The Lantern of Unseen Ports

In the autumn of 1984, I was twelve, living in the port town of Greyhollow, Maine. My mother and I drove to the old ferry terminal to pick up a woman from the Azores, a distant cousin of our neighbor, Mr. Delgado. Her name was Senhora Marta, and she arrived wrapped in a shawl of deep indigo, her face weathered like the hulls of boats that had crossed the Atlantic many times. She was said to have the sight, and her son had brought her to Greyhollow because she was dying and wanted to see the sea one last time. But there was something else—she carried a small iron lantern that she never let out of her grip, its glass smoky and dark.

A week later, she came to our house for a clam bake. My father, a fisherman, had caught a bushel of clams, and the whole family gathered on the porch. Marta sat in the corner, her lantern on the table, and she spoke in a low, accented voice. She told my mother that a letter would arrive from a brother she had not heard from in twenty years—and indeed, two days later, a letter came from a man in Lisbon claiming to be that brother. She looked at me with her milky eyes and said, ‘You will leave this town before the ice breaks, and you will never see the harbor again.’ I laughed, because I loved the sea. But she simply tapped her lantern, and the flame inside flickered green.

That winter was brutal. The bay froze solid for the first time in a century, and the fishing boats were trapped in ice. My father grew restless, and my mother began to speak of moving to her sister’s in Arizona. But the strangest thing was the lantern. Marta would take it out at night and walk along the shore, the green light casting long shadows on the ice. She told me that the light was a signal, a beacon for something that traveled between worlds. She showed me her hands, and on the palms were two circular burns, like the mark of a compass. She said a being had touched her when she was a girl, and the burns had never healed, and they glowed faintly in the dark.

One evening, she asked me to help her carry the lantern to the end of the pier. The wind was howling, and the ice groaned. She told me to look into the light and not look away, no matter what I saw. I did. The green flame grew bright, and I saw shapes moving beneath the ice—not fish, but something with many legs, like a crab, but as large as a car. They were crawling toward the shore, and I felt a coldness creep into my bones. Marta whispered, ‘They come when the light is lit. They are not from the sea, but from the spaces between the stars.’ I wanted to run, but she held my wrist with a grip like iron. She said, ‘You will tell no one. But remember: when you see a lantern on the water, do not look into it.’

A few days later, she died. My mother and I found her in her room, the lantern dead, and a smile on her face. But on the frost of her window, there was a symbol, like an eye within a triangle, burned into the glass. After her funeral, we packed our things and moved to Arizona, just as she had predicted. I never returned to Greyhollow. But sometimes, at night, I dream of that green light, and I see the creatures rising from the sea, and I know they are still waiting. And I wonder if they are the ones who left the lantern in her hands, to be passed on, to guide them to a new harbor.