Chapter Text
Along the westmost coastline of the United States, where the forest melts to shoreline that melts to sea, countless lighthouses can be found. Most of these had been long since automated by the time the internet was born, but a few remained untouched by the winds of change. Glanced over by the government for lack of funds, their keepers were left tending to their lights in the absolute isolation of a life bound to devoted to centuries old tradition.
John Egbert was one of those keepers. He lived in and watched over a remote lighthouse on the coast of Washington state. His life there was ruled by a routine of work as unrelenting as the endless churning of the waves outside until, one night, one stormy night like hundreds of others that had come and gone before, his routine was broken.
The night of the change began, as many of John’s nights did, with work. His daytime tasks done, he’d retreated to the shed on the edge of his beach to work on a personal project: the reconstruction of a boat.
He was working on a mid-sized skiff. It boasted a captain’s seat with steering, a large motor, and space for two rows of bench seats. Everything was assembled save for the empty place where one of the benches was meant to fit. Much of the wood looked very worn, and some of the planks appeared to be different types of wood than the rest.
With a series of hefts, John lowered the skiff from its supports, flipped it over, and lifted it back up one side at a time. After a few adjustments, he had it balanced upside-down on the supports, its bottom sitting just above his waist.
He paused for a moment then, looking up to the window to ensure that the lighthouse was still piercing bright through the gloomy evening drizzle. It was. John straightened up and went to grab a sheet of sandpaper from his workbench, then circled the skiff again. Once he found a place to stand where he could keep a good view of the light, he leaned over and began to work.
About an hour later, he had the whole outside of the skiff sanded and ready for paint primer. He checked the time as he finished, seeing that it was almost time to do his first round of nightly checks and readings. With a sigh, he set down the sandpaper, turned off the shed light, and pulled on his raincoat in anticipation of the journey back to the house.
When he opened the door, John’s world exploded into a cacophony of noise. The rhythmic patter-pat of raindrops on the roof became the wild roar of churning waves and downpour, the whistle of the wind became a shiver-inducing scream. He grimaced as icy drops began to spatter his face, pulling up his hood and beginning his jog back to the house. He glanced behind him as he ran, wanting to ensure that the shed door had pulled closed all the way behind him. It had, but that wasn’t the thing that caught his eye.
Between the crests of waves, he spotted a mass of something black and gray. It didn’t look like any debris or driftwood he’d ever seen before, and with a horrible crashing sensation, he realized what it was. There was a person drowning in the storm.
John froze for a moment, caught in the terror of the waves. His mind was filled with boats dashed on rocks, with helpless sailors disappearing into waves not unlike the ones in front of him. He had seen this before, he thought, and he was helpless.
He looked back to the lighthouse then, at the steady tower that he had lived and worked around for his entire life. He thought of how his dad had always talked about the house, about his duty. It was there to help those who would otherwise be lost to the waves, and as its keeper, as a part of the house, so was he.
John gritted his teeth and, quick as he could, pulled off his coat, shirt, shoes, and glasses. He waited then, breath heavy as the rain drilled into him. He needed a break in the waves and, before too long, he found one. The tossing chaos settled into the briefest moment of relative calm, and John launched himself into the ocean toward the body.
The water hit him hard, slamming in from all sides and burning his throat with salt water as it tried to choke him and knock him from his feet. He half swam, half flailed his way onward anyway, jaw clenched as the cold overwhelmed him. It was hard to even see his hair as it was slicked down in front of his eyes, let alone the body he was searching for.
Then, through the chaos, he spotted it. John flung himself forward, grabbing at the dark shape in front of him and twisting in search of any frantic glimpse of shore. He was half blind and losing strength fast, and he realized that he wouldn’t be able to find his way back alone. Instead, he turned his eyes upward as he struggled, waiting for the darkness to break.
The beam of the lighthouse cut through the storm, filling the world with light. John broke the rhythm of his desperate tread and kicked off toward the light with everything he had. The body made it even more difficult to move, though, and he felt like he was making little progress. There was a voice in the back of his head urging, screaming at him to drop the body and fend for himself. The person’s skin was cold, the voice said, and it hadn’t moved at all since he had taken hold of it. As noble as his intentions were, there was no point to throwing his life away for a corpse. John’s grip on the body began to slip.
The lighthouse flashed again over the ocean. In the instant of illumination, John realized that he had gotten closer to shore than he’d thought. He tightened his grip, pulling the body over his shoulders in a makeshift fireman’s carry and dragging himself through the water with his legs and free arm. He pushed on, and the relentless pounding of waves fell to chest, waist, knee level. Finally, chest heaving, John dropped the body and collapsed onto the beach in a fit of coughs. His lungs burned and his body ached, but the ground below him was solid.
Once the air began to rake through his lungs at something like a steady pace again, John pulled his face out of the pebbles and shifted through the torrent to the body. He was weak, and the drenching had made his pant legs heavy, but he made it close enough to look over the body. It was still where he had dropped it; not even the chest was moving.
John’s mind reeled as he tried to remember the first aid that his dad had taught him long ago. He leaned his ear in front of the body’s mouth, but he could hear no signs of breathing over the roar of the waves and rain. That close, though, it became clear how discolored the body’s skin was. It was ash gray, free of both the patchy bruising of a corpse and any kind of living color. The sight of it made him itch to be far away, curled up in the warm comfort of his home.
John stopped himself. Death gray or not, he was still dealing with a person. He had risked his life to save them, he reminded himself. It would be stupid to give up at that point without trying.
He put a hand to the person’s neck and felt for a pulse. There was none. He tried their wrist with the same result. He shifted to lean his head over their face, close enough that he could actually make out features despite his lack of glasses. They looked like a girl, John thought. They (she?) had long black hair and bright red makeup smudged all around her (he was pretty sure it was her) eyes. It was a weird color, and it stood out in stark contrast to the gray of her skin.
John took a deep breath and began singing “Stayin Alive”by the Bee Gees in his head like his dad had taught him. He pushed down on the person’s chest in time with the song, counting to thirty compressions before tipping back her head and breathing air into her lungs. There was no reaction. He tried the process again with the same result. Then again. Then again. The repetitions did nothing to help.
Finally, he reached his limit. He was shivering and drenched, and the person hadn’t moved at all since he first found her. He had failed. She was dead.
Thunder rumbled overhead as John fell back from his knees to the ground. He kicked himself mentally for not being fast enough, for not being able to save her. He thought of his father. He felt like a failure. The beam of the lighthouse lit up the world around John, raindrops drilling into his goose-pimpled skin with more force than he knew they could have.
He stood, pushing a lock of hair from his eyes, and scanned the beach for where he’d left his things. Once he did, he ran to grab them before returning to the body. The soak soles of his sneakers oozed and squelched between his toes.
With his glasses on, John could see just how young the dead woman was. She looked like she couldn’t have been older than twenty, which put her right in John’s own age range. A chill ran down his spine. The woman’s eyes were closed, but he felt like she was looking at him anyway.
Thunder roared again over the sound of the waves, the sky exploding with cloud to cloud lightning. John knew he needed to get inside, but he didn’t want to leave the dead woman out on the beach in the storm. He didn’t like it, but he knew he had to bring her in with him.
He looked back at the shed at the other end of the beach. It would be so easy, he thought, to stash the body there, but something about that seemed cold. Had he really risked his life trying to save someone just to dump her in his shed? He didn’t think so. The room at the base of the lighthouse stayed cool enough at night, so he decided he would keep her there. He’d have to find something to put under her, though. He couldn’t leave a soaking wet dead body on the floor of his home.
With that decided, John took off jogging for the shed. He kept a large blue tarp on a shelf inside the door, and he grabbed it before turning around to rush back through the downpour to the lighthouse.
The moment John walked through the lighthouse door felt like walking into a warm embrace. The room at the base of the stairs was anything but cozy, but the sudden lack of pounding rain drew an involuntary sigh of relief from his lungs before he had even processed the feeling. He shook his head quickly, flinging droplets of water around the room, then knelt down and spread the tarp across the floor. Then, after a moment to steel himself, he stood up and returned to the storm.
Back outside, the shock of the freezing rush against John’s skin filled him with a jolt of adrenaline. He bolted back to the dead woman, pebbles crunching under his feet as he ran. He was a little uncomfortable with the fact that he’d have to carry what he now knew was a dead body, but there was no good way around it. And anyway, he rationalized, he’d had his mouth on its mouth not five minutes ago, so this was nothing in comparison. He tried not to think too hard about that.
Once he reached the dead woman, he squatted down and slid his arms beneath her back, pulling her against his chest as he stood back up. Her weight was cold and heavy in his arms, and though he’d never carried a person bridal style before (he tried not to think about the implications of that name), he was pretty sure that this was not how it was supposed to feel. He thought he remembered reading somewhere that dead people were heavier than living ones, and it sure as hell did feel like it.
The dead woman’s hair was long and thick and tangled, and the feel of it on his arm reminded John of the uncomfortable caress of seaweed on his ankles. He hurried back as fast as he could, almost slipping and falling on his face as he crossed back inside. The floor of the room was soaked in rainwater from the open door. Careful as he could be, John knelt and laid the dead woman down across the tarp. She was still smiling in that vague, absent way.
Satisfied for the moment, John decided it would no longer be rude to leave her and go dry himself off. He crossed into the house proper, being sure to shut both the door to outside and the door between the house and lighthouse as tightly as he could, then found his way to the bathroom and grabbed a towel. His hair stuck up at odd angles as he dried it, and as he caught sight of his reflection in the mirror, he had the brief thought that it resembled the way he used to gel it up when he was younger. It didn’t stay, though. He’d let it grow too long and messy to defy gravity the way it used to. After a minute or two of effort, he gave up on getting his hair into any kind of shape besides “moppy bird’s nest.”
He turned to leave the bathroom when he was done, but caught himself just before he could. He was still wearing his sopping wet pants, and he knew his parents would’ve hated him to drip dirty water all over the white bedroom carpet. John leaned out into the hall to check that the door to the room with the dead girl was still closed. It was, so he stepped back to the middle of the bathroom and stripped off his soggy pants and underwear, hanging them from the shower to dry with the rest of his clothes. Something about being naked felt wrong, though, as if there were another person in the house that could walk in on him at any time. He felt a nonexistent gaze creep up the back of his neck, the sensation as real as if a bug had been crawling across him. He swatted for one, just to be sure, but there was nothing. He hurried to the bedroom, trying his best to ignore the lingering goosebumps.
Once he was behind the bedroom door, he was overwhelmed with a sense of relief. The room (his room, he reminded himself) was still decorated with all the same things that his mom had chosen almost twenty years previous, and her choice of colors and lights created an effect as though the room were always lit by mid-morning sunlight filtering through a white curtain. It was the room he would come to to hide from storms as a child-the one place where he felt safe from even the very worst thunder and lightning.
This time, though, things didn’t go as they should have. After the initial moment of relief, the prickling discomfort returned to him. John wasted no time getting dressed. Then, once he no longer felt so exposed, he went to the old landline sitting on the nightstand. The cell service out by the lighthouse was sketchy at best, so John’s dad had preferred to rely on wires. He punched in the number for his county sheriff’s office and brought the receiver to his ear. There was nothing on the other end, though. The phone line must have been down.
With a sigh, John put the phone down and collapsed backward onto the bed. He hated how he felt knowing that the dead woman was there. He needed to get her out of his head. He needed to put her to rest so he could stop feeling her freaky ghost eyes and get on with the night in relative peace. He sat for a minute, fussing with his bedsheets as he tried to think of something to do for her. His only knowledge of what to do with dead bodies came from movies, and he didn’t think a Weekend at Bernie's setup was going to help his situation. Eventually, he decided he’d just have to cover her and hope for the best.
Once he’d gathered his energy, John pushed himself out of bed and down the hall to the linen closet. He dug out a clean whit sheet from the back, then turned around to look face to face (well, face to wood) with the door to the base of the lighthouse. The polished brass handle glinted at him, a reminder of the work he needed to be doing. He still had to take his weather and pressure readings and check on the light. He couldn’t let his discomfort delay him any longer.
He opened the door with a creak, making a mental note to oil the hinges the next day as he did so. The woman’s body was still there on the other side, prone and waterlogged just as he had left her. She was staring at him from under her closed eyes (John was pretty sure they had been open when he pulled her from the water, but he wasn’t about to complain), and that same smile was still plastered on her face. John knelt and stretched the sheet over her, careful not to touch her skin. With it in place, she looked like something out of a morgue scene in a horror movie. He got up and left without looking back.
He sped through the rest of his nightly work, eager to distract himself until he could go to bed. Each time he passed near or through the base of the stairs, he could feel the dead woman’s vague smile and yellowing eyes lurking under the sheet.
Finally, as he finished his final reading, the sun’s rays began to spill over the horizon. Relieved, John set down his logbook and stretched. He wasn’t looking forward to climbing the tower stairs and passing the dead woman, but it would all be worth it when he fell into bed.
He speed walked past the body on his way to the light, managing to avoid eye contact until he was too far up the stairs to see her anymore. He kept climbing, and even the prickles on his neck subsided by the time he reached the landing at the top of the stairs.
He climbed the ladder into the light room and put out the lamplight, taking a moment to appreciate the sight of the sunrise over the forest. The sky was dotted with wispy clouds, each one lined in sherbet orange. Behind them, the sky itself was the palest lilac-tinted gray, fading into that same orange, fading into vibrant red. That red was uncommon, deep to the point of being almost unnatural, but John couldn’t deny that it was beautiful.
After a minute, though, his exhaustion overwhelmed his sense of awe, and he turned to climb back down the ladder and descend the spiraling stairs. Below the light room and its openness, the tower air had grown thick with humidity in the aftermath of the storm. It was an uncomfortable feeling, and he hurried down in search of something easier to breathe. When he passed the dead woman on the way out, he could swear he saw one of her arms shift beneath the sheet. He tried not to think too much about it. It had to be a trick of the light.
Right?
Once the door to the lighthouse was closed, John breathed a sigh of relief. Without any further delay, he walked to the bedroom, stripped down to his underwear, and collapsed into bed. The air felt much lighter down in the house proper, and it didn’t take long for John to drift off to sleep.
~
John opened his eyes to find himself standing on the beach outside the lighthouse. The water in front of him was gray and stiller than he had ever seen it, the sky above him a featureless void of reddish black. Everything was somehow well lit despite the lack of light source, and John could clearly make out a figure floating above the water. He began to walk closer, drawn to the figure, and he recognized her as he neared. It was the dead woman.
She was hovering an inch or so above the water, her body still as anything. The closer John got to the water, the stranger she began to look. Her skin was as gray as it was when he pulled her from the ocean, and a pair of massive red ram’s horns spiraled out from her skull. Her eyes were closed, but she was smiling.
John reached the waterline and found himself pulled still closer to the figure of the dead woman. He waded into the water, and to his surprise, it wasn’t cold at all. In fact, he could barely feel it even as it reached his torso. Finally, as he reached chest depth, he found himself as close to her as he could get. She opened her eyes, and somehow John was unsurprised to see that her sclera were bright yellow, while her irises were jet black. She grinned, and her teeth were razor sharp. He stood there for what might have been eternity, the water lapping at John’s chest as he stared at the floating dead woman. Then, without warning, she dropped.
There was a massive splash that forced him to close his eyes, and when he opened them again, the dead woman was standing in the water with him and looking very much alive. Her skin had gone tan, her eyes had gone white and brown, and the massive horns and fangs were gone. The only strange detail that remained was the bright redness of her eyelashes.
The no longer dead woman stood grinning for the briefest moment, then made a sudden grab for John’s hand. She pulled it to her face as if she were going to kiss it and paused to look up and wink. It was quite possibly the weirdest eye contact John had ever made, but it seemed to make sense at the time. After just long enough to build a bizarre sense of anticipation, she pressed her lips to the back of John’s hand, and the world disappeared.
~
John woke up with a start, his still sore muscles groaning in protest as he shot bolt upright. It took him a moment of looking around the room to realize where he was and process what had and had not been a dream. His head still foggy, he looked to the clock on the nightstand. It was a little after nine: still a while before when he had to be up.
Relieved, John collapsed back down into his sheets. He wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep, but something was stopping him, pulling him toward wakefulness. He lay there, trying to figure out what it was that felt off. Then, all of a sudden, it clicked. He could small bacon.
In most situations, bacon was one of John’s favorite smells. However, for a man supposedly alone with a corpse countless miles from civilization, there were few smells that could have been more alarming. He was almost afraid to go and check what was going on.
After a minute, though, the concern overwhelmed his deep desire to not deal with whatever was going on, and he pulled himself up to sit on the edge of his mattress. He lingered a moment more, rubbing the back of his neck and licking his dry lips. They tasted like saltwater, and John remembered that he’d never showered after diving into the ocean the night before. He’d need to change his sheet; he was sure he was covered in all sorts of gross dried residue.
Once he’d gathered himself and put on some pants (people that investigated things in their underwear always died in horror movies), he stood up and made his way out of the bedroom and down the hall. As he neared the kitchen, he began to hear the sounds of sizzling in addition to the smell. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, he reached the kitchen door and looked inside. There, standing in front of his stove, was the dead woman. She was frying bacon and eggs, and she looked more alive than anyone John had seen in a long time. In fact, she looked just like she had in his dream.
“Um.” John said, “what the fuck?”
“Oh!” The no longer dead woman turned around, startled. She looked at John for a second, eyes wide, then broke into a massive grin. “Good morning! Do you want some breakfast?”