Ghostlight [Entry 2]

CW: This story contains themes of religious horror, familial death and grief (including immolation), emotional neglect, divorce and estrangement, body horror, isolation and psychological distress.

It must be near midnight. The moon shines brightly while no sun peeks on the horizon.

Three times I dreamed of climbing the stairs. I’d count 196 steps with every climb, but they were slick with dark and warm fluids. The walls grew closer than they should, breathing against my shoulders like the throat of some enormous beast. Each time I reached the iron door at the top, I found it shut. Each time, I pressed my palm against the metal and felt a quaking, like music through a speaker.

From the other side of the door, my dad called to me. In the first dream, he asked if I'd eaten. Just that.

“Dawit, have you eaten?” His question was really an accusation. He always knew when I hadn’t. “There's canned fish in the storage. The one with the red label. Your mother packed those for your lunches, remember?" His voice was exactly as I remembered it—the slight rasp from years of incense, the rolling accent that softened his vowels. I told him I wasn't hungry, and he laughed in a scoff. His laugh was so normal, so him, that I woke up with my face wet.

The second dream, he talked about the weather. "The sea is flat today. That's good for fishing, if you set your traps by the eastern rocks. Abdi caught a grouper there once, do you remember it? He wouldn't stop talking about it for weeks."

I told him I remembered. I didn't tell him that Abdi had been dead for four years now, that his arm was bone now, buried in a cemetery outside Addis under a stone that mom visits every Sunday. I didn't tell him I was the one who identified the body because mom couldn't bear to look, because dad wasn’t home to see it.

The third dream, I tried to open the door. My hand closed around the iron—cold enough to burn—and I pulled. The door didn't budge. I pulled harder. The hum on the other side sharpened into something like singing, and then the cracks around the doorframe blazed white-gold, blinding, and my father's voice came through one last time, gentle and curious, as asking about the news or the price of milk:

"Tell me about Meron?”

I startled awake with the light still burning behind my eyes. My hands shook. My teeth chattered. I sat up on the cot and pressed my palms against my face until the glow faded, and when I looked at the window, I could see the lighthouse beam sweeping its slow, steady arc across the black waters. The lamp was still lit.

I couldn't go back to sleep. Not after that. So I pulled the sea chest out from under the cot and opened the Bible.

My father had bookmarked dozens of pages—scraps of faded ribbon, dried palm fronds, even a folded photograph of our family, before I left for the States, before everything. I turned to one of the passages he'd circled in red ink. The Ge'ez was dense, but his translation was written in the margin in his cramped English script:

And Azazel teached men to make swords, and shields, and chestplate, and made them know the metals of earth and the art of working metals... and there was great evil upon the earth, and the world is corrupt.

Beneath it, in red ink that had faded to the color of dried blood:

Azazel is not of the light. Azazel is bound in the dark. The one of the light is older. He was never named in this book. Pray you never hear him speak. If he speaks, he has noticed.

I closed the Bible. The hum from the tower was still there, threading up through the floorboards, through my spine. I could feel my tongue restless in my dry mouth. And I realized, sitting there in the dark with my father's book in my lap, that I no longer felt alone.

Not in the room. Not in the tower. Not in my head.

I thought about Meron. Her small hands, the way she pronounces "spaghetti" like "p'sketti," the gap between her front teeth that sprays me with spit when she laughs. She's with her mother, safe, far away from this black sea and breathing tower.

I thought about my Sarai. No, not mine anymore. We don't speak much now—just logistics, pick-up times, summer schedules. She told me once, before the divorce, that I had a "talent for disappearing into my head or my ass.” She said she couldn’t tell the difference sometimes. I didn't argue. I spent the first half of my life surrounded by the ethereal and the supernatural. I sang of men who walked on water and women who healed themselves with the hem of a cloak. Then I left that behind, spending the next half searching for my purpose in a newborn country that still longed for meaning. I spent the second half of my life running from the family I came from. Now here I sit in the middle of it, and my family is humming at me from the walls.

I tried to turn to the Lord's Prayer. The words were there in Ge'ez, but they felt hollow. Not because I don't believe—I don't know enough to stop believing—but because the prayer assumes you're speaking to someone who is listening. And I was suddenly very afraid that I had the ear of something I didn’t want to listen.

I wrote this all down instead. I don't know if it helps, but the act of writing, putting words on a page, reminds me that I'm still Dawit. Still a person. Still a father, or a son, not just a keeper.

The hum is still there. It hasn't stopped. And I think, now, that it isn't just a sound. It feels like a voice, learning my name, practicing the shape of it.

Sleep is coming for me again. I can feel it at the edges of my eyes, heavy and warm, and I don't know if it's natural exhaustion or something else—something that wants me back on those stairs, in front of that door. If I dream again tonight, I won’t open the door.

The light holds. I remain. For now.