The Ocean Stops Moving At Night

A misconception about lighthouse keepers I hear very often is that we don't use the Internet, don't have access to it. But we do. Sometimes, that is. It's not common, but with ever-advancing technology it's possible. However, it's taken me a long time to post this here, both because I am old now and because the WiFi here is shot, down half the fucking time.

I am the sole keeper of a lighthouse on the east coast, up near Maine. I am alone most of the time, very rarely getting visitors, but it does happen, that, or I get a call from a ship. I sleep most of the day and watch at night. I've taken up crochet as a hobby, it's very nice to sit in such a bright light surrounded by the darkest black and do something easy and repetitive. Loop, hook, loop, hook, over and over again, a simple action that brings great peace.

Once, on a rare day off, or rather, a day where I was well-rested enough to venture into the small town a few miles from the lighthouse, I was approached by a man who knew of me, but I didn't know of him. He asked me what it was like, keeping such a monstrosity, and I told him the truth. I told him it was odd at first, scary even, to be so alone and in the dark constantly. But over time, you become used to it, the inverse becomes odd, the daytime begins to hurt your eyes and human contact, the same contact you were so desperate for before, becomes foreign and strange, and a feeling like you don't need it begins to creep into you, seep into your bones, but if you fall to the lighthouse's tricks, you go mad.

The reason I write to you all now is that, a couple nights ago, I was reminded of this interaction. When, as I sat crocheting, loop, hook, loop, hook, I heard, over the sounds of the machinery spinning the gargantuan light, singing. I had grown up around sailors, my father was one, so I had heard tales of sirens before, but this was unlike them. In the tales I heard, the singing of sirens was beautiful and magical, something that pulled you towards them. But this, this was off-key, sharp, and horrid, akin to a knife being sharpened on a whetstone, a sound fine in and of itself but terrible to hear escaping a human's throat. Listening to it froze me, stopping my body from moving, my crochet hook held upright, shaking, unravelling the loop around it and letting the yarn fall.

I stood up to look outside, expecting to spot perhaps a drunk woman caterwauling, but despite the sound being so loud and present, there was nothing outside of my windows. Nothing except the sea, flat and unmoving. Just a tarp laid across a pit.

The next night, I decided to go down to the ocean. A door led from the bottom floor of the lighthouse out onto the beach, and I walked forward, stumbling on the wet, slippery, shifting sand. The smell of rotten fish pervaded my nostrils, and, in the dark, it was my only true sense available to me. I was practically rendered blind until I turned on my flashlight, it was just a few steps from the building to where I was when I turned it on, but those few steps felt longer and harder than they could've been. A man blind, deaf from the waves crashing against the shore, and admittedly, drunk, stumbling into darkness, hoping to catch a glimpse of a singer.

When I turned my light on and a beautiful white artificial sun illuminated the beach, I saw it all at once. I took it all in and fell to my knees and vomited. Dead fish, everywhere, rotting carp and cod and whatever else that had been dredged up from the depths, surrounded me. My feet, imprinted into the carcasses of fish, made a red and pink trail back to the door of the lighthouse. Atop one of my knees lay a small eyeball, one that was tossed up from my fast descent.

The smell was so much worse, so much more pervasive, once I was sitting in it. Stinging and attacking me, burning the inside of my nose along with the vomit burning my throat. I was burning alive from the inside out. I coughed up the last remaining bits of my stomach onto the overlapping pile of dead fish, some still flapping their tails in a stupidly desperate pursuit of water to find its way back to. It was a blanket that covered the whole beach, not a grain of sand was visible between the lighthouse and the ocean. I straightened, still on my knees, too drunk and weak to stand, and looked around.

I moved my flashlight from side to side, emulating and becoming the building I guard, looking for anything that would make this trip outside worth it. As the light was flung back and forth, the crossing waves began to blur together, to merge in my eyes and make the ocean stand still. The rotation of my body on the bodies of so many creatures was the only noise I could hear. Such a thick and tangible silence. I spotted something atop a rock as I went left and right and left and right again, and I steadied my flashlight, aiming at the protruding stone that must have something atop it, and I saw nothing.

I stood shakily and slowly and shined my flashlight at the water once more. The tricks my eyes played on me, making the ocean stagnant, by now would have worn off, but the ocean still did not move. No wave rose from the surface, no disturbances upon the surface of the water caused by the wind, just one ripple, by the rock I had noticed.

And then the silence was filled with a screech, metallic and horrible, loud and atonal, and I ran inside.

The smell of fish, so many dead fish, on my beach did not leave my nose as I shut the door behind me and covered my pained ears with pillows. But when I awoke, I could smell only salt water and the lighthouse itself. The smell of death was gone from the air, the only noise I could hear was the mechanical whirring of my home, the waves slammed against the shore with their normal force, and not a single fish lay strewn on the beach. But my clothes were still stained with fish blood.