The Last Lightkeeper

The wind carried salt and silence to the cliffs of Wraithmoor. For over a century, the lighthouse had stood like a spine against the ocean, casting its beam through fog and storm. Now, it was obsolete—a relic from a time before satellites, drones, and automated beacons. But there was still one man inside it.

Thomas Graye, age seventy-three, was the last lightkeeper.

He had lived at Wraithmoor Lighthouse for forty-one years. A tall man turned slightly crooked by time, Thomas wore a heavy wool coat year-round and still lit the lantern by hand, though the mechanism had long since been modernized. The lighthouse authority had given him six months' notice, a generous offer in an impatient world. His replacement was a solar-powered tower fifteen miles down the coast. No need for keepers now.

He stayed past his farewell date. Nobody checked. Nobody came.

Each night, Thomas climbed the spiral stairs, one slow step after another, to tend to the lamp. He would pause at the gallery window, looking out to sea, remembering the voices on the radio, the ships that once hailed him, the fisherman who left baskets of mackerel on the steps in thanks.

Now, the radio was quiet. The sea, however, was not.

One evening, thick fog rolled in—dense, unnatural. It muffled the cry of gulls and swallowed the horizon. Thomas lit the lamp anyway, though no vessels had passed for days. He felt it again—that odd stillness, like the world was holding its breath.

Then he heard the bell.

Not the modern foghorn on the rocks below, but the old bell buoy that had been removed twenty years ago. It clanged once, then again. A sound heavy with rust and memory.

Thomas leaned into the night. Below, through a break in the mist, he saw a ship.

It was a long, low silhouette, black as ink, with a single mast and tattered sails. No modern vessel, and no name on its hull. Just drifting closer.

He watched, unable to move. He'd read tales like this as a boy—ghost ships, revenants of drowned crews, the sea reclaiming its own.

But the ship passed silently, making for the rocks.

Acting on instinct older than thought, Thomas turned the lamp. Not mechanically—he physically rotated it by hand, angling the light beam to guide the ship clear of the shoals.

The moment the light struck the hull, the ship stopped. Then, impossibly, it began to turn.

No crew was visible. No engine, no wake. Just the groan of timbers and the creak of ropes. It moved like it remembered what it was to sail.

Thomas watched it vanish into the fog.

By dawn, the mist had cleared. No wreckage. No sails. Only silence and sea.

He never spoke of it. Who would believe him? He wasn’t sure he believed it himself.

But that night, and every night after, Thomas climbed the tower. The world had moved on, but the sea still needed watching.

And he would watch.

Until the light went out.