Beacon on the Edge of Nowhere

The morning’s as gloomy as it always is. Heavy air, heavy fog, and a heavy general malaise. Nothing much changes on the edge of nowhere.

That’s not hyperbole or an exaggeration. I literally live right at the very edge of what’s known. Here, at the very precipice of the Gloom, we are as far from the civilized world as anyone has ever been.

Thus, “the edge of nowhere”.

Fishing rod in hand, I step out of my door, hinges creaking loudly in the stillness of the street. My boots squelch and slide in the mud. It’s always muddy here.

Walking the streets of the town is a challenge in itself, even though there’s barely five streets in all. The last is three rickety structures laid out in a barely straight line. Trying to slog your way through is a constant test of balance and awareness.

Down at the waterfront, the only difference is instead of mud, there’s also gravel. Every step has a crunch to it that feels loud as a gunshot in the stillness. Lazy waves crawl up the shoreline, not powerful enough to create foam and not strong enough to creep very far before retreating back to sea. There are no birds, no crabs, nothing. Nothing but a line of footprints that stretch behind me.

A dead beach.

I trudge toward the dock. It’s actually a sturdy piece of carpentry, but time and the elements have worn it down. It’s nothing fancy, just a long length of planks hammered together, stretching out into the grim gray expanse of the Gloom, right to the edge of disappearing.

The Gloom is unending. It is eternal and oppressive, yet a strange comfort in its constant presence. Every day, I shuffle my way down the dock, rod strung and ready to cast out into the murk, all in the faint hope that maybe I’ll catch something other than slime-covered mud suckers.

Today, today’s the day. I can feel it. My grandfather’s eternal words of optimism are poison and medicine all in one.

This far out on the dock, all that’s visible of the shoreline is a dark smudge. The water is almost black and still as a sheet of glass.

As I reach the end of the dock, I take a moment to marvel at the stone monolith standing tall, reaching out from the dark water, the dock built around it. It’s a dark, massive thing, at least three times as tall as it is wide; twenty men couldn’t even reach all the way around it. While the dock looks weathered and beaten, the smooth angles and planes of the pillar appear untouched and pristine, dark as a starless night.

Everyone else seems to have forgotten it even exists, or they pretend that it doesn’t exist. It’s painful when hope doesn’t produce fruit.

The Beacon is still lit, the edges of flame dancing just in view of the upper lip of the bowl on top. No one has been able to explain how the fire still burns, and how it’s burned for as long as the town can remember. My grandparents’ grandparents said it burned then.

We can’t see how. It’s too smooth to climb and too hard to damage. People have tried since people were here. Less so in recent times. Why bother? As far as I know, I’m the only person who even comes out here anymore.

Sitting on the edge of the dock, I cast out my line. The hook and sinker send ripples through the water, disrupting the stillness.

And so I wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Time blurs together this close to the Gloom, and the quiet doesn’t fill the mind with much but emptiness. Left alone for long enough, the mind starts to wander. It begins to ask questions. Questions you don’t always have the answer to.

Or you might not want the answer too.

However hard I try not to think of it, my attempts just bring me there quicker.

Is there anything out there?

That question is a good way to wind up dead.

The question of what hides beyond the Gloom is as old as the Beacon itself. No one knows. People have tried to find out in the past, taking boats into the fog. There was even a ship that went out a hundred years ago. Or so they say.

Regardless, it always ends the same, with no one returning from the mists. Without a scream, a raised word, or a whisper, they all found themselves swallowed by the Gloom.

My father was the last one to try. It was after my grandfather died. He told me that he was going to find the other side of the Gloom. Said he was certain he had seen something in the Gloom. Something that called to him, that demanded to be followed. Something otherworldly that could finally answer all the questions. I’m pretty sure he was just tired of trying to be a fisherman.

So he set off in a dinghy with a red sail, made from our old bedsheets. He never came back.

That was ten years ago. We haven’t built a boat since.

What possesses a person to go any further into this unknown? What did he think he saw? I’ve wondered about it myself. In the safety of my home, of course. Dreaming here on the dock is dangerous. The mysteries of the dark waters are just one step away.

Just one step.

The line pulls taunt, tugging lightly, and I snap my wrist up and feel the hook set. There’s a moment of fight, but it’s sluggish and half hearted. Like it already knows the fight is futile.

The water ripples as a small, scaly body is pulled through the surface, wriggling and dripping mud. Barely longer than my hand, with aging scales and a tattered tail that barely flops in a tired attempt to live, it’s a sad excuse for a fish. It’s probably sick, given how many scales are missing, and how pale and tattered the remaining ones are.

This has been happening more and more often. Seven times out of ten, dying and diseased fish are all I seem to catch.

I pull out the hook and toss the fish back. It makes the smallest of splashes.

Right next to a partially submerged face with a pair of dark eyes.

The sound I make is too shrill and cracked to be a scream. I scramble back, only to slip and fall on the slick wood.

Too quick to be human, the face and the body it’s attached to is standing on the dock in front of me, inky black hair falling in waves around a pale face. She looks barely older than fifteen years old, a girl right on the cusp of being labeled a woman. Her clothes are dark and tattered and crusted with salt. Blue lips are set in a firm line, her skin possessed of the luminous pallor of a drowning victim.

Yet there is no malice in her eyes. Despite the deathliness of her entire countenance, her eyes are vibrant and alive, yet still subdued. They swim with an almost palpable regret and loneliness.

She just stands there. Watching. Dripping on the dock. No other sounds ring out except a gentle rustling of the wind and the pounding of my heart in my ears.

The flame atop the Beacon suddenly flares up, a spout of burning blue rising a hundred feet in the air, booming with a sudden flare of life that I can feel the heat from here. Light slices through the fog, destroying the veil that stretches across the waters.

The girl turns as the curtain dissolves, the murk beginning to consolidate and shapes forming in the mist. The shapes grow more and more detailed until a fleet of boats creeps into the light. There are tiny rowboats, sailboats with dark sails, and there’s even a full three masted ship with seaweed in the rigging and a headless figurehead.

In all of them were people, dressed in threadbare rags that could barely be considered clothes, their shoulders hunched and weary, lightly bobbing up and down with the subtle waves. Bloated and blue, all of them peered back with similar pale eyes, bright like lanterns in the dimness, awash with lament.

A low melody begins to weave its way across the water as the people on board the boats begin to sing. I’ve never heard anything so beautiful. It’s a mournful sound, no words, no real structure, but it grows and resonates with hypnotic, otherworldly allure.

The girl turns back and extends her hand, an expectant look in her eye.

Don’t touch me! The words won’t come out. I don’t obey them.

Her fingers are frigid as she hauls me up with no effort. Once I'm standing, she turns and drops ten feet off the dock into a waiting rowboat. The tiny vessel barely rocks as she lands without a sound.

“Wait!” I finally manage to eke out. She looks up as the person manning the oars begins rowing them back towards the collection of boats.

“Who are you?” The question seems so small when I ask it. So underwhelming and unsatisfactory. Nothing she can say will begin to matter. Will it?

Her lips stay closed, every second carrying her further from the dock and further into the Gloom. The mists are beginning to creep back, swallowing the boats back into the murk like they were never there.

Are they actually there?

“Please, tell me. Are you real?” I ask. “Are you from beyond the Gloom?”

She says nothing, her lips curling up in a half smile.

I reach my hand out. “What’s out there?”

She chuckles. “Come and look.” Her voice is softer than a whisper and before she can say another word the fog takes her, her pale eyes vanishing a second later.

One by one the other boats are surrounded by the fog as the flame atop the beacon dwindles and fades to its earlier spark. Only one boat is left now. The one captaining it drops the sail, the red folds of cloth unfurling in the nonexistent wind.

I blink and there is nothing there.

Only the Gloom.

Only the Beacon. On the edge of nowhere and somewhere.

What is that somewhere? I need to know.

I need a boat.