Forty-One Years, Turning

She should have left. She knew that, with the clear, useless clarity of hindsight, for the rest of her life. But the light swept past her position on the headland, illuminated the grass in that sickly pale green, and moved on toward town — and something in Elena, the same instinct that had made her a documentarian of forgotten places instead of anything sensible, made her follow it instead of running from it.

The lighthouse door, rusted shut according to every historical record she'd read, opened at her touch.

Inside, the spiral stair climbed up into darkness that the green light didn't reach, as though the light and the structure it moved through were two entirely separate things sharing the same walls out of habit rather than necessity. She climbed anyway, camera clutched against her chest like a talisman, counting steps the way you count anything when counting is the only thing keeping panic at a manageable distance.

At the top, the lamp room was empty.

No lens. No mechanism. No source at all for the light that continued, even now, to sweep steadily past her through a window with no visible bulb behind it — just the pale green sweep itself, turning at the exact rhythm the historical records said the original light had turned at, forty-one years after the original light had been removed and sold for parts.

On the floor, scratched into decades of dust, was a single word repeated in a widening spiral, over and over, in a hand that grew more frantic the closer it spiraled toward the center: WATCHING. WATCHING. WATCHING.

Elena raised her camera, hands shaking, and took one photograph before the light — impossibly, because light does not have attention to give — seemed to pause in its sweep.

And turned to face her instead of the sea.