Days of Sunshine: July 2020

I stood suddenly and stepped to the railing, gazing at a remarkable sight. A bright blue meteor raced across the dark sky. I leaned to catch its decent. The meteor appeared to land many miles away, but when it did, the ground around me trembled. There was flash of blue light so fast that I wondered if I had imagined it.

“Cepheril, what was that?” my wife asked, emerging from the house.

“I don't know,” I replied.

The Lighthouse - 12

  Sadier took my arm, Seth took my wife’s arm, and we walked outside. The waves became louder as we walked. We stepped from grass to sand. After a while, the sand became firm under my feet, informing me that we were close to water. They carefully guided us up a narrow ramp onto a wooden deck. Sadier showed us where we could sit while I heard Seth working the ropes in the background. We were moving.
  When the shoreline was out of sight, Sadier took off our hoods. We were on a vessel not unlike the one I had journeyed here on. It was cutting through the water at high speed. Now it was a waiting game. Seth, Sadier, and I talked. I asked them a lot of questions but they didn’t answer them all.
  The sun traveled toward the horizon and began to set. Seth said that the sailboat would cross the wall in an hour. It was going to be a close call. A half hour later, Seth spotted the sailboat. Light was beginning to fade. We honed in on the vessel. I swallowed hard, trying to be happy that we were going to make it. We glided up beside the sailboat so that my wife and I could board it.
  Sadier and Seth hugged us.   “Take this with you,” Seth said handing me a necklace. “Just so you don’t have to make the swim to shore. The lever on the machine slowly returns to its original position, so the lighthouse won’t call the sailboat to itself tonight, but this will make it take you right up to the pier.”   “I look forward to the day when we will meet again, Cepheril,” Sadier said to me.   “How will I find you?” I asked, not wanting the conversation to end.   “The day will come,” Sadier replied. “Be humble and be faithful.”   I sighed but flashed a smile. Then I turned toward the sailboat. I stepped from deck to deck, arriving on the boat that was about to cross the wall and return to the natural world. My wife followed reluctantly.   “Say hello to the lighthouse for me,” Seth shouted as he let their sail go limp, causing their boat to start slowing. We sped ahead in ours as they floated there watching us sail to the wall. I watched them fade away. It was dark, but I do believe I noticed them suddenly disappear. That informed me that we had crossed the wall. I didn’t feel that chilly feeling this time.   My wife and I sat against the back railing of the boat, looking out at the sea, taking in the moment. She laid her head on my shoulder. I was happy. She slept but I couldn’t. I didn’t want to miss a moment of this ride. I thought back on what I had been doing at this time last night. I had just pulled the lever and connected the machine to the apparatus.   Hours passed as the sailboat gently brought us home. It wasn’t nearly as foggy tonight and I started to see lights in the distance. The sailboat steered parallel with the shoreline about 300 yards out. After twenty minutes or so, I saw our lighthouse’s beacon now returned to it’s normal two seconds on eight seconds off. The vessel edged right up to the pier, so close that we were able to step off comfortably. We sat on the edge of the pier and watched it sail away into the night. Then we went inside the lighthouse and climbed into bed.   We decided to find a new home because using the lighthouse again was too great a temptation. As the years passed by, it became hard for us to believe that our trip to the afterlife had even happened. We asked each other if perhaps it was just a dream we had conjured up together. But of course, deep down we both knew it had really happened. My wife was different in many ways after the experience. She longed to see and feel the glory of that city again. I hadn’t seen the city like she did, but I didn’t need to. For many years, I had felt that longing and that awareness that such awe lay just beyond us. We love our lives and we have reached a place where we are not restless. We are thankful for what we have been given. But as we grow older, our hearts leap with excitement as we think on the glorious world that awaits us in the end.

The Lighthouse - 11

After ten minutes the jeep came to a stop. I heard Saider hop out and run around to the passenger side. He helped me to the ground and began to guide me. He opened a door and ushered me through. After closing it, he took off the hood. I blinked a few times and perceived a dimly lit room. Sitting on a couch against the wall was my wife... I ran to her and embraced her tightly.
She squeezed back crying, “Cepheril, you came! They were right. How did you know how to do it? All this time you were studying the lighthouse to prepare for this? You knew it was coming. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“How could I tell you that you were going to die?” I said. “And you are not going to die. I’m going to take you back.”
“I don’t want to go back,” my wife said. “This world is amazing. You need to see it.”
  "Cepheril," someone interrupted. A figure walked toward us, carrying a chair in one hand. He set the chair in front of us and sat down. After Sadier took off my hood, I had briefly spotted this man sitting in the corner before I ran to my wife.
"Do you recognize me?" the man asked.
I did faintly recognize his face and paused trying to figure out why. "I've seen you somewhere," I said.
"Perhaps around the holidays?" he suggested. It was the only hint I needed.
"You're my uncle Seth!" I declared. "You look not a day over twenty-five." I said.
"I see you found my machine," Seth said.
"Why did you build it?" I said. "Why did you leave home?"
"There's enough time for conversation, but we need to get you both back on that sailboat as soon as possible," Seth said. "We’ll chase down the sailboat before it crosses the wall. If you miss it today, you will never be allowed to return."
"I don't see why we have to leave," my wife spoke up. "If it's my time to die then let me. And now my husband has joined me. I can't imagine anything better. And don't tell him that he's taking heaven unnaturally because you did the very same thing."
"I did. But I'm telling you it’s not worth it. At first it was great. But it didn't take me long to start feeling extremely sick about it," Seth replied. "I left my family and friends without saying goodbye. How could I enjoy the wonder of this place, knowing I had taken it before it was time? But then I met a girl named Saymi here, who happens to be his sister,” he said, pointing at Sadier. “She had recently come to the afterlife. She told me her brother had been given the chance to join her in the afterlife and had selflessly chosen to go back and keep fighting with his friends. The exact opposite of what I did. I realized that perhaps I was being given the chance to right my wrong by taking Sadier's place in the afterlife until he arrived."
"What do you mean taking his place?" I asked.
"It's not for you to know," Sadier replied. "But what my friend Seth is trying to say is that he has sacrificed the pleasures of this world the last five years to spend his time learning how to rescue my sister, Saymi."
"What does she need to be rescued from?" my wife asked. "It's not for you to know," Sadier said again. "But when you get back here, find me, and I'll tell you everything you want to know." "What if I keep using the lighthouse to bring back people who die before their time?" I asked.
"No, Cepheril," Sadier said stepping close, his eyes growing wide in anger. "You must never come here again on the deck of that ship. Let it go. Do you hear me? It’s far too easy to find yourself in witchcraft. I've had too many friends go mad meddling in things they should have left alone."
There was silence for a while.
"That sailboat moves at twenty-five knots," Sadier said. "It's got a head start of almost thirty minutes now, which means it's at least ten miles away. We have five hours till it crosses the wall. We can only hope to gain a couple miles on it every hour. So if you are going back we need to leave right now."
  My wife and I looked at each other.
  “They’re right,” I said.
  “But you haven’t even seen it,” she protested.
  “I will,” I said taking her hand. “We’ll be back someday.”
  There was another brief moment of silence and then Sadier tossed us our hoods. We looked at each other one last time. I put mine on to encourage her, and she did the same a moment later.

The Lighthouse - 10

Something about the color of the beach, the curve of the crashing waves, stirred a deep part of me, something I had either long forgotten or never known at all. The place was very like the world I knew, yet dramatically different.*

A few moments later, I heard a smooth engine approaching from my right. I raised my head weakly and saw a jeep racing toward me.

“Cepheril!” I heard my name above the engine. “Cepheril! Close your eyes!” I staggered to my feet. The jeep parked near me in a storm of sand, and someone jumped out. He tackled me and forced a dark sack-like hood over my head, like what you would use if you were going to kidnap someone.

“Cepheril, it’s Sadier,” he said. “We messaged each other about your lighthouse. You did well making it here. But the more you see, the less you’ll want to go back to your world.”

I was heartbroken.

“I know everything. I know your wife died. And I know you’re here to bring her back. I know where she is.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond as Sadier guided me into his jeep. I felt his urgency. Within seconds, I felt the jeep lurch around and begin speeding back across the sand from the way it came. After a moment, I felt the surface under the tires change to solid ground, and I figured we were now on the grass.

“She’s seen a lot, Cepheril,” Sadier said. “To give your endeavor a chance, I tracked her down and kidnapped her to keep her from seeing more of this world. When I knew that you were close, I left her with a trusted friend so I could come find you. We told her you’re coming but she doesn’t want to leave this world. We need you to help us convince her that she needs to return.”

*paragraph written by Luke Rawlings https://thelordsgarden.wordpress.com/

The Lighthouse - 9

The lighthouse’s beam had long faded away. I had been on the sailboat for several hours and judging by the sailboat’s speed, I was over a hundred miles out from shore.

Suddenly I felt a shivering, a chill in my spine, similar to how I felt in the lighthouse when I was being lead by the angels. You know the feeling. You get it when you encounter something eerie that you can’t explain. Sometimes your soul senses something that your natural senses don’t perceive. For me, this shivering usually passes in a second or two, but it kept growing stronger and stronger until tears were streaming down my cheeks. I wiped my face with the back of my hand swiftly, trying to keep my eyes ahead, my other hand clenching the mast.

The sea hadn’t changed in any noticeable way, but I knew that I had crossed into the afterlife. I trembled and tried to breathe deeply. I wish I could explain to you how the atmosphere shifted. It was almost like I woke from a dream. It was more vivid, more real here, like everything had always been rushing by me until now.

If I had, instead, taken a boat out to sea in the same direction, I would have sailed for hours and hours and never found myself in the afterlife. The sailboat must have slipped through a doorway that my eyes hadn’t seen.

A light began to rise over the bow in the horizon. A sunrise with a color unlike I had ever seen was blossoming in the sky. Though my eyes were wide and my heart beat strongly, the next several hours weren’t particularly eventful. The light in the sky rose higher and moved overhead.

It was hazy, and I thought I was imagining it at first, but land became recognizable far in the distance. My heart raced. It approached slowly over the course of a half hour. I began to make out a vast beach, and beyond that a thin forest.

The sailboat suddenly began to turn, the enchanted ropes and sails moving by themselves. It began so abruptly, I almost lost my balance. The sailboat turned until it was sailing parallel with the shoreline. It continued like that, three or four hundred yards from the shore, which I realized was about the distance it sailed from the shore back home. But then I realized that if I was going to reach that beach I would have to jump out and swim.

A thought raced through my head. Even if I found my wife, we were going to have to somehow catch up with this sailboat and board it to return to our world. But I had to put that out of my mind for now and focus on this swim. I breathed slowly and deeply for a few minutes, then plunged into the waves.

The waves pushed me toward the shore, but they also smacked into my head causing me to choke and cough constantly. Sometimes I would barely get a breath before a wave would consume me. It was a grueling swim. I was very curious what would happen if I drowned but I put that out of my head too. It was tiring. The sailboat was already far away. I didn’t feel like my muscles had anything left to give, but I was a mere hundred yards from shore. I dug deep, fighting and coughing. What I would have given for a few good breaths.

But suddenly I knew I could make it. The shore was right there. Depending on the slope of the beach, I figured my feet would touch down soon. About fifty feet out, my feet found sand. I gave it just a few more good strokes and then put my legs down again, this time my head rising confidently out of the water. I breathed heavily. I trudged through the water, half swimming half walking the remaining distance, my body faint. The waves were violent close to shore, but they couldn't stop me now. I collapsed on the beach where the waves could only lap at my legs.

The Lighthouse - 8

Though it seemed to move slowly at first, the craft now raced through the water, tossing up spray from either side of the bow. For a moment, I was afraid it might smash itself on the huge boulders where I stood, but I put that thought away, trusting it would turn. When it reached a mere three boat-lengths from the shore, I retreated down the slope of a huge rock, preparing for a running leap.

My heart thumped. I could no longer see the vessel’s deck, but the mast was straight ahead. I ran. My rubber soles gripped cracks in the rock, I timed my steps such that my last one was on the edge of the giant rock and then I leapt into the air with all my might.

When airborne, the first thing I noticed was that the vessel had started to turn. At first that made me think that I may not make the jump and fall into the raging waves. Or worse, smash my jaw against the vessel and then fall into the waves. My feet were at least ten feet above the deck of the vessel and the edge of the vessel was at least fifteen feet away. I swung my limbs involuntarily as I soared through the air.

As I began to descend two things came to mind. First, I could now judge that I was going to make it, but barely. And second, I had better start thinking about rolling upon landing, or I was definitely going to break a leg. While flying through the air, I slightly rotated to the left which turned out to be a good thing. I touched my feet to the deck just momentarily, but the brief moment of contact gave me the ability to rotate my body further counterclockwise, instinctively choosing to take most of the force on my back instead of my shoulder.

My body collapsed and I rolled on my back, yelling involuntarily at the violence of it. Then I tumbled several more times, narrowly missing the mast, and finally stopped clear on the other side of the boat. I laid on my stomach, shaking and moaning. I felt the vessel complete its 180 degree turn. I moved my arms into the push-up position and pressed against the wet boards arching my back with a loud groan.

I was hurting. My jump had gone well. I hadn’t broken any bones or hit my head but I was certainly bruised from tumbling against the deck. My right elbow was throbbing and something in my spine hurt, but I lifted a knee and put a foot on the deck. I rose, triumphant and frightened, looking immediately back at the lighthouse, its beam still pulsating the message. The shoreline was a good ways away already and soon it faded into the fog. Only the lighthouse’s beam remained. The vessel cut through the waves as if it knew exactly where it was going and was rushing to get there. Cold saltwater splashed my face. I stood with a hand on the mast squinting against the spray, peering into the distance, tense at what I might see ahead.

But if anything I believed was right, and if anything my uncle had believed was right, I knew where the vessel was taking me.

All this began as just a seed when I was young. I spent countless hours thinking about it. We talk about our plans for the future—what vacation we are going to take, what movies we want to see, when we want to retire. But for some reason, when it comes to talking about our future beyond this life, the conversation ends. There are only short jokes and comments as if it’s cliché to bring it up. It’s just too controversial, too unpredictable to talk about. It’s an awkward subject, not suited for everyday conversation. Yet, who can deny that this trip is coming for each of us? For all of time we’ve watched people one at a time disappear, and we cry for them and say they are gone.

But where have they gone? Are they asleep or are they awake? If they’re asleep, will they awake again? If they’re awake, what are they seeing? What are they feeling? These people that we used to see and talk to, what are they doing? It is something that I beg everyone to ponder deep and long. It’s given me overwhelming excitement at times, and at other times deep, crippling fear that makes me wake up in the night and cry out in terror. These are things I beg everyone to ponder.

It was a lifetime of pondering that lead me to find what I found in the lighthouse. I knew my wife would die, but I also knew that I would be given the chance to save her, albeit in a very mysterious way. The passion I poured into the lighthouse was for her. For I love her more than anything in the world, and I was not about to just let her die and leave me. Her life had not been taken fairly. It had been forced from her by a supernatural enemy in her sleep. Unknown to most, this is how many die in my land. They appear to die from something natural, when in reality, their destiny had been sealed in the supernatural battles that rage in dreams. I had been called by the angels to rescue her in a way not even they could. The time had now come. In mere hours, this sailboat would take me into the afterlife, where I planned to find my wife and bring her back to our world.

For years, I pondered anxiously whether or not what I was doing was witchcraft. Necromancy is a very serious subject, but what I was doing was not necromancy because I was not talking with the dead. I was dying myself in a controlled way. Everyone has heard accounts of people who died in a hospital for fifteen minutes and then came back with stories of an awesome world. This is the stunt I was trying to pull off. Die for a night to bring my wife back.

But to do this, one has to have a portal to the other side. Suicide was simply not an option. But In our world there are many portals to the afterlife, but you’d better not get too curious about them unless the angels guide you, or you will find yourself messing with things that you should be leaving alone. The demons are ever ready to pounce on any naive soul, dangling the carrot in front of their nose, making them think they are finding something. When too deep into the witchcraft, they snatch them in a trap of death.

I don’t understand these things very well. All I was clinging to was the faith that I was being guided by the light. Given any other person in any other world, and I can’t guarantee the same. But as for me, I felt certain that what I was doing was right.

The Lighthouse - 7

My heart raced as 2am drew near. As anxious as I was, I was also overwhelmed with curiosity. That’s why as the moment approached I waited in the lantern room. The blinding lantern was currently pulsing on for two seconds then off for eight seconds per it’s normal function. I trusted that the machine would come to life. I had seen it consistently do so night after night.

I caught my breath as suddenly the cables disappearing into the floor grew taut. I was too high up to hear the machine start, but the five cables started to slowly move and come to life, causing the pieces of the metal apparatus above to slide every which way. The consistent rhythm of the lantern was no more. It flashed on and off quickly and several different shaped metal plates passed in front of the lantern, momentarily blocking part of the beam. Everything in unison, it built momentum and didn’t take long to reach full speed.

As much as I wanted to stay there and study it, I couldn’t. I leaped down into the service room and then started down the abundance of stairs as fast as I was capable. I hustled out to the pier and looked out at the sea. It was a cloudy night and the moon was dim. There was heavy fog on the waves. I couldn’t see far due to fog, but through that fog the lantern’s message was reaching. I started to see the seven second cycle. The beam turned off and on many times per cycle. The beam usually had a portion of its light blocked as if forming strange letters. The plates moved into position and then paused in a certain place to form a letter and then moved on to the next one.

I waited for fifteen minutes and began to grow nervous, but then through the fog I faintly started to see something only a couple hundred yards out. It was a vessel and it was pointed right at me. Or actually I realized it was pointed at the base of the lighthouse. I ran back down the pier and toward the lighthouse. I climbed on the huge rocks at the lighthouse’s base. The ominous vessel was getting bigger. It was now close enough for me to hear the wind ripping in its mainsail–a mainsail which had the marking X789X. The vessel was now less than 50 yards out. I could see it in more detail: its open wooden deck, its mast connected to the tall mainsail and headsail. It was no more than thirty feet from bow to stern and about ten feet wide.

The Lighthouse - 6

When I had initially discovered the machine, I messaged, Sadier. I grew curious why so many days had gone by without a response. Finally, a response came.

“Dear Cepheril,

“I’m messaging you regarding your friend, Sadier. I’m sorry to tell you that he was in an accident last week and has passed into the next life. Something he mentioned to me as he was dying was that he wanted me to follow up with you and tell you not to give up on your project. I’m very sorry for the news.

“May angels protect you. Blessings.

“Sincerely, Priscilla”

I swallowed and closed my computer, wishing he could have just known that I had found the cellar. Wherever he was and whatever he was doing, I wondered if he knew.

Several months went by as I absorbed everything I could from the notepad. Late one night, I came home from the store with flowers in my hand. I looked for my wife in the kitchen, living room, bedroom, but couldn’t find her. I set the flowers on the kitchen countertop and doubled back, looking in every room and closet, but I couldn’t find a trace of her.

Then I found her FIN machine on our bedside table and my heart began racing with fear. She occasionally experiences a very rare and bizarre type of seizure. She had to keep her FIN on her at all times which would control them. She often went for a run through the park when the weather was nice, but she should have been back by now.

I quickly glanced at my phone to ensure that I hadn’t missed a message from her. Then I snatched her FIN and the flowers I had bought her and ran out the door. I sped for the access point to the trail that was just a block away. Unsure of how far down the trail she could have fallen, I had difficulty determining a running pace.

How was I so sure she was in trouble? For years, I had a growing sense that this day was coming. I didn’t know how it would happen or what it would look like but I had a constant prophetic sense that there would come a day when something would threaten her life.

Only ¾ of a mile down the trail, in the blue light of dusk I began to make out a slumped figure on the ground ahead. I accelerated to a full sprint. It was her. I crashed to the ground next to her and strapped the FIN to her wrist. The seizures had already passed but she was not looking well. She stirred and woke at my coming and faintly reached out her hand toward me. I took it in mine.

If only this trail was more used, perhaps someone would have found her. Her cell phone had fallen out of arm’s reach. The seizures must have struck over an hour ago, I guessed.

She looked at me with frightened eyes and asked, “Am I going to die?”

I hesitated. I knew when I first saw her on the trail that there was no saving her even if paramedics were here. I was honest with her.

“I think you are, sweetheart,” I said. She clutched my hand tighter and stared into my eyes.

“What is going to happen?” she asked me. So many nights she had humored my theories and thoughts about the afterlife. There wasn’t anything I could say that she hadn’t heard but she just wanted to hear me say something because she was scared.

“It will be amazing,” I said.

She closed her eyes and squeezed my hand again, tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. I stroked her head slowly.

Ten minutes passed. I pressed my hand to her wrist, monitoring her fading pulse. She suddenly breathed in sharply and did not breathe out. I watched her closely and held my breath with her, but she did not resume breathing. I waited and waited. But her pulse was gone. Her breathing was gone. She was gone.

I closed my eyes and hung my head. I wept, reaching for the flowers. I imagined how she would have reacted to them. I placed them on her chest. I bent down and kissed her lips softly.

Then I rose abruptly and ran. I ran back down the trail as fast as my body was able. Then back down the street, I ran heading for the lighthouse.

When inside, I went straight for the cabinet. I raced down the ladder to the machine room, blinded by tears and emotion. I paused at the machine, my hands shaking a little. But then I did what I had been waiting to do for months. I dropped to the ground and pulled the five levers one, at a time closing the clamps and connecting the machine to the cables. Now at last, when the machine started, the cables would move.

I stood and stared at the machine with wide eyes, my breath short and fast. It was 8:39pm. I had about 6 hours to wait and I knew I wouldn’t sleep a second of it. I journeyed up all the stairs to the lantern room, then out to the pier to gaze out over the dark ocean, then back down through the cabinet to the machine room again. I paced and paced, more anxious than I had ever been in my life. The hours passed slowly.

The Lighthouse - 5

That night around 2am I woke to the machine. I rose and journeyed to the cellar, hoping to observe the machine in action. My heart leapt as I climbed down the ladder and saw it rumbling. The sound that I had heard many times as a low rattle was now loud and clear. Having studied the notepad pages, I was able to take in the machine’s moving parts with a discerning eye. The machine was divided into five sections, one responsible for each cable. As I watched, I started to catch on to the cycle that looped every seven seconds. Every time through I noticed something new. From the notepad, I had learned how to connect the machine to the cables. Near the floor, there was a lever for each of the machine’s five sections, which would connect it by clamps to the cables above. I was tempted to go for it right then and there, but I felt that I should continue to study the notepad and gain a deeper understanding of the machine. For it was not just a machine. There were pages from the notepad that befuddled me at first and seemed completely unrelated to anything else in the notepad. But as I continued to ponder them for the next few days, I began to get an idea.

My uncle and I had many things in common, as I said. He had an uncanny sense of the spiritual, a beckoning in his soul that lead him to things he would not discover naturally. And this sense was what guided my uncle to build. What he had built was woven into the lighthouse, which was woven into the unseen realm, connected somehow through the lantern. I was still grasping to understand it. In the pages of the notepad, my uncle had scribbled the design for how the machine’s parts would connect together, but also how the lighthouse would then connect to the unseen.

I previously had pondered a theory that the supernatural is manifested in things we can see. The unseen and the seen are so connected that one can, in theory, affect the supernatural with natural things. In this case, my uncle had used the lighthouse’s lantern. When operational, the machine would use the lantern to send out a message in the language of light. I was fascinated by the language of light, which from the notepad I learned was defined by the patterns and rhythms of darkness and light. And I knew what the message was intended to reach: the vessel with X789X marked on its mainsail.

The question was increasingly harder to ignore. What happened to my uncle? Did his disappearance have anything to do with this machine? I didn’t know but I hesitated to connect the machine to the cables.

The Lighthouse - 4

A few nights later, I woke to the sound of the machine. I rose and went out to the pier. It was a completely fogless night and I could see the vessel very easily. So easily that I could perhaps even make out the symbols on the mainsail. I squinted and perceived the characters X, 7, 8, 9, X. I froze. X789X. A letter followed by 3 digits followed by a letter. I sprinted in the dark to my garage. I turned the wheels of the lock to X789X. I ran into the kitchen and jumped on top of the countertop. I clicked on the flashlight and aimed it to the back of the cabinet. The lock had opened.

I pushed on the back of the cabinet and it seemed loose. I gave it a solid thump and it budged. I pushed on it again and it swung up and clicked into something that kept it up. The sound of the machine roared louder than I had ever heard it. I climbed further into the cabinet and shined my flashlight into the open space. I saw the thick wooden steps of a ladder descending downward into the dark. Surely, I had found the passage to the machine. Despite my excitement, I felt that it would be preferable to wait for daylight before braving into the basement. Journeying into the mysterious cellar in the middle of the night for the first time was more than my courage could handle. So I shut the hatch and ran to bed.

At sunrise, I forced myself to have a normal morning enjoying breakfast with my wife. But around 10, I eagerly climbed back into the cabinet and re-opened the back of the hatch. Despite the daylight, I still needed a flashlight to see down through the hatch where the wooden ladder was again waiting for me. It lead down to a concrete floor. I lifted a foot off the countertop and into the cabinet, feeling for the first rung on the ladder. Once my foot was secure, stabling myself with my hands, I swung the other foot into the cabinet and onto the first rung of the ladder. I began descending one foot at a time, my heart began to race as I lowered into the unknown. When my feet made it safe to the concrete I lifted the flashlight toward the center of the room, and the first thing that my light fell upon was the producer of the sound I had heard so many nights. A machine. It sat there, its gears and shafts poised but motionless. Not a huge machine. More tall than large. One of the first things I immediately noticed as I moved my flashlight around was that cables were strung taut from the top of the machine straight through a hole in the ceiling of the cellar. I instantly knew where those cables went because I had seen them coming out in the lantern room where the light was.

Was the machine my uncle’s creation, or perhaps someone who lived in the lighthouse before him? How many long hours had the builder spent down here building this machine, I wondered. And how many trips through that small cabinet hatch? Whoever it was, they definitely didn’t want anyone to find this cellar by chance.

I moved the light around cellar. There was what looked like a workbench against the far wall. There were machine parts, tools and other various items strewn across the floor, mostly near the wall. I shook my head in amazement when I identified what had been the original staircase to the cellar. It ascended up to a closed off wall that I figured had been a door opening to the hallway I had walked through so many times. Someone completely removed the door and patched the wall so as to be indistinguishable from the hallway. I noticed a few light bulbs screwed into the wooden rafters, each with string dangling below. I walked toward the closest one, hoping to fill the room with better light. When I pulled the string the old light bulb flashed, popped, and went dark.

I paused, chuckled, and then hustled back up the ladder to snatch some fresh bulbs from the garage, along with a step stool. Upon returning, I swapped the bulbs and pulled the string again. The new bulb lit up a good portion of the cellar. I forced myself to replace the other two bulbs both near the workbench, my heart dancing with excitement. There were also a couple of shop lamps hanging from the ceiling directly above the machine, but I figured I didn’t need to go to the trouble of getting them operational just yet. My attention turned to the now illuminated workbench which had tools, gears and various objects laying on it. My eye was drawn to a notepad. I flipped through the pages, hoping to find something that could tell me about the lighthouse and its machine. I turned a page and froze, catching my breath. It was a sketch of the sailboat, and on its mainsail were the markings X789X.

I turned back toward the machine and walked around it, scanning it thoroughly up and down. There were gears clicking into gears connecting to chains that pulled wires. It was a lot of complexity to take in. Ultimately, it all seemed purposed to drive the five cables that lead through the ceiling. I realized, however, that the machine was disconnected from these cables, meaning however much the machine churned it would never move them. This checked out because I never saw the cables moving above in the lantern room. It always confounded me as to why they never moved. Now I understood that if I made the connection, the cables and the apparatus would come to life. The apparatus in the lantern room was woven into the lighthouse’s lantern, which shone a beacon out to the sea. Therefore, I speculated that ultimately whatever the machine did, it had something to do with altering the lighthouse’s lantern.

Most of that afternoon, I studied the notepad papers and learned several things. First of all, the machine was a clock. It had a cycle that took around seven seconds to complete and then would repeat. All of the machine’s complexity was wrapped up in making the cables that led to the lantern room move up and down a certain amount at a certain time.

From details in short journal-like entries on the notepad, I also determined that the author was indeed my uncle. The machine, the apparatus, and the combination lock were all his handiwork.

The Lighthouse - 3

I told my friend Sadier about the captain’s story.

“It would seem a section of the ship’s nightly route is in view from your pier,” he replied.

“That seems to be the case,” I typed.

“Have you noticed any hot spots in your house?” he asked.

“Yes, the kitchen,” I responded.

But that was where I got stuck for a while. I started to grow a little frustrated. There seemed to be nothing more to go on. Sometimes I thought about just taking a saw to our kitchen floor because I knew there was a room below it. But I didn’t want to take any shortcuts. I knew my uncle got down to that room somehow. I had to figure out how he did it. Sadier had a suggestion.

“Do you ever feel like you’re out of your body?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. Perhaps at times,” I typed.

“For some people, out of body experiences have allowed them to see past walls,” he stated.

He had my attention. “What do you suggest?” I asked.

“You might be able to encourage an out of body experience by lying still for a long time. Ensure there is no sound to distract your ears and no light to distract your eyes.”

That night I apologized to my wife and dragged a small mattress to the kitchen. I lay very still but kept my mind working as best I could, so as not to fall asleep. I started to have a floating sensation as if the room was filling up with water. It felt like my body was tilting and swaying back and forth. It was not uncommon for me to feel this way while falling asleep. I tried to open my mind’s eye and look around the room. It was difficult. The next thing I remember was waking up to engine’s rumble, much louder than usual because I was right above it. When the engine stopped 15 minutes later, I fell back asleep until morning.

I didn’t think anything helpful had come of the night until I was having breakfast with my wife the next morning. She watched my eyes suddenly grow wide. I rose, leaving my scrambled eggs, and walked toward the cabinet where we keep our glasses. I climbed onto the countertop and stuck my head into the cabinet. I recalled that sometimes when getting a drink of water I would have a strange feeling. Last night while lying in the kitchen I had noticed something. I hopped down and briskly fetched a flashlight from the garage. Then, I started pulling glasses out of the cabinet, apologizing to my wife. I pulled out all of the glasses and then started on mason jars and other glassware. My hand picked up a rarely-used china teapot which was against the cabinet wall and I saw something glimmer in the flashlight behind it. Upon a closer look, it appeared to be a small metal lock attached to the cabinet’s back wall. My heart raced. Coming from the lock was a metal rod. I had to take everything out of the cabinet to see that it disappeared into the wall that the kitchen shared with the garage. The rod looked familiar. The metal looked the same as the metal combination lock in the garage, leading me to suspect that behind the wall the rod ran all the way to the combination lock. Since my wife had been the one to organize the cabinets when we moved in, I had never seen this. Perhaps if I set the combination lock in the garage to the right combination, the lock in the cabinet would release. What was the lock in the cabinet locking though? It was hard to guess. I figured perhaps if the lock was released, the back of the cabinet might swing open.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have any idea what the combination was. When I had brute forced all the combinations I had probably unknowingly spun the wheels to the right combination, unlocking the lock in the cabinet momentarily before I relocked it with the next turn of the wheel. Now that I had a theory as to what the combination lock was connected to, I could brute force it again with the added step of running around the corner to check if the lock in the cabinet was open. However, it had taken me over 30 hours in all to brute force it the first time, and that was when trying a new combo every second or so. Checking the lock every time would mean every combo would surely cost no less than 10 seconds given the time taken to run between, and this would push my overall time at best to 300 hours, I figured. I knew there had to be a better way. I could have asked my wife to watch the lock while I turned the wheels, but given the time involved that would be a lot to ask of her. She humored my obsession with our lighthouse, but I couldn’t ask her to do that. Even though I had a sense that finding what I was searching for was desperately important, I wanted to do this on my own. I believed that I could come up with the answer. I needed to get inside the mind of my uncle and crack his password.

The Lighthouse - 2

When we moved in, there was one thing that caught my attention before anything else. An odd, not-so-subtle combination lock in the attached garage. I studied it tirelessly, turning its wheels time and time again, hoping for some insight. The lock was built right into the garage wall and had five independently rotating wheels. The first and fifth wheels had the letters A, B, C, D, E, V, W, X, Y, and Z. The second, third and fourth wheels had the digits 0-9. My first approach was to brute force it, though it took many hours. I tried every combination, A111A, A111B, A111C and on and on, looking, and listening, asking for my wife to look and listen for anything unlocking, anything changing in the house, anything suspicious. I diligently exhausted all 100,000 combinations, but to my disappointment it lead to no apparent revelations.

Then, one day as I was in the kitchen getting a glass of water, something caught my attention. I froze, chills racing through me as water raced out of the fridge and down my hand. Something about the kitchen was strange. My eyes had just passed over it a second ago. My mind had definitely noticed; it was trying to tell me, and I was trying to listen. I closed my eyes. What had I just seen? What had I just missed?

That night, around 2am, I woke to the rattling as I often did. I sat in bed listening to it. What could make a sound like that? It sounded like the grinding and chugging of a big engine. I rose and shuffled around the house. It seemed to be the loudest in the kitchen. I traveled outside and walked out to the pier. There were no clouds in the sky and the moon was nearly full. I heard the waves crash against the rocks behind me. My eyes peered out across the churning sea. I spotted a vessel way out from the shore. It was a plain boat with tall sails. It had some marking on the mainsail, several symbols traveling from top to bottom, each one surrounded by a circle. It was in this moment that a thought occurred to me. It seemed that every time I came out here on a clear night after being awoken, this sailboat was in sight.

The next morning I went down to the Kenderville wharf. I found one of the captains and asked him if he knew anything of a boat with symbols on its mainsail traveling from top to bottom.

He replied at first with a surprised stare. “Where’d you hear about that vessel?” he asked.

“I’ve seen it in the middle of the night from the pier near my house,” I replied.

“The vessel is one of the strangest mysteries I’ve ever encountered,” the captain answered.

“How so?” I asked, my eyebrows raising.

“Many captains have seen it gliding through the sea in the dead of night. It takes the same route every time,” the captain whispered. “But no one has ever spotted a soul on its deck. No captain. No sailors. Some have sailed up close. Their men have tried to board, but it always eludes them no matter how hard they try or how much they prepare. I think... it’s enchanted,” the captain concluded.

The Lighthouse - 1

I remember when I first noticed. A low rattling beneath the floor. Sometimes I would awake in the night and lie there listening to it, so curious what it may be. I would kiss my sleeping wife’s cheek and walk out on the pier that was below the lighthouse. I’d sit and watch the mighty curling waves crash against the rocks on the shore. I’d look out across the water, and in the lighthouse’s swaying beacon, sometimes I would catch a glimpse of a vessel rising up and down on the sea.

I have a peculiarly strong subconscious that tells me things I should not know and guides me to things I should not find. Very deep inside me, it kept giving me a strange feeling about the lighthouse that we called our home. A most subtle yet sure suspicion. Never a day went by that I didn’t wonder about it. Something deep down was urging me to push, to haste. By some revelation, I knew time was ticking. I had to unlock the mystery before it was too late. I had to understand it, because somehow I knew that I would need to understand it.

Months ago, I was contacted by someone regarding the lighthouse. He was helplessly curious about it. He and I had a code. An unspoken agreement to share information but not revelation. We both brought something to the table that the other needed. His understanding of the supernatural was far beyond mine, and he guided me. But I was closer to the mystery, the window through which he could interact with it. I knew him only by his username “Sadier”.

Nobody knew what happened to the man who lived in the lighthouse before us. He was my uncle. There were a lot of theories. He was an odd character, they said, though I never knew him very well. He wasn’t particularly close to anyone. He was the lighthouse keeper before me, faithfully ensuring that its oscillating beacon never failed to reach out to the captains who navigated the sea. Then one day without warning, the lighthouse’s lantern turned off. Two men drove quickly to the lighthouse. One hurried to the service room to try to find out why the light had gone dark. The other man looked everywhere for my uncle. He searched every room, every closet, every balcony. Eventually a whole team of men and women were searching for my uncle, but to no avail. He was gone. Everything in the house was in order. From the table and chairs, to the bed and sofa, there was no trace of anything that could explain his disappearance. The man who managed to get the lantern operational that night said that the lighthouse looked as if it hadn’t been maintained in a week. A week prior, a few sea captains had noted that the lighthouse’s beacon had an atypical pattern, but it returned to normal the following night.

A lighthouse’s job is to warn ships of potentially dangerous rock. It is a tower built to project light from a system of lamps and lenses that acts as a navigational landmark for marine captains, cautioning them that the coastline is hazardous and they should keep away. But as I meandered through the service room and listened to the sound of the grinding gears and peered at the lighthouse’s blinding lamp rotating on its axle, I knew something was unusual about this lighthouse. My uncle had done something to it. Running up through the lighthouse’s service room and lantern room were unnecessary cables. These cables were connected to a metal apparatus in the lantern room which was attached to the lantern itself. This mechanism had been delicately designed and attached. However, in the lighthouse’s normal function, none of these parts moved. It was my suspicion that my uncle built and installed this apparatus. But what did it do? How did it turn on? I had no idea. The cables disappeared into slits in the floor of the service room. I shined a flashlight down the slits but couldn’t see very much.

Of all the theories that attempted to explain what became of my uncle, mine was surely the wildest, although at the time I didn’t share it with anyone. I knew his vanishing had something to do with the lighthouse but I wasn’t sure how. I’ve found that my uncle and I have some things in common. He had a similar subconscious that told him things he should not have known and lead him to things he should not have been able to find. I was determined to uncover whatever he had discovered here, and hopefully unlock the mystery of his disappearance. So, when the request came for a new lighthouse keeper, I applied and my wife and I moved into the abandoned lighthouse, making it our home.