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In a village on the Breton coast is a lighthouse emerging from the ruin of a monastery.
The ruin and lighthouse are on a rocky outcropping, in a spot with rapidly changing weather that has needed a lighthouse for as long as there have been sailors. Someone needed to keep the fire burning, and for a while the best way to ensure this work got done was to enlist a community of monks. They were used to interrupting their sleep to pray, and it was only a little harder to go up the stairs of the light instead, and spend a few hours tending the lamp.
That, at least, was the idea. But it must have been a great deal harder, after all, because as the years went by, fewer and fewer novices discovered they had a vocation to spend their midnights climbing narrow stairs to tend a flame in a room filled with the uniquely pungent smoke of fish oil and rapeseed oil burned together. After a few decades the monastic community fell below the required size to sustain itself. A layman was hired to care for the light; the village went back to attending mass at the parish church; and the monastery fell into disrepair and ruin, as the hungry eighteenth century gave way to the turbulent nineteenth and the metal of the roof was carried off for other uses.
So for many years there was a man at the lighthouse, but the stories that have lasted from that period of the place’s history are not about him but about the shades of the monastery. It was a little surprising, given how short a time the monks had stayed, that any of them had the opportunity to die there. But at least one must have done so, as the lighthouse was clearly haunted. Everyone knows that monks make for pernicious ghosts, annoyed not to be in heaven and determined to make it everyone else’s problem. Attempts to lay the lighthouse ghost to rest with prayers and holy water were unsuccessful; it stuck around for decades, spoiling the food in the kitchen before its time and slamming doors shut with a keeeerimp just loud enough to give warning and just quick enough that the warning was useless.
That keeper eventually gave up, scraping the dust off his feet as he left, and no one has heard from him since. That was when Tifenn came to the light.
The village was surprised to get a woman lighthouse keeper, but her work ethic was strong and her references excellent, and so no one wished to tell her about the ghost. Tifenn found out about it by herself, directly upon moving in. The spoiled food and slamming doors persisted, and the whistling of the wind around the lighthouse came at all hours and from all directions, even when the day was calm. Nothing very dangerous happened, but life was a string of inconveniences.
She attempted to carry on and ignore it. Some ghosts will give up if you do that, discouraged not to have made an impression, convinced they have been forgotten. This one redoubled its efforts. After weeks of being ignored, it started to interfere with the fire. There had been talk of electrifying the light, but in the meantime Tifenn burned kerosene, and on this night it was volatile in a way kerosene isn’t supposed to be—burning low, smoking, and even throwing off sparks. It was when of these landed on Tifenn’s skirt and she had to quickly smother it that she reached the limits of her tolerance.
“What do you want?” she shrieked, abandoned by her usual calm.
The wind had been tearing around the lighthouse and making a huge gusting, whistling noise, but after she spoke there was a moment of quiet, as if the world were gathering its thoughts. Tifenn huffed, not ready to stop being angry, and set the room and the fire to rights.
She was allowed a few quiet days after that. The incident with the spark had frightened her a little, and she was careful to keep her hand on the banister when going up and down stairs, to thoroughly bank her house fire at night and latch her windows securely when closing them against the rain.
Her answer came quietly and in pieces, starting early one morning when she was putting the kettle on the stove and noticing the quiet whistle of wind against her windows. One of the window latches rattled itself a little while the others were still—a quiet click-click-click. Tifenn waited, thinking, long enough for the rattling to stop and then, tentatively, to start again.
“All right,” she said. “We can try something. If you behave. If you don’t throw any more fire at me.”
The rattling stopped again and then, just to her right, the scarf she had left hanging on a hook by the door lifted itself as if in a tiny, localized breeze.
Tifenn frowned. She lifted up the scarf and looked at it—a plain piece of dark cloth, something she wrapped around her hair when going out in bad weather. She couldn’t see anything meaningful about it.
“If you want to lead me somewhere, you’ll have to give me a minute,” she said firmly, and she stayed in the kitchen until she had fortified herself with a cup of tea and some bread and jam. The kitchen remained calm; her tea cooled itself at only its usual pace. On the scale established by her time here, this was a victory.
Tifenn placed her empty tea cup back on its saucer, stood up, and brushed her hands down her skirts. “All right. Show me.”
There was a long silence, as of someone unsure what to do or say next, and then there came the ringing of a bell, from the direction of the monastery church adjacent to her house.
Tifenn muttered something under her breath about the irritating persistence of ghost monks and went out to follow the sound of the bell.
The monastery was largely a ruin, roofless, weathered. But the chapel was intact. It was dim in there, and dusty. Tifenn put her hands on her hips and surveyed the scene. The thick stone of the walls dampened the sound of wind from outside, and the place had a damp coolness like the inside of a jam cellar.
Like a cellar, too, this place was preserving something. Tifenn looked around, letting her eyes adjust to the dim, and saw that the chapel, though mostly bare, had a number of wooden ships hanging from the high ceiling. They even seemed to be outfitted with sails, although those might have been cobwebs. There was a ship’s bell mounted on a wall near the altar—that must have been the bell she heard, and as she looked at it she saw that the rope hanging from its clapper was still swaying a bit.
“Who made these?” she said aloud, but that wasn’t the kind of question she could expect a ghost to answer. The only logical answer was that it had been one of her predecessors, some lonely man at the lighthouse filling his time with building models.
“Do you...like these?” she asked, trying to feel her way from her desperate “what do you want?” to an answer. “Do you want me to do something to them?”
A wind curled around the sanctuary, swaying the model ships on their ropes and creating just a little echo of a sound in the ship’s bell.
“All right,” she said generously, “I will give you some time to think about it.” She spent the day on laundry, scrubbing and wringing out her sheets and shifts, and brought them into the chapel to dry. Normally she hung a line outside, but it looked like rain, and she was taking a chance that the ghost would be more gratified by her taking an interest in this place than shocked at her sacrilege. Surely the place had been deconsecrated when the monks left. She supposed that it would be wise to consult the parish priest on that question, but that would require time away from the light.
The sheets danced a little on the line. Perhaps there was a draft in here; perhaps the ghost liked having them. They filled the nave with a light, astringent scent of soap and made the place seem a little more alive.
*
That night she dreamed of hauling a long rope, eager to retrieve the precious thing at the end of it. She awoke full of purpose, but with a doubt in her mind. If the dream had come from the ghost, it didn’t suggest that it was a monk haunting the light. Perhaps a sailor who died near this shore?
*
She came back to the chapel for her dry laundry and thought that something had blown off the line, until she realized it wasn’t one of her belongings after all but a large, fine piece of lace, draped over something close to the altar. Somehow she had missed it the previous day—perhaps because the light had been too dim, perhaps because she was distracted by the ships. She walked up the aisle, slowly enough to stop if given a sign, and grasped a part of the lace that didn’t seem too delicate to pull it up and away. The lace revealed a glass dome with another model ship underneath it, a three-masted specimen created with an exquisite level of detail.
“Is this important?” she asked, so softly that the ghost might not hear her. She wasn’t sure how that worked. She admired the ship for a long moment, noting the tiny face carved onto the mermaid figure at the prow, the rows of belaying pins, the delicate lines of shadow laid down by the ropes.
The air was still and heavy while she stood there, and when she looked up, a corner of one of her sheets was lifting, as if beckoning her back. She unpinned and folded her laundry and went back to the day’s work.
*
That night she dreamed of being in the ocean during a storm, trying to fight her way to safety, to where she could breathe. She wasn’t sure what was air and what was water, where it would be safe to take a breath.
*
The next morning, after the light was tended, she returned to the chapel with a feather duster and a bucket of rags. She hung one of the rags on the clothesline and said aloud, “I thought it would be useful to keep one here, for signaling.”
She took a rag to the glass dome and polished it. It didn’t need much cleaning, but she thought it deserved some attention.
The ships not under glass were dustier, and she gave them lengthier attention, knocking off as much dust as she could with the feather duster and then setting to the details with the rags. A true deep clean on one of these would want more detailed tools, perhaps a fine paintbrush if she could find one. The air fluttered around her in a freshening breeze, taking away the dust as she brushed it off the model.
*
She dreamt of being on deck during a storm, hurled against the rail and fighting to keep her footing. She fought her way through to wakefulness and wiped her face clean before she could determine if it was sweat, or tears, or blood.
*
“You’re frightening me,” she said the next morning. She had brought her teacup into the chapel but not her cleaning tools. “Are you giving me these dreams? I can’t afford to fear the ocean.”
The breeze blew around the chapel so rapidly that the rag she had left on the line blew sideways and came loose from one of its clothespins.
“I have work here,” she said. “I didn’t come to wait upon you.”
There was a low wind around her feet, which seemed like it might indicate an apologetic, groveling posture but also felt a little like an undertow trying to carry her away from the shore. “I have to tend the light,” she said, and she did not return to the chapel for the rest of the day.
*
The dream of drowning returned. It returned night after night, changing in particulars but not in essence. Waking in the middle of the night she had no composure. “STOP,” she cried on the third night. “This is too much. Are you trying to chase me away?”
There was no response—what response could she have expected, in the close confinement of her bedroom?
But in her waking life, the ghost did not seem to be trying to frighten or harm her. On the contrary, it was easier than ever to get her woodstove going in the morning, and the lighthouse flame produced little smoke. She even seemed to be luckier than usual, finding dropped pins more easily and—though this was outside what she had assumed to be the ghost’s reach—arriving at the bakery just as the newest warm loaves were ready to sell.
A week after she began having the drowning dream, she returned to the chapel with duster, rags, and a bucket of soapy water. “I am willing to finish the work,” she said. “Try to tell me if I’m doing something wrong.”
She cleaned the whole chapel, dusting the pews and the little alcoves, clearing away the cobwebs from the statue of the virgin, sweeping and scrubbing the floor. The ghost gave no obvious signal.
The next day she came back with a paintbrush she had found in the village, a collection of cotton swabs, and a set of tools, and set to cleaning one of the ships, one at full sail. She brushed the dust out from the crevices, using a dampened swab where it was sticky. After working for at least an hour she blew across the deck, looking to see if any more dust came loose. A little bit did, but that was less important than the wind that blew up behind her and filled up the ship’s sails.
“This one?” she said, hopeful and a little desperate. “Is this model important?”
The wind died maddeningly down.
*
She dreamed again of being submerged, and then she dreamed of salvation: a buoy, a rope, an extended hand. She tried to reach it, swimming hard, but when she grew close she was struck with a bone-deep fear.This was not safety. If she let herself be hauled up, she would never get home.
*
The lighthouse required no less attention than ever, so Tifenn could not dedicate herself entirely to the contents of the chapel. But she kept going back, and the ghost kept sending signs, bigger but no clearer. The day that snow momentarily fell from the ceiling of the chapel, she asked aloud, “Are you getting stronger? I thought the goal with ghosts was to lay them to rest.”
The wind picked up her hair and swirled the snow around her.
*
She dreamed again of swimming toward a rope and then realizing it was a trap, of trying to get away, of being drawn against her will out of the storm and the water.
She dreamed again of hauling up the rope, desperate for what was to be found at the end; and she succeeded, and pulled the thing up, and was met with fury, with teeth, claws, screaming. She dreamed of falling.
*
“Is there more than one of you?” she asked the chapel, and, softer, “What did you do to one another?”
*
The last ship she cleaned was not outstanding in any obvious way. Unlike the big model under the glass dome, it had sails; unlike the one that had summoned the wind, its sails were furled. The most unusual thing about it was that it had been damaged somehow. Tifenn investigated the dent in the hull: it looked as if it had been struck from the outside, as if someone had come into the chapel and thrown a rock at it where it hung.
She contemplated the hull for a while, and then asked, “Is it all right if I take this away?”
The next time she went into the village, she brought the ship with her and had a quiet conference with the person at the shipyard who seemed the least likely to laugh at her. He did look startled, but lighthouse keepers are generally assumed to harbor a little eccentricity, and she treated the whole interaction with too solid an earnestness to be dismissed. He gave her some advice, some scraps, and some wood glue.
She made the repair carefully, allowing for both the drying time of the glue and possible interruptions by the ghosts, and when it was done she painted over the entire hull, making it clean and uniform.
That night a storm blew up, but the lighthouse fire burned high and bright, and when the rain was over she could see the stars dancing.
*
The only thing to do with a ship, once it’s seaworthy, is to sail it.
Tifenn allowed for the possibility that she was mistaken. She walked it down to the shore slowly, deliberately, with time for a wind or a dislodged rock to stop her. She walked past the men on the shore, who watched her curiously. A lighthouse keeper is allowed some eccentricities. She walked through the shallow rising tide with the ship in her arms and set it on the water where it was deep enough to float.
She took a breath, two, three, waiting to see if anything would happen. She was prepared to have misunderstood. She would take the model ship back to the lighthouse and the chapel if need be.
She was just at the point of deciding to go back when the wind curled round her again, more closely than usual, and the little sails of the ship unfurled themselves. The ship lifted as the tide lapped in, and after it had bobbed up and down a few times the wind caught it, filled it, turned it. Tifenn stayed still as the tide came in and the ship, impossibly, went out.