The Last Relay

The old Coast Guard station on Loon Point had been decommissioned for years, but my brother and I still spent summers there, helping our father restore the lighthouse. The station was a maze of rusted corridors and salt-bleached rooms, and the only sound that ever disturbed its silence was the mournful foghorn from the distant pier. When the October storm hit, we were stranded there with our aging retriever, Buster, who whimpered at every crack of thunder.

I slept in the old radio room, a circular space with a giant window that faced the sea. My brother, Eli, was in the next room, and my father had set up a baby monitor in the hallway so we could hear him if he called. Buster, terrified of the storm, had crawled onto my bed, and I let him stay, hoping his trembling would calm as the rain battered the glass.

Around midnight, I heard Eli cry out from his room. I switched on the monitor and heard his shaky voice: ‘Charlie, can you come here?’ I dragged myself out of bed and padded down the corridor. As I passed my own room’s door, I saw something move in the darkness. A shape—tall and impossibly thin—stepped from the doorway into my closet, which I knew was closed. My heart seized. I froze, my breath catching. But Eli’s voice came through the monitor again, more urgent, and I forced my feet to move.

I leaned into Eli’s room, where he sat up in bed, pointing toward the window. ‘There was someone in the yard,’ he whispered. ‘I saw a light.’ I shined my flashlight across the wet grass below, but there was nothing but the whirlpool of rain and the distant foghorn. I told him it was just the storm, but as I turned to leave, Buster bolted past me and skidded into my room. I found him lying by the closet, which now stood wide open. I yanked the cord on the bare bulb overhead—it flickered but held—and the closet was empty. But beneath the shelf, I saw a single boot print in the dust, heel to toe, facing out. Buster wouldn’t stop staring at the dark corner.

Later, I couldn’t sleep. I sat with Buster in the kitchen, listening to the storm. My father was on the mainland, and the storm had knocked out the phone lines. I kept replaying the shadow in my room, the way it had moved with a purpose. I told myself it was a trick of the lightning, a stray branch from the pine tree scratching the glass. But Buster’s low growl told me otherwise.

At 3 a.m., I heard the static crackle of the baby monitor on the counter. It was turned down low, but I heard it: a rhythmic breathing, slow and deep. Not Eli’s. I picked up the monitor and turned just in time to see the tiny LED light on my room’s camera flicker off. The battery could have died, but my hands were shaking. I walked to Eli’s room, leaving Buster downstairs, and found the door open. Eli was gone.

I ran toward the hallway, and that’s when I saw it: a shape emerging from my closet, but it wasn’t in my room anymore. It was in the corridor, standing between me and the stairs. It had no face, just a hollow where features should be, and I could smell the brine of the sea. It didn’t move, it simply waited. I stumbled backward into the bathroom and locked the door. Through the thin wood, I heard Eli’s voice, clear as day: ‘Charlie, it’s just the radio. I’m fine. Come out.’ But I couldn’t. My hand was on the doorknob, ready to turn, but something in me held back.

Then the storm went silent. The wind, the rain, the thunder—all of it ceased abruptly, leaving a vacuum of quiet. In that stillness, I heard the baby monitor crackle from inside the room. A voice, ragged and wet, whispered: ‘You’re the last one to receive the signal.’

I threw open the door and charged down the stairs, grabbed Buster, and ran out into the night. The storm had left the ground slick, and I slipped on the wet rocks, cutting my hands. I looked back at the station. All the lights were out, but in the window of the radio room, I saw a pale figure pressing its face against the glass, its mouth open in a silent wail. Then the foghorn blasted once, long and loud, and the figure was gone.

I found Eli huddled by the generator shed, drenched and shivering. He said a man in a yellow raincoat had led him there, told him to wait. But there was no man. We drove to the mainland at dawn, and I never spoke of it again. But sometimes, when the fog rolls in thick from the sea, I hear that broken radio voice calling my name from the waves. And I know that the lighthouse, with its empty relay room, is still sending a signal for something else.