The Light That Calls : Part II

The Light That Calls: Part II

Immediately after Clara’s disappearance, the townsfolk avoided the lighthouse. The small community was slipping into silent secrets. Others claimed that if it were stormy out, you could hear her on the wind, a wail of mourning. Some said they spotted Elias standing on the cliff’s edge, gazing at the sea, but believed he had gone down with her.

The story of the fisherman who lost his hat to Ransen is told on one such night. He swore he could plainly see the light from the lighthouse burning brighter than he had ever seen it before, and it cut through the ocean like a harpoon. Its glow caused the sea to boil, and something monstrous from the depths started rising, impossible limbs like coiled serpents, eyes burn of fire.

Roland muttered, ‘They’re not gone,’ his voice trembling in a swallow of pint ale at the local tavern. “They’re part of it now, Clara, Elias,” he said. The light them, but doesn’t let go.”

Sitting among the listeners was a sceptic, a drifter named Jonah, who’d been moving around the country doing odd jobs here and there in the town. Jonah had never believed the locals’ superstitions, those he had found foolish. Jonah’s curiosity sprang up, however, as Roland as he described the horrors of the under water.

Jonah went to the lighthouse that night, armed with a lantern, and a knife.

The gale howled in his ears as he climbed up the cliffs, brutally. His hands were numb from the cold, and he made it to the door of the lighthouse. He touched the door and it creaked open revealing the dark hollow interior. It felt wrong, the air inside: like he could feel himself suffocating, that the very walls were spying on him.

Its strange beam cut through the foggy darkness of the top was lit. Jonah climbed the spiral staircase, the feet from his running making echo. Each step brought a crescendo of the lantern’s hum right into his skull. His head was pounding, he could feel the on me of an unseen weight that pressed against him by the time he made it to the top.

In the corner of the lantern room it was just gone, no one was there except for the glowing light. Jonah drew nearer and peered against his arm to block his eyes from the brightness. Its patterns changing in ways that looked alive, he had never seen a beam before.

He muttered under his breath, “I wonder if this is what took them.” The hum swallowed his voice.

Jonah reached out, and a voice froze. Clara’s voice was quiet, quivering.

Please don’t touch it, she begged. “I’m too old to escape, but you can still escape.”

Jonah turned around but no one was there. But the beam of light moved, making a fuzzy picture of Clara’s face, as pale and translucent as ever, with sorrow filling her eyes.

“What is this?” Jonah demanded. “What happened to you?”

Clara whispered, her voice fractured and far away; The light is alive. “It feeds on us. Upon our fears, and hopes, and souls. ‘It shows you what you most want, and then leads you.”

The light began to change again, as if to prove her words. This time, a younger Jonah saw his brother, alive and laughing, before the young man’s life was taken in the accident. It was the kind of sight that Jonah felt like he got punched in the gut for. Tears dripping from his face, he stepped closer.

Clara’s voice answered, sadly growing fainter, ‘No’. “It’s not real! Don’t let it take you!”

The image started coming clearer, and Jonah couldn’t; it wasn’t possible. His fingers brushed against the edge of the lanterns beam.

Blinding, all consuming light erupted from the room. Jonah screamed and was swallowed by the hum, which became deafening, its heaving reverberates reaching down across the cliffs to the sea.

The light from the lighthouse failed to change as morning came again. Like they hadn’t found Clara or Elias, the townsfolk found no sign of Jonah. Yet the beam from the lighthouse seemed brighter than ever before, and from beneath its light, the sea was restless, waiting on something.

On stormy nights now there are whispers of a new voice on the wind, a man’s voice begging to be freed from the light.