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      THE BEACON: A 9 Part Novella

From Dallas Tanner, author of "The Shroud" & "The Cryptids Trilogy", comes the tale of one man's search for meaning and survival, when he finds himself alone and stranded hundreds of miles from shore. On his final watch as the last lighthouse keeper in a world of GPS and global communications, a seismic upheaval unleashes a tsunami that devastates North America and Europe. With no boat and his radio reduced to reception only, all he can do is tend the only beacon left to all the world, and hope someone answers its desperate call. Look for new episodes each Sunday evening, with a Podcast to follow its completion.

Part 1: The End

This is a story about mermaids, pirates, and lost boys. It is a tale about an island in the middle of nowhere; but this is no Neverland, and I am not Peter Pan. It begins at the end, in the final moments of my life. It is no journal, so I beg your pardon if any details are overlooked, or left out. I suppose you could call it the fleeting collection of memories of thoughts and deeds that stand out most in the recollection of an otherwise ordinary and mundane existence.

For a boat is coming, you see; a ship approaching carrying men, women, and children I will never truly see, or come to know. Even after all this time, in isolation over years as perhaps the last lighthouse keeper in all the world, I am drawn, even compelled to dispatch my duties, at the risk of life and limb. You see, the world as I ever knew it, and for all I know, everyone I ever loved along with it, was destroyed before I was retired from my duties.

How did I come to such a sad state of affairs, you may well ask, and rightly so? I suppose you could say it began for me 57 years ago, with a love of the sea instilled in me by my lobster boat captain father, at the very moment of my birth. Strange, that the same compunction and predisposition motivates me now, in a final act for which any sane or rational human being would think me mad.

Unfortunately, the only people I have come across in the past three years, since my remarkable ordeal began, were far more insane than I shall ever be. Perhaps that is for the good; but what I know I must now do, for the sake of those passengers on the ocean liner fast appearing over the crest of storm-tossed sea, I do of my own free will and volition. If I am remembered at all afterward, let it be for what I endured, and sacrificed myself in their behalf.

Why should you care, inasmuch that I have yet to give you my name?

 Then, let me finish with that innocuous piece of information, such that by the end of my brief discourse, it holds any more meaning to you. I only ask in return that you forgive me, should my strength of conviction fail me, or my resolution to act waver. I am unique only because I am a lighthouse keeper, you see, as I mentioned before. That I should consider myself the only one left is not by desire or necessity, but rather by the decree and will of fate, destiny, and perhaps even God himself.

Gone are the days of the civilian lighthouse keeper, who worked in the United States for the U.S. Coast Guard, or its equivalent, around the world. One by one, these beacons of hope and light were extinguished, their lanterns oiled and maintained by volunteers, who acted only thereafter as tour guides. Because I took retirement, rather surrender my commission, I was granted special permission to become perhaps the last of my singular profession.

Since Ptolemy authorized the building of the Pharos in 290 B.C., which when completed 20 years later became the Lighthouse at Alexandria and one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, there has never been an age without some incarnation of these coastline navigational towers. Built on harbors, islands and beaches, or perhaps a craggy promontory offshore as was mine, they acted as guideposts to seafaring folk of the shores they neared. The purpose was sometimes to direct them in properly, should the fog grow thick around them. Others, to ward them off before they crashed on the rocks, as from a night squall.

It was strangely fitting then, that I should be seeking to do both, at this late hour…

Three years ago, I was given the unsavory news that budget cuts, and the advent of global communications had rendered my services obsolete. The world no longer had any need for line of sight direction, as had been provided by lighthouses in England since 1698, and the United States since 1716. Satellite telemetry now monitored buoys maintained offshore, by the same Coast Guard, which had closed down all other lighthouses before mine. My superiors had delayed my decommission until last almost as a professional courtesy, given my years of service. I had been credited with saving the lives of over thirty-five men and women.

Technically, that number should be five times that many and more, considering that the captain onboard a U.S. naval destroyer once argued with me that I needed to vary my course and let him pass. Fortunately, his assertion that he outranked me carried little weight, when compared to the enormity of his peril, when it finally became clear to him that I was adamant. The land behind me was not to be breached by any vessel.

Still, I approached that final night, before I was to relinquish my authority, snuff out the Beacon Point lighthouse forever, with less trepidation, and regret than I have, even now. I would set my life to no other purpose than to see that lighthouse station 23, built in 1923 and refurbished in 1981, was given its due in history. It had already been nearly two decades, since they replaced my welcome boat ride to the island of stone, with a narrow pier extending out nearly of a quarter mile from the land.

I am a sailor who longed only for the sea as a companion, although I had not been aboard a true ship for the Coast Guard since I was a midshipman, in my early thirties. For the past twenty-five years, I had been here, and here I would remain it seems, to the last of my days. Although the last three years had been the only ones in which I came to curse my forced solitude, I had a chance to make up for all I had experienced, during that time.

I could make a difference now, having failed in my last duty on the night the world ended for us all. Now, I am by no means a geologist, or one given to any claim of how it is possible for the land to overcome the sea. All I know is that on that fateful night, I climbed the winding cast iron staircase with its 157 steps, up nine stories to the Lantern Room. Other than a shrouding fog, which crept over the ocean and would not be moved by the waves or breezes that lifted the gulls just out of their reach, nothing was amiss or out of place.

 I knew this lighthouse like the back of my hand, as the only home I had ever truly known. I ran away as a child from a family by turns abusive and dysfunctional; they caught me all but once. When I was seventeen, I lied that I was out of school, and forged my father’s signature, granting me the opportunity to join the service. Odd as it may seem, I could not get a sense of the vastness of the deep, without contemplating it from the shore.

So, after 15 years, I put in for the assignment that would change my life forever; and now, hopefully, yours, and the men and women who even now unknowingly reach out for what little aid I have left to offer them. The Beacon Point lighthouse stood 93.7 feet in height, not including the seven-foot thick basement drilled down deep into the stone, which anchored it to the tip of a single rock that was now the only true land for nearly a hundred miles, in any direction. The remains of what had been the rocky coast of Maine lay ten to thirty feet beneath the surface of the swelling whitecaps.

The tapering column of its tower was filled with limestone, the exterior a mixture of stone, brick, and machine-tooled granite. Above the seventh level, from floor to ceiling, ran the cast iron pedestal, which turned the lantern above. As I did so often in the past, I would clean the lens and ready it for a night of safeguarding the harbor. It would be my last, as I mentioned before. It would also be the last for the harbor, the town beyond, the county, state of Maine, New England, and all of the eastern seaboard of North America, as far as I knew.

Now, I do not hold myself solely to blame, as no one other than possibly the geologists I mentioned earlier could have predicted the devastation of that night, three years ago. Because I have no boat, and my radio now only receives transmissions from those few and far between vessels daring to brave the open waters surrounding me, I have come somewhat to understand what happened. At least, the epochal nature of seismic upheaval brought about by tectonic shifts long predicted by false prophets, on either side of the Atlantic.

 Some had foretold this event decades earlier, while those of us caught unawares had less than thirty minutes to evacuate, and no time at all to avoid the cataclysm to follow. I lost my mind during the insanity that ensued after the end came, and only a dying man’s lucidity in the final moments of my life, in which to convey to you what happened next. Perhaps, once you have heard my whole story, you will come to judge me less harshly.

It was approximately 3:27 AM on the morning of July 12^th, in what you may call the near future. For this is a cautionary tale; a message in a bottle, cast into the liquid void of time and space. That it has found you, and you were curious enough to read on, is a testament to your hope, like mine, that the spark of humanity remaining in us as a race has not been fully extinguished. We all have a job to do, before we’re done; and yours is to see that my life’s work is not forgotten. In fact, you and the other survivors will only discover what land remains, and whether it has been reclaimed, if you follow my instructions to the letter.

Like the wick of a sputtering candle, I have little wax left to burn as a light to your dark. Still, I will endeavor briefly to tell you what I recall of that last hour, in which I utterly failed in my last official act for the U.S. Coast Guard, which is, as I take it, no more. Neither the governments nor the imaginary boundaries, which divided our countries, fared much better.

But, I digress. You shall witness both in the aftermath of barbarism and savagery I will relate to you.

I remember now that a light rain began to fall on the copper roof, capped by the ventilator, which directed fresh air into the Lantern Room in which I sat.

Not wishing to succumb to sleep entirely, I stepped a moment out onto the encircling gallery, and leaned over the brass railing to enjoy a pipe. I had dozed off more than once on duty, but never before at such incomprehensible peril.

As I filled the bowl with a plug of tobacco from my ever-present pouch, I noticed for the first time that the promontory on which I sat seemed far higher out of the water than that to which I was used. The tide had not only gone out, but it seemed that the waters themselves had receded. There were only patches of reflected moonlight below, as it skirted the racing clouds. The wind was still, and the seas below not only calm, but still as the grave. What little movement there was seemed somehow ineffectual, as if bereft of a means of locomotion. There seemed to be pockets of struggle not only for motion, but also for breath, and even life itself.

When the low flung cumulonimbus clouds did part enough for me to see, the full moon revealed to me a horror beyond my most fearful imagining. I had indeed detected motion below, like that of prone figures that time and again would shudder and shake. Some dragged themselves, and others lay perfectly still. My curiosity piqued, I first circled the gallery, and failing that to gain a better view, I descended the seven flights of stair as fast as my aging legs would carry me.

I no sooner reached the outer door at the base of the tower than the smell of dead and dying sea life assailed my nostrils. I took out and covered my face with my handkerchief, trying to mask the stench. I ran back down to the spine of the promontory to the pier, which creaked and groaned under its own weight, for its foundations were no longer supported by the buoyancy of the ocean.

From my more accessible vantage point, I noted that the dock where I once moored my boat now hung suspended perilously more than forty feet above the seabed. Below it now tossed and turned, not the waves of the peaceful inlet, but the sea life the missing waters left behind. The ocean had not boiled, but simply parted from shore to shore. The sights, sounds, and smells, which reached my incredulous senses, neither confirmed nor denied my worst fears.

Every fiber of my being fought back revulsion and abject terror. All manner of aquatic life native to the bay, which had not followed the retreating waters out beyond the farthest horizon, now lay helpless or moved listlessly in tidal pools barely deep enough to cover half of their flattened bodies. Even turtles and crabs fared not much better, for neither could find refuge in the welcome embrace of the vanished ocean.

It was not simply the waters immediately surrounding the lighthouse and its craggy precipice, which now found itself raised high out of the waterless seabed, but the vast gulf and empty abyss beyond. For as far as the eye could see, a pale mist had risen immediately above the expanse of a dead and barren seascape, which now revealed the stranded marine life it left behind.

Not having a way down to the exposed ocean floor even so close to land, I looked back at the small Coast Guard station at the other end of the pier, which linked us together. The lights were on, and I could just make out a flurry of activity within. The lights of the town twinkled beyond, even as church bells and a single siren left over from the days of Civil Defense began to sound, joined by the horns of vehicles.

There were those brave or foolhardy enough to advance beyond the former shoreline, and test the sands and exposed rock, which had once been covered beneath the waves. The boardwalk on which I stood groaned and threatened to collapse under its own weight, and none dared approach me. No one had sought to warn me, or even asked if the sight was as forlorn and desolate from high above the point, as from the beach itself.

Only the suddenness of the event, and the enormity of its mystery, could explain such a lapse in protocol, even if it was the last watch of the Beacon Point Lighthouse, and I its keeper. A few now called out to me for any answer, one or two whose voices and silhouettes I recognized behind the glow of lanterns and flashlights. I thought to descend the catwalk secured against the rock face to the dock below, but saw much to my surprise that it too had relied on the sea for much of its support. It now hung dangerously suspended at a steep angle, and threatened to detach for its moorings. The small boat tethered to it hung suspended, its trolling motor detached and lying half-buried in mud. Not that either would do me much good, now.

I could see well enough by the trace beams and the light of my own tower that the ocean had either drained or simply gathered itself in the deepest and farthest reaches of the Atlantic. Whether this was an isolated phenomenon, or a worldwide cataclysmic and epochal occurrence, I was both hard-pressed and unqualified to say. As I told you in the beginning, had I but known of tectonic plates and seismic upheavals, it would have made little difference.

No sooner had as many of the townsfolk come down to the sea, as sought to take themselves and what little they could carry with them in their cars, trucks and motorcycles further inland, than the ocean returned with a vengeance. It began first as a thin dark line on the horizon, capped and preceded with foam not at first visible for what it was. Curiosity and then dread filled the hearts and minds of all who were equally foolish and doomed enough to be close at hand, to witness it.

The earth began to shake in its approach, the winds grew to a gale as from a hurricane, and before we knew it, a thirty-foot high wall of seawater in the form of a tsunami was upon us. With only a few scant miles separating us from the wall of water approaching at fifty miles per hour, as many as could turned too late and ran for their lives. Other simply knelt in the sane or held each other a final time. I thought to ascend to my lantern tower, to sound my klaxon and foghorn, but it was already too late for any that might hear it.

Instead, I sought to save my own worthless skin, and ran back up the pier, the trough of the promontory, and through the access door at the base of the lighthouse. Instead of going up and manning my post out of a sense of duty to warn those beyond of their peril, I climbed twenty feet down to the basement beneath the lighthouse; there to lock myself in, and await the end of the world. It was as solid and deep as the foundation of the wedge-shaped promontory into which it was both drilled and blasted.

With only a single fluorescent lamp overhead, flickering with a bad ballast I avoided replacing because I was so seldom reliant on this meager storeroom, I hid myself, cried, and prayed. I cursed myself as a coward and a fool, so certain was I that my dozing had brought about this calamity. I was by no means the master of the sea, but for those who sailed upon it, I was its guardian. I might have seen this coming, had I not succumbed to sadness and old age. It was my last evening to be lulled by that which I loved most in all the earth, and the ocean like a scorned lover had betrayed me. I hated it as much as I hated myself, as it raged about me and headed inland in an unstoppable torrent. The light went out of its own accord, with no electricity left to power it.

Part 2: The Aftermath