On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 147, of 240 so far.

The Lighthouse

Hansen was having his first real doubts, but he was here now, and there was nowhere to go but forward.

The only visible man-made object, besides the van he’d been given, was the building in front of him. Daylight was rapidly fading, and the evening would be cold. He pulled his jacket more tightly around his body and looked at the van, its engine ticking as it cooled. It was a plain dark blue, with a large crest on the side.

Northern Lighthouse Board, it said.

He was 14 miles from the nearest village, if you could even call it a village. The population was less than that of the high school Hansen had gone to many decades earlier, and the welcome hadn’t exactly been warm when he arrived there a few hours ago. He’d had a pub lunch sitting in a quiet corner by himself, then he’d paid the bill — tipping handsomely — and then left before the atmosphere of scrutiny and distrust could get to him.

A real one-horse town, he thought. And the horse is thinking about leaving.

Notwithstanding his stop for food, it had taken him all of the long morning and a chunk of the afternoon to reach his final destination. He had left Dunleven, the nearest large town to the south, long behind and now he was in a place where it seemed like he might be the last man on Earth.

The landscape was rugged, and he could hear the incessant roar of the waves crashing against a shore far below that he could not see. The sky was heavy and low, and he could smell the dirt and the rocks and the grass and everything else. He filled his lungs with it, and he felt his chest finally start to loosen.

Hansen’s real life — or rather his former life — seemed impossibly far away, which was exactly what he had wanted. His old job, his old wife, his old friends… none of them existed here. It didn’t even seem like they could exist here, in this place. He felt like he’d travelled back in time, and the building in front of him completed the illusion.

The lighthouse was as white as anything could be when it had stood out upon this landscape, perched on a cliff high above the ocean waves, for well over two centuries. There were running rust stains around the external metal fittings, and the paint had not been refreshed in perhaps half of Hansen’s lifetime, but otherwise it was remarkably well preserved. From this day onwards, its preservation would also be his own responsibility.

All of the country’s lighthouses had been automated and computer controlled since 1998, of course, but this one had proven strangely troublesome, regularly suffering from unexplainable temporary malfunctions. It was relatively close to its two nearest sibling stations, but sited on a promontory extending several miles beyond the primary coastline and into the darkness of the northwestern sea. It was the only structure on the peninsula.

There were no trees in the area, despite plentiful surface vegetation, and it was a peculiarity of the region that while the sound of the water was omnipresent, the beacon that the building held was visible only to passing ships, and was swallowed up by the geography on the landward side. Hansen had driven right past the nondescript turn-off which led to it, and had to turn awkwardly at a farm gate.

“Home,” he said aloud, trying to make himself believe it.

Hansen had chosen to leave absolutely everything from his old life behind except for whatever necessities he could carry, and when he had seen the unusual job vacancy online, it had called out to him. There was a certain romantic quality to the idea of being a lighthouse keeper in an age which had long since left behind any need for such things, but the main reason he had applied for the job was the same reason that most people would shun it: the isolation, and the remoteness, and the need to spend long periods of time with only your own mind for company.

He had briefly considered getting a dog to take with him, but ultimately he decided that if he couldn’t handle it on his own, then it was unfair to submit another living creature to it for his own sake.

Slowly, he walked to the heavy door, noting the fenced-off cluster of communications equipment to one side of the modest parking area, and he took a set of keys from his jacket pocket whose weight he had been feeling for hundreds of miles. There were four keys needed for entry: one for a padlock, one for the mortice, one for a recently added high-level deadlock, and of course the tarnished and scarred brass key which fitted the hole beside the handle, and had probably been in service since before Hansen’s grandfather was born.

He unlocked the door, and opened it. The air inside was a little musty, but not too bad due to the building’s ventilation. It was cold, though, but an automatic low-level heating system kept the worst of it at bay. He had instructions for bringing it up to a liveable temperature, and the van held plenty of supplies for getting through the first night. He flicked a switch just inside the door, and all of the lights came on, revealing a whitewashed space with some small box-canvas paintings sparsely hung, a solid table, a single chair, and not too much else. There was also a spiral staircase heading upwards, and a door across from him which he knew led to a makeshift kitchen.

There would be deliveries in the coming days, of basic furniture and also the essentials of a rudimentary standard of living, but for now he would have to make do. Hansen went back out to the van, retrieved his two large bags, locked the vehicle, and took one last look around. Gulls circled high overhead, but they didn’t call.

Probably think I’m mad, he thought, and the idea offered some small measure of perverse amusement. They might be right, too.

He went inside, and pulled the door closed behind him.

An hour later, the place was very different. He had lit several lamps, turned the heating up, dusted down a few surfaces, and made some instant coffee with the small kettle he’d brought with him, which he’d drank while eating a packaged sandwich from his luggage. The building heated up quickly, and was now quite comfortable. The evening was wearing on, and Hansen used one of the other keys on the fob to unlock the upper door to the light chamber. Everything seemed to be working for now, at least, and he ran through an inspection checklist just to familiarise himself with it.

When he was finished, he did something he’d been avoiding, and looked out through the glass panes and across the twilit ocean. The scene would have looked no different in black and white, and again Hansen felt the sense of inhabiting a different time.

The moment of contemplation was interrupted by an insistent alarm sound from the room below, and the main beacon flickered and then went out.

After he was plunged into darkness, for a brief moment of terror it seemed to Hansen that he’d been thrown out into the air, hundreds of feet above the sea, doomed to crash down into the water or onto the jagged rocks. But his eyes adjusted to the gloom, and of course he was still standing in the light chamber, over at the panoramic lens window, just with no source of illumination behind him. The alarm continued blaring below. The beacon remained off, but then suddenly there was light from beyond the glass.

Hansen frowned, confused for several moments. The cloud cover still stretched to the horizon, and the sun had long since set. For a panicked instant he wondered if an aircraft had flown too low, and was about to breach the cloud layer, or perhaps a search and rescue helicopter, but there was no sound, and the light was wrong.

Aurora? he wondered.

It was certainly a possibility here, and there had been a number of reports in recent months. The clouds were lit from within, in shades of green and purple and gold. He had seen the northern lights once himself, when travelling in Finland, and he had almost settled on the explanation when he was startled by the light beacon behind him briefly flashing into life again, before once again going dark. Then the source of the outside illumination came into view above.

It looked like pure light to begin with, dropping slowly from within the heavy clouds, but then it resolved into points, and the structure behind those sources of light became visible. Dark, of indeterminate material or texture, and by some trick of reflection it seemed to be rippling. The lights moved too, drifting languidly across its surface, pausing here and there before moving off to follow a different axis. The whole thing rotated as it came, tipping over in slow motion, following some obscure and distracting pattern of movement or contortion.

Hansen stood rooted to the spot, feeling utterly exposed, and catastrophically small, and alone, and powerless. Then the smaller lights on the thing — the machine, the craft, the whatever-it-was — blinked out of existence, and instead its entire central surface became a single, unified, blinding eye of radiance. He wasn’t sure, but Hansen thought he might have screamed with fright.

The unearthly illumination swept to one side of the thing, and then vanished for a few moments, and then came around from the other side, bathing the entire cliffs in an eerie and silent spotlight which roved for a full mile before splitting away out to sea.

Beacon, Hansen thought, seeing the similarity through the viscous fog of terror and wonder in his own mind.

He distantly heard the warning alarm cease sounding below him. The vast spotlight came around again, blazing down like the face of an alien god, in a wordless question.

The lighthouse answered.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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