The Pale Visitor at the Lighthouse Window

The last ferry of the season had left the mainland hours ago, and I, Maren, was alone on Gull Rock. My job was simple: tend the automated light, log the weather, and keep the station tidy until the supply boat returned in spring. The lighthouse had stood for over a century, its whitewashed walls streaked with salt and bird droppings, its lantern room a glass cage at the top of a spiral staircase. That evening, I was in the tiny kitchen, reading a dog-eared novel about a shipwreck, when the window above the sink began to glow. It was a soft, milky luminescence, not like the sweep of the lighthouse beam or the setting sun’s last blush. I dismissed it as the reflection of a passing cloud or a trick of the brine-encrusted glass. I continued reading until the words blurred, then I switched off the lamp and climbed into my bunk. Sleep came in fits, the waves slapping the rocks like wet hands. At some ungodly hour—my watch said nearly midnight—I woke with a start. The air in the cabin was cold, colder than it should have been, and the window was glowing again. This time it wasn’t soft. It was a stark, unnatural white, and silhouetted against it was a figure. A boy, maybe ten years old, pressed his face to the glass, his features flattened and pale, his eyes wide and unmistakably open. I fumbled for my thick spectacles—I usually wore them only for reading—and focused. It was undeniably a child, but his skin was the color of washed-out bone, and his clothes hung in tatters. No one could reach that window; the nearest ledge was thirty feet up a sheer cliff, and the only approach was the narrow catwalk I used to clean the glass. The boy’s mouth moved, forming words I couldn’t hear, and then he raised a thin hand and tapped twice, as if asking to come in. I screamed, and the figure vanished, leaving only the empty night and the faint glimmer of the lamp reflecting on the water. I did not sleep again. I checked the logbook. Twenty years ago, during a storm, the light keeper’s son had fallen from the catwalk while trying to rescue a gull. They never found his body. The entry noted, in faded ink, that his mother swore she saw his face in the lantern glass every night until the station was automated. I lifted my pen to write a new entry, but the ink was oddly warm, and the words I tried to form came out as a single line: ‘He is knocking, and he will not stop until you let him in.’ I slammed the book shut, but the whistling wind through the cracks in the door sounded like a child’s uneven breath. All through the night, I listened. Toward dawn, the glow faded, and a gull landed on the windowsill, tilting its head at me as if waiting. I am still here. The supply boat is not due for four months. And tonight, the boy is back, this time in the door’s small round window, his mouth forming a name—not mine, but the drowned keeper’s son. He taps, again and again, and I know now that the lighthouse has always been his, and he is simply waiting for someone to join him.