intervals, beam flickering in a deathly morse. I rushed
to the landing, finding Callum crouched by the panel, fast blanched.
He doesn't look up. His voice is a horse thrum.
You need to leave it alone, you hear me. He
slams the fuse box with a wrench. The impact is
much furious maintenance, and lurches away before I can protest.
As he goes, he mutters again, we were told to
ignore a weird knights write them out. Don't mind. The
static doesn't matter. The desk remembers even if we don't,
and trembling. As I returned to the main office, the
clock'smen at hand jumps, then stopped again. Something in the
radio is pitched, threads itself into me. Out the narrow window,
the lighthouse beam swings wild, hailed by rain. At three
thirty three am, always always that time, alive transmission bursts
into life without warning. The main radio speaker explodes into gobble,
shrieking forces, snatches of phrases impossible to follow, blend with
distorted laughter, as if there itself were mocking me. Then unmistakable,
my own voice pitches through the static, warpedon and human
count the pulses. My hand fires to the night desk,
to steady myself beneath my palm. The desk vibrates ever join.
Every nail shudders and fevered rhythm. The hinges of the
hidden drawer tremble, as if something inside wants out. As
the storm crescendos, the lens of apulses and erratic staccato,
breaking the night into sharp, painful fragments of light and shadow.
I stumble back, disoriented as the office tilts around me.
The lights flicker out for one heartbeat, and in the darkness,
the only thing I can hear is my own ragged breath,
layered with the odd mechanical hum of the old night desk.
When the lights stutter back to life, the storm beyond
is nearest peak. I call for calum only echo and
the beat of rain and glass answer. He's gone. His
yellow rains liquor still drops from a hook. Radio irpies
tossed in the chair. I am alone, save for the
ceaseless whisper from the radio and the ragged, unsteady flash
of the beacon over my head. Searching for him, my
hand finds a gap beneath the desk. A slight pressure
pops a false panel loose, revealing a cavity deeper than
the previous draw inside a secondary radio set dust chowwise
twisted and soldered by image hands tuned to a frequency
I do not recognize. There are indecipherable skulls on tape,
notations in rappids, bidary script guard this one never look
I scan the numbers the diahov Is between channels marked
as unlicensed. Flipping through a tattered notebook found beside it,
I read enters in various handwriting all equally fractured flashes.
At three thirty three. Radio responds do not answer next
to that underline twice if the desk calls resist, Everything
lines up, the pulses, the resignations, the missing irons in
the lock. It isn't just the dark as eating at
these keepers. It's an external, something key to the forbidden frequency,
manifesting only with the right confluence of storm and stuff.
I sink to the coal floor, radio receipts in them
through pages scattered about. There is a pattern here, recursive
and relentless. Whatever compels the staff of Hawthorne to leave,
to lock their voices away in a haunted drawer is
not a quark of human nerves. It waits for storms.
It waits for midnight, for silence, for whoever is unlucky
enough to man the night discompressed their heir to the
wrong frequency. When dawn pulls across the drifted windows, and
gulls returned to pick at the rocks, I have made
my resolution, no more pass of note taking, no more
denials or circuitous warnings. I will find the source, whatever
it is, whoever put it there, or whoever still listens.
I cannot trust what I see or hear, and in
more not the sudden lurch is in time, nor the
persistent ache behind my eyes, where memory tries to warn
me that, for the first time since my arrival, I
know at least this the threat is real, the pattern
as clear as that eyes, and to night. For whatever
reason it has chosen me, I reload my recorder and
begin to plan. Above me, the lighthouse lends churns in anticipation,
and the desk waits for its next keeper. The next
evening comes sound heavy and Misshaven, pressing its weight into
every seam and hollow of Home Hawthorne's old stone. The
town below is only a rumor in the dark. Fog
claws against the flood lamps, so dense that headlights from
the supply van crumple into white. At the drive's edge.
Mart appears before the end of her shift, shoulders pinched,
hands bundle deep in a scarf as she relieves the
morning watch. She stands in the door, studding me through
the reflection of herself in the glass guard, unsure, as
if she expects to find fractures in me already. When
she speaks, her voice is the color of hush frayed
at the corners. Callum's off to night. Heel left word
this morning not well. She doesn't meet my eye, but
lets the sentence dangle between us. There's a fresh key
fob on the desk, two more logs already close for
the day. I busy myself in the routine's battery checks
and methodical sweep of the generator room, updating the transmission
register for the coast Guard. Yet every click of the machinery,
at every lurch of the ancient transmission relay tidens the
knot in my chest. I forced normality, like a ritual,
shuffling through each task, so the air feels just slightly less,
intent unpressing me to the ground. At ten past midnight,
as the station's hush grows absolute, there is Ano at
the outer door shop out of rhythm with the wind.
Mardat lingering in the passage, hesitates at the noise. We
exchange a fleeting glance before she retreats down the corridor,
leaving me to answer. Outside. Sam's pale face hovers, eyes
rimmed with sleeplessness. He stands barely inside the spill of light,
hand shaking as he digs a crumpled envelope from his
jacket pocket. Either, I can't do another cycle, he stammers,
You ever listen, really listen to the static at night?
There's something under it. I can't concentrate lines like like chanting.
He's wild eyed, haunted by exhaustion of something more. I
heard my name. I heard the desk calling me, not
in a voice, but in the sound itself. When I
got home this morning, I found in Kamahan's didn't remember
writing a thing. I don't know what I wrote. I
coax him inside, push a mug of tea toward him,
my mind cataloging every detail, the erratic tap of his fingers,
the way he keeps glancing over his shoulder, as if
afraid the corridor might swallow him to He thrusts the
envelope at me, voice dropping take it. Couldn't throw it away,
figured you'd know what to do. He pushes it into
my palm with a force that surprises me, his fingers
cold as polished bone, And then, as abruptly as he arrived,
he hurries out, not daring a backward look. Inside the envelope,
a brittle folded sheet's torn from a holforn issued notepad.
The riding is intermidden half in scroll, were sometimes trailing
into the margin four five six, so quiet, then the gaps.
It's not me on the log, but I don't remember
anyone else there. The pulses match the light. I can't
sleep when you hear your own voice. It's too late
to walk away. The remainder dissolves and frantic pen slashes,
as if disjointed from reason. When the clock takes past one,
murdery appears. She lingers in silence, then speaks low. You
know about the drawer, don't you, I nod quietly. She
leans against the side of the radio, face glinting in
the little lamp's exhausted glow. I've only opened it once
my first week. It was Callum who caught me. I
found a slip. Never stay past three pulses, leave by dawn.
If you remember how that time there was also an
old coin American. Nothing to do with this place. Why
keep these things? I ask, my voice dry almost breaking,
Why not burn them or throw them out? She shakes
her head. Some part of you wants to forget. The
rest knows that's worse. She crosses her arms. There's a
rule unofficial. If you hear yourself in the static you leave,
see may or no farewells. No one ever comes back
for their badge. Does anyone try to talk about it?
I press you're restraining for any sign of movement in
the tower. She shrugs. You stop trusting your own thoughts
before you trust anyone else with them. Most assumed they're
sick or overtire. But the stores, the stories don't change.
Was there ever someone who broke the cycle? I ask?
Stayed after the date came up? Marta hesitates, then nods.
Once Old O'Neill, the overseer, he lasted two years after
his last storm cycle. He locked himself in the generator room.
When they checked on him, he'd sealed every window and
pluncative line kept saying, it's not gone, it's just paused.
He left in the night. Nobody knows where. Thunder booms,
wrapping hard on the glass as sudden a praft winds
itself through the cracks in the door. In it. For
a moment, I think I hear my own name muffled
by wooden storm. Marda shivers and rubs her arms. If sensible,
you'll leave too when you go. Don't take calls from
this place. Don't answer the radio. If you hear the
hawthorn tone. I want to argue, to tell her I
have reason she could never guess. Instead, I let the
silence hang, comforted only by the slow tick of the
old clock and the hush of the fog outside. After
she leaves, her raw loneliness settles, I turn on the
personal corder, set it under the desk, then force myself
through the checklist lights, radio tests, lend rotation. Everything is functional,
but I can't stop checking angles, half fearing, half anticipitting
a silhouette in the line of light. Fast too. The
radio's usual background no spikes. At first, it's ordinary static.
Then it begins to cohere into a rivic pulse, like
an engine's buried rum. The hair's on my FOREM stir.
I scribble data into my notes. Two seven, A M
pulse begins inter valse regular resonates with lighthouse beam rotation.
I count once, weep two three. At the fourth, the
static warps, swelling into a thick, almost electronic agle. I
press have funds to my ears distantly under the artificial noise.
A phrased reds through blow clipped but unmistakable even with
digital artifacts. Count the pulses, count, the the words fracture
into a raw, almost physical shudder. Snapping off my headphones,
A catch sight of movement out of the window at
a pinpoint glow far down by the surf. The lensarks
passed and knows nothing, just the black glass of the
cliff face. But on each return, the faint impression returns,
a flicker, then interruption, as if shadow is resisting the light. Compulsively,
I log the time again, two twelve a m. The pulse,
the flicker, the whispered voice of patterns, ditch tight into
the structure of every stormy night. The phone rings for
a moment. I nearly jump from my skin, heart jammed
in my throat. I pick up. Silence follows, except for
a memor of static, but within the distortion, a familiar rasp,
my own voice, a mistakably halting count. The pulses, count, Miriam.
Then the line goes dead. Not a click, not a fad,
just instantaneous silence, cold and absolute. My hand shake as
I lower the receiver, adrenaline making my vision swim a
fumble inn Death's new cavity for the secondary radio. It
feels heavier tonight, I just a dial to the frequency
last checked immediately an atonal, a hypnoc beepy start, flanked
by high pitched whispers. I recognize no human language, only
the casionce of someone's pleading, warped and stretched against all sense.
I speak into the nearest mic. Is anyone there if
you can hear me? Respond? At first, only the wind answers.
Then I hush, a soft exhalation of breath from every
shadowed corner, almost like the room itself is listening back.
The secondary set begins to vibrate, metal humming in a
way that seeps into bone. For at splitting instant in
a ray of voices lay as the squall. Some older
almost sepple crawled their consonants due by taped drag. One
of them is mine, unmistakably but broken. At the end,
I count the pulses can't stop. Please not again. The
throb of machinery rises to a kind of fever pitch.
The lamp and the desk wavers between shadow and blinding clarity.
My hands are slick, heart beat almost visible in my
shaking finger tips. Each time the lens completes a revolution above,
my mind tells as the number. A counting game I
can't stop forcing myself to act. I break the chance
by slamming the spare radio off, yanking the pluck. The
hump persists another moment, then dies. I stagger back, muscles
electric with unspent terror. My eyes fall to the chaos
of artifacts strewn across the night desk. I decrds scraps
of letters, that bat of photograph. Everything points to cycles,
to anniversaries marked in persistent inc across the bottom of
a log, except I hadn't yet examined. A skull stands out.
Whoever hears the last word remembers that's the trap, And
suddenly a new question flames up in my mind, raw
and fundamental. Has anyone truly left at all? Or does
some part of every keeper, every voice live on trapped
within these pulses and gaps, perpetually re echoing into the
machinery of the place I sit, forcing breath to come
slow as the clock drips pass to forty one a m.
The next hour passes in high alert, but the storm
outside begins to fade. Surful thunder, the wail of the
wind received by discrete stages. I busy my hands with
cattaalogging every relic sighting each Len's flashes. If on abscribed schedule,
the adrenaline doesn't subside, It just petrifies into vigilance. Then,
approaching three thirty something shifts static builds and the regular
channel not the hidden set this time and automated both
shirts then distorts into a lawn strangle screech. A digital
time simplinks rereard on the radio three thirty two. Every
instinct has to look away, not to listen, but I
keep my headphones in place with corder running. Three thirty three.
The light overhead freezes, then flickers three times uneven. The
room contracts as dimentions briefly on canny two tall, then
too narrow, then precisely A voice unlike Henny I have
heard laid, multi tunned impossible speaks, count the pulses. Her
name is kept. Then a ragged, singular exail, like the
sound of sand pouring through wood. The desk vibrates under
my forearms. The secondary radio, unplugged, clicks on. A heathless
wind rises from the floorboards, thick with a smell of
rare earth and burnt metal. Images come my brother's face
as I last saw it on the show years ago,
returning from port in a borrowed raincoat, his hand raised
in what I thought was farewell or surrender, or both,
his voice overlaying the others softer, just out of recall.
If you listen, never answer. The pulse in my ears
sinks perfectly now, not just to the machinery, but to
something internal. It is an itch, or a hunger, or
may be only dread. A noise from the corridor breaks
the tense of rough scraping or wet gasp. I wrench
myself upright, finding the passage empty except for the echo
of footsteps receding down the service stair. I stumble after
her boots slipping on the slicklinoleum. The lower landing is deserted.
The outer door ajar and rain scatters, and through the
gap outside, above the crushing sea, the lights wings, as
if searching for something it will never find. In the
wavering after image, a glimpse of ship moving past the
lamp room window, tall, cloaked in shadow, gone as soon
as I fixed my eyes on it, I returned to
the desk, shutting unlocking the inner doors. Behind me. The
colt cans have lapped again, as if time itself prefers
not to dwell on this section of night. The alarms reset,
the pulsing fades. My hands trace the cover of my
taper corridor. For a moment I could sider flinging, just
walking away as the others did. Instead, I press the
records reached down hard. This is Miriam Lane Hawthorne night
lock Storm cycle, third week. I have heard the voice.
There is something at work in this place, something that
insists on being remembered, even if it needs mouths and
hands to ride itself into the world. If you find this,
leave the desk as you found it, and run before
the pulses stop. If they do stop, the storm relents,
But in its wake a new and these creeps between
the beams and braces of this lighthouse presents, filling each
gap far below. The surf never quite goes silent. In
the hush before dawn. It sounds unervingly like static, a
communication seeking reply. Above The lens resumes its circuit, flawless
and bright. Down Here at Halforn's night desk, I sitbrace
for the next cycle, acutely aware that at some level
within the frequencies, or the wood or the shivering wire,
am already part of the pattern clouded summrise never quite
shakes the night from Hawthorne. After the storm, the horizon's
nothing but bruised wol in, a thin band of sickly
yellow beneath the lample clouds. Every joint in the tower
aches from battering. The lens grinds to recycle, as if
nursing an injury of its own. I move through the
morning sequence, mind sick with alf images and exhaustion. Every
sound seems slightly double, the bell trailing, a bell, footfalls
miss by beat, the radio echoing just after the voice finishes.
Marta hans off the day's log with a damp, searching look.
Her gaze never quite hold into my face. You are
sure you are last watch to night, Miriam? I can,
I can swap? I shake my head. Her attempt at
care only undiscores her defeat. This something resigned, a silent
concession that my path forks from here and nothing will
turn me back. She purses, her lips, hesitates, as if
half the words she wants are pulled out by the tide.
Then Omy says, you are brave to stay. That's not
always wise. By mid day, among the bench outside Colquise's
post office, rocking gently forward with the scratch pad headphones
and the battered contents of the desks, hidden box, the
back of my teeth ache from pressing questions together. I
spend IROs and raveling wives from the secondary set, laying
them bare and failds unlight on the faded bench slats.
My cell's barely holding charge. But on the third ring,
my old friend Jewels picks up from her workshop two
towns Inland. Her voice carries texture, floor fan mumford and
suns leaking from somewhere with soud of smoke coffee. What
have you roped me into lane? She groans, but her
energy is a relief, steady and stubborn. I described the night,
the pulses, the voices, the sick lurge of time. I
explain as much as I dare about the hidden radio
and the times when impossibly my own voice echoes back
from the transmission, locks chills, asks for files. I email
her the fresh recordings what's selvash from both the official
logs and my own, and then carefully frequency notations and
a brief video clip of the radio set itself. There's
a long pause. Jewels's habitual skepticism is muted. By something
like dread. Did you mean to capture these undertones? There's
a weird sub frequency like data, but analog. It's manipulating
ampitude in a pattern. Hang on, there's type in the
muted put her of software working outside my comprehension. It's
not maritime co lane. These pulses line up in six
minute cycles, then go silent. Did you notice it spects
every half ire, then a long pause At three thirty three.
A sick chill fills my throat. That's the time the
voices come through, every incident, every resignation. I'll put this
through a spectrograph. But you are dealing with a repeating
antalog message. Something or someone embedded it so that the
uninitiated getstatic. But anyone who spends enough iro starts to notice,
starts to count, she breaks off. You could get stuck
in it if you keep listening, like an old number's station.
But self propagating lane, don't let yourself loop on this.
I thank Kurt wicked joking. Don't worry, not planning to
become a ghost in the machine just yet. But my
hand is shaking. As I end the call. I jog
back up the broken bluff path breath shop. When snapping
my jacket at my rented room, I arrange the old
artifacts on the desk in sunlight, the budges, the journal
pages that photograph. I photograph everything, sending back up images
to online storage, then to jewels, just in case the
unnaise lifts just a little with the motion evidence order,
the friction of the living against the mechanisms of the past.
I dropped by the Kolqueith Library, hoping against hope that
the Akkadist is on shift. The place is empty, only
the slow passage of sn over dustmotes and the agent
clock hunched above the stacks. The librarian, Missus Iverson, materials
near the local notices. I ask if I can look
through old coast guard reports, a phrase that makes her
apt to frown, storm records, resignations, anything strange about Hawthorne Lighthouse,
A pitch it like routine research. Missus Iverson's lips compress.
She tugs out three box clippings and a leather binder
for inspection, then stands watching me in the silence. The articles,
mostly typwriton are thin and obfuscated, the kind of sidelong
wording that means a story was quashed before it was told.
Technician departs before don no statement, the routine broadcast cycle interrupted.
Apology issued no further comment. In the errorless binder, a
hand marked calendar notes unsolved shipwrecks, the Norwich, the Astroid,
the Hellene, all run aground or vanish near Hawthorne. Each
in March was September. Each date staggered is followed by
stuff changes at the lighthouse. I asked missus Iverson upright,
was there ever an accident related to the radio at
hawthor anything not explained by the official stories. She doesn't
look up from straightening books. It's not the accidents, she
says quietly. It's the silences, the times no one answers
the phone, and the next morning a new face replaces
the old. The official story is that the sea took them,
or nerves or must chance. But the light never stops.
That's the heart of it. What about signals? Heard anything
about double boadcasts odd transmissions from the tower. Donnelly said
her ice jump narrowed that one's dangerous to chase deer.
The only double you need to worry about, how there
is your own footsteps. I thank her, and she squeezes
my hand, blue vein voice cracked with something unspoken. You'll
want to leave before dark light haunts you harder if
you know its secrets. When evening comes, I sit and
listen the audio analysis of where Duelsen tries to pass
pattern from the pulses. The voice, my own voice, echoes once,
then the signal diverges, snapping to a new rhythm, as
if aware it's no longer unobserved. I examine the artifacts again.
We're cassifying. Note by note Olivia James, the assistant keeper
whose badge I hold, resigned March nineteen, two years past
the morning after a failed transmission logmarked routine note say
flashes four five six, then silent door didn't open. The
coin mart found in the drawer, older than the desk itself,
was you as military issue, A lighthouse token possibly, but
stamped with a radio frequency. Nowher in public inventory. Another
slip from a year before, Olivia, if the night is
too still, do't aanswer the third call? Each time the
phrase count the pulses rendered in tramping script. Each item
is a bread crumb, but more desperate with repetition, as
if the process unravels the longer it runs. Jewels's email pings,
looked up shipwick record huge by durn, double signal nights,
smuggler cordes. Maybe don't think this is random. You're dealing
with the cover operation, something that's been hiding inside routine
maritime transmissions for decades. Stay sharp, Stay sharp. I hear
it echoed in the slap of the surf against black rock,
the crackle of the radio, the throb of the wind
at my window. In the darkest hour, before my last
scheduled shift, I packed the secondary radio, the warm photograph,
a portable recorder, and my own bat of resolve. I
step off for Hawthorne before the custov roden spoils all
its secrets. The horizon is already rising, size of mist
in my pocket. The radio battery ticks out, voltage steady
so far, but fading. The returning walk is haunted with
the sharpest sort of dread. But the weight now is direction,
not ignorance. At the gates, martyrs already waiting. She does
not speak, only hands over the keys and backs away.
Her footsteps careful, deliberate, never once crossing the dark stones.
At the lighthouse is threshold in the corridor, the boar's
flex under my tread the desk's bulk already looming under
the dying lamp. I snap on every bowl, every emergency flood.
I want there to be no corner for shadow to propagate.
Every piece of analog machinery is checked, rechecked, reel is working,
signal repeater is watched. I laid the secondarysect carefully atop
the desk, distancing myself from all rituals by inches at
a time. The cockeras just pass midnight. I run my
own experiment in sequence. I test each frequency, logging the spectrum.
In every channel there is regular static except the forbidden one,
where our deep pulse recurs every minute and a half.
I impose my voice deliberately. This is Miriam Lane testing. If
you are transmitting, identify yourself no answer except the smallest echo.
Identify yourself for trailing back with a lilt, as if
stitched together from old scraps of speech. I lose myself
in the love books, running tan lines, overlaying them with
jewels as frequency patterns, cross checking with shipwreck dates from
Missus Iverson's binder, every missive stretch in a log of
lines with storm nights. Every resignation follows a night with
what I now call the pulse manifestation the all of
the interference, the more abrupt the departure. By the end,
the gaps between entries become tight little voids, a lattice
work for ignoring the impossible. I come to understand the
secondary radios in an accident. It's a tull, a shield
or a key, depending on who built it, when and
to what end. At two zero, my own heartbeat picks
up pace skim prickling from cold sweat. A two weelve
precisely is predicted the pulsing under frequency bills I feel,
at first in my jaw, then in my chest. A
tightly wind dread makes me aware as never before, of
the structure of the desk, the way its green rises
under lamp light, the faint hornering from mugs on ancient varnish,
the velvet lining head and deep and never quite soft.
I force myself to write to array for the tape
half o night log Storm anniversary. If you hear this,
know that the phenomena are real. The secondary set modulates
a signal that seems to halored for accident, for a resignation,
or if some one stays toulon for something harder to name.
I believe the pulses coincide with Illicit's mother broadcasts, possibly
coded warnings or handoffs, shooted behind the official weather traffic.
Each cycle seems to require a participant to listener, an
actor without one. The signal intensifies until a mine slips
or breaks the cycle by leaving. I imagine my brother
the final call that was in conclusive noise. Was he chosen, conscripted,
or only unfortunate enough to listen at the wrong interval.
I tune the forbidden frequency to maximum gain. The light
shud out, The desk vibrates under my elbow. It's not
fear of the supernatural. The machinery here is enough to
shut in nerves alone. But this feels cunning, patient, unshaped
by strategy. I try to send my own signal, a
block of silence, then a deliberate override. No answer, no reply,
This is not your listener. For a moment, nothing but wind. Then,
with mournful clarity, my own voice again, fainter, barely above
a breath, Not your listener, not not any more? Can
the pulses miriam My hands clench. I feel the persons now,
not an apparition in shadow, but a pressure in the
air and await in my head, as if the desk
has grown rouse into my bones. At three thirty, the
beacon lens pauses, then resumes, stuttering in brief spasms, beams
hitting the fog and snapping back to post ghostly cord
on every blank wall. The secondary set, unplugged comes alive.
Lights flicker, indicating a pow drawer from nowhere outside. The
surf breaks in a passern intervals naked and mathematical. I
refuse to flinch. With third quarter running, I begin to
speak over the top of the pulse. This message is
not free. I renounce the pattern whole fum light is
now a dead channel. Can zero zero. The pulse rises
over my words louder, now a course of lost voices
rolling through the speakers, wordless, royal, hungry through the fog.
The light has beam flickers, then goes back entirely for
three heartbeats before flirting in one lawn silent candle. The
objects on the desk begin to vibrate, coin stacking upright, watch,
hands sticking under dead glass, a photograph curling at the corners,
as if heat or breath pass close. My own voice
lay with at least four others, some male, some female,
one umplacably young, leaps from the speaker. Count the pulses leave,
while you remember how the words loop, growing sharper and
more desperate. The voice is blowing into polyphony that whips
the room into verdigo. I slam my palm on the desk,
muscle memory and spooling. I do not accept this desk
is empty, no record, no resignation, no consent. I try
to kill the power, but the generator flickers and then holes.
Light's glowing hard as exposed nerves. The line splits again,
lading through one clear, limpid phrase, Count the pulses. Your
name is kept. At that instant, the room contracts, light bends,
shadow spills across the floor in shapes and consistent with
any lamp or beam. The window walks to show the
sea sparkling blackland in the reflection the outline of my
own face, but aged eyes in the sinct. My lips
move and do not match the word I am saying.
I try not to break. Anger floods up to chirp
back the terror. If you exist, whoever, you are sure yourself,
They for a recording. Let me and you if you
are alive. Speak now a silence longer and more profound
than any night before it descends. Then rash bidio feedback
loops in the room, throoms as every transmission, every resignation,
every play, every warning is played in reverse. Lay it
so fast to feel my heads well. The death drawers rattle,
the badger's flutter, my own tape, A corder jumps, and
when I play back later, I hear only wind, but
in real time the message is clear, your name, your voice,
you horror. I wrench the secondary set from the desk,
samming it to the floor. The signal waverers then holds
itself into a tightly wound electronic screen. I leap to
the breaker, flipping each switch in sequence. The room dies
to total darkness, no harm except what's left in my bones,
the throb in my ears refusing to fade. And then,
in that richness of absence, the heartbeat returns, impossibly strong.
Three slow beasts, a brief pause, then three again. My
own were the buildings. I cannot disentangle the difference anymore.
In the blackness, time fractures. I remember the first time
I lost my brother to storm and static, the echo
of his call, the story of O'Neill's desperate sabotage the
warnings in the librarian's eyes. But I remain. I choose
not to move, not to flee. I count the pulses
aloud and unafraid, even as the voice tries to thread
itself through my own tongue. One, two, three, four, five, six.
The echo blunts itself against my rhythm, not the other
way round. Something yield to breeze of release or defeat
hard to say. The signal dies, not with a scream,
but with a sigh, as if the lost breath in
a room wire exhale for good. They light to return,
hesitant and feeble. The beacon atop the tower wars, then
resumes its ballet falls and slow. I examined the desk,
half expecting the hidden compartments to have vanished, but they remain,
each artifact, dull and annette. Now the coinstone vibrate, The
badges are silent in my palm. The old photograph refuses
to unfurl further. The radio stays dead, excepting the official channels.
No magic, no pulses, only the sound of my own
breathing in the barrick called hush of her room. Too
long vigil occupied. I sit at the night desk as
the machinery shivers back to life above, recording a moment
with so care. This is Miriam Lane. The signal has ceased.
There is no answer, whoever send it, whoever it waits for.
I refuse to keep the pattern. A sigh. The wind
rises once, but does not carry voices. I gather my recordings,
the evidence, every written warning, every badge, and burned out watch.
I see the secondary set in a battered shipping case,
locking the desk behind me for the last time. As
dawn creeps in, lime washed and tentative, I walk the
stairs down with resolve, each footstep diminishing and noise behind me.
I make no official report. When the relief keeper arrives,
he finds everything in order except for a single sheet
of plain paper tape to the window. You do not answer,
do not keep, do not count. Within three days, I
returned to the city, but the shadows clane my tape recordings,
where once they played back the voices in the pulse
yield only wind, neutral static, and the mechanical decrepitude of
live places. My editor receives my article draft but deletes
it within IROs citing instructions from higher up national security
sensitive data abandoned the project. All my files on the
magazines serve a vanish by the next morning. I keep
my copies encrypted. I do not send them anywhere else.
She always tries to reach me daily, pressing me for updates.
You are right, Lane, that was heavy. The pulse is gone.
But your false kind of sk gave my phone into fits.
She laughs, but I can hear weariness, a subtle calculation
in her lightness. I tell her I'm fine. I think
I've really did end it. But I lie in a
thousand subtle ways. My dreams are filled with rhythmic flasches
and the taste of salt and old copper. My heart
beats out the intervals in my chest, trying to skip over. Three,
then six, then nothing. Days pass, kirl Keith closes upon itself.
Fisherman lower eyes at the ferry. Dark. Reports from the
lighthouse return to tight, colorless formality. I hear secondhand that
a new manager took over the night desk, a man
from Wales who keeps to himself, who brings in a
new radio set and locks the drawer. The first night,
one evening near solstice Duel's emails. Your recordings all corrupted lane.
They play back only wind a few odd beats at
three distinct time marks, never the words. She's tried to
recover files, but even the digital ghosts seem gone. Marda now,
a voice from my own past writes me a single note.
We sleep better now. The lens doesn't pause anymore, nothing stutters.
Thank you, even if I don't know what you did.
She signs only with an M and a small drawn lighthouse,
no name. I move farther inland. On especially still nights,
I run my phone's voice MEMOAP I sleep with it, recording,
waiting for at leap a crack in the silence my
own voice to call out with a forbidden phrase. So
found nothing, just the rise and fall of breath, the
world's machinery limping as usual, But the question Lingers was
at the last to answer, or merely the last the
pattern required before a distance itself searching for new circuits,
Quieter sees six months twrists passed, the world forgets halforon's
my no mysteries. One more lighthouse in a country of
shadows and wind. Then one rain, heavy Tuesday, and unmarked
envelope rise in the post no return address, but the
stamp is local. The paper wetstained, as if someone stored
against the bones of winter. Inside is my own bat
had recorded a one from the very last night, packed
in a plastic back battery, Replace still running as if
no time had passed. My hands tremble as I unlock
the memory, coud and press play first when ires of it,
rallying stone and cable an unremarkable hollow, then a three
thirty three clearers prey. My own voice, rugged and almost resign,
breathing out. Count the pulses. Count the pulses, Count the
pulses of the phrase, calls and interlaces, my voice blending
with half a dozen others, layered slightly off tempo, fading
in and out a phase. The background folders a heartbeat,
the faint chime of the old brass clock. This time,
there's no climax, no break, only as slow frade as
the tape went on, voices dwindling till static fills every frequency.
I sit by the window, listening and wonder does the
lighthouse still listen after all? Or did something some men
to do, some code to take me up. Count me
among its keepers. Mark me on the next cycle. When
I try to rewind the tape, the dvaskis and will
not play again. Outside the rain pulses against the glass,
six drops in sequence, then silence, just once, just faintly,
I think I hear my name. I leave the tape
orcorder where it is on the table and stand un saddle.
My hands and certain palms roll with memory. I want
to throw it away, bury it, burn it, but something
pins me in place. I close my eyes and listen,
as if the faintest echo might still be drifting through
its plastic scenes. Nothing but the recoil of rain and
the silk, and the far off wash off a lorry
on the village road. Still it can't shake the sense
that whatever process began at Halforn Tower is still unfinished,
some circuit waiting to be closed. That night, I try
not to dwell on it, but the old compulsion flockers,
count the pulses, Listen for the undertone, check the shadowed
corners for the glitch. In reality, sleep deserts me as
place taken by driftings in the edge of consciousness, the slow,
regulous sweep of a light through fog, the echo of
waves breaking on distant rock, the knowledge that somewhere there
could be a listener tuned to just my frequency, waiting
for a signal. The next morning, Groggy, I stashed the
package in the least logical place. I can imagine the
trunk of my car beneath the lining, waist against the jack,
and a faded raincoat of my brothers that I keep
but never wear. Still, I can fight the urge to
return to the cliff stage, where the sea knaws at
the coast beneath Hawthorn. I drive on impulse, not caring
if anyone would describe it as a false errand or
relapse into obsession. When I crest a rise above Colkeeith,
the lighthouse is a distant spike lost in drizzle. The
fields around it are blanketed in low fog, crisp and dense,
muffling even the cause of gulls. I park away from
sight lines and climb the old footpath, hands bared deep
in my pockets, heart tripping uneven beats. The memory of
the desk is still rawnder my finger nails. I want
nothing more than to confront the place, to see if
the pattern remains broken, or if new groups have already
begun to form. But as I near the iron palings
and new lock glints on the gate, municipal and personal,
newly installed. Someone took official notice after all, or at
least enough to curtail random foot traffic from the road.
I scan the windows, no glow, no movement, only the
salt cake glass reflecting Veabbott sky. The beacon lens is
still frozen. Mid day. I turn away reluctantly, but the
minute the lighthouse falls out of view, I hear it again,
not out loud, not even in my own internal voice,
but as a rhythm. Six drops of rain on the fence,
perfectly spaced, then one long piles. The reflux to count
is immediate, and thinking one, two, three, what comes next,
the urge to answer or to listen for the response
crawls up through my spine, stubborn as an old June
back in the village. I stop at the pub, hoping
for a living destruction. Donnilly is at his usual end
of the bar, keeping solid watch over a pint. I hesitate,
then sidle on to the next drw. He gives me
a sidelong glance, not surprised heard you finally left them
to their own ghost Up at Hawthorne, he says not unkindly,
don't look better for it, though I force a right smile.
I suppose the light never really lets any of us alone.
His quints, the lines at his eyes deepening with wariness,
never did reason. Men stopped asking questions about it, as
that nobody liked the answers. Where it is? They sent
a man up to check the gear after you came
down within two days, white as a cod's belly, wouldn't
say what he saw. Have there been any signal? Since
it feels childish, but I ask anyway. He nurishes his spear,
watching the football game flicker on the TV above the bar.
Static's more regular now, logs coming clean. But if you
ask the new manager, he'll tell you there's some interference
once a night, nearly, always at three twenty or three thirty,
Never quite enough to blame it on whether on machines.
He lowers his voice, almost a whisper, don't get what
you're chasing, laying that light was never for ships, at
least not lately. Too many sets of with that. I'm
not grateful for the confirmation, but it leaves me hollow.
I press him for more or anything about old codes.
Coast God procalls the habits of the men humanned those shifts,
but he only shakes his head patience thin. I know,
as much as I want to, he ought to think
about doing the same. When I leave the bar, the
air feels too still, the odor of beer clean to
my hair, the dim illumination inside more honest than daylight.
I passed the post office on instinct, drawn to a
tiny window. Lift from within. Through the glass, Missus Iverson
leans over a ledger, jaw perched tight in concentration. I
catch her attention, raise my hand in greeting. She unlocks
the door, lets me in without surprise, hoping for mail
or for anters. She asks. Her tone, kind but watchful,
makes it plain she knows what the last envelope hell,
I received something odd from Hawthorne, I admit, not sure
why I'm telling her, an old recording device still running.
Some one wanted me to hear myself my own voice
repeating that phrase. A slow, sad smile stretches across her lips.
Sometimes the village gets packaged as old habits, untrap left set,
deckad to go, not always from Hawthorne, Sometimes just fragments,
an empty envelope or a single page from a logbook
posted from nowhere. She esitates, then fiddled with a cluster
of keys, unlocking a bat of drawer behind her. From within,
she lifts a stack of letters, elastic banded together. People
try to let go sleep, yet they always want someone
to listen. She offers me the stack. I thum through
pages torn from journals, resignation letters, even scraps of dialog,
all circled around the weft of date's stormy equinoxes. March
in September, always at that boundary between seasons, when air
feels neither one thing nor another. One card is just
an address long since cross out, and the words do
not answer. If I called, who sends these? I ask?
Spreading them carefully, she shrugs, shoulders a lawn defeat. Sometimes
the lighthouse, sometimes the sea. I think. Maybe when enough
memory pools in one place find its way out looking
for a witness, you don't have to be the next
one the light takes. But sometimes it just wants an audience.
I leave the stack with her, un settled by the
idea of mayobook's hauntings, a web of relaid me messages
with no sender, no destination, and no real meaning. Except
to keep people circling the same mystery. Evening comes fog
grolling in again, heavier and thicker than any forecasts promised.
I walk alone by the breakwater, with a close stumble
into black water and steady, my mind alive of questions
that spiral but do not land. In my pocket. My
phone vibates, Jewels, undeterred, wants an update. I almost don't
answer and show what to say, but her insistence is grounding,
so I'll let the coconnect. Her voice, bright and impatient
at first, tell me you turn nothing off lane. I
nearly laugh, but the sound dries up in my throat.
It was off, some one turned it back on, or
maybe it just never stopped. Jewels absorbs that in silence. Then,
ye know. Most analog recorders have a tip head that
gets magnetized if you keep running the same track, the
ghost on and a tape there in the metal itself.
May be that's the problem. May be it remembers you
more than you remember it. I imagine those heads, orn
smooth by finger prints and salt. What memory is? How
sleepless inside an object never built to forget? Do you
think media carries intention? I ask, feeling half foolish. Jules's
response is quiet. Maybe it does if enough people treat
it like a reliquary. Maybe not supernatural, just memory with
an edge. Her words settle uneasily. Would you hold on
to it if you were me? My own question surprises me,
the implication that there's a choice, long pause. Then I'd
keep it, if only to see if it ever went
completely blank. She sounds tired, Laine, the signal might not
want listeners any more, but you still do. Don't let
it define your frequency. You're not part of the desk.
We say goodbye. The calls Island is slipping under water.
That descents for real. As I crossed the empty yards
around my flat, drizzle intensifying to a full downpard the chols.
Even through my jackets, lining my mind raises fragments of
the diary, enters the fleck of the lighthouse, lends that
moment of ultimate dread, when the voice is doubled back
and I realize my words no longer belong to me.
I decide to confront the thing more directly, not just
to listen, not just a count, but to interrogate, to
see what remains, if anything. I fetch the recorder from
the car trunk, cold and slightly damped to the touch.
I I set it on my kitchen table, plugging it
into a battered speaker I scavenged from years of cheap
sound gear. I make a mug of tea, hands trembling
less from feared and from a bright, feverish intent. Every
one the tape, not to the moment of the phrase itself,
but to the blank stretch after was static and win
a number actual words. I put on headphones's volume low.
I listen and listen, First the familiar fluttering, then that
gentle endostatic underneath so faint I almost miss it, creaking,
not a word but a pattern two three six pause.
Then if I focus, a kind of breathing, not mine,
just a presence in the sound. And then a voice
so much like my own, but wrong and tambour rolder,
bruised by years a generation offset. It whispers what is
left his memory? What his memory is? Pulse? His interval
is waiting, a cough mine perhaps, or a stranger's rasps
through the hiss. Lightning outside throws my shadow across the wall.
The tip continues a brief shift and wind, then no
voice at all, but a metallic tabmatronomic, relentless. I set
my tea down hard, accelerate. I try to track the taps.
They don't settle into a human rhythm. The intervals are
too precise. Then scatter like thrown marbles, and then a
series of thumbstat if esquinton. Let my mind wander, mimic
the patter of the storm beacons in the night. I
broke the cycle. I fast forward, more wind, one shreak
of sea birds, and answered questions. Dead in the spool,
I rewind in on some foolish instinct pressure record, speaking
into the cheap microphone. If there's memory in this machine,
this is the last entry. No more signals, no more pulses,
tore free or I am. When I play back, it
is only my voice, thin, the hum of the refrigerator
in the background, no response, only the exhausted resignation of
a purseon trying to draw a line in salt. But
that night, sleibityin refuses to settle. I dream not of Hawthorne,
but of a thousand lighthouses around the world, some ruined,
some gleaming, and modern mails share in the same interior,
all containing the same ancient massive desk, dark and breathing,
waiting out the censures for the next person to sit
and listen to what it cannot say. In the morning,
rain has washed everything clean. I walk past the pier,
glancing up at the room of the hell. Hawthorn looks smaller,
now diminished. I decide to mail the recorder to Jewels,
ending my role at its custodian. At the post office,
missss Iverson handles the package carefully, nodding at my half
muttered explanation memories on ghost's slain. They are only burdens
if you drag them behind you. As a key shortens
and the drizzle slackens outside, I ask, did you ever
hear them yourself out on the wind? She shakes her
head with a bittersweet smile. Only storers only silences. It's
what's left behind that way is the most. When I exit,
sun outlines the distant light station for a moment, its
stonewashed with gold puddles at my feet, reflecting that same
shifting sky. The tide is coming in. I stand facing north,
wondering if across the world, someone somewhere is feeling that twinch,
that fleeting certainty that they have heard their own voice
speaking before they thought the words. I walk home with
a sense that the cycle has listened its crip. The
pulses counted and counted now fall irregularly, blending back into
the noise of ordinary life. No more letters arrive, no
more calls come from the lighthouse with the editorial office
in the city. Even Jewelsy mails left, and her tone
turns cheerful, life resuming its usual pattern. Yet every so often,
as I climb the stairs to my flat, will listen
to the kettle shriek. I feel the skin at the
back of my neck prickle, an instinct for pattern, for
signal in the noise that I cannot wholly read out.
One night in Midsomber, the storm returns strong, the kind
of wild, unseasonable whether that draws every old fisherman's eye.
The wind strains the window frames, rushing the eaves till
I can feel it in each bone. I retrieve a
new recorder from my bedside drawer, press it into the dark,
lips barely moving, I tess, this is Laine. If you
hear my voice, No, this is in Hawthorne. No, you
are safe. The tape starughters cycles. Only the hush of
bed sheets send the wheez of pipes answering back. No
other voices reach out, no pulses join my own, and
so time turns. The headline in my thoughts is never written,
the story not published, the cycle unrecorded but not quite raced.
The day's Lengthen memory too dissolves into larger seas, dispersing
among the drift and tide. Still, Hawthorn Tower stands, weathering
all its mechanisms, Those both living and dead, are taken
up by new hands. And perhaps some day, when salt
and silence have outlived the names written in its locks,
the cyga will start fresh with new phantoms and new listeners.
But for now the old pattern has slipped its hold,
carried out untides no incident lob could ever faithfully describe
on a future night. Should I keep return the certain
about a death drawer, find an old badge, a faded letter,
What will they hear? The answer is probably as old
as a sea of warning, a plea, or just the
imprint of a heartbeat, regular and patient, counting off the
IROs of another lawn, vigil shadowed by pulse impossibility, and outside,
as on every coastline, with crumbling towers, the storm mists
the light keeps its silent circuit, and the world spins on, imperfect,
but for a while, unaltered, and that is the end.
Thank you for listening, and I will see you in
the next one.