The lighthouse was a wound on the coast, a raw, stone pillar against a sky the color of a fresh bruise. Elara watched it from her kitchen window, a beacon of failed hope in a town that had forgotten how to hope at all. Her husband, Silas, was a creature of the sea, pulled by its relentless tide and anchored by a job he could no longer stand. But for the last week, his obsession had been with the lighthouse's strange new light. Not the slow, steady flash it was famous for, but a frantic, off-beat pattern that seemed to have no earthly purpose."The old-timers say it's a message," he'd said, tracing the pattern with a finger on the condensation-clouded glass.
"From the deep." He'd said it as a joke, but his eyes held a feverish glint she'd never seen before. He began bringing home old charts and forgotten nautical logs, poring over them under the harsh kitchen light. He saw patterns in the numbers, hidden meanings in the faded ink, growing thinner and paler with each passing day.The night he disappeared, the lighthouse light went dead. Elara hadn't been worried at first. Silas often went on solitary walks to the bluffs, returning with salt-caked hair and a distant look in his eyes. She left a plate of food for him, but it grew cold, and then colder. When morning came, she found his worn oilskin coat on the kitchen chair, but no trace of him.She called the harbor master, who grumbled about a faulty bulb, about the sea taking what it was owed.
The police offered the hollow reassurance that she should wait. But the tide didn't bring him back, and the town's whispers became a constant, low drone, a new sound to haunt her.That night, the lighthouse flickered back to life, but with a new, terrifying message. Not light and dark, but long, frantic flashes against the oppressive gloom. It was a pattern of Morse code, a language Elara knew from her father, a fisherman now long gone himself. She grabbed her binoculars, her hands shaking, and pointed them at the distant tower. She deciphered the first phrase, the words burning themselves onto her mind as if with a branding iron: "I am hungry."Her blood ran cold. She knew, with a primal certainty that bypassed all reason, that it wasn't Silas sending the message. Not anymore.She watched, frozen, as the pattern continued, the rhythm of the light a frantic, grasping thing against the night.
The next phrase came into focus, and her stomach clenched with a nausea that threatened to consume her."I am here," the light blinked.Elara backed away from the window, her heart a trapped bird in her chest. The whispering wind outside seemed to carry a new sound now, a thin, hungry whine that coiled around her house. She knew what it was. It wasn't the sea taking him. It was the sea giving something back.With a sudden, sickening jolt, the light changed again. It was faster now, a frenzied Morse code that wasn't a message at all, but a demand. ''
The light was pounding against the glass, and the sound of the waves on the shore seemed to be growing closer, louder.She looked at her reflection in the dark kitchen window, and for a moment, her own face was obscured. Behind her, in the dark corners of the room, a shadow shifted. It wasn't the darkness of night, but a living, breathing absence of light. A voice, thin and wet, like something dragged up from the deep, echoed in the room."I am here now," it whispered, and the lighthouse blinked its final, desperate message before going dark forever.