The Lantern Keeper’s Due

The last entry I wrote scratched at an old wound, and I thought I had buried it deep enough. But the dead have a way of pulling threads, and I was foolish to believe the tapestry would hold. It began with my brother, Sam, and the strange inheritance our grandmother left behind—a tarnished brass lantern that sat in the corner of our ancestral home, a relic I had always taken for granted. Our grandmother, Elara, had been a quiet woman, but her eyes held storms. When she passed, the lantern was the only thing she left to Sam, and I had felt a twinge of envy, though I knew not why.

Sam and I lived in a coastal town where the fog rolled in like a blanket of grey wool, and the lighthouse on the cliff was more a ghost than a guide. Our family had been lighthouse keepers for generations, but the station had been automated decades ago, and the old keeper’s cottage stood empty, a hollow shell against the wind. Sam was restless, always drawn to the cliffs, and I often found him standing at the edge, staring at the churning sea as if it whispered secrets to him. I dismissed it as youthful melancholy, but then the dreams came.

First, it was Elara in a white dress, standing in a field of pale moonflowers, cradling something that glowed faintly. She smiled at me, but her eyes were sad. When I woke, the lantern in the corner of Sam’s room flickered—a flame without oil, casting a sickly light. Sam dismissed it as a draft, but I knew better. The following week, Sam’s wife, Mira, began to have dreams of a woman in the sea, her hair tangled with kelp, reaching out to her. Mira woke with a start each night, her pillow damp with sweat, and she described a sensation of being pulled toward the cliff edge.

I tried to rationalize it. The pressure of the upcoming move, the strain of renovating the old cottage—we were to turn it into a bed-and-breakfast, a venture that excited Sam but frightened me. The cottage had been sealed for years, and when we finally opened its creaking door, the smell of salt and old rot rushed out. In the attic, we found a trunk of our grandmother’s belongings: sepia photographs, a journal with crumbling pages, and a map of the cliffs marked with strange symbols. The final entry in the journal was dated from the night our grandfather disappeared at sea, and it spoke of a ‘due’ that had to be paid to the tide.

As the days passed, the lantern’s glow grew stronger, and Sam became obsessed with it. He would spend hours polishing its brass, muttering to himself, and Mira grew distant, her eyes hollow. One evening, I found her on the porch, staring at the horizon. ‘It’s coming,’ she whispered. ‘The baby—it isn’t ours.’ Her words sent a chill down my spine. ‘What baby?’ I asked, but she just shook her head and went inside.

Then came the night of the new moon. Sam took the lantern and walked down to the beach, and I followed, my heart thudding. The tide was low, exposing a path that I had never seen before—a natural causeway leading to a dark promontory where an old stone altar stood, covered in barnacles. Sam placed the lantern on the altar, and its light flared, illuminating a circle of figures in the water—pale, translucent shapes that seemed to be waiting. I screamed, but Sam stood silent, his hands at his sides, his face blank.

The figures moved, and one stepped forward: a woman, her features shifting like mist, holding a baby wrapped in seaweed. She held it out to Sam, and he took it. I watched in horror as the infant’s eyes opened—black, like voids—and it began to cry. Sam turned to me, and his voice was no longer his own. ‘The debt is paid,’ he said. ‘The lantern keeper’s due has come due.’

I ran, but my legs were heavy, and the tide began to rise. I stumbled back to the cottage, soaked and trembling, and found Mira in the nursery we had prepared, rocking an empty crib. She looked at me with a knowing sorrow. ‘It’s in the house now,’ she said. ‘It’s been waiting for a body.’

The next morning, Sam returned, but he was different—quieter, with a distant look. The lantern was gone. And in the crib, swaddled in a blanket, was a baby with eyes like the sea, calm and deep. Mira held it, and I saw a flicker of something in her gaze—resignation, or love. I don’t know.

I tried to leave, but the fog had swallowed the roads, and the ferry was cancelled. I am writing this in the old study, the wind howling through the cracks, and I can hear a humming from the attic—the sound of the lantern, I think, but I cannot find it. The baby is asleep in the next room, and Sam is there, watching it with a tenderness that chills me. And I realize now that this was never a haunting—it was a contract, and we have all signed it in blood.

The due is not just one child. It is a cycle, and the lantern will need a new keeper, and the sea will call again. I have to finish this entry before the tide comes back, because I fear that this time, I will be the one taken. And I can hear the waves, and they sound like footsteps on the stairs.