The Silent Tide

"The past never drowns quietly." Clara M. Ellis

She’d outrun every ghost. Until now. Margo, a reclusive lighthouse keeper, had guarded the cliffs of Blackspire Point for decades. The crash of waves and the shriek of gulls were her only companions until the fog rolled in. Thick, suffocating, it carried a salt-tinged whisper she couldn’t place.

The weather station crackled: “Coastal surge warning evacuate immediately.” Margo snorted, slamming the receiver down. She’d weathered hurricanes, rogue tides, even the Great Flood of 78's. But her hand trembled as she lit the lantern. The beam sliced through the gloom, revealing nothing. Or so she told herself.

The tide swelled, clawing at the rocks below. Strange noises seeped through the stone walls a child’s laughter, a piano’s broken chord. Margo chalked it up to the wind. Always the wind.

A wave shattered the generator. Darkness swallowed the tower. In the blackness, a figure materialized at the foot of the stairs a girl in a rain-soaked dress, clutching a sodden teddy bear.

“You promised you’d come back.”

Margo froze. The voice was hers. Seven years old, trembling, waiting on a porch that no longer existed.

“You’re not real,” she hissed, backing into the wall. The girl stepped forward, seawater pooling at her feet.

“You left me here. You left us all.”

The lighthouse shuddered. Margo’s breath hitched. She’d buried those memories in driftwood and whiskey. The girl’s eyes her eyes glinted with accusation.

Outside, the sea roared like a beast unchained.

Memories surged: her mother’s empty pill bottles, her father’s fists, the car ride she’d fled at sixteen. The girl reached out, dripping and desperate.

“It’s not too late. Let me go.”

Margo lunged for the stairs, but the door slammed shut. Saltwater gushed through cracks, ankle-deep, then knee-deep. The girl vanished, leaving only the teddy bear floating in the brine.

At dawn, the coast guard found the lighthouse battered but intact. No bodies. No survivors. Just a rusted locket in the tide pool, its photo faded to ghosts.

Margo had stayed. The sea, they said, remembers what the land forgets.