The Lighthouse at the End of the World

The storm had been howling for three days when Elara noticed the first one. She had been tending the great lens — polishing the brass fittings the way her father taught her, the way his father had taught him — when she saw the shape moving through the rain. Not a ship. Ships had mass, had weight, left wakes in the churning black water below. This thing drifted upward, toward the light, like smoke looking for a chimney. She pressed her face to the cold glass. A woman in a yellow dress, soaking wet, walking on the surface of the water as though it were cobblestone. Her face turned toward the beam as it swept past her and her expression — Elara would never forget this — was pure relief. Then she was gone. Elara sat down on the iron stairs and did not move for a very long time. Her logbook lay open beside her. She picked up her pen. 'Night 1,847,' she wrote. 'The light is still working. Something has changed about what it is guiding.' She stared at that last sentence for a long moment, then added: 'I think I recognise the yellow dress. My mother had one just like it. She has been dead for eleven years.'