The Keeper's Light

Source written for Revision Library (original, copyright-free). Fictional narrative created for 11+ comprehension practice.

Amara Okafor had promised herself she would not be afraid of the lighthouse, not today. Yet as she climbed the last few steps of the cliff path, the white tower seemed to lean over her like a question she could not answer.

'You are sure it is empty?' she called back to her cousin, Rhys, who was struggling with the picnic bag some way behind.

'Empty since 1987,' he puffed. 'Grandad said the keeper just vanished one winter. Left his boots by the door and never came back for them.'

Amara did not like the sound of that at all, but she kept walking. The wind off the North Sea tugged at her coat and filled her ears with a low, steady roar, as though the water itself were breathing. Above her, gulls wheeled and cried, sharp as knives against the grey sky.

The lighthouse door hung crooked on one rusted hinge. Amara pushed it, and it groaned open with a sound like an old man clearing his throat. Inside, the air was cold and smelled of salt and something else, something green and forgotten, like the inside of a shell.

'Race you to the top,' said Rhys, dropping the picnic bag with a thud and darting past her onto the spiral staircase.

Amara hesitated at the bottom step. The staircase curled upward into darkness, iron rail cold beneath her palm. Something about the silence pressed on her chest, heavy as a held breath. Still, she would not be the one left behind. She began to climb.

Round and round the stairs wound, past a narrow window here, a peeling poster there, faded so much that only the ghost of red letters remained: DANGER, it seemed to say, or perhaps DO NOT. Amara's footsteps echoed strangely, doubling and trebling until it sounded as though a whole crowd climbed with her.

At the top, Rhys stood at the great glass lantern room, his breath fogging the salt streaked panes. 'Come and see,' he said, and his voice had gone quiet in a way that was not like him at all.

Amara joined him at the glass. Below, the sea stretched grey and enormous, folding over itself in slow, patient waves. The old lens of the lighthouse still stood in the centre of the room, an immense structure of glass rings, dusty and cracked, but somehow still catching what little light there was and scattering it into a hundred small rainbows across the floor.

'There,' Rhys whispered, pointing.

On the dusty floorboards beside the lens sat a pair of boots, cracked with age, laces long since rotted to threads. Beside them, half buried in dust, lay an open logbook, its pages rippled with damp. Amara crouched down, hardly daring to breathe, and read the last entry, written in careful, looping handwriting.

15th November. Storm still rising. Light holding, just. If anyone reads this, tell my sister the garden needs pruning before frost. I will not leave my post while the light still turns.

There was no entry after that.

Amara sat back on her heels. Outside, the wind had risen, and the old lens gave a faint, complaining creak, as though it remembered turning once, long ago, for a keeper who never came back down.

'Do you think he's still here?' Rhys asked, and for once he was not joking.

Amara looked at the boots, empty and waiting by the door, and did not answer straight away. Then she reached out and, very gently, turned the great lens a single inch, so that for a moment the whole room span with scattered, trembling light.

'I think,' she said slowly, 'that some lights are not meant to go out.'