Lantern Watch

Ray Calloway, sixty-four, retired keeper of the St. Augustine Light, has spent his whole life on Anastasia Island tending a lamp that no longer needs him. When the museum asks him to lead a new after-hours Halloween event, a candlelit haunted walk called Lantern Watch, he says yes because the tower is the only place he has ever felt useful. On the first rehearsal night, with the power to the lamp disconnected for safety, the lens lights itself. The beam sweeps the black water and holds, steady as a pointing finger, on a stretch of empty sea. Then the wet footprints start appearing at the tree line, each one full of black water that smells of lamp oil, and the museum's logbooks turn out to have pages razored out of November 1888, and Ray's own handwriting starts appearing in the nightly log with entries he does not remember writing. The things the lantern was built to warn ships about are coming ashore, and they are not strangers. They know his name, they know his daughter's childhood nickname, and they have been waiting for a Calloway to be the one holding the lamp key. Lantern Watch is built on the oldest lighthouse fear there is: that the light does not keep the dark out, it shows the dark the way in.