 I found this story in the basement of a lighthouse I had purchased over the summer. My girlfriend Sarah always liked the look of them and I thought I might surprise her with one when I proposed. I had my secretary look into the market for any inactive lighthouses for sale. A contender turned up near the coast of Wales at an extraordinarily low price. I bought it immediately. After all, I could always have it remodeled into a summer home if Sarah ever lost interest. I hadn't been to the place myself, but my secretary visited the lighthouse and informed me it was in mint condition before I filled out the paperwork. That's when she'd found a map with a story scratched on its back hidden away inside the basement. It read as follows. From a young age, I didn't understand people's aversion to loneliness. It had always unsettled people close to me how comfortable I was with being lonely. My therapist attributed it to my parents never being very communicative. My stoic mother preferred to speak through her actions, if at all, in my father much the same way, perhaps more brooding from his time as a fisherman. They ran the lighthouse that we lived in with mechanical synchronicity, falling into a faithful routine. The lighthouse was my parents' passion, their pride and joy, their lives orbited around caring for the amphibian tower with a devotion that had always struck me as odd. Father would sometimes murmur of strange sightings at sea between puffs of tobacco and I could never call my mother disappearing into our basement for hours on end with bottles of whiskey and mint at hand. She frequently referred to the lighthouse as the last threshold, whatever that meant, and generally maintained that her role was of utmost importance. As a child, I may have found their work fascinating, but I lost the reverence with age and in turn they grew increasingly clueless as to what to do with me. If they were disappointed at my indifference, they never said so and instead took to speaking to me as little as they possibly could. In any case, I rarely visited home after leaving for university. In fact, my return to the lighthouse was almost a decade later, sometime after I was informed by telephone that both my parents had passed. Their hearts had stopped in their sleep, the corner explained, likely only an hour apart. I nodded, surprising him with my calmness and made slow arrangements for my return. I remember the drive back, feeling the wheels sink into familiar bends and eventually the smooth singular stretch of road running parallel to the swollen sea. It was a foggy afternoon and in the distance a column of stone anchored a beam of light into the pale ocean. They say that as an adult, your childhood home may look shrunken since children perceive the world as being disproportionately large. But upon reentering the lighthouse, I discovered the opposite. The interior appeared bloated, everything ever so slightly wider than I remembered as if the tower itself had inhaled and was holding its breath, the stone wall struggling to contain the space within. I wondered if it was a change of furniture, but I recognized everything. The three-legged drawer and lamp, my mother's cushions on the sofa, a stack of tea-stained envelopes on the mantel, ashes over the crystal ash tray, the smell of wax furniture polish. Everything had changed. I spread myself over the sofa, which smelled of cigars, deciding to dismiss the distortion as a side effect of depersonalization, something I was apparently prone to. Constant latent stress, my therapist said, compounded with a breakdown of your marriage. It's not surprising you would feel this way. She nodded, with a tone I assumed was meant to be soothing. Therapy, I felt, was rather like lying on a dentist's chair. Both were clinically intimate and subjected you to uncomfortable prodding. Maybe, I shrugged. Talk to me, she pressed, these sessions rely on your honesty, Alex. I didn't know where to tell her, it wasn't as though I was lying. I think I've always felt like this. I tried, tiredly. I stared at her carpet, admiring how the wool had been braided into a pattern of waves. And what is it you feel? Without warning, my thoughts were swept away by the waters of my childhood. At first, ripples in the bathtub. I watched my stubby toddler fingers grabbing for the wrinkles in the surface, giggling. Then there were raindrops hooked onto my blazer as I trekked home through a storm, my head echoing with the slapping sound of rain pounding sea, and it was so cold, I thought I might die. I did almost die once, when I was older, sixteen or maybe seventeen, by the rocky beach. I was alone one moment, and the next, a strange mass resembling a small human, floated a few feet away from me, bobbing in the midnight water. Instinctively, almost as if I were spellbound, I waited forward reaching for the shape. Do you need help? I shouted at it. The shape didn't respond, only bobbed further into the distance. It was a summer night, but the sea was still painfully frigid. My heart quivered as my jeans soaked in the freezing water. Hey! I tried to shout again, but only a weak croak left my drying mouth. The shape was drifting further from me, and I was already waist deep. I dove, hurled myself blindly toward the thing, whatever it was, my skin shrieking in protest against the icy water. I grabbed it, sinking my fingers into the slimy mass and pulling it to my chest. Inexplicably, I was convinced in the moment that I was holding an infant I had saved from a terrible fate. Bizarre warm relief washed over me, as I cradled it against my limbs. I might have even laughed had the fatigue not completely wracked me. My eyes and nostrils stung as my muscles burned and threatened to seize. Only a lifetime of swimming gave me the sense to try to relax. I forced myself to float, tuck the fleshy form under my chin, and face the moonless inky sky, as dark as the ocean I laid on. I inhaled slowly, and willed myself to exhale even slower while I contemplated how to get us back to shore. One moment there was nothing, and in the next there was a riptide. Like fingers yanking hair, the punishing currents plunged my body into spidery black depths. Thick oily seawater guzzled down my throat until all I could smell was blood and salt. I desperately tried to grip the child, but the tide was hellbent, ripping it from my fingers and leaving me paralyzed, drowning, consciousness, bleeding. I woke with a violent start, covered head to toe in cold sweat with chills prickling every follicle. How had I forgotten about the floating child and the August riptide that almost killed me? Had I forgotten at all? I'd always assumed the memory had been a dream, after all, here I was in the flesh. But I was so sure, sure in the same way that I knew the thing I had held was a child. This was not my first recollection of the incident. I paced when I was anxious, it was one of my less intrusive coping mechanisms, well, less intrusive for myself, my flatmates at university didn't appreciate it. I found myself first pacing across the length of the kitchen floor and then through the diagonal of the sitting room and eventually up and down the spiral staircase. Every step I took, I felt watched by the ghost of my 16 year old self, the memory bulging from the seams of my mind. I racked my brain, trying to remember how exactly I'd gotten out of the water and back home. Did I get home? It was unlikely that either of my parents would have fished me out of the water and neglected to mention it, so had I simply washed ashore by good luck, the more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed that the incident was simply a dream. It was too vivid, too visceral, and more details bubbled to the surface the more I replayed the memory. I didn't normally go to the beach. The pier was my usual course for a late night excursion, but that particular night my father had warned me from walking there, mumbling something about bad business. I glanced at the window and gait at my reflection. It was not me in the translucent image, but my 16 year old body, gaunt and faceless, my features eroded away by the waters of my coffin with only a dark hollow where my mouth had been. I froze, seized with horror as I stared into the unblinking sockets of my teenaged corpse when a knock on the door interrupted my haunting. I blinked and found the reflection had vanished. Hello? I called out warily, waiting a full minute for a response that didn't come. I slowly creaked open the door and discovered three schoolboys still in uniform huddled over the doorstep. Can I help you boys? I asked tiredly, far too sleep deprived to be stern. They said nothing and made no acknowledgement of me. They peered intensely through the crack of the door over my shoulder as if expecting something to jump out at any moment. I told you it was old. One of them declared. He was the tallest and maybe the oldest. His eyes were transfixed on the house. Yeah, but I didn't think it'd be so cold. Another one replied, shifting on his feet, clearly anxious to leave. He met my eyes, but quickly turned away, fiddling intensely with a button on his wrist. I heard they died here, the third of the trio whispered, pushing his glasses up and tiptoeing to look past the larger boy, the previous keepers. Anger flared through my exhaustion and I growled, slamming the door shut with ringing force. I could hear their footsteps scattering away immediately as I breathed heavily, trying to digest the encounter. It had been so strange that I briefly considered speaking to the school before dismissing the idea almost immediately. Too much work, I reasoned. And for what? I sighed, telling myself I had better things to occupy my time. For starters, if I was going to sell the place as I'd planned to, a thorough clean of the basement was in order. The basement under the sitting room had possessed an allure to it when I lived here. It wasn't as though I was ever explicitly forbidden to enter. In fact, I was sure I'd been inside on multiple occasions. But children have a way of knowing where adults did not want them. And I knew that when my mother was in the basement, she wanted privacy. Naturally, the place had fascinated me and I couldn't help the mischievous thrill in my stomach as I fished for the key in my parents' cabinet. Upon unlocking the old door, I found creaky pine wood shelves lining the walls and cobwebs hanging over every visible corner. I grimaced at the thought of the cleaning required before I could show the place to any realtor. There was an old musk in the air and a whiff of something like mint and whiskey that could have been my imagination. The shelves were filled with old mechanical equipment, antique fisherman tokens and trinkets I would expect my parents to hoard. Paste it across one of the walls was an obscenely large map of Great Britain and its surrounding seas with dozens of pins tacked across the blue surface. There was also a long desk bolted to the floor at the center of the room that when I approached to examine, I found was distinctly cleaner than the shelves or floor. Black and white photographs of a Navy officer who I recognized as my grandfather were propped on the sides like an altar. I didn't know anything about him. My mother rarely spoke of anything, but especially not of him. I knew only that he'd served in the war and was lost at sea, had been presumed dead soon after, which apparently was not an uncommon fate for the time. Alongside the photographs, manuscripts filled with spidery cursive covered almost the entire wooden surface. The script on most pages was too hurried to even be legible. And if the rolling bottles of empty liquor on the floor were a clue, I suspected the writer had been intoxicated. Something like guilt bit at my conscience. As I realized looking over this basement, there had been a great deal I didn't know about my parents that I'd never cared to ask. I picked up a tattered journal from the table. So many pages had been torn out of it that only a few were still stuck to the binding. The first page was a crude pencil sketch of a fishing trawler adrift at sea, trapped as a mosquito inside an amber drop. My brows furrowed in confusion, had my mother been harboring a secret artistic talent. The next page was a similar drawing but of a majestic navy vessel instead of a trawler. The third page had almost been entirely scribbled over, with only three large eye-shaped blanks in the middle. A tiny caption in the margins read simply as her. My fingers traced over the lines in the drawing was this what my mother was doing for hours locked away in the basement, drawing lost ships and boogie women in the oceans. Coming up I'd always assumed my father to be the superstitious one, but evidently not. I flipped through the mostly incomprehensible writings and drawings, each depicting a vessel and vast body of water. These must have taken hours to produce, I thought, until I stopped dead at a particular drawing. It was an outline of a body standing on the beach. It was vague and the lead smudges didn't reveal details, but it stood a few feet from shore with its back turned to the observer. It looked like a child somewhere between toddler and school-aged. Chills trickled down my back and I shuddered. It was certainly taller than the creature I encountered, but the similarities were too striking for comfort. The writing underneath read, have been hearing about these more often, bodies floating near pier or beach, poles any well-meaning passerby under the current, likely an agent of her, make sure Alex stays away from pier. I flinched at the mention of my name and my initial surprise at the drawings melted into excitement. After all, this was potentially excellent news, perhaps it was not such a mystery. Perhaps it had been my mother who rescued me and brought me back home. Perhaps I'd simply repressed the memory and returning home had resurfaced the trauma. I was buzzing with anticipation as I flipped to the last page. The book almost slid from my hand. It was the ghost, my ghost, the one I'd seen in the reflection, ghastly and gaunt, my younger features smoldered away with decomposition. The ghost stared at me through the paper, the pencil hashing on the open void mouth so forceful it had torn through the page. The scribble underneath simply said, he's gone. My hand trembled, and I dropped the journal and immediately began scratching over the other pieces of paper when what looked like a diary buried over a sketchbook caught my eye. Like the sketchbook, only a few pages seemed to remain intact, and I flicked over the pages anxiously, unsure what I was looking for, but desperate to find it. There were records of disappearances, lost ships, odd sightings of lights too far from any coast to make sense, entries dedicated to mariners who had heard strange music in deadly calm waters. But none of that interested me. Close to the end of the diary was a tiny entry written in especially shaky lettering. It read, he's still here. I don't know how he's dead, I'm sure of it. Spencer even saw it before it was too late. But somehow he's still here. He doesn't seem to remember what happened and goes on completely unaware. But he's not Alex, at least not entirely. He doesn't notice dates changing or seasons moving and spends hours to days alone locked in his room. I don't know how long he'll stay, but every minute terrifies me. Is this her revenge, her way of telling me to stop looking for her, killing my son and haunting me with his ghost? I sank to the floor, the entry still in my hand. I stared down at my feet and noticed I was not wearing shoes. In fact, I didn't appear to have any feet either. Where I expected ankle, toe and foot, I saw only old bones and maggots. I couldn't stand. I found I didn't have the muscle where muscle needed to be to hold weight. As I write, more and more of my body is rapidly decomposing. It is all I can do, reader, to write this, to write this and warn you, I suppose. Beyond that, I'm not sure what else is left for me. Well, I thought, snapping a file shut, that was certainly something. Perhaps an amateur writer's first attempt. I slid the file back into my drawer. It read like a poor Lovecraftian fan fiction, patchy and fantastical. But if the story had anything to do with the outrageously low price of the lighthouse, I suppose I owed the author my thanks. I'd scheduled the proposal on a Sunday, and I'd called Sarah's sister and parents beforehand, instructing them to arrive by Sunday evening for the surprise. I drove myself to the lighthouse Friday evening as soon as I left the office. I still hadn't decided whether I would propose on the tower or the beach, and wanted to visit before making the decision. It was a peaceful drive, and I recognized the singular stretch of coastline road leading to the ivory tower. It seemed the writer had taken inspiration from the real life surroundings. I found most of the former tenant's belongings had been cleared by the time I arrived. There was no three-legged drawer or lamp, no embroidered cushions, and no ash tray or vintage envelopes. I attempted to climb up the spiral staircase to the balcony, but found the metal screeched with every step I took. I angrily made a mental note to call Linda to arrange repairs as soon as possible before gingerly climbing my way down. I suppose that sorted that out, I grumbled. I certainly would have preferred to have the option, but the beach would have to do. It was a rocky beach, and not sandy like I'd hoped, but the sunset shimmered mesmerizingly across the surface. I imagined myself getting down on one knee, a gasp on Sarah's beautiful face and slipping my mother's ring on her finger, and then I saw it. One minute I was alone, and then the next I wasn't. Something stood in the water a few feet ahead of me. It looked like a body, around sixteen if I were to guess the age. Instinctively, almost as if I were spellbound, I waited forward, reaching for the shape.