The salt spray tasted of secrets. It clung to Elara’s lips as she stood on the weather-beaten pier, her gaze fixed on the skeletal finger of granite that clawed its way out of the perpetually churning sea. Atop it sat her inheritance: the Storm’s End Lighthouse. It wasn’t a quaint, picturesque structure from a postcard. It was a brutalist pillar of stone and iron, scarred by a century of relentless storms, its lantern room a single, unblinking eye staring into the oppressive grey expanse.
Her great-uncle, Arthur Vance, had been a ghost in her family’s history, a name whispered with a mixture of pity and fear. She knew only two things about him: he had been the keeper of this lighthouse for fifty years, and he had died screaming at the sea. The lawyer had been tactful, of course, using phrases like “a tragic, solitary end” and “a mind weathered by years of isolation.” But the local fisherman who had ferried her to this desolate pier had been less poetic.
“Old Arthur? He went mad, miss,” the fisherman, a grizzled man named Silas, had grunted, refusing to help with her bags. “Said the light called things from the deep. Things that whispered back.” He had made a sign to ward off evil and had practically fled, the chug of his motorboat a fading heartbeat in the thick, damp air.
Now, with the groan of the automated foghorn echoing like a lament, Elara felt the weight of that madness settle around her. She had come here to escape the ghosts of her own life—the sterile white of hospital rooms and the phantom ache in her limbs. But as she took her first step onto the winding stone path that led to the lighthouse door, a chilling thought took root in her mind: what if she hadn’t escaped her ghosts at all, but had simply traded them for older, colder ones? The heavy iron door creaked open under her touch, revealing a spiraling darkness that seemed to exhale a breath of mildew and brine. Home, she thought with a humor as black as the entryway before her. She was home.
The interior was a study in spartan utility. A tight spiral staircase, its iron treads worn smooth by decades of use, dominated the space. The ground floor consisted of a small, functional kitchen and a living area, all built into the circular confines of the tower. A single armchair, its upholstery faded and torn, faced a cold, empty hearth. Everything was coated in a fine layer of dust and the ever-present dampness of the sea.
Elara dropped her bags with a thud that echoed up the winding stairwell. The silence that followed was profound, broken only by the rhythmic crash of waves against the rock and the mournful foghorn. It was an oppressive quiet, the kind that made the ringing in your own ears seem deafening. She ran a hand over the cold, curved stone wall, goosebumps prickling her skin despite the humidity.
She spent the first few hours in a frenzy of cleaning, a desperate attempt to impose her own order on the suffocating stillness. She scrubbed away layers of grime, aired out musty linens, and tried to ignore the feeling of being watched. But with every shadow she chased away with a damp cloth, another seemed to deepen in the corner of her eye. The portraits of stern-faced keepers from a bygone era seemed to follow her movements, their painted eyes filled with a shared, somber knowledge.
As dusk began to bleed into the grey afternoon, Elara climbed the spiral staircase. The air grew colder with each step. The second floor was a single, cramped bedroom, a narrow bed tucked against the curved wall and a small desk overlooking a salt-caked window. It was here she found the first true relic of her great-uncle’s life: a heavy, leather-bound journal lying open on the desk.
His handwriting was a frantic, spidery scrawl, the ink bleeding in places as if the very humidity of the air had wept onto the pages. The last entry was dated just two days before his death.
October 12th. It whispers my name now. The light is a beacon, but not for the ships. It’s for them. They rise with the fog, their voices like the grinding of stones on the seabed. I see their shapes in the waves, their eyes in the seafoam. They want to come inside. They want the warmth. The foghorn used to keep them at bay, its song a lament they understood. But now they are deaf to it. They only listen to the light. The light calls, and they answer.
Elara slammed the journal shut, her heart hammering against her ribs. It was the nonsensical raving of a lonely, disturbed man. That’s all it was. She repeated it to herself like a mantra, but the words felt hollow. The fisherman’s warning echoed in her mind. He went mad, miss.
Night fell with an unnerving finality. The automated lamp at the top of the tower switched on, its powerful beam beginning its slow, methodical sweep of the sea. The light flooded the small rooms with an eerie, rhythmic pulse of brightness and shadow. It felt like living inside a giant, slowly breathing creature.
Elara tried to read, to distract herself, but the words on the page blurred. Every creak of the old tower, every moan of the wind, sent a fresh jolt of adrenaline through her. She found herself listening, holding her breath during the silent pauses between the waves, straining to hear something beyond the natural symphony of the storm-tossed coast.
It was close to midnight when she first heard it. It wasn’t the wind, nor the sea. It was a low, guttural sound, a scraping noise from outside the thick walls of the ground floor. It was rhythmic, like something heavy being dragged across the stone walkway. Scrape. Pause. Scrape. Pause.
Her blood ran cold. The lighthouse was on a tiny, isolated rock, accessible only by the pier she had arrived on. There was nowhere for anyone—or anything—to be walking. Silas, the fisherman, wasn’t due back for a week. She was utterly, completely alone.
She crept from the armchair, her body rigid with fear, and peered through one of the small, thick-paned windows. The fog was a solid, roiling wall of white, so dense that the powerful beam of the lighthouse barely penetrated it. All she could see was the swirling mist, illuminated in a ghostly sweep of light, then plunged back into darkness.
The scraping stopped. Silence descended once more, heavy and expectant. And then, a new sound began, a soft, wet tapping on the windowpane right in front of her face. Tap. Tap. Tap. It was a delicate, inquisitive sound, a stark contrast to the violence of the sea.
Elara flinched back, a scream caught in her throat. She stared at the window, her mind refusing to process what her ears were telling her. The window was a good twenty feet above the jagged rocks at the base of the lighthouse. There was nothing out there but a sheer drop into the churning, lethally cold ocean. Nothing could be tapping on that window.
But the tapping continued, patient and persistent. In the next sweep of the lighthouse beam, as the light flooded the fog just beyond the glass, she saw it. For a fraction of a second, a shape was silhouetted against the illuminated mist—a long, slender, webbed hand, its fingers impossibly thin, pressing against the glass before it was swallowed by the darkness again.
Elara finally found her voice and screamed. The sound was stolen by the wind and the ceaseless roar of the waves, leaving her alone in the pulsating heart of the lighthouse with the chilling knowledge that her great-uncle’s madness was not his alone, and that something in the deep had indeed answered the call of the light.
