Hothouse

It was a strange thing, to take a night job when you were afraid of the dark. It was a strange thing to be afraid of the dark at all, when you were almost twenty, but there you have it. But times were hard, and the lighthouse wasn’t going to tend to itself, and the ocean had started to get rougher and rougher as the season went on. Soon, things would start going missing, swept off the shore out of sight of unwatchful eyes. People too, sometimes. The ocean was an unforgiving creature. 

“There’s going to be a storm tonight.”

“Hm?” Logan didn’t look up, busy lacing up his boots, and his mother sighed from her chair in the corner of the room, setting down the socks she’d been mending.

“There’s going to be a storm,” she said again. “It’s your first night, Logan. I don’t want you to get caught in anything.”

“I’ll be careful, Momma.” he promised.

He stood, smoothing out his jacket where it had bunched around his shoulders. It was still too big on his narrow frame, no matter how many hours he spent at the shipyard, hauling crates and pulling himself over the sides of the fishing boats. He would grow, his father kept saying. He would grow, and then he could be on the boats, not just helping unload them. 

Being so small was half the reason Elias Kerse from down the street had asked Logan to take this job in the first place. The lighthouse tower was too small for some of the bigger men, he’d said, and with what had happened to the last keeper, they needed someone younger and more careful. Someone like him. He hadn’t mentioned how much the lighthouse terrified him. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Money was money, his father would say. 

“Be sure you’re back at sunrise,” his mother told him as he headed towards the door, looking at him with the pinched brow she hadn’t lost since he’d first taken this job a few days before.

“Yes, Momma.” He nodded and bent down to give her a small kiss on the cheek. The worried look didn’t disappear.  

“I’ll be careful.” he promised again.

The wind was already cold and biting as he opened the door, the last rays of light leaving the far horizon. It would be pitch black soon, and the rocks of the street were already slippery underfoot. He tapped his flashlight against his leg until it flickered to life, then pulled his jacket tighter around himself. The shoreline wasn’t far off, and he willed himself to walk faster, looking over his shoulder every few minutes. He missed the fishing boats and the sun that would beat down on their chipped white hulls. The laughter of the fisherman, and the easy conversation that came with it. The shore with its docked boats looked different at night, skeletal and strange. 

He reached into his pocket for the key Elias had given him as he neared the tall and creaky building, taking a deep breath. There was a small, unlabeled side door, just as he’d been told there would be. The key made a horrible grating noise as it slid into the lock, and Logan grit his teeth. Somewhere far off, one of the fishing boats blew its horn as it drifted towards shore. He couldn’t make it out in the darkness.

With a rough push, the rusty door swung open, revealing a long flight of twisting stairs, ascending into a pitch-black cavernous ceiling. The very bottom stairs stood out from the others, gleaming white with fresh paint. He shuddered as he moved past them, starting the climb. The flashlight cast long shadows on the wall, and he tried to quiet his breathing, as if afraid something might hear him. The wind only got louder as he climbed, buffeting the glass windows that slowly came into view as he reached the top. 

The darkened lighthouse bulb stood in the center of the room, a tall and imposing shadow against a flash of lightning outside. He took a deep breath and began looking for the switch to turn it on, shining his light across the row of metal plates on the wall. Only one of them was labeled, and the rest looked like they hadn’t been used since the place was built. 

He flipped the switch slowly, and the bulb hummed to life behind him, slowly illuminating the room until it was almost blinding. There was a scraping noise of metal on metal as it started to spin, and then silence. He squinted against the harsh light, watching it rotate. Slowly, the glow revealed the rocky shore, waves churning and smashing against the beach below. The rain had started, quietly tapping against the glass.

Logan shivered as he moved toward the one chair that sat in front of the windows, the light spinning and spinning above his head. If he looked far enough when the glow of the bulb caught the ocean just right, he could see waves cresting thirty or forty feet high, careening into the sea below with a massive splash. The lights in the small houses of town were starting to go out, and he tried to relax as he resigned himself to a long and freezing night alone in the lighthouse tower.

It wouldn’t be hard, Elias had told him. Just make sure the bulb doesn’t need to be changed, and make sure it keeps spinning. As long as he watched for both of those things, everything would be fine. A job so simple anyone could do it, even the last keeper, who was almost eighty years old. 

Logan didn’t know the last keeper’s real name because no one had ever told him. What he did know is that he’d quit the lighthouse two weeks ago, after some sort of accident that everyone was whispering about. Fallen down the stairs, they’d said. Cracked his head open and fell unconscious until the fishermen found him the next day. Somehow he’d managed to survive until they took him to the hospital. He only had a miniscule cut on his head. Nothing that would’ve justified all of the blood, but there it was. He didn’t remember falling, he said. Only waking up and feeling just fine. Nobody could figure out what had happened, only that it must have been some sort of freak occurrence, a combination of old age and tricks of the memory. 

Logan tried not to think too hard about it as he sat, eyes fixed on the horizon. It was somehow even colder in the building than it was outside, and his breath billowed out as vapor in front of him as his teeth chattered. The rain was picking up, slapping against the glass in earnest, and the sound was almost hypnotic as he tried to sit still and stay awake. He’d brought a book with him in his jacket pocket, something his father had insisted on him reading, but it felt wrong somehow to take his eyes off of the sea, rising and falling in tempo with the howling storm. 

He checked his watch and realized it had only been half an hour since he got there. He yearned for the sunrise, the light dappling the sides of the buildings and shining off the clear blue water, gently rocking the rowboats tied up at the docks. The rain continued to drum, and he sat back, breathing a deep sigh. The bulb was still spinning, and the ocean was spitting foam against the base of the building, murky and black. He pulled his knees against his chest to fend off the cold and waited.

He didn’t remember falling asleep, but when he awoke, it was to a crack of thunder so loud it seemed to shake the walls from the outside. He jumped, eyes flying open and feet slamming to the floor. His breathing was ragged as he stilled, listening earnestly to hear anything besides the thunder and the rain and the pounding of his heart against his ribs. He squinted out of the window, and found the sea had become even wilder as he slept, threatening to tip some of the tied boats as they were wrenched back and forth in the waves. 

He checked his watch quickly and sighed as he realized he’d been asleep for almost two hours. Above his head, the light was still moving lazily in circles, making everything it touched a dingy yellow and casting strange shadows on the wall. Sleep had done nothing to relieve him of the creeping unease running down the back of his spine, and he idly flicked the flashlight in his pocket on and off as he tried to steady his heartbeat. The light swept along the shore once more, and his breath caught in his throat.

Far below, silhouetted only by the occasional flash of thunder and the glowing arc of the bulb, was a person standing on the shore. They didn’t seem to be affected by the wind whipping past them, still and unmoving. Logan’s eyes widened, watching as they stood, staring at the base of the lighthouse. They were too far away to make out their face, but whoever they were, they were small and wiry, wearing clothes so dark they only barely stood out against the rocks beneath them. 

“Come on,” Logan whispered, gripping the flashlight in his pocket tighter. “Do something, come on.”

The light sliced over them once more, and they still didn’t move. Logan leaned closer, face almost pressed against the glass. The light slowly rotated once more, and he swore and stumbled back, breathing hard. Whoever they were, they were gone. Like they’d never been there. He strained and strained to see any sign of movement on the beach, but there was nothing. Just the waves and the rocks and the wind jostling the grass further up the beach near the road. Part of him wondered if he’d imagined someone standing down there. He hoped that he had. 

The next hour crawled past slower than before, and he tried not to let his mind run wild. Overactive imagination, his mother had always said. Always finding something to be scared of. He tried to scold himself out of his nerves, pacing back and forth and trying to tune out the dull pounding of the rain against the roof and the windows. It had just been a fisherman, he told himself. Someone who was late coming home from one of the boats. Stranger things had happened. 

He didn’t dare go near the stairs, seized by the fear that somehow, he’d fall down them as well, just like the old man before him. He didn’t want to think about the fresh white paint, or the old wives’ tales that people in town told about the sea and what it had done to people. Part of living and working near something so dangerous was losing people. It was in the job description. But what was worse is that they sometimes came back, different and wrong and worse than before. 

Everyone knew someone who had been changed by the ocean. For Logan it had been a girl in his class, Alice, who went for a walk on the beach and never came home. They found her school bag snagged on a rock fifty feet out from the shore. A week later, she stumbled into a hardware store, stinking of saltwater but otherwise completely fine. She didn’t remember what had happened. She didn’t remember much of anything. 

And there were others, too. Fishermen that were flung from their boats and crawled onto shore hours later, quiet and eerily calm. Women that disappeared from their cars and their work, then walked into their houses the next week as if they’d never been gone. Children that vanished in the grocery store, only to be found on the beach, happily playing in the sand. There was always blood, too. They were always drenched in it but never hurt. Always completely unharmed, if more silent than usual. No one ever remembered where they had been between disappearing and coming back. Eventually, people stopped asking.

Logan was still pacing as the next hour started, gritting his teeth against the cold and the feeling that there was something watching him. He looked furtively out the windows as he paced, eyes straining to catch any movement. All the houses were dark now, from what he could see through the sheets of water pounding against the rocks below. It was just him and the light at his back, slowly spinning in a way that hypnotized him if he looked for too long. It would be morning soon, he tried to tell himself. It couldn’t be night forever.

He had counted 150 times circling the room when he suddenly noticed that the sound had dissipated, the rain slowing down enough that he could see again. The ocean was still wild and raging, but the water against the windows had slowed, trickling along the glass in long jagged lines. He listened to the sound of the waves crashing against the shoreline and squinted toward the horizon. Thunder rolled, loud enough that he felt it in his chest. Then there was a fork of lightning, sharp white and purple against the sky, and he froze. The bulb turned, slow and silent, and from the shore, two people looked up. 

“It’s alright,” he said softly to himself, hands shaking where they held his jacket tight around his chest. “They’re just people, it’s fine.”

They were still too far away to make out faces, but the clothes they wore could never have been mistaken for the raincoats of the fishermen or the dock workers. Instead, the shorter of the two wore some sort of dark jacket that billowed out behind them, snapping like a sail in the wind, and the other wore a long dress that pooled around their ankles. They were both drenched in water, but didn’t seem to feel it. 

It was still almost pitch black, and Logan squinted to see as he watched them stand perfectly still, their faces tilted toward his window as if they were looking back at him. He sucked freezing cold air into his lungs as slowly as he could, trying to breathe normally. The light moved across the beach again, and he watched as the water began to churn, closer and closer to the shoreline. A wave slapped against one of the larger rocks, and suddenly there was another person, pulling themselves onto the top of it. Then a fourth, beside them. 

Logan stepped back, slow and careful, never taking his eyes off of the figures on the beach. One of the first ones, the one in the jacket, suddenly moved, waving a hand over their head as if they were beckoning him. He jumped, then shook his head, even though they probably couldn’t see it. The rain had picked up again, making everything outside the window blurry and strange. The person kept waving their hands above their head, trying to get his attention, and suddenly the rest joined in, one of them even jumping up and down in their urge to be seen. All of them were being drenched by the waves and the rain, and Logan grimaced, trying to steel his nerves and figure out what he was meant to do.

Shipwrecks had happened before, certainly. He hadn’t been at the docks today, maybe not all the boats had been accounted for. Maybe they were people who needed his help. Maybe they weren’t even from here.

“Don’t be a coward.” he muttered, gritting his teeth as he finally turned to eye the top of the stairs. “Come on.” 

He moved as quickly as he dared, minding his footing on the less stable steps. He couldn’t just leave whoever these people were, no matter how much his heart was racing at the thought of their silhouettes against the raging water, or the ghostly way they had looked up at him. The door at the bottom of the stairs was bathed in darkness, and he held the flashlight in his teeth as he shoved hard against it. 

The sound of the storm was deafening as it swung open, and he squinted against the water that immediately drenched his face, struggling to find his footing on the uneven rocks as he circled the lighthouse. It was so dark he could barely make out anything past the dim glow of the flashlight, which was shaking in his hand.

“Hello?” he called, voice echoing against the rocks and mixing with the sound of the driving rain. “Who’s out here?”

He took another step forward, then cursed as his foot slipped out from under him and he hit the ground flat on his back, water soaking what little of his clothes he’d managed to protect from the rain. The flashlight skittered a few feet away as he fell, and he scrambled to grab it before it could roll any further. Grabbing it, he stood, then screamed as he illuminated a figure standing only a few feet in front of him, face hidden in the darkness of their jackets hood.

“Who are you?” Logan called, fighting to be heard as best he could. “Are you alright? I can help you!”

The figure’s shoulders shook, almost as if they were laughing, and Logan noticed that the fabric of their jacket was bunched around them, loose and wrinkled like it was meant for someone much larger. Lightning flashed overhead, and the figure pulled off their hood, smiling as the rain lashed against their face. 

“We seem to have found ourselves a bit lost.” 

Logan stood still, opening and closing his mouth as he tried to find anything to say. It was him. Or at least someone who looked exactly like him, down to the jacket that hung off his slender shoulders. There was more thunder, and Logan’s heart hammered against his sternum as he stared into his own eyes. 

“Who are you?” he yelled again, holding the flashlight out like it might protect him. His twin smiled even wider, arms outspread like he was presenting himself on a stage.

“I’m you.” he replied. 

Logan froze as the lighthouse bulb illuminated the beach, and he saw even more silhouettes, starkly outlined against the black ocean and sky. There had to be eight of them now. More. They were getting closer, ambling across the shore and towards where the two of them were standing. He shook his head and blinked hard, as if trying to clear his mind of something he was imagining. His twin just stood there, bathed in the glow of the flashlight, grinning like this was some sort of performance. 

“Why are you here?” Logan stammered, inching one foot backwards as quickly as he could without drawing attention to it. Just a few steps, he told himself, then you can run. You’re fast. You can make it off the beach.

“The same reason as you.” His twin was still smiling. “This is our home.”

There was water lapping at both of their ankles now, the tide rolling in fast. The glow of the lighthouse showed the others were getting even closer, seemingly not even feeling the rocks beneath their feet. Logan yelped as something moved next to them, brushing against his leg, but didn’t move, flashlight still trained on the face of the person in front of him. His own face, his own teeth shining back at him. The twin spoke again. 

“You’re not afraid, are you?”

“What the hell do you want?” Logan took another small step back, hated how shaky his voice sounded in his own ears.

“To take your place.” His twin gestured behind himself, and Logan slowly turned the flashlight beam onto the figures that had now made it all the way up the beach and were standing still once more, quiet and blank. 

“We all do.”

He could feel his breath heaving in and out of his chest, cold stinging his lungs as he illuminated the rest of the faces. They were all people he knew. Boys from school, men from work, girls that he’d met at church. Elias was there too, and his parents, all looking on as he stood and shook in the rain and the wind, trying to gain a few more inches of ground. 

“I don’t understand.” Logan shook his head. His twin’s grin got even wider, skin stretched and skeletal in the flash of lightning that slashed through the sky above them. Then there was a sharp cracking sound, and an explosion of pain in Logan’s nose. He dropped to his knees, fighting to keep a grip on the flashlight as blood poured over his face and down his shirt. 

There was even more water now, pooling around his thighs as he tried to pick himself back up. The light from the lighthouse swung in a long arc across the water, and Logan stopped moving. Laying in the water at the feet of Elias was a body, gnawed to pieces by saltwater and birds and time. He was wearing fisherman’s clothes, and Logan felt bile rise in his throat as he realized who it was. The lighthouse keeper from before, very much dead. He looked back at himself, eyes wide, and his twin shrugged.

“There can only be one of him.”

He was laughing, loud and shrill, as he hauled Logan to his feet, gripping the collar of his jacket. Logan grunted, feet scrabbling against the rocks beneath them, struggling to pull out of the vice grip he was trapped in. His own hands, holding him in place as he thrashed. None of the others had moved. Not even his parents. It was still deafeningly loud, far too loud for anyone in town to hear him. He was alone.

He thought of the girl from his class, Alice, and the way she hadn’t known who he was when she came back to school. How people had whispered about those who had come back from the sea and been someone completely different. He thought of his mother, waiting for him to come home. Then he turned his head and bit down on one of the hands holding his jacket until he felt bones crunching.

His twin screamed, lurching back and pulling his hand to his chest, and Logan didn’t hesitate, turning on his heel and bolting back up the beach, past the lighthouse and towards the road. It was too dark to see his own feet, and he stumbled as he ran, but suddenly the ground sloped upward, rocks turning to grass, and he willed himself to go faster. The road was close now. It wouldn’t be long until he was back in town. 

He swore as something slammed into him from behind, sending him sprawling. The flashlight flew out of his hand and into the darkness, and he was pinned to the ground, familiar breathing ragged in his ear.

“You can’t outrun me. I’m you, remember?” the voice growled, and Logan felt hot blood dripping onto his neck where he was being pinned to the ground. He sucked in a breath as the hand tightened. 

“Please.” He groaned, hands scrabbling against the grass underneath him. There was sand and dirt under his nails, soaked from the rain. 

The water was clouding his vision, making it impossible to make out the town. The hand pressed him down harder into the sodden earth, and he was gasping as he tried to get his arms underneath him and get up. His fingers sunk deeper into the dirt, and he felt his hand close on something hard and angular.

The hand on his neck let go and rolled him over, and he was shocked to see his twin was still smiling, teeth bared like he was going to devour Logan whole. 

“There can’t be two of us.” he said again.

He was laughing again as he reached out to grab Logan’s throat, and Logan closed his eyes and summoned all the strength that he could, swinging his arm in a sharp arc until he felt the satisfying thud of the rock in it connecting with bone. He watched, frozen, as blood started to trickle down his fingers, soaking the sleeve of his jacket. Then the body above him went limp, and he went still for a moment, waiting to make sure. His twin was deathly silent, but he could feel him shallowly breathing. He couldn’t hear if any of the others had followed. He wasn’t waiting to find out.

He grunted as he freed himself, limbs weak and shaky. There was a pool of blood forming under his feet, and he shuddered. The thunder was still rolling, and in the near distance, the lighthouse bulb was still spinning, slow and placid against the rage of the storm. Lightning flickered, and the houses across the road cast long, strange shadows. He took a deep breath, hands balled into his fists in his pockets once more, and started towards them. 

Only when he was across the road did he dare to look back. The light was dimmed by the storm, but there was no one on the beach. He couldn’t even see where the body, his body, was sprawled across the dirt anymore. It was like none of them had ever even been there. Like he had imagined the whole thing. But his nose was still throbbing, and he still had the jagged rock from the beach clutched in his hand, soaked in blood that was his and blood that wasn’t.

The rain eased up as he made his way back towards his home, but he still shivered, jacket pulled tight around his chest. It was quieter in the safety of the streets that he knew. He would be home soon, he told himself. It couldn’t stay night forever. Somewhere in the distance, waves crashed against the shore.