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.