The Lighthouse Archive

Meg came into the pallet drop yard a few minutes after midnight, and the door rattled shut behind her and the sound rolled off the corrugated walls and came back to her like a second, slower knock. She was twenty-three years old and her birthday was in eight days, and she had the wooden coat hanger in her jacket pocket with her hand wrapped around it so tight the little brass hook had started to bite. The building was huge and mostly dark. There were pallets everywhere, stacked in towers taller than she was, and the aisles between the towers went back further than the light reached.

There was one light. It hung off a chain near the middle of the floor and under it a man was spraying down a ventilated bed with a high-pressure hose, and the noise of it filled the whole building, a flat steady hiss with water hammering off the metal slats.

She got close enough to see his face before he saw her, which was maybe rude, but the hose made it hard to announce yourself. He was tall, kind of wide in the shoulders, dark hair pushed back off his forehead, and he looked like he had been awake for a while, the way night shift people look, awake and faded at the same time. He was maybe thirty-one or so, a working man's face, not much going on in it.

He shut off the hose and looked at her.

"You're not the courier," he said.

"No," Meg said. "I'm Meg. My dad was the keeper at the lighthouse up the coast. He died in March."

The man set the hose down on the drain pan and wiped his hands on his coveralls, which were already wet, so the gesture accomplished nothing.

"Bradley," he said. "Soto. I do the beds."

"Okay," Meg said. "I know this is weird, coming in at midnight. The office said the yard is basically unstaffed after six, and I said that's fine, that's actually better for me, and the guy on the phone kind of laughed and said do whatever you want, nobody stops you."

"Nobody stops you," Bradley agreed.

"I'm here for the archive. The logbooks. My dad kept the lighthouse logs for thirty-one years, and the family has a deadline to claim his stored effects before the purge date, and the purge date is the day before my birthday, and I don't know, it's got this weight to it, you know? Like I have to get them out or they're gone forever and he's gone forever."

Bradley looked at her for a second and then pointed past her, back into the dark end of the building.

"They're back there," he said. "Corner stack, third row. They've been under a collapse since last winter. Pallet stack came down, nobody got hurt, nobody bothered to dig it out. The office told the family to send somebody, so you're somebody."

"Somebody," Meg said. "Yeah. That's me."

She walked where he pointed and he came along, slower than she walked, and she noticed he moved quiet for a big guy, like the floors didn't bother arguing with him. The stack he took her to was a bad one. Pallets had come down crooked, boards busted, nails sticking out, and the whole mess leaned against the wall like it had thought about going further and decided against it. She could see the corner of an oilcloth bundle jammed in a gap, gray-green and bound with cord.

"That's them," she said, and her voice cracked a little, and she pretended it didn't.

"That's them," Bradley said.

They stood there in the dark looking at it. Then Meg took the coat hanger out of her pocket because holding it made her feel less like she was talking to an empty building, and Bradley looked at it and then looked at her.

"Hotel hanger," he said.

"Hotel Estrella del Norte. It's burnt into the wood. My dad had it in his coat closet for as long as I can remember and nobody knew why. He never stayed at hotels. He said the hanger came to him and it was his now, and that was the whole conversation every time."

Bradley nodded like this was a normal thing to say to him at midnight in a pallet yard.

"You should know some things about this place," he said. "Before you dig."

"Okay."

"I moved here three years ago. First week I worked nights, a broom I put against a wall was on the other side of the building in the morning. Standing up. Leaning on a different wall. Second month, a whole pallet moved twelve feet in the night and there's no machine in this yard that moves pallets on its own, and I checked the tracks, there's no tracks. The office people know. They don't talk about it, but they know, and they schedule nobody here after six because of it, and they don't say that's why."

Meg turned the hanger over in her hands. It was smooth and dark, old wood, and the burnt letters were sharp and clean like they'd been done with a soldering iron by somebody careful.

"Things move," Bradley said. "In the dark spaces. Between the stacks. I hear it some nights, wood settling in a way wood doesn't settle. It's never touched me. It just wants you to know it's there, is the feeling I get."

"Okay," Meg said. "Well. My dad would've loved that. He was the kind of man who talked to his tools and kept a log of the weather and also of his dreams, separate log, and he'd have been out here with a folding chair waiting for your broom to walk."

"He sounds like a lot," Bradley said.

"He was a lot," Meg said, and laughed, and the laugh came out wet, and she wiped her face with the back of her hand and got pallet dust on her cheek and didn't notice.

They stood there a minute.

"So here's my situation," Bradley said finally. "I got eleven beds to do tonight and I do them by hand and it takes all night. I'll help you dig that stack out, and I mean actually help, I know how to strip a collapsed stack without bringing the rest of it down. But I can't lose my whole shift over it. You help me do beds while we're at it, feed me slats, hold the hose, whatever I need, and we'll get your books out by dawn."

"That's a deal," Meg said. "That's a great deal. I've been working here six months myself, loading trucks, so I'm not useless, and I'm honestly going a little crazy in the evenings and midnight is as good a time as any to be crazy in."

"Six months," Bradley said. "Huh. I haven't seen you."

"I load days."

"That explains it."

They walked back to his workstation and he handed her a pair of heavy work gloves off a nail and a set of coveralls that were too long in the legs and she rolled the cuffs up while he explained the bed cleaning, how the ventilated beds came in from the hospital supply route caked and gray, how the high-pressure hose stripped them clean, how you had to mind the angles or the water came back at you and hit you in the chest.

"Hold it like this," he said, showing her the grip on the wand. "Not too close. Let the water do it. And don't point it at me, and I won't point it at you."

"I would never," Meg said.

"You'd be surprised," he said, and turned the hose on, and the hiss filled the building again, and out in the dark, back where the collapsed stack leaned against the wall, something in the gaps between the pallets shifted its weight, slow and patient, the way wood does when it's not wood.

They did beds first, because Bradley said you start with the work you know and the dark can wait its turn, and Meg took that on faith and held the wand and got soaked once up the left arm when she forgot about the angles. It was good work, actually, the kind that empties your head out, gray cake coming off the slats in sheets and the runoff swirling down the floor drain in long ropes, and Bradley moved along the line with a scraper and didn't talk much but hummed sometimes, something low and tuneless, and the building felt almost friendly for a while. By two in the morning they had five beds done and he called a break, and they sat on an upturned pallet by the light of the one work lamp and ate the empanadas she'd brought in a paper bag, and he ate two and said they were good and she told him her aunt made them and he nodded like that explained the quality, which it sort of did.

Then they went to the stack.

It was worse up close than it had looked from across the building, a whole corner of pallets that had leaned and folded into itself last winter and just sat there since, nobody willing to be the guy who touched it, and Bradley walked around it twice with the lamp held up and pointed out the load lines and said okay, here's how we do this without dying, top layer first, pull toward us, never reach into a gap you can't see the bottom of. Meg said that last part sounded like advice from a horror movie and he said all good advice sounds like that eventually, and they started.

It went slow and it went loud, wood scraping wood and nails groaning, and twice the stack above them shifted a half inch and settled and they both stopped breathing until it stopped moving, and the third time it happened it didn't settle right away. It held. Bradley had his hand flat on a pallet and stood there listening and Meg watched his face change in the lamplight.

"That's not settling," he said quietly. "Settling goes down. That went sideways."

"Maybe it's just," Meg started, and stopped, because she didn't have an ending for that sentence, and the stack held its sideways lean for three more seconds and then let go all at once, dropping back with a bang that echoed off the corrugated walls and rolled away down the building, and somewhere past the far end of the rows, something answered it. One knock. Low and solid, like a fist on the inside of a door.

Bradley looked at her. "You heard that too, right."

"Yeah," Meg said. "I heard it."

"Okay," he said, and rubbed his palms on his thighs, and went back to work, faster now, like he wanted the job done more than he wanted to think about the sound, and Meg matched him, and by three they had the third row open.

The books were there, just like the manifest said, oilcloth bundles wedged flat between two whole pallets like somebody had built the stack around them on purpose, and Meg got the first one out and unwrapped it right there on the floor with her gloves off and her hands shaking a little. Her dad's handwriting filled the first page, the date and the weather and the wind in that narrow slanted script she'd know anywhere, and she made a sound she'd have been embarrassed about if anyone else had been there, but Bradley just stood back and gave her the minute, which she appreciated more than she could say to him.

She worked through the bundles one by one, counting, checking dates, and it was near four when she got to a logbook that was already open. Not bundled. Just open, face down in the stack like someone had set it aside mid-entry, and the oilcloth around it was darker than the rest, stained through in spots, and when she turned it over the page it fell open to was dated August of 1923.

"Bradley," she said. "Come look at this."

He came and crouched beside her, and the lamp threw their shadows big against the pallets, and she read the entry out loud because it seemed like the thing to do, like it had been waiting to be read.

*Signalman A. Chan did not report for the second watch. Lamp was found turning, wick trimmed, log up to date through midnight. Coast walked to the point and back twice. No tracks past the gate. Keeper's note: the tower was colder inside than out, and the stairs sounded like more than one man on them. Recommending transfer of remaining staff. Recommending they go tonight.*

"Huh," Bradley said.

"That's it. The entry ends there. The next entry is three days later and it's a new keeper confirming the transfer."

"Chan," Bradley said, trying the name out. "So a guy just walked off the point in 1923 and nobody found anything."

"Nobody found anything," Meg agreed, and then she felt it, and she stopped.

The hanger in her jacket pocket had gone warm. Not body warm. Warm like it had been sitting on a radiator, and she pulled it out and it was warm all over, both rails and the bar, and the burnt letters were almost too hot to touch where they were cut into the wood.

"Bradley. Touch this."

"Why would I touch that?"

"Just touch it."

He reached out and laid two fingers on the hanger and pulled them back fast, flinching like he'd grabbed a pan. "It's hot," he said, and then he frowned and touched it again, slower this time, holding his fingers there. "No. It's not hot, it's. It's pulsing. It's warm and it's pulsing, like a heartbeat but slow, like really slow, like something that doesn't need to beat very often."

Meg put her own fingers on it and tried to feel what he felt, and for her it was just warm, steady warm, but the way he said it made the hair on her arms stand up. "You can feel a pulse."

"I can feel a pulse," he said, and took his hand away and wiped it on his coveralls like the feeling would come off. "Meg. Why do you have this hanger. Really. Because hotel hangers don't do this, I don't care what hotel."

"I told you, it was my dad's, it came to him, he never said how."

"My broom came to a different wall," Bradley said. "That's what things do here. They come to places. They don't come to people." He looked at the hanger, and then at the stack they'd opened, and then at the open logbook on the floor between them