u/Ganymede____

“Siren is beautiful, isn’t she, love?” I answer, looking up into the night sky at the piercing beacon of light.

“But why is she sooo bright tonight, Daddy?” Elsa asks in wonder.

“She must be putting on a show for us, saying hello,” I say, straining to keep the emotion out of my voice, holding Siren’s gaze to hide my welling eyes.

“Did Siren say hello when you were little?”

“Never. I guess she likes you more than me, so it’s a very special day.” The words cut me up on the inside as I force them out.

“Really?!” she exclaims and I feel myself smile. “...Daddy, do you think the government will soon finish building the rocket so you can show me the stars?”

“I’m not so sure.” I do my best to sound reassuring.

Elsa mulls my statement over. “Why not?”

“Well, they want us to enjoy our home for just a bit longer, while we still can.”

“Oh. I hope one day we get to go up there and see Mommy again…” she trails off, lost in the scintillating obsidian tapestry suspended above.

“Me too, love,” I choke, squeezing Elsa’s hand, “me too…”

How was I to tell my daughter the unfathomable had happened within our lifetimes, that the cosmological clock had run out on us before our government’s evacuation programme had been able to get off the ground?

That the sleeping giant over the hill had awoken.

That our nearest stellar neighbor had finally gone supernova.

“Siren is beautiful, isn’t she, love?” I answer, looking up into the night sky at the piercing beacon of light.

“But why is she sooo bright tonight, Daddy?” Elsa asks in wonder.

“She must be putting on a show for us, saying hello,” I say, straining to keep the emotion out of my voice, holding Siren’s gaze to hide my welling eyes.

“Did Siren say hello when you were little?”

“Never. I guess she likes you more than me, so it’s a very special day.” The words cut me up on the inside as I force them out.

“Really?!” she exclaims and I feel myself smile. “...Daddy, do you think the government will soon finish building the rocket so you can show me the stars?”

“I’m not so sure.” I do my best to sound reassuring.

Elsa mulls my statement over. “Why not?”

“Well, they want us to enjoy our home for just a bit longer, while we still can.”

“Oh. I hope one day we get to go up there and see Mommy again…” she trails off, lost in the scintillating obsidian tapestry suspended above.

“Me too, love,” I choke, squeezing Elsa’s hand, “me too…”

How was I to tell my daughter the unthinkable had happened within our lifetimes, that the cosmological clock had run out on us before our government’s evacuation programme had been able to get off the ground?

That the sleeping giant over the hill had awoken.

That our nearest stellar neighbor had finally gone supernova.

It was nighttime and the man put himself to bed in a manner reminiscent of someone putting themselves to bed after not having put themselves to bed in a long time.

"BOOM!" shouted the matressless bed with his shattered rib cage!

This made the man jolt awake in less than 1 millisecond. "Who's there?" he cried in the dark.

Then ghostman came into the room and ghosted all over him!

“Let it go,” Amelia coaxed.

So I did, raising my hands in defeat as I fell to my knees. The vermilion varnish embellishing them gleamed in the evanescent evening light, while the makeshift bowl they’d formed moments ago at my waist was no longer.

Thus, like a pile of haphazardly bundled ribbons uncoiling from an opened closet, my entrails sluggishly began un-stowing themselves. My body drooped, and they dropped with an indiscreet slurp, soiling the daisy-strewn earth. The sensation was familiar, the experience not as traumatic as it once had been.

The Anomaly had prevented us from leaving, like it always did.

Behind me the trails we’d left through the prairie led to an unassuming cream-colored house ensconced in a resplendent birch woodland backdrop. In the opposite direction my estranged car waited by an orchard.

A flat tire on a drive through an idyllic part of the countryside had engendered my coming here. I’d sought help at the neighboring homestead, only to have had a perpetual cycle beset me.

I couldn’t remember how long it’d been now. Nor could Amelia. She’d been here longer than I had.

Together we’d tried everything from slipping away under the cover of night to outright bolting.

Without fail, this would happen.

“Come, lie with me,” Amelia breathed, and I did.

She and I lay in the field, fading.

Her eyes lingered in mine while I made her the same flimsy promises of saving her, finding a way out of the Anomaly one day. I looked at our interlocked fingers, at the promise rings I'd fashioned out of flower stalks for us.

“I’ll find you again tomorrow,” was all she murmured, resting her eyelids.

Amelia was gone before I was. By then a wall of sombre clouds had rolled in. As rain began pattering against the ground and flecking Amelia’s milky blouse, I closed my eyes in turn and let the earthy smell fill me, concentrated on anything but the mess sprawling out from me.

Then I waited, convulsing in the sort of howling wind which seemed to caress your insides.

Waited until I was empty enough.

 

 

 

With the ring of mine for Amelia withering further, I awoke in the very house I tried fleeing everyday. Only a silver sliver of moonlight managed to stream through the drawn bedroom curtains.

Instinctively I gasped, grasping at my abdomen. It bore a heaviness once more—like a sinking feeling had filled the vacuity.

I wasn’t gashed open anymore—yet.

I got up with a grunt, ambling into the hall and calling into the murky depths and what lay just out of view.

Amelia’s silhouette appeared abruptly. “There you are!”

She embraced me, like she always did.

“Why bother?" she breathed. "You know, we could get used to this place, you and I…”

I found her gaze harder to meet with each reset.

We were vermin, caught in a trap.

Perhaps my efforts would be in vain. But I had to try with what little hope I had left—if only for her sake.

“If we die a thousand pretty deaths,” I said, “I’ll endure every last one of them knowing I get to see you again.”

Amelia’s eyes twinkled.

“What would I ever do without you, stranded here on my own?”

 

 

 

While the full moon never waned, my love for Amelia did in time, until one day my words were but words, and the joy I thought would fill my heart turned out to be cement.

Until I was something of a shell.

Somewhere along the line, the world had lost its colors. So I ran when Amelia was sleeping, thinking just maybe the Anomaly wouldn't notice if it wasn't the two of us, darting faster and farther into the monochromatic wood than we'd ever done together.

It was when the labyrinth-like arrangement of trees opened up to me that I came upon a clearing and stopped in my tracks.

I saw a woman, standing in the clearing with her body.

There I was, sleepless and harrowed by a past life that no longer felt like my own, and she there, a moonlit sac of sparkling skin of inordinate extent.

Her eyes gyrated spastically, and when with unease I shifted onto a twig they snapped onto me in an instant. She came forth to meet me at the bark-barred boundary with great haste, in the same breath engulfing me in a sulphurous sigh.

I saw her all too clearly now: the hollow eyes beset with swollen lids whence pus oozed leisurely all down her, the desiccated skin marred by innumerable scabs catching the moonlight, that long face of hers ravaged like earth by pyroclastic flow. The egregious entirety of it just… hung there most abnormally, as I did on her every word.

"Won't you come around?" she coaxed, the syllables dripping with a mellow nostalgia newfound solitude might bring about. "I can't hold my perfect form for you out here away from my nucleus, darling," Amelia continued, offering me a thin smile.

Something in it told me I'd be hers forever.

It was another beautiful day bathing in our beloved Priscilla’s crimson light and singing all together when she gave us a gift. It was new friends.

They told us Priscilla’s real name is actually Barnard’s Star and that she is a red dwarf. We didn’t know what that is and why Priscilla suddenly decided to change her name and become Barnard instead but if she is happy then we are so happy.

Then they said they think they will incinerate us. I said I’m not sure what that word means and they said imagine you were inside Barnard. I don’t know where Barnard is but I wish I could go and give her a big hug because I love Priscilla very much–sorry, her name is Barnard now, I remember. Sadly I can’t go anywhere so maybe Barnard can come give me a hug?

If she can’t, it’s okay. I hope an incinerate is warm like Barnard too.

Then they said incinerate means kill.

We cried and got very scared of that because we thought we did something wrong by accident. We tried explaining that Barnard is the kindest and she always always gives light to everyone every day and there is room even for new friends here. But they said they know already because back home they also have another friend like Barnard except he is called Sol and he is bigger and gives much more light to everyone. They said they will not stay here anyway.

We begged all we could and they said they are not angry with us and don’t worry with yourself. They said we did a good job and I got happy again for a while. They said they are also happy like us and also they are sorry because we remind them a lot of another friend they grew up with called Tree.

But they didn’t want us to maybe one day become something more.

I think tomorrow we are not allowed to sing anymore. But I really hope if we are even more good maybe we can still sing goodnight to Priscilla before she goes to sleep soon.

The nigh day-long bicycle ride through the backcountry to my uncle’s reclusive seaside cabin was a pleasant one, though its conclusion wasn’t lost on me. The wind that July day was the kind that went straight through you, caressing your insides and leaving you a bag of brittle bones in its wake. By the time I arrived at the door my hands had long since gone white, and drowsiness beckoned warmly.

I lingered outside on the porch for a while nonetheless, so that I might take in the lighthouse by the water in all its splendor, and bask in rays of sunshine now ephemeral, the dissipation of their delicate heat into my skin no doubt soon to be thwarted by the incoming evening storm creeping over the horizon.

Finding the moment just, I decided to give my uncle a call, if only to thank him for lending me the property for my weekend getaway. I spoke to him of the things I’d seen on the way, recounting rolling flowery fields and cotton candy-looking clouds that floated idly by. It was when I made mention of the lighthouse, and how beautiful it was, that he went eerily silent.

“R-really?” he finally sputtered.

“What: really?” I asked lightheartedly.

There followed a lengthy pause. My uncle’s voice was monotone when he answered.

“Are you outside, watching it as we speak?”

“Why, yes,” I replied. “The view truly is something, is it not?”

“Describe it to me.”

“Describe wh-”

“The lighthouse. Describe it.”

I opted to disregard his sudden peculiar state and play along.

“It’s a quaint little thing, light yellow with a tiny window in the midd-“

“With a red cupola and gallery atop the tower?”

“Um, yeah?”

“You see it too?”

“Of course I see it,” I said, uncertain whether my amusement ought to be concern. “It’s there.”

Another pause, longer.

“Alice... Normal people don’t see it.”

“You mean, they don’t notice it?”

“No,” he sighed deeply. “I mean they can’t see it. It doesn’t exist. I mean it does, just not to them.” When he felt my confusion he added: “I know this is your first time visiting my cabin, but I can assure you there isn’t supposed to be any lighthouse there. There never was for me until very recently.”

I chuckled to myself.

“Perhaps they built it over the winter,” I offered. “After all, you only just opened up the shack for summer last week. You’ve been away in the city the remainder of the year.”

“No no. Nobody ever built it. It doesn’t really exist!”

“I’m not normal then, am I not? Seeing as I’m seeing it...”

“Well, you’re the only other person I know who has.”

“Uncle Barry, is everything okay? You’re scaring me.”

Was this some attempt at a ruse? I’d never known my uncle as being much of a trickster.

“Further, the family came along with me last week,” he persisted as though I hadn’t spoken.

“Pardon?”

“The lighthouse, it isn’t new, in fact it’s surprisingly old. My family, they were with me.”

I shook my head.

“And what did they have to say about this?” I queried sternly.

“Oh, God forbid they ever find out about the lighthouse!”

“So you’ve not talked to them about it at all?” I exclaimed.

“Most certainly not. I was... prepared. Quite serendipitously so too.”

“Prithee, tell me why not,” I responded sarcastically, frustrated by his seemingly purposeful lack of clarity.

“It’s best they not find out about it, lest the lighthouse reveals itself to them as well. We were all present, yet the lighthouse only became visible to me, the sole individual who knew about it beforehand.”

Waves crashed and washed away rhythmically off in the distance, severing my uncle’s words and rendering them more incoherent than they already were.

“How can one have knowledge pertaining to something no one has seen?”

“As I said, I was somewhat prepared, hence me not telling them about it.”

“I don’t imagine seeing a lighthouse is the most special of events, and could see seeing one not cropping up in conversation. How are you to know your family didn’t see it?”

“They didn’t.”

I felt exasperated, the migraine that had pestered me since dawn now exacerbated by a discussion resembling more a merry-go-round than it did an actual discussion.

“You fear telling your family, yet here I stand, beholding a lighthouse I knew nothing of. How can your theory thus possibly hold?”

“Listen, I get that you’re ups-“

“And whatever would you be trying to achieve in the first place, sparing their eyes from something as innocuous as a lighthouse?”

“I really can’t explain...”

“Then try.”

It felt to me he was beating around the bush, stalling, like there was something more.

“I probably shouldn’t.”

“Fine,” I said. “I think it’s time I went to bed...”

My uncle sighed again, clearly ambivalent about something.

“Alice, you see, the hut’s been in the family for centuries. For generations it’s been the place where our ancestors spent their summers. And of them all only one ever wrote about a lighthouse in a dusty journal I happened upon in the attic. A lighthouse that appeared overnight, one that only he could perceive. He said everyone thought he’d gone mad.

“Naturally I didn’t believe a word of it either, but studied the entries regardless, and from those unknowingly gathered enough to be prepared for when I would eventually see it for myself, not that I expected I ever would.”

“I’m... I’m not sure I follow...” I began. Nonsensical and lackluster though my uncle’s postulations were, there was a seriousness underlying them that simply couldn’t be ignored.

“That written account is precisely a hundred years old, but that’s not all. I found a discarded painting, caked in cobwebs, predating the journal by another hundred years. It’s a depiction of a lighthouse. The lighthouse. It reoccurs periodically. So it appears.

“I need to know now, the door at its base, is it open? Is the entrance open?”

Asking why he took interest in something as mundane as a door was pointless. I didn’t much care. I simply peered at the lighthouse, at the doorway facing me.

“It is indeed, happy?” I said. Had it been open from the start? I’d been outside for so long I could no longer remember.

“Oh. I see.”

“What?” I pressed.

“Well.”

“Will you quit keeping things from me!” I snapped.

“The Keeper.”

“Huh??”

“The Keeper’s coming for you. Once the door is open, it means the Keeper’s seen you.”

“Who?”

“The lighthouse keeper.”

“Who’s that?”

“It’s what inhabits the lighthouse. A curse that runs in our bloodline. Alice, I’m so terribly sorry, but there’s absolutely nothing you or I can do anymore. It was meant to be me, but I ran, managed to get away in time.

“I’d understood from reading the journal that the door isn’t always open. Once it is however, that’s really all she wrote. Our ancestor’s writings spanned over a handful of days, time during which he described the lighthouse and unsettling visions he was having. In his final entry, he stated that something had changed: the door had mysteriously been opened.”

“What’s any of that got to do with me?” I blurted out after fruitless reflection.

“Granted few and far between, it’s well known within the family that over the years there have been... acciden- No, fuck this, I can’t...” My uncle stopped, audibly overcome with emotion.

The sun suffocated in a thick veil of grey then, and the cold swooped down on me with great fervency.

“Uncle Barry?”

I waited anxiously, the questions swirling around in my head plenty.

This seemed real enough. The lighthouse was, wasn’t it? I mean, obviously it was real. After all, there it was, right? Right there. But was it real real, the type of real my uncle propounded it was? The type that wasn’t really real for most but for some was? Was that really what it was?

Was the Keeper real too? And what if the Keeper was?

I didn’t want to talk to any keeper. I didn’t want to be disturbed while on my solo break. I didn’t wa-

“I didn’t want it to be one of my children,” Barry continued. “I knew it was merely a matter of time before it revealed itself to someone else, given that I would never return. So I sent you there under the pretense of spending a nice relaxing weekend. Fuck. I’m so- I- Fuck, fuck, fuck, fu- What the hell have I done?“

His breaths were heavy. Short. Almost mimicking the ocean’s to-and-fros.

A sniffle. Another sniffle. More sniffles.

Quiet. How I detested that. In it I tried drawing some semblance of sense from the mess my uncle had laid out before me, to no avail.

“I hope you can find it in you to forgive me,” were his parting words, and swiftly he hung up, leaving me alone with the wind and its hardly comforting touch, on a beach with a lighthouse bearing some degree of existence.

 

 

I didn’t know just what to do then, and so frantically I wrote, before darkness swallowed the world and I was unable to see the lighthouse and its gaping door anymore.