The Click of the Toggle

The first time I noticed the lights, I thought it was the wiring in the old lighthouse keeper’s cottage. We’d moved there that summer, my father having inherited it from a reclusive great-uncle who had spent sixty years manning the beacon on the headland of Blackrock Point. The cottage was a squat, granite building, huddled against the wind, and the only sound besides the sea was the constant hum of the generator in the shed. But that hum would stop, and the lights would flicker, and I’d find myself staring at the switch plate in my bedroom, waiting.

It started with a click. A small, precise click, like a finger pressing a toggle switch. I’d be lying in my narrow bed, the thin blanket pulled up to my chin, and the overhead bulb would go out. Then, after a pause, it would come back on, but dimmer, as if the filament was choking. This happened nightly, and I grew accustomed to it, attributing it to the ancient wiring and the salt air. But then the clicking began to happen in my head.

My name is Erin, and I was nineteen. I’d come to stay with my father to help fix up the place, but my brother Sam, who was twelve, and my cousin Lila, who was fourteen, were also there for the summer. My mother had stayed behind in the city, unable to take time off work, and my grandmother had refused to come, muttering that Blackrock Point was a place of ‘drowned prayers.’ I’d chalked that up to her age.

The first time I saw her was a week after we arrived. I’d been lying awake, listening to the click of the switch, when I felt a cold draft sweep across the room. I turned, expecting the window to be open, but it was shut tight. And there, in the corner, where the moonlight didn’t reach, was a pale shape. She was thin, almost skeletal, with long wet hair that clung to her skull and shoulders. Her skin was the color of a drowned moon, and she wore a dress that seemed to be made of seaweed and brine. Her eyes were the worst—they were not eyes but sockets, filled with black seawater that seemed to shift and swirl.

She didn’t move, but I felt her voice inside my head, a low murmur like the pull of a tide. ‘Erin,’ it said. ‘Turn it off.’ I didn’t know what she meant, but I reached over and clicked the switch on the wall, killing the light. The darkness was absolute, and when my eyes adjusted, she was gone. But I felt her all around me, cold and patient.

The next night, she came to the foot of my bed. I’d told myself it was a dream, but the wet smell of salt was in my nose, and the floorboards creaked under her weight. She stood there for a long time, just staring. Then she reached out one long, pale arm and touched my shoulder. It was like being touched by a piece of ice that had been in the deep for a thousand years. I gasped and pulled the blanket over my head, squeezing my eyes shut.

My father and siblings thought I was being dramatic. Sam told me I was getting spooked by the horror movies we’d watched in the living room, and Lila said I was just attention-seeking. They didn’t see her. They never did.

But the clicking grew louder, more insistent. It wasn’t just the lights anymore. It was in the pipes, in the floorboards, in the shingles rattling against the wind. And I began to understand that the lighthouse, the cottage, the entire headland, was a machine, and she was the one who worked its switches.

One night, I woke to find her standing over me, dripping wet. She opened her mouth, and inside, instead of a tongue, there was a tiny brass toggle, the kind you’d find on an old electrical panel. She tilted her head, and the toggle flipped, and the room went black. In the darkness, I heard her voice, clearer than ever: ‘I’ve been waiting for you to see me.’

I tried to wake my family, but they were all in deep sleeps, as if drugged. I ran to the storeroom, where I’d seen an old electrical cabinet, its door rusted shut. The clicking was coming from behind it. I pried it open with a crowbar, and inside, instead of fuses, I found a nest of wires, all leading to a single, large brass switch. And on the facing, in engraved letters, was my great-uncle’s name: Marcus Hale.

She appeared behind me, her reflection in the glass of the cabinet. ‘He turned me off,’ she whispered. ‘The night the storm came. He thought I was a signal fire, but I was his wife.’ And I realized that the ghost was my great-aunt Clara, who had died when the lighthouse was still working, and that my great-uncle had shut off her light to save himself, leaving her in the dark forever.

Now, she wanted me to turn it back on. She wanted to be seen. She wanted to be remembered.

I reached for the switch, my fingers trembling. As I pressed it, the entire cottage seemed to shudder, and the lights blazed brighter than ever, a blinding white that hurt my eyes. I looked at her, and for the first time, I saw her as she must have been: a beautiful woman, with a gentle smile. She mouthed ‘thank you’ and then she was gone.

But the clicking didn’t stop. It moved into the walls, into the foundation, into the ground itself. And at night, from the lighthouse tower, I could see the beam sweeping across the sea, and I knew she was out there, waiting for the next one who would hear her voice.

My father sold the cottage that autumn, and we moved back to the city. But I still hear the click of the toggle, sometimes, in the quiet moments before sleep. And I know that somewhere, in the depths of the ocean, there is a light that will never go out, and a name that will never be forgotten.