The lighthouse at Cape Morrow had been dark for eleven years. Decommissioned, boarded up, its lens removed and sold to a maritime museum in Portland. There was no mechanism left to produce light. The wiring had been stripped. The generator had rusted into a sculpture of its former self.
So when the light began to flicker on Tuesday night, the town paid attention.
Harbormaster Elena Voss drove out to the cape at midnight. The lighthouse stood on its promontory like a forlorn sentinel, battered by decades of salt wind and neglect. But there it was — a faint, rhythmic pulse coming from the lantern room at the top.
She climbed the spiral staircase. One hundred and twelve steps. She counted them the way she counted everything — automatically, as if her mind needed numbers to stay anchored.
The lantern room was empty. No equipment, no wires, no obvious source of light. Just the glass windows and the residue of old paint on the floor. But the light continued — not from the room itself, but reflected in the glass. Coming from the sea.
Elena pressed her face to the window. Far out on the water, something pulsed. Regular. Deliberate. The pattern felt sinister in its precision — three short, one long, three short. An old signal code.
She had spent twenty years on this coast. She knew every channel, every sandbar, every current. Whatever was out there had managed to infiltrate the shipping lane without triggering a single radar alert.
Elena reached for her radio.
The signal stopped.
The sea was dark again, as if it had never spoken at all.