Horror

by Scribes Stories · 5 min read · 1 view

The Tally The lighthouse at Corrow Point had been automated for thirty years, which was why Simon found it strange, on his first night as the facility's sole maintenance technician, to discover fresh tally marks scratched into the wall of the lamp room. Rows of them, hundreds deep, carved into the old stone with something sharp enough to leave clean, deliberate lines. He mentioned it to Old Petra at the harbor the next morning, mostly out of idle curiosity, expecting a shrug and a joke about bored former keepers. She did not shrug. She went very still, coffee cup halfway to her mouth, and set it down without drinking. "Which wall," she asked. "East, I think. Behind the old lens housing." "Don't add to it," she said, quiet and completely serious in a way that made the joke die in Simon's throat. "Whatever you do out there at night, don't pick up anything sharp near that wall and don't, under any circumstances, start counting along with it." "Counting what?" Simon asked, half laughing, though something in her face kept the laugh from fully forming. "The old keeper, Alden Marsh, manned that light for nineteen years before it was automated," Petra said. "Alone, mostly, the way keepers used to be. Toward the end, before they finally pulled him out, the coast guard found him scratching marks into that wall around the clock. Thousands of them. When they asked him what he was counting, he said he was counting the ships that hadn't sunk because of his light. Said if he ever stopped counting, even for a moment, the light would fail and the count would break, and every ship after that would be his fault." "That's..." Simon started, unsure how to finish the sentence. "Sad, yes. Also apparently contagious, if the stories are true, which I've never been fully sure of myself, until now, hearing you found fresh marks in a lighthouse that's been fully automated and unmanned for three decades." Simon laughed it off that night, mostly, chalking the marks up to bored teenagers or a previous technician with a strange hobby. But he found himself avoiding the east wall anyway, an instinct he didn't examine too closely, the way you avoid stepping on cracks even after you've stopped believing they mean anything. It was on his fourth night, doing a routine check of the lamp mechanism, that he heard it. Faint, rhythmic, coming from the direction of the east wall behind him. Scratch. Scratch. Scratch. He turned slowly, flashlight beam sweeping the old stone, and found nothing there. No one. Just the wall, and the tally marks, and, he was almost certain, one more mark than there had been the night before, though he couldn't have proven it, hadn't thought to count them himself. "Hello?" he said, feeling foolish even as the word left his mouth. The scratching stopped instantly, replaced by a silence so complete it felt deliberate, the specific quiet of something listening back. Simon left the lamp room that night without finishing his checks, and told himself, walking down the spiral stairs faster than strictly necessary, that it had been rats, or settling stone, or his own tired mind playing tricks after too many nights alone in an unfamiliar building. He did not fully believe himself, and the belief only weakened further as the week went on, the scratching returning nearly every night now, always from the east wall, always stopping the moment he tried to catch it in his flashlight beam. Twice he found new marks he was certain hadn't been there the day before. Once, unable to help himself, he counted them, arriving at a number he immediately regretted memorizing, because it meant he would now, against every rational instinct, know exactly how many there were the next time he checked. There were more the next time. He did not check after that. It was Petra, again, who finally gave him something he could actually do about it, appearing at the lighthouse unannounced on his ninth night with a look of grim, weathered understanding on her face. "You've heard it," she said. Not a question. "I think I'm losing my mind," Simon admitted. "You're not," she said. "Alden Marsh never really left that wall, best anyone in town can figure. Some keepers say the sea takes a man's mind slow enough that a piece of it stays behind even after the rest of him is gone. I've heard it goes quiet if you tell it the truth. Not comfort. Truth." "What truth?" "That the ships are fine," Petra said. "That the light still works, automated or not, and it's saved just as many lives without him standing over it counting every single one. Tell him he can stop. Tell him the count doesn't depend on him anymore." Simon went up to the lamp room that night with his flashlight in one hand and something like courage borrowed entirely from Petra's certainty in the other. The scratching started almost as soon as he reached the top of the stairs, faster now, more urgent, as though whatever remained of Alden Marsh sensed he had come with something to say. "The light still works," Simon said into the dark room, voice shaking only slightly. "It's automated now. It hasn't failed once in thirty years. Every ship that's passed this point is still counted, still safe, whether or not you're the one keeping track. You did your part. Nineteen years of it. You can stop counting now." The scratching stopped, all at once, and the silence that followed felt different this time, not listening exactly, more like something finally, after decades, allowed to exhale. Simon did not hear the scratching again after that night. The tally marks remained on the east wall, hundreds of them, a permanent record of nineteen years of a man's devoted, exhausting vigilance, but no new ones appeared, not that week, not in the months that followed. Sometimes, on quiet nights, Simon still glances at that wall while running his checks, and he says, quietly, without really expecting an answer, that the light is still working. That the count is still safe. That Alden Marsh, wherever the sea eventually took the rest of him, can finally rest easy, knowing the ships are still finding their way home.