Touching The Edge

The lighthouse blinked twice as Mara’s boat drifted toward the black rocks.

The flashes came from Gullward Point’s upper lantern, pale and deliberate through the storm: two quick bursts, a pause, then darkness. Mara tightened her grip on the tiller. The boat’s keel scraped something beneath the chop, and the sound traveled up through the soles of her boots.

“Not yet,” she muttered.

Rain stitched the water silver. Beyond the bow, the rocks appeared and vanished in the fog, their wet backs shining whenever lightning opened the sky. The lighthouse stood above them, its white tower reduced to a blurred column, its beam turned inland as though it had forgotten the sea.

Mara checked the old marine watch strapped beneath her sleeve. The second hand shuddered at each wave. She waited.

Two flashes.

Pause.

One flash.

Then three, close together.

She marked the sequence in the notebook wedged against her thigh: 2-1 - 3. Her pencil slipped when the boat lurched, dragging a black line through the page. The pattern repeated before she could steady herself.

Two. One. Three.

Not a distress signal. Not any code used by the coast service. The intervals were too exact, the pauses too clean. Someone - or something - had built a rhythm into the light.

The boat swung broadside to the swell. Mara released the tiller and caught it again before the bow pointed directly at the rocks. The motor coughed once, then died.

“Of course.”

She pulled the starter cord. Nothing. Again. The cord snapped back hard enough to burn her palm.

The fog thickened around the boat. Gullward Point disappeared. So did the horizon. For a moment the only visible thing was the lighthouse lantern, blinking its impossible message above the white churn.

Mara reached for the oars.

The first wave struck before she had one fully in its socket. Water broke over the gunwale, cold against her knees. The boat yawed, and a rock surfaced to starboard less than a boat length away. Its edge was ridged with barnacles and pale weed.

She drove the oar into the water and pulled. The blade struck stone. The impact threw her shoulder forward. Pain flashed down her arm, but the boat turned enough for the next wave to carry it toward a narrow inlet beneath the lighthouse.

The inlet was not on any chart she had seen.

Mara rowed until the fog swallowed the rocks behind her. Each stroke returned as a hollow knock from the cliffs. The sound seemed to come from different directions, as if the inlet curved beneath the land. She counted the lighthouse signals by reflection instead of sight.

Two.

One.

Three.

At the fourth repetition, the boat’s bow slid over pebbles.

Mara jumped into knee-deep water and dragged the boat after her. The current tugged at her legs, icy and strong, trying to pull the hull back toward the open sea. She looped the painter around a rusted iron ring set in the rock and knotted it twice.

The ring was warm.

She stopped.

Rain struck her hood. Water streamed from the lighthouse cliffs, pattering on the stones. Beneath her gloved fingers, the iron held a faint, steady heat, as though something behind the rock had been running for a long time.

A low vibration moved through it.

Mara looked up.

The tower was gone in the fog, but the lantern still shone above her, each signal leaking through the white: two, one, three.

She climbed.

The path rose along the cliff face, a stairway cut directly into the stone and slick with rain. The steps narrowed where the sea had eaten away their outer edges. Mara kept one hand against the wall and the other around her notebook. More than once, the fog made the next step appear farther away than it was. Once it made a gap look solid.

She tested every foothold with her boot.

At the top, a metal gate emerged from the whiteness.

GULLWARD POINT, the sign above it read, though half the letters had peeled away. The gate stood open by an inch. A chain crossed it, looped through a padlock large enough for a shipyard.

Mara tried the lock.

It was cold, unlike the ring below.

She pulled. The chain held.

“Lighthouse!” she shouted. “Can you hear me?”

Her voice struck the fog and came back flattened.

No answer.

Another signal pulsed overhead. Two flashes. One. Three.

Mara stepped back and studied the gate. The padlock had no keyhole. Its face was smooth except for three shallow grooves arranged vertically.

Two. One. Three.

She pressed her thumb into the first groove. Nothing. The metal remained sealed.

A gust tore across the platform, carrying grit that stung her cheek. Somewhere below, the boat’s painter snapped taut. The rope groaned against the ring.

She could leave the boat and climb the tower path on foot, but the gate was the only route into the compound. The fog had already erased the stairway behind her. She could not see the sea, the inlet, or the direction she had come from.

The lantern blinked again.

Two.

One.

Three.

Mara took the small pry bar from her pack....