Deep Thing Part One

I have often wondered, in the days since that night, whether some part of me knew what was coming. Whether the pull I felt toward that iron tower in the bay was not nostalgia, but something older, something that had been waiting beneath the black water for precisely this conjunction of despair and solitude.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The story begins, as these things often do, with a boat.

 

Nick sat behind the wheel of his center console boat as we cut through Mount Hope Bay like a butter knife through cold margarine, slow, deliberate, slightly apologetic. The May sky hung low and grey, pregnant with the storm that had been threatening since morning after an overcast week. I sat on the bench seat, duffel bag between my knees, watching Borden Flats Lighthouse grow from a rusty smudge on the horizon into something solid. Something real.

Something final.

“Fourth year running, right?” Nick called over the engine’s whine. He was grinning, the kind of smile that came easy to men who loved their work. Clean shaven, polo shirt, hands that showed some signs of a life outside of an office. “Been with us from the start. You and your girl gonna try for five next year?”

“Just me at this point,” I said. The words came out easier than I expected. I’d been practicing. “Thought I’d give it a solo run.”

“Ah.” Nick’s smile didn’t falter, but something shifted in his eyes, that New England discretion that knows when not to pry. “Well, you picked a hell of a night for it. Storm’s been building all day.”

“Good,” I said. And I meant it.

He cut the engine as we approached, letting momentum carry us to the iron ladder off the platform of the lighthouse. The structure rose from the water like a middle finger of iron and concrete, its massive base squatting in the bay as though it had grown there over centuries rather than been built. Rust bled down its sides in long vertical streaks, patterns that looked almost organic. Almost intentional.

“You’ve done the tour before,” Nick said as he tied off, “but I can run through it again if you want. Some folks like the ritual of it.”

I looked up at the lighthouse. At the dark windows. At the gallery rail circling the top like a crown of thorns.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’d like to hear it again.”

Nick’s face lit up the way it probably did every time. This was a man who’d poured his life into preserving this place, and it showed in every gesture as we climbed the ladder to the platform.

“Built in 1881,” he began, producing a key ring that looked like it had been handed down by a medieval jailer. “Cast iron tower, Victorian design, one of only two offshore lighthouse towers in the world you can actually sleep in.” He unlocked the door with a theatrical flourish. “Welcome to the Borden Flats Lighthhome, Justin. Your fortress of solitude for the evening.”

The interior smelled like old metal and older wood, with an undertone of the marine that no amount of dehumidifiers could quite erase. It was a scent I’d come to associate with Amelia, with her laugh echoing off these walls, with her hand in mine as we climbed the spiral stairs, with the way she’d looked in the light from the windows as the sun set over Fall River.

“The lighthouse is completely off the grid with no outside electricity, city water, wi-fi, cable, etc.” Nick explained, “We are strictly powered by a bank of solar panels and heavy-duty batteries. We have a large inverter that converts the solar battery power into normal 110V electricity. There is normally enough battery power to run the lights, fridge, TV and charge cell phones/tablets. We can also power portable CPAP machines.  We do ask for your cooperation in conserving the electricity and water during your stay, especially if it’s been a cloudy day.  There is definitely not enough power to operate high wattage items such as hair dryers, fans, flat irons or extended use of the microwave.”

“No problem,” I said. I wouldn’t be needing it for long.

“Ground floor here is the kitchen.” Nick continued, gesturing to the space. “We’re equipped with a small dorm-sized refrigerator, microwave, tea kettle, an extremely popular stove-top coffee percolator, French coffee press, a 4 burner gas stove and oven, and free bottled drinking water.  We also provide plates, mugs, glasses, cookware, cutlery, eating & cooking utensils, salt & pepper and various spices/seasonings.

“We also provide paper goods such as paper plates, paper towels, napkins, toilet tissue, etc. Just like home! ” 

“We do not have city water or septic service.  However, we do offer fresh water from our sink via a battery operated pump system for washing up, cooking, dishes, and all that.  We also include plenty of bottled water for drinking. Sadly, since we do not have city water service out to the Light, so we do not have a shower on board. We do provide wash cloths and hand towels at the sink. There are hot showers available at the Marina’s clubhouse if desired if you want after your visit.”

“  The lighthouse is purposely not equipped with WiFi or cable TV. The idea is to “UNPLUG” from the rest of the world and enjoy the peace and tranquility of the Lighthouse.”

He showed me the head, the sitting area on the second floor, the sleeping quarters on the third level, the storage closets that still held rusted artifacts from the lighthouse’s working days. His enthusiasm was infectious in a way that made my chest hurt. Here was a man who’d found meaning in preservation, in service, in the simple act of keeping something beautiful alive.

I wondered what that felt like.

“Now,” Nick said as we returned to the main level, “House rules: as part of your light keeper duties, you are asked to kindly volunteer leaving the lighthouse in the same clean, original condition it was upon your arrival. Changing your bed sheets, with the fresh linens provided, wash your dishes and wipe down counters and sink areas. That’s it, simple!”

“If you hear anything weird, it’s just the tide. Metal expands and contracts, makes all kinds of noises. And lastly,” He paused, glancing out the window at the darkening sky. “If that storm gets nasty and something goes wrong, please use your cell phone to call 911. Fall River has top-notch police, rescue and fire officers through their Harbormaster. Also, contact me to let me know what’s going on”

“I’ll be fine,” I said. And I meant that too, in a way he couldn’t understand.

“Right.” Nick clapped me on the shoulder. “You’ve got my number. You’ve been here before. You know the drill.” He moved toward the door, then paused. “Hey, Justin?”

“Yeah?”

“You mentioned wanting to experience a storm out here. Looks like tonight’s your night. Should be pretty spectacular.” His grin was genuine, almost boyish. “Enjoy it, yeah?”

“I will,” I said.

And then he was gone, the sound of his outboard fading into the wind until I was alone with the rising sea and my decided fate.

 

I’ve always been methodical. It’s what made me good at my job, back when “good at my job” meant something more than “hasn’t been fired yet.” Twenty-three years in manufacturing, watching machines do the same tasks over and over, fixing them when they broke, maintaining them when so they didn’t. There was a comfort in routine. In predictability.

In knowing exactly how something would end.

I unpacked with the same precision I’d applied to everything else in my life. Clothes all over the bed upstairs, toiletries scattered on the bathroom sink downstairs. The bottle of Macallan 18, Sherry Oak Cask placed carefully on the desk on the second floor next to two glasses.

Two glasses.

I stared at them for a moment, those twin Glencairns catching the grey light from the window. Habit. Muscle memory. The ghost of optimism.

I left them both there.

My laptop came next, the case worn at the corners from years of commutes and coffee shops. I sat down at the second-floor desk and opened it, waiting for it to boot. The wallpaper flickered to life: Amelia, photographed from behind as she stood on the gallery of this very lighthouse two years ago, her hair whipping in the wind, one hand raised to shield her eyes as she looked toward the horizon. I’d taken the shot without her knowing, captured that moment of her searching for something I could never quite see.

I closed the laptop.

The duffel bag was nearly empty now. Just one item left, wrapped in a towel at the bottom. I lifted it out, set it on the desk, unfolded the cloth with the same care I might use to unveil something sacred.

The Colt Gold Cup .45 gleamed dully in the failing light. The monogrammed grips, JSW, Justin Samuel Willis, a detail I’d insisted on when I bought it ten years ago, caught my eye as I lifted it. The weight was familiar. Comforting.

I’d been shooting since I was young. My father’s hobby, passed down like a genetic trait. Amelia had never minded. She’d come to the range with me a few times, found it meditative in her own way. “It’s very Zen,” she’d said once, loading a magazine with focused precision. “All that concentration on a single point.”

I set the pistol down.

Then I pulled the single round from my pocket, a Hornady XTP hollow point, 185 grain, and placed it beside the gun. Not in it. Just next to it.

Not yet.

 

The wind was picking up. I could hear it testing the seams of the lighthouse, probing for weaknesses the way water finds cracks in stone. Thunder rumbled somewhere to the south, still distant but coming closer with the patience of something that had all the time in the world.

I sighed while looking back at the laptop and tethered the laptop to my phone. One bar of signal. Maybe. The storm was wreaking havok with the signal.

To: Family & Friends

Subject:

The cursor blinked at me. Patient. Waiting.

I’ve started this email six times now. There’s no good way to say it.

Delete.

To: Everyone

Subject: Distribution of Stuff

Marissa gets the vinyl collection, she’s the only one who’d be able to read all of the underground black metal band logos anyway. Tom can have the b-movie DVDs. Someone needs to destroy my hard drives. All of them. Especially the –

Delete.

To: Amelia

Subject: I understand now

My fingers hovered over the keys.

You left on a Monday. Not even a significant Monday, just another day in a sequence of days that had stopped meaning anything. I found the email when I got home from work. You’d sent it while I was in the third hour of a production meeting about process optimization.

“I’m changing, Justin. It won’t work anymore.”

Like we were a subscription you’d decided to cancel. Like fifteen years could be summarized in two sentences and a Gmail notification.

I looked for you. You must know I did. Your phone went straight to voicemail. Your cousin said she hadn’t heard from you. Your work said you’d resigned, effective immediately. You just… vanished. Like you’d never been real at all.

And maybe that’s the truth of it. Maybe I invented you. Maybe I invented us. Maybe –

Something scraped against the window.

I stopped typing.

It came again, a long, slow drag across the glass, deliberate and rhythmic. The sound was achingly familiar in the way that certain sounds are hardwired into childhood, the familiar tick and scrape of a branch against a bedroom window on a stormy night. That’s exactly what it sounded like. A branch, flexing in the wind, tapping for attention the way a bored child taps a shoulder. Petulant. Persistent.

I almost smiled at it. Almost let myself be comforted by it.

Then I put my glass down.

I was sitting in the middle of Mount Hope Bay. The nearest tree was somewhere on the Fall River shoreline, a quarter mile of open water away. There were no branches. There was nothing out there but iron and water and empty air between the windows and the surface of the bay.

Something had scraped against the glass.

I sat very still and listened to the storm and tried to remember how to breathe.

 

The scraping stopped.

I told myself it was the iron contracting in the cold. I told myself Nick had mentioned the lighthouse made noises. I told myself I was a grown man who had come here with one specific purpose and was not about to be derailed by the creaking of an old building in a storm.

I turned back to the laptop and continued typing.

I’m at the lighthouse. Our lighthouse. I thought it was fitting, coming here for the last time. For my last birthday. I thought maybe I’d feel close to you again, or at least close to the memory of you.

I startled as lightning strobed through the lighthouse.

In that half-second flash of blue-white light, something moved past the window.

Not debris. Not shadow. Something upright. Something that moved with the suggestion of limbs.

I was on my feet before I’d decided to stand, the chair scraping back across the floor. I stared at the window. Outside, the storm churned and the darkness pressed against the glass like it was trying to get in.

Of course nothing there. No trees, certainly no people.

I was on the second floor of a lighthouse tower. Nothing was walking past that window.

I stood there for a long moment, heart doing things hearts aren’t supposed to do, then sat back down with what I felt was admirable composure for a man who’d just frightened himself half to death in a haunted lighthouse. Which was not haunted. Which was just old iron and solar panels and the accumulated atmosphere of a hundred and forty years of isolation.

Right.

I poured three fingers of the Macallan into one of the two glasses and drank half of it in a pull that Amelia would have called wasteful. I call it therapeutic.

You’re not here, Amelia. You’re not anywhere.

So I’m not going to be anywhere either.

I hope you found whatever you were looking for when you –

The scraping came back.

Lower now. Not from the window beside me but from somewhere near the waterline, working its way up the concrete base and along the iron hull with a rhythmic, deliberate patience that had nothing to do with wind or current. Something with purchase. Something that was climbing.

I closed the laptop.

The single bar of signal had given up entirely. The email sat unsent in the dark of the draft folder, half-finished, which felt appropriate. Most things I’d started had ended that way.

The sound paused.

In the silence, I became aware of the smell.

It crept in around the door seals and the old window seams, subtle at first, not just the bay, not just the sea air I’d been breathing all evening. But this was different. Thicker. The salt was underlaid with something organic and ancient, a reek of deep water and rotting vegetation, of the places sunlight never reaches. It settled in the back of my throat like a memory I couldn’t place.

Kelp. Blood. The particular cold of water under pressure.

My eyes went to the Colt Gold Cup on the desk.

The Macallan glass was still in my hand. I set it down very carefully, as if sudden movements might matter, and picked up the gun. The monogrammed grips found my palm the way they always did, JSW pressed into my skin, familiar as a handshake.

The single Hornady XTP round sat beside the laptop.

I picked it up. Slid it into the chamber. Released the slide.

The mechanical sound was enormous in the silence.

I moved to the edge of the stairs and listened.

Something shuffled on the platform outside the front door below. Still not the wind. Not debris. Not old iron complaining about the cold. Something was moving out there with a wet, dragging gait, circling the entrance platform in a slow orbit that was pulling tighter with each pass. I could hear the light repeating slap of something damp against the decking. Could hear the irregular rhythm of movement that followed no pattern I recognized.

One bullet.

I had one bullet, and whoever or whatever was outside that door was doing a very convincing impression of something that might require significantly more.

The thought arrived with almost clinical detachment: one bullet, Justin. You brought exactly one bullet, you colossal idiot. In my defense, I had only anticipated needing it once, for one specific purpose, and this scenario had not featured in my planning.

The smell intensified as I made my way down the stairs to the ground floor. Salt and rot and copper and something else, something underneath it all that was almost, almost familiar in a way I couldn’t articulate. Like a song heard from another room, the melody just out of reach.

I raised the pistol and pointed it at the door.

My hands were trembling.

Twenty-three years running manufacturing equipment that was in a perpetual state of trying to kill me and they’d never shaken. Fifteen years with Amelia through arguments and reconciliations and the slow mundane terror of building a life, and they’d never shaken.

They shook now.

The shuffling stopped directly outside the door.

A silence that was not silence, full of weather and water and the ragged sound of my own breathing and, beneath all of it, a sound I couldn’t quite identify. A low, rhythmic clicking, like stones tumbling in surf, like the last sound a depth gauge makes before it stops working.

The smell rolled through the door seams in a wave.

My finger slipped past the trigger guard.

One bullet, I thought. Make it count.

Make it count for what?

I had no answer for that.

The storm hit the lighthouse like a fist.

And the door blew open.