There is a cove that leads to a vast, dark ocean. It is perpetually covered in fog that ebbs and flows over itself like a slow-beating heart. Sometimes it lightens up enough to see through the haze and make out the shape of the rocky outcroppings, cliffs, and beach. On a good day, when the tide is low, a man-made stone pathway can be easily spotted leading from the shore to a strange lighthouse. When the tide is higher, it’s more difficult to see the path but it can still be followed if you don’t mind your feet getting wet.
Unlike most lighthouses you may have seen in photos, this one has roots in the water itself. I mean that literally. With that low tide, you can also see enormous roots branching off of the lighthouse itself, like those tropical trees that grow in the water. It’s as if the structure is partly organic, along with the steel and stone that were used to create it. The light atop the tower also doesn’t function as you would expect. It isn’t strong and doesn’t cut through the fog. It doesn’t seem to matter, though, as I have yet to see or hear any kind of vessel in the area. There are a few other things about it that don’t make sense but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.
On the shore, directly across from the beacon, there is a decently sized home. I assume it functioned as a keeper’s house at one point, built for whoever was in charge of the lighthouse and their family. For now, I’m occupying it. It’s not huge but seems large enough for a married couple and a kid or two. There’s nothing fancy or special about it except for one single thing that I can’t figure out. It’s surrounded by a weathered iron cage. The lower section, perpendicular to the ground, where you would expect a normal iron fence to be on some houses, the bars are thick, leaving only a couple of inches between them. And they’re tall, a bit taller than the house itself. The bars surround the entire house, leaving only maybe five feet from any exterior wall. But then the bars curve and meet a latticework of thinner bars that crisscross over the roof itself. The entire house is in an iron cage.
At first, I couldn’t understand why anyone would cage a house but I think, after the past month, I can assume it’s to protect whoever is inside. I remember the old superstitions about iron warding off ghosts and creatures but I never considered it to be a real thing. After what I’ve witnessed so far, though, I believe it is. I believe I am protected here, which is why I haven’t left yet, why I haven’t tried to find a way home, wherever that is.
Beyond the cove, the lighthouse, and the house itself, I don’t know where I am. Worse yet, I don’t know how I got here. I’m struggling to remember almost anything leading up to when I woke up in the lighthouse twenty-seven days ago. Many things I just know, like my name - Aurora, how to write, speak, walk, simple math, reasoning, and so on. It’s the details leading up to my arrival that are fuzzy. I can vaguely recall memories from when I was younger: my mother, some school days, and graduating high school. But they are all hazy like the atmosphere in the cove. They feel so far away, detached from me, even though I know they are mine. There’s a gap, though. There’s a stretch of recent time that I can’t remember anything. I don’t know exactly how far this stretches, it’s difficult to pinpoint a memory and be able to tell it’s the most recent, but that doesn’t even really matter right now. What matters is that I simply don’t know how I got here or why I’m here or where here is or anything of the sort.
All I know for certain at this moment is that this can’t be the world I came from. I don’t know if I’m dead and it’s hell or if I’m on some alien planet or what but I need to get out of here. There is a small journal in the lighthouse. I know it’s mine, I woke up with it in my coat pocket, but I left it there when I escaped to the house. I hope it holds some clues as to what is going on. I just have to work up the courage to try and retrieve it. That’s the most difficult thing right now. I am terrified and I’m not sure I could survive going outside again.
Let me go back so you might understand.
Twenty-seven days ago, I woke up on my stomach, on a cold metal floor. I was disoriented and everything in my body screamed with pain. It was a deep, bone-crushing, limbs-on-fire, pain. My head was pounding so hard that it hurt to even open my eyes. Eventually, after lying there for what felt like an hour or more, I was able to push through the pain and use my arms to lift my torso up and look around. It took a long time to be able to move my head much or move enough to put myself in a seated position. My vision was blurry and I could barely make anything out around me except for unfamiliar shapes. I managed to reach out and feel a wall that I then inched my way to. I put my back against it and closed my eyes, trying to focus on my breathing in order to get through the horrible feeling in my entire body.
After a few minutes, with my eyes still closed, I used my other senses to try and get an idea of my surroundings. I gingerly moved my hands over the floor, feeling that it turned from a metal grate to concrete a few inches from the wall. It felt sturdy where I was, which was a relief. Next, I took in a deep breath and smelled and tasted salty air. I listened hard, trying to cut through the sound of my wildly beating heart and blood rushing through my ears. It took longer than I’d like to admit for me to realize that what I was hearing wasn’t my internal functions, after all. It was waves crashing somewhere near me.
Ocean. I had to be at an ocean.
I hovered one hand over my eyes as I opened them, trying to let them take their time to focus. After a moment, I blinked and moved my hand away. Everything around me was still altered, with soft and staticky edges, but I could actually make out distinct shapes now. Before me, in the center of the room, was a massive light. It wasn’t alight or moving but I immediately recognized it as the revolving light for a lighthouse. I was in a damn lighthouse and it felt like I had been dropped onto the floor there from a painful height. I continued to look around the sparse room, double-checking that the roof appeared to be completely intact. For the next few hours, I worked on benign able to stand and then walk, or rather shuffle, around. I racked my brain to try and remember how I had gotten there. That was when I began realizing all the things I couldn’t remember.
It was difficult to focus on my own mind’s lack of details, though. It only made my headache worse. Instead, I began inspecting my surroundings. Through the great glass walls of the room, I couldn’t see much. I could make out the general shape of the rocks nearest me but the fog was too thick to see very far.
Once I felt I could manage it, I located the stairs and began my descent. It was a tremendously slow process as I had to take it one stair at a time and my legs still felt as if they could buckle at any second and send me crashing down the entire way. The closer I got to the bottom, though, I began to hear a noise that is a bit difficult to describe. At first, it sounded only like someone wailing but it evolved to have a strange sort of melody to it. Just hearing it made my heart feel like breaking and I wasn’t sure why. This mix of a mournful lament and keening grew louder and I recognized it as being something I had never heard a human make before. It was unearthly, that’s the best way that I can describe it. It wasn’t that it was made of multiple voices. No, it was a single voice, but it wasn’t human. At least, I had never heard a human make that sound before. The way it infected my very being only added to the ethereal idea I was forming about its source. There were no windows along the walls, though, so I couldn’t try to determine what or who it was. I still wasn’t all the way to the bottom of the stairs but it froze me in place.
Just when I thought I wouldn’t be able to take it anymore and I would break down into my own tears, it tapered off. The voice began to drift in the air, becoming more distant and fading into nothing. And then it was completely gone. I took a few breaths to steady myself and continued making my way to the bottom.
At the bottom of the lighthouse, there was a simple room. It wasn’t much bigger than a walk-in closet and didn’t contain anything but a small cot with a damp blanket. The walls here were stone, as if the room had been there longer than the rest of the lighthouse. There was a metal door set into one wall, opposite the stairs. At the base of the door was a large piece of rectangular metal. I looked closely at the door and determined the thick piece of metal had once been used to bar the door. At some point, one of the hooks that must have held it in place against the door had been broken and now it wouldn’t be of any help.
My trip from the top to the bottom of the structure had left me exhausted and I laid down on the cot. Before long, I had fallen asleep. I spent the next two days there, building my strength back up and working my stiff and sore body before I made my way outside. I spent my time wandering up and down the stairs, partly for exercise and partly to try and get a sense of where I might be. I looked for anything that might give me a clue as to why I was here or who might have been here before but there was simply nothing. I went through my own pockets and discovered the journal I mentioned before, along with a lighter, a ring that fit my own finger, and a key on a small leather cord. The cord was just long enough to slip over my hand and let the key dangle around my wrist, so I let it stay there. I tried every finger and found that the ring fits best on my left ring finger. I couldn’t remember if someone had given it to me or not. I couldn’t remember if it meant I was married or engaged or something else. It was a simple silver band with small black gemstones inlaid around it. I left the lighter in my pocket and opened the journal. I somehow knew it was my own handwriting and that the journal was mine. Hoping to glean some information from it, I began flipping through the pages, scanning them quickly to try and look for anything that popped out to help me understand what had happened.
Before I made it very far into the journal, the lament began again. It didn’t fade into existence or start slowly; it was sudden and abrupt. I flinched at the sound of it and dropped the journal onto the floor. Without thinking better of it, I looked all around me before I remembered that there were no windows. The only options I had were to go all the way up the stairs and hope I could see through the fog well enough to find whoever was out there or go outside through the metal door. The latter idea made my heart start to race and I felt anxiety bubble up inside of me but I wasn’t sure why.
It didn’t take long for me to decide to go through the door, though. As nervous as I was to venture outside, I knew it was going to have to happen eventually. Suddenly, I couldn’t quite remember why I had put it off for so long. I was still in a bit of pain, yes, but I hadn’t even considered going outside. Until that moment, I simply hadn’t wanted to.
The handle of the door was cold in my hand and I braced myself. The door opened with a soft scraping against the floor. It wasn’t as heavy as I expected it to be, though. There was no rush of air against my face or shocking sight. It was all just misty and dull. Before me was a small concrete platform leading to the stone pathway that connected the lighthouse to land. I stepped out and stood there, looking around. I could see trees in the distance, cliffs towering around the cove, and water lapping gently over the pathway itself. I followed the heartbreaking and melancholy crying with my eyes and ears and saw a woman on the shore. She was crouched down in the water near some rocks with her hands moving around in the water. There was a veil over her face but I could tell that she was thin, frighteningly thin, and her clothes looked worn and tattered.
Without thinking much of it, I began walking the path to land, taking care not to slip on the wet stone. The whole time, she didn’t look up from what she was doing and didn’t seem to notice my presence. The moment my foot came in contact with the rocky shore, her head jerked up and cocked to the side. It was an unnatural jerking motion as if the bones in her neck should have cracked or dislodged themselves. She didn’t look at me yet and her lament never wavered. This unnerved me but I continued on, making my way toward her.
“Are you okay?” I called out, my voice cracking. It was then that I realized not only was I crying but I also hadn’t used my voice in at least a couple of days. It felt strange to have words emit from my throat and mouth but I couldn’t focus on that at the moment. She still didn’t look at me. Instead, she tilted her head back down in another swift and unnatural motion and continued moving her hands in the water.
I approached her as calmly as I could, trying to talk to her a few more times to no avail. When I was close enough, I realized that she was rubbing her hands along the rocks under the water. Fabric billowed around her fingers in strips. I reached out to touch her shoulder but before I made contact, she froze. Her wailing song stopped and her body twitched. In an instant, she was standing, facing me, her back completely straight, and her veil being pushed gently by the breeze. She was so close that her veil, old and rotting against her face, would almost touch my nose. If the wind picked up at all, it would brush against my own skin.
I gave a small squeak and made to step back but I was frozen in place. Standing there, face to face with her, I began wishing I hadn’t ventured outside at all. In that same bone-cracking way her head had moved, she moved one of her arms. She paused for a moment, her hand dangling above the crown of her head, then she stretched and wiggled her fingers as if testing them and I saw that the cloth I noticed before was actually bandages wrapped around each of her fingers and hand, reaching up to her wrist. The bandages were torn and I could make out bits of flesh there, too, detached from bone and just hanging there, entwined with the fabric that was torn and ragged. Her joints popped and clicked like breaking tree branches. She took the top of her veil in one hand and pulled it up and away from her face. That horrid face.
The skin on and around her lips was cracked and torn as if there was no moisture in her body at all. Streaks of blood ran down her face in place of tears. She looked like she was barely skin stretched over a skeletal frame. Her eyes were milky white in sunken sockets, with no pupils or color to be seen at all. My trance was broken quickly, though, as a noise resounded from the trees behind her. She seemed surprised as well and we both looked in the direction it came from. As I looked over her shoulder, I saw something even more shocking than her visage.
Crashing through the trees was a creature that made my veins feel icy. It instilled in me a sense of that primal fear you hear about when people meet predators in the wild. Before I could even completely see it, I knew I was afraid. Not even just afraid, I was petrified and I need to flee. The lamenting woman stepped back into the water and continued her song as if nothing was happening. I, however, began to book it the second that thing came fully into view. I didn’t know where to go and had no plan, I just ran up the small incline, away from the lighthouse and the water. I heard it pursue me. It was fast but its gait sounded awkward. I didn’t realize that until I thought about it later, though.
A high-pitched shriek came from behind me as I ran, my blood pumping, my still-healing body aching. It was a piercing sound that made me cover my ears and stumble as I made my way toward the trees. I could just barely make out something there that wasn’t part of the forest. As it came into view and I was able to see the iron cage, I felt both of my feet slip out from under me. I fell face-first onto the hard ground. I didn’t have time to try and brace myself for the landing and ended up landing roughly on my hands, tearing. One caught a jagged rock that cut open my palm. It hurt like hell at the time but now I’m just glad I didn’t land on my face.
I looked back to see what had made me fall and that’s when I got a good look at it. I rolled onto my back and saw the rope around my ankles. It hadn’t reached me yet but had managed to tangle my feet up in some sort of lasso. I sat up and reached down, desperately trying to untangle myself before it caught up completely. Between glances at the rope, I saw the creature approaching. It was almost humanoid except it was taller than a normal human, at least nine feet tall, and it had eight limbs: four arms and four legs. Where a body should stay straight to the tailbone, it was bent, almost reminding me of a centaur, except the legs were human, set just far enough apart to make running without tripping over itself possible. At the elbow joint, its arms split in two on each side, giving it double the forearms and hands. On those hands were still fingers but they were short, only about half the length you would expect, but the claws that extended in place of nails were hard, sharp, and jagged. I know how sharp they were because as soon as I was free of the rope, it had closed the distance enough to lunge for me and wrap two of those hands around my calf. The nails cut in deep and I was left with ragged slashes in my pants and my skin as I wrenched myself out of its grip.
It appeared to be nude, with deep blue skin covered in scars that almost glowed. The scars were everywhere: across the torso, the arms, the legs, the face. Its face was possibly the most terrifying part to me. It was childlike, cherubic even. It had dark wavy hair that fell to its shoulders, tangled with small sticks and leaves and pine needles, but its face was that of a small child. The cheeks were doughy and the eyes glimmered. And it never stopped smiling at me. Although the face could have been something found in any painting of small angels, that smile was something altogether bloodcurdling. It was wide and frightening, with small teeth that looked sharper than its claws.
As I crawled backward on my elbows and scrambled to get to my feet, I heard it giggle. It wasn’t a normal kid giggle, either. It was almost a cross between a gurgle and a laugh. With a final burst of all the energy I could muster, I sprinted toward the cage and away from the thing pursuing me. I slammed my hands into the iron fence and quickly began following the perimeter for a way in. At the back of the structure, I found a locked gate. Without fully processing what I was doing, I grabbed the key from my wrist and shoved it into the keyhole. It fit. I don’t know why I had this key but it fit and I pushed the gate open and shut it as quickly as I could. As the lock clicked into place, I saw and felt the extra-limbed thing slam into it. It screeched in pain and began crying as a toddler might when pitching a fit. Its voice became discordant as it cried. I stepped away from the gate slowly until my back reached the wall of the house. I only spared a glance at the door behind me as I felt for the doorknob. The creature had resorted to grabbing whatever it could and throwing it at the fence. A few pebbles managed to find their way through the bars and one even hit me in the leg but it seemed the thing itself couldn’t come in.
I opened the door, thankful to find it unlocked, and finally turned around to make my way into the house. I stood there for a while after I shut the door, just staring at it, dissociating from the inability to comprehend what had just happened. After a while, I was able to come back to the reality I was in. The creature was still outside screaming and crying like a spoiled child but the lamenting woman had stopped at some point.
Doing my best to ignore it, I made my way around the house and found some first aid items to clean and bandage my leg. It was in bad shape and I only hoped it wouldn’t become infected. After what I assume were several hours, the childlike forest monster wandered off. I found a bed in one of the rooms and passed out.
This is where I’ve been ever since. Over the next few days, just as I had in the lighthouse, I took my time looking through everything here in the caged house. I found this laptop that seems to connect to some sort of wifi every few days, some books in various languages that I can’t understand, and other basic necessities. It appears this house is still set up for someone to live here so I’m taking advantage of it. There’s no TV and the water is either frigid or scalding but I’ve been making it work as well as I can.
It’s difficult to see through the iron bars clearly, especially when the fog is thick or it snows ash. Sometimes I can make out the lighthouse easily. The lamenting woman appears every few days and other things have made appearances. I’m terrified to get caught by anything out there but I’m beginning to think I have no choice. I need to know where I am, and what this place is. At the very least, I think I’m going to have to retrieve that journal. I just hope it has some answers. If I die trying, at least I tried, right? Maybe then I could actually sleep.