The Light Does Not Welcome
Remain awake. The dream is still forming its teeth.
Written for the 30 Days of Fright Horror Story Writing Challenge. Come and join us!
Do not call it a god.
Do not name it aloud.
Do not dream too near the cliffs.
—from the Red Ledger, Page 9. Ink salt-damaged, rest unreadable.
The Lighthouse Keeper
The ancients charged me thus: let not the beacon perish, lest the dreamer beneath stir from its ageless slumber.
They told me that as long as it turned, as long as it burned, the thing below would keep dreaming. That the walls would hold. That the island would stay whole.
I believed them.
What else was I meant to do?
I was born with salt in my mouth and stone beneath my cradle. My mother bled onto the threshold. My father hung himself in the lantern room when the wick sputtered during a storm.
The carved ammonite he kept in his pocket was still warm when I found him. I carry it now. It pulses faintly sometimes—more now.
I took the post before I knew what it meant.
I thought I was tending a flame.
But the light is not a warning.
The light is a barrier.
And it is failing.
The oil reeks. The flame flickers on a wind I cannot feel. And last night, I woke with brine crusted around my eyes. I hadn’t cried. I hadn’t slept. I scraped my skin clean, but beneath my fingernails I found something grainy. Not blood. Salt. No—shell. It crackled when I touched it.
My fingers ache. Skin fissures like dry coral.
Above, something ascends the stairs. Not footsteps. A rhythm I do not recognize but know in my bones.
I opened the cellar door and heard something breathing behind the walls.
The salt will not stay dry. The beams drip water that tastes like rusted teeth. The light bends east. It has never bent.
This place is not a tower.
It is a lung.
It is a womb.
It is the last hinge of something older than language.
And I am its rotting stitch.
Something is coming.
No—something has already come.
And I do not know if it will crawl up from below...
or walk in from the sea.
The Arrival
They found him on the black shore just after dawn, where the tide had dragged back too far and the world held its breath. The air tasted of brine curdled with rust. The sand crunched not with shells but with something finer—ground enamel, bone dust. Even the gulls, which ought to have screamed, fell mute. Their absence pressed like a migraine behind the eye.
The sea had retreated beyond reason. The beach gleamed like skin peeled from something raw. The island exhaled a secret it never meant to yield.
And there, where the lighthouse’s beam never reached, lay a man face-down in the shallows—arms spread, mouth agape, hair matted with kelp like a drowned relic from a future ruin.
He should have been dead.
When the saltgirl prodded him with the hooked end of her staff, he breathed in.
No gasp. Just breath entering a body like it had been waiting.
His limbs were human-length, but not human-shaped. His elbows bent at angles that made her stomach twist. When he sat upright, his neck swiveled just slightly too far before correcting itself. A ripple passed under his skin, like memory stirring too fast.
No cry escaped her lips. She turned and walked the path to the village.
“There’s something on the shore,” she said.
Not someone.
Something.
The Villagers
The elders came. Three of them. Old bones wrapped in wool and ritual silence. They brought no healer, no stretcher. Just a blanket, a jar of holding salt, and a bell that had not rung since the last breach.
They stood in a triangle around him.
They did not touch him.
They waited.
When he opened his eyes—green, not the island kind—they pulsed. Like something moved behind them. The pupils contracted to spirals. And then smoothed.
The bell rang once.
One elder whispered: “The tide remembers.”
They carried him on a shutter door into the guest house no one had entered in a generation. The hearth was lit. The windows barred. No one brought him water.
No one asked his name.
He slept two days. On the third, he walked the perimeter of the house.
No one stopped him.
Children were kept inside. Dogs barked hoarse and low. The crows circled wide and wouldn’t land.
A boy chalked a spiral into the dust. His mother slapped his hand before he could finish. Her knuckles bled white. “Not that shape,” she hissed.
That evening, the lighthouse turned—but for one breath, it stuttered.
The keeper screamed without sound.
The man stood beneath the stars.
And smiled.
Not with his mouth. It did not move.
But the shape of his face bent into a smile nonetheless.
The Saltgirl
They sent her with broth.
Not for kindness. Because she kept her mouth shut.
The bowl was old. Fired clay, spider-cracked. It had held births, burials, regrets. She was told to fill it halfway. And to carry salt in her pocket.
Not white salt.
Gray salt.
The kind that grows from the walls of the old chamber. The kind they whisper over. The kind that bleeds if you cut it.
Her grandmother once slapped her for asking why they fed the dark.
Later, with tears in her cracked voice: “Because the dark listens. And it waits for silence.”
The guest house stank of salt and sleep. The walls bulged, not with damp, but with something softer. The planks sweated.
He sat waiting.
His eyes glinted like fish scales stretched over bone.
She remembered the cellar. The night it breathed. That same scent curled in the back of her throat now: oil, rotted wood, something sweet—lavender, long decayed.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said.
He smiled again. That same broken arrangement of skin.
“I’ve heard that before,” he said.
“You shouldn’t be here. Nothing ever comes. That’s the point. This place doesn’t allow visitors—unless something’s changed.”
The broth quivered.
A shape floated in it now. Spiral. Hairlike. Moving slowly despite the stillness.
She looked down at her palm. A faint swirl raised in the skin. Not ink. Not scar.
A line growing deeper.
She left without turning her back.
The Chamber
She climbed the tower.
The stairs twisted inward, not around. Her feet sank. The walls pulsed.
A memory that wasn’t hers whispered into her ears.
The bowl vibrated. A hum in the stone.
The door exhaled.
And opened.
It blinked.
The Apostle waited.
She could not say what it was.
It was child-small. Tower-tall. It shimmered wetly. Limbs that shifted mid-breath. Mouths that flickered in and out of flesh. Teeth that turned like augers—not human ones.
It stepped forward.
Its shadow trailed behind it—backwards.
The tower bent.
The air liquefied.
And the saltgirl felt her body stretch.
Not pain.
Recognition.
The thing looked at her, and she saw herself. Not as she was—but as she would be.
As all her grandmothers had become.
Vessels.
Not chosen.
Inescapable.
The tower cracked.
Spirals bloomed in the stone. In her wrists.
A boy outside screamed.
The wind turned inside out.
The Apostle stepped into the light.
And smiled with her face.
THE END
Written for the 30 Days of Fright Horror Story Writing Challenge. Come and join us!
Beautifully written with hints of Lovecraftian horror. Great job.
I am such a fan.