The Watch Without a Light

Synopsis

They told me the job was simple: mind a decommissioned lighthouse through the winter, keep the generator running, watch the automated beacon do its work. They did not tell me the lamp was switched off on purpose, or what it had been holding back for two hundred years. I lost my twin sister to the dark when we were nine, on a black stair in a power cut, her hand drawn out of mine while I stood there too frightened to hold on. I have spent thirty-five years making sure I am never anywhere without a light I control. Maren Skerry is where I run out of light. The dark out here is not empty. It waits at the exact edge of the lamp, it drinks my torches dry, it stands in the blind half of my eye where I cannot quite look, and on moonless nights it sings the song my mother taught us for the dark, in a child's voice, from a cellar where the light has never reached. The islanders light their houses before dusk and will not say why. The old keeper's log says do not follow a light you did not light yourself, and do not look. One of the faces in the dark has my own face, nine years old, holding out a hand. When the last light fails and the dark comes all the way in, does it end you, or does it keep you, sightless and straining and never sure you are alone. I came to a rock with no switch to flip. Now I have to choose what I do in the dark.