The Second Light

Halloran had kept the Vela light for nineteen years, and in that time the coast had never lied to him.

On the ninth of March it lied.

There was a second light burning four miles north, steady as a heartbeat, in a place where the charts showed nothing but wet rock and the wreck of the Ardent. He watched it for an hour before he wrote anything down, because a keeper who reports what cannot exist is a keeper who is replaced.

At dawn it was gone. At dusk it came back.