The Moth-Filled Air

The old lighthouse on Raven’s Point had been unmanned for decades, its beam long since extinguished. I’d taken the job as a caretaker, a solitary gig to escape the noise of the city. My first night, I unpacked in the keeper’s quarters, a dusty room with a narrow bed and a window that framed the churning sea. I’d brought a vintage wind-up alarm clock, a brass relic from my grandfather, more for decoration than function. I wound it anyway, setting the time, but left the alarm unset. The clock’s face glowed faintly in the dark, a beacon of its own.

I woke in the black hours before dawn to a tick. Not the steady tick of a clock, but a sharp, deliberate tap, like a fingernail on glass. It came from the bedside table where the clock sat. I fumbled for the light, but the bulb was dead. In the gloom, I saw the clock’s face, its hands frozen at 3:33. The tap came again, and I realized it was coming from inside the clock. I picked it up, and the ticking grew frantic, a frantic heartbeat. I shook it, and something rattled—a small, flat object that hadn’t been there before. I pried open the back, and a moth fluttered out, then another, and another, until a cloud of them filled the air, their wings brushing my face.

I stumbled back, choking on the dry, powdery wings. The moths swarmed the window, beating against the glass as if trying to escape. And then, as suddenly as they’d appeared, they dropped to the floor, dead. The clock was silent, its hands now spinning backward. I set it down, my heart pounding. I told myself it was a nest of moths that had been dormant in the mechanism, that the warmth of my room had awakened them. But the clock was brand new, or at least, it had been when I bought it at the antique shop. The shopkeeper had warned me, ‘Some things keep their own time.’ I’d laughed it off.

The next morning, I called the mainland, but the line was dead. The wind had picked up, and the sea was a gray, churning mass. I tried to leave, but the causeway was flooded, cutting me off. I was stranded. For three days, the lighthouse was my prison. Each night, at 3:33, the clock would tick, and the moths would return, but not just from the clock—they’d seep through the cracks in the walls, the gaps in the windows, a tide of them, their wings beating a dry, rasping chorus. I tried to destroy the clock, but each time I got near it, the moths would swarm, blinding me, and I’d find myself back in my bed, the clock ticking on the table.

On the third night, I gave up. I sat on the floor, the moths clustering around me like a living shroud. The clock struck 3:33, and the ticking stopped. A voice, dry as old bones, whispered from the clock: ‘You wound me. Now I wind you.’ The moths surged, and I felt them crawling into my ears, my nose, my mouth, filling me with their dry, beating bodies. I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t move. The last thing I saw was the clock’s face, and in its reflection, I saw myself, my skin crawling with wings.

The search party found the lighthouse empty. The clock was gone, and the only sign of my presence was a pile of desiccated moth corpses in the corner of the room, arranged in a spiral. They never found my body. But sometimes, on nights when the wind is right, you can hear a ticking from the old lighthouse, and if you look closely, you’ll see a figure in the window, its silhouette oddly still, and a shower of moths escaping through the broken glass, as if the building itself is breathing them out. I am that figure now, trapped in the clock’s time, waiting for the next wounder to set me free.