The Lighthouse

“*You get used to the smell.*”

The year was 1999. I was nineteen years old and dead broke. Most of my friends opted for the four-year state schools after graduation. Some went to private. Some went to trade and some to liberal arts and some fucked off to another country entirely. But there was a special place in the hot hell of my small seaside town for the local proclaimed low-lives who stayed at home after high school. My friends left me. My parents were bored of me. Unemployment wrapped its ugly claws around my chest so hard I thought I would suffocate. I was a loser before I ever had a chance to amount to anything. That’s what it felt like, anyway.

Consequently, lighthouse keeper sounded like a pretty good gig.

The advertisement appeared in the local paper one rainy day in the middle of July. It was short and sweet, just a phone number and a few carefully chosen words. *Temporary lighthouse keeper wanted for overnight shift. No experience required. Island transportation provided.* I had never seen anything like it before. Plenty of local businesses hired for summer work. The bars and restaurants all begged for extra hands. Retail shops and grocery stores needed the help. At that age, I just didn’t think of the old lighthouse as somewhere a human being could still work. Didn’t they automate all that stuff? My mom said they must have. But I had also never met a human lighthouse keeper. I found the prospect interesting.

The schedule met my needs. Nights would allow me to fuck around all day and still get my old man off my ass. Plus, the money was good. Eight hours a night at a rate a high school burnout could only describe as stupidly high made for a strong motivator. The man on the phone answered all my questions and talked me into taking the job. He also emphasized a very important point before the end of the call.

“*You get used to the smell.*”

I didn’t understand what that meant. I only cared that my first shift started in less than a week.

The assigned night came on one of those chilly New England evenings where the sea fog rolls in right around sunset. I took the family truck out to where the docks met the port at the far end of town. A grim looking old-timer met me there. He wore a navy blue work shirt that neatly matched his wrinkled old slacks. His hair was gray. His face was all wrinkles. And his expression looked about as friendly as the one on my step-father back at home. The fella stared at me for a moment and gestured to a small motorboat anchored at the edge of the pier. It could hold three people max. I gathered he would be my ride.

“*Nineteen?*” he grunted as I got onboard.

I looked down and smiled awkwardly.

“Uh, yeah. How’d you know?”

“*All the same at that age. Where are your parents, kid?*”

I shrugged.

“Don’t really know. Around. What’s your excuse?”

He laughed and put the keys in the ignition.

“*Seventy-six. The years fly by. You enjoy the trip.*”

The little boat bounced on the waves as it cut out from under the land. The old lighthouse looked much larger from a distance. It sat atop a small rocky Island with black sand beaches and sparse grass. A steep incline on one side led up to the lighthouse itself, a long dead thing made of ancient stones and layered with lichens and dark streaks of salt. I had no way of knowing it then, but that dull and weathered tower was one of the oldest in the whole state. A squat two-bedroom attached to it served as a residence for folks who ran the place in former years. The whole setup looked the color of a storm cloud underneath all the fog.

I usually liked the ocean. Growing up around it makes its presence feel like family. You get used to the smell. The water lapping up against the side of the boat sounded like a soft melody. But something about the way the fog swallowed the lighthouse made me uncomfortable.

Once we were about half way there, the old-timer killed the engine and nodded ahead to the shore.

“*Last chance to change your mind.*”

“What, because of the smell?” I laughed. “You still haven’t told me about that.”

The man looked at me with pity.

“*There’s all kinds of things trapped in the belly of an old lighthouse,*” he said. “*Rot. Mildew. Dead things. Whatever the fog drags in. You’ll know it when you smell it.*”

I nodded as if I understood. I didn’t. Not really. All I knew was that the old timer stayed right in his seat. So I got out and walked through the dark beach in the direction of the tower, smiling coolly and waving back all the while. Then I entered the lighthouse.

And I smelled it.

The old man did not do it justice. Dead things had indeed rotted inside the lighthouse. There was also mildew, mold, and every other foul aroma associated with old damp places. But none of those odors compared to the main one. The primary smell that assaulted my poor nostrils and set my eyeballs watering was fish. In all its putrid forms. The base of the lighthouse smelled like a thousand pounds of fish had recently died all at once. I could hardly breathe. But there wasn’t much I could do except step inside and start the shift.

The inside of the lighthouse was even stranger than the outside.

One level above the entrance served as the attached apartment. The rooms were tiny and held ancient furniture. A landline in the living room kept up its own creepy ambiance when it gave out an old-fashioned ring as I passed it. I thought maybe my ride didn’t leave yet. Maybe he would come pick me back up if I asked. The phone stayed quiet by the time I backtracked. It stopped making a sound and the line itself held no static or dial tone when I picked it up. I cursed and laughed at my own jitters. Just a prank from the old guy on the boat, maybe.

I moved on.

The spiral staircase to the top of the lighthouse seemed to go on forever. The tower itself rose a good hundred feet above the house below. The sheer number of steps made me winded. On my way up, I noticed patches of the old stone walls were smeared with black muddy handprints. Apparently previous keepers lacked a proper grip. The higher I got, the more damp those handprints looked, like the rock itself sweated in between them. The stench of the lighthouse also seemed to reach new heights. By the time I got to the top, I could all but taste the fish.

The beacon itself looked like something out of science fiction. A giant light sat atop a weathered platform of wood and rusted gears. There had once been a fresnel lens around it. By 1999, that aspect of the lighthouse was long since gone. Thick industrial glass now protected the lamp from curious keepers and the nasty coastal winds. I also saw a backup generator, large enough to power a house, as well as an old emergency radio receiver. That part looked well worn.

A wrinkled instruction sheet on the wall told me how to work the light and radio. The list was fairly short.

Turn on backup generator by following switches in order.

Call harbor if the light goes out.

Do not leave the light unattended.

Do not descend after midnight.

Wait, what?

That last part caught me off guard. Maybe I misunderstood. I looked at the old paper again. I read the words three times. *Do not descend after midnight.* No reason given. No extra clarification. Just the warning. I remember squinting at the paper as if doing so would magically force it to make more sense. Lighthouse keeping was strange work, clearly, but I didn’t understand why I would be stuck at the top all night. It got cold up there. The room beneath at least had some furniture.

I looked around for an explanation and found none. It dawned on me then that the old timer on the boat likely could have answered that too. But it was too late. He was already gone.

So, being nineteen and stupid, I shrugged it off and started the shift anyway.

The light itself took a while to warm up. It flickered and hummed with a deep, ugly vibration once it fully came to life. The beam cut through the fog as best it could. Each sweep of the light revealed different shapes moving in the surf below. Sometimes they looked like logs. Sometimes rocks. Sometimes something else. I remember trying not to stare too long. I also remember how often I checked my watch. Midnight felt a million miles away. I had no cell phone service. I had no books. I had no music. I had nothing but the tower, the light, and that disgusting smell.

Around ten, the phone rang again.

This time the sound came from downstairs. It echoed up through the tower in one long metallic groan. I considered going down to answer it. Maybe the harbor was calling. Maybe there were more instructions. But the warning on the wall came back to mind. *Do not descend after midnight.* It wasn’t midnight yet. I could still go.

Then the phone stopped.

Silence rushed back in so suddenly that I could hear my own pulse. I hovered beside the stairwell and listened. A minute later, the phone rang a second time. Again, it cut off before I reached the first step. I waited. It rang a third time. By then I was annoyed enough to start down.

Halfway to the apartment level, I heard something else.

It sounded like wet footsteps on the stairs below me.

I froze.

The noise came slow and deliberate. Something heavy dragged itself up from the entrance one step at a time, with a slick scraping in between each movement. I held my breath and peered through the narrow gap in the spiral. I expected to see a person. Maybe the old timer came back. Maybe the whole thing was some stupid initiation.

I did not see a person.

At first all I caught was a pale shape rounding the lower bend of the staircase. Then another. Then the first hand. It gripped the railing with long gray fingers and too many joints. Water poured off the skin in steady droplets. Another hand followed. Then a head, slick and hairless, with an enormous jaw that hung half open as if the thing forgot how to close it. Rows of tiny fish teeth lined the mouth. Gills fluttered in and out of the neck like little wounds opening and shutting. The creature kept climbing.

I ran.

I don’t know how else to put it. Any bravery I might have imagined in myself up to that point in life disappeared immediately. I sprinted back to the top of the lighthouse and slammed the trapdoor behind me so hard it rattled the entire tower. The metal latch looked ancient and flimsy. I threw my body against it anyway. A second later something enormous hit the other side.

The whole lighthouse shook.

I screamed for help into the radio.

“Hello? Hello? There’s something in here with me. I need a boat. Right now. Please, somebody answer.”

Static hissed back.

I kept trying. Each call sounded more pathetic than the last. The pounding below came in waves. Sometimes the creature threw itself at the hatch. Sometimes it dragged its hands along the underside and made a horrible scratching noise like knives against steel. In between all that, the smell got worse. So much worse. It became a wet heat all its own.

Then midnight came.

The pounding stopped.

I wish I could tell you that meant safety. It didn’t. The silence felt far worse. I sat beside the light with my knees against my chest and watched the beam make its rounds through the fog. Every now and then I thought I saw movement down by the surf. Tall shapes. Several of them. Just standing in the black water and looking up. I tried not to blink. The radio stayed dead.

I must have stayed there for two hours before the whispering started.

At first I assumed it came from the wind. The tower made plenty of strange noises on its own. But this sound had rhythm to it, and intent. Words. Soft and wet and all wrong. The whispers rose up through the gaps in the floorboards beneath me, dozens of voices speaking at once in a language I did not know. Every once in a while one of them would break into English.

“*Come down.*”

“*The light hurts.*”

“*He said you would come down.*”

That last one got my attention. I crawled toward the hatch and listened.

“Who said that?” I shouted before I could stop myself.

The whispering ceased immediately.

Then, from somewhere below, came the voice of the old man from the boat.

“*You get used to the smell.*”

I think I cried then. Not a full breakdown, not yet, but my eyes started leaking against my will. I backed away from the hatch and held onto the emergency radio like it was a bible. I kept the light trained on the windows and tried to ignore the voices whenever they started up again. The rest of the night crawled. Once or twice something banged against the outer glass from the outside and left smears of black water. Once, I saw a face pressed flat to the window between sweeps of the beam. I still see that face sometimes when I’m tired.

The boat came back just before dawn.

I heard the engine first. Then a horn. Then the old man’s voice shouting from below.

“*Kid! Get the light off and come down while it’s still dark enough.*”

That didn’t make any sense either, but I wasn’t in the mood to argue. I killed the generator, waited for the beacon to die, and made my way down the stairs on trembling legs. The apartment level looked untouched. The entrance stood open to the beach. Beyond it, the old man waited by the boat with a shotgun in one hand and something like terror in his eyes.

“Move,” he snapped.

I moved.

We shoved off from the island before I even fully sat down. Only once the lighthouse shrank behind us in the fog did the old-timer finally look at me again.

“*You went below before midnight, didn’t you?*”

I nodded.

“There was something on the stairs.”

He gave a grim little smile that never reached his eyes.

“*There usually is.*”

“What the hell was it?”

He stared at the island.

“*Used to be a crew out there. Long before your time. Long before mine. Storm sunk a fishing boat and whatever came in with the tide found its way into the tower. Men kept going missing after that. Livestock too. So they made rules. New keepers follow the rules, they usually last the night. Ones who don’t…*”

He let the sentence die.

I never went back to that lighthouse. I never even asked for the money. For years I told myself it had to be some kind of hallucination brought on by stress and the smell and an overactive imagination. But every now and then, especially when the weather turns and the sea fog rolls in, I remember the handprints on the wall. I remember the whispering under the floor. I remember the way that face looked pressed against the glass.

And every single time I pass the harbor, I notice the old lighthouse still standing out there in the distance. The beacon still works. Someone still keeps it.

I just pray he remembers not to go downstairs after midnight.