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.