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jgmartin · 11 months

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THE LEGEND OF COLD ROCK KEEP

The island was nothing without the lighthouse.

It was the defining feature. A stone monolith, rising out of the earth like a haunted spire, sweeping its glowing gaze out across the rage of the Atlantic ocean. Cold Rock Keep was different from other lighthouses, though. Cold Rock Keep had a bodycount.

Ever since anybody could remember, the island had been a haunted affair. A cursed place where ships went to die. The legend went that once upon a time, way back when the town was first erected in god-knows-when, there lived a coven of witches upon Cold Rock. They practiced their craft there because they thought the ocean would keep them safe.

And it did. For a time.

But like any old story, the players eventually disappear, and so too was the case with the witches. They died off, or were killed. Who could say? History has a funny way of forgetting itself. Whatever the case was, the shipwrecks didn’t let up, and so a lighthouse was built on the island to warn ship’s away from its serrated shores.

That lighthouse, though, didn’t seem to help matters one bit. In fact, after it was built the deaths just went up and up, and soon the jagged coastline of Cold Rock was filled with the corpses of shattered vessels. It didn’t take long for the townsfolk to come to an agreement that the island was cursed, and the lighthouse had somehow become a conduit for evil.

After that, folks started avoiding Cold Rock. Local folks, at least. They knew better, because our mothers and fathers knew better, and their mothers and fathers had known better before them. They passed down the warnings in bedtime stories, or cautionary tales before trips to the sea.

“Don’t drift too close to the lighthouse,” they’d say, “unless you want the ocean to gobble you up.”

My brother often told me the same.

A fisherman by trade, George was the captain of a small ship called the Trout’s Kiss. It didn’t belong to him, it belonged to the company he worked for, but it really should have— he could sail that boat through a hurricane and make it out the other side. Everybody knew it. He wasn’t afraid of anything in all the ocean, save for that damn lighthouse, and he’d tell you the same.

That was then, though. He died three days after my ninth birthday.

Capsized.

His boat tossed him and his first-mate overboard and the Trout’s Kiss smashed into a thousand pieces against the Cold Rock coast.

I went to bed and my brother was alive. When I woke up, he was dead. No goodbyes. No last words. Just gone. It was the moment I realized the legend of Cold Rock Keep wasn’t just a myth. It was the moment I realized it was the truest story ever spoken.

My brother was a superstitious man. A good sailor. There was no way he’d find himself near those rocks if not for some darkness pulling him there, and maybe that same darkness had then begun pulling me, or maybe it was just my childhood grief, but not a week after his funeral I went down to the docks and untied his skiff. Then I rowed it out into the harbour.

I rowed it out toward Cold Rock Keep.

Too long, I decided, had that towering mausoleum lorded itself over our gentle town. Too long had it stolen our loved ones and filled them with the sea. It was time somebody did something about it and in that moment, on that brisk summer night, I decided that somebody would be me.

So I set off toward the sweeping beacon that haunted the ocean like a ghost in the dark. I rowed and rowed until I got close enough that rowing didn’t do much anymore, because the ocean became all rolling waves and riptide currents. I remember feeling panicked. Like I’d made a grave mistake, an impulsive decision that I was now going to sorely regret, as I tossed and churned in the soup of the sea. First I lost one oar, then the other.

Then the boat tipped over like a rubber duck in the bath, and the looming figure of the lighthouse vanished. Darkness took me. Frigid, wet darkness.

When I came to, I spat out a river of seawater. Trembling and disoriented, I gathered my bearings. Surrounding me was a mess of wood— the remnants of my little skiff, or some other sorry vessel. Not ten feet away, great waves thundered against razor-blade rocks, jutting out of the coastline like the jaws of a shark while their sea-spray washed over me, reminding me where I was, and what I was doing.

I rolled onto my back. There, towering above like a titan of myth, loomed Cold Rock Keep. Its spiral architecture reached up into the moonlit clouds while its yellow light swept in a hypnotizing circle, humming an electric tune. It felt like it was calling to me. Beckoning me toward its heavy doors.

I pulled myself to my feet and realized I’d come all this way without much of a plan. In retrospect, I wondered if I ever truly meant to make it there at all. Perhaps I had been so sick with grief that I was hoping that the ocean would simply swallow me up the same place it’d swallowed George, and then it would let us be together again. Perhaps I just wanted an end to my misery.

Whatever the case, I didn’t have anywhere to go but forward now, and so I walked toward the lighthouse. As I did, I passed stone columns. Gravestones, I realized, carved with effigies for men whose stories I knew better than any nursery rhyme.

Rupert Dougee, 1892.

“Fell from the lighthouse while effecting repairs to the roof.”

Body inexplicably found thirty feet from the structure, torso split in half on the rocks, seagulls nesting in his ribcage.

Howard Newton, 1903

“Died peacefully in his slumber.”

Haunted by vicious voices. Took a liter of whisky just to get himself to sleep every night. Found dead in his bed, partially decomposed, with his open journal in his hands. His last entry?

I fear the ocean not half as much as I fear the malice in these walls.

The lighthouse had always been monstrous, that much wasn’t up for debate. Whether it smashed you on the rocks or drove you mad once you washed ashore, Cold Rock Keep would take what it wanted and leave the world more miserable for it.

Now, I meant to change that. Little nine year-old me, with nothing to defend himself but a sturdy rock and his brother’s hand-me-down pocket knife. What choice did I have? At that moment, none. I was there, and there was no going back. Only forward.

So I ascended the steps to Cold Rock Keep.

When I opened the doors, I found old beer cans and nudie mags. The walls inside were dressed in graffiti and the tables and chairs were chipped and carved with names and memories. A steel, spiral staircase wound upwards, clutching the narrowing walls of the lighthouse. At the very top sat a hatch leading into the uppermost room.

Something tugged at me then. Something pulled me toward it, and I knew then that it was the room the light spun in lazy circles, tempting souls to their deaths. It was the source of all this misery.

Heart thrumming, I took the stairs two at a time.

When I reached the top, I found the hatch sealed shut. An old padlock hung off of it that read Maintenance Key # 1. While I didn’t have the maintenance key, I did have a rock, and so I bashed the padlock clean off the hatch and pulled it open.

Light blinded me. Vicious, vibrant light spilled out like an uncorked supernova. My ears filled with the whirring drone of whatever mechanism drove the artificial sun. Shielding my eyes, I clambered up the ladder leading into the hatch, one step, two step, until I was in the room proper.

And then something strange happened.

Things became dim. I opened my eyes and found the blistering light gone. In its place was a faint glow, and even that was quickly fading, receding back into some great void until it was only a firefly speck in the distance.

Then, that too vanished.

Darkness enveloped me. Not turn-off-the-lights-it's-bedtime darkness, but true darkness. The sort of darkness you find yourself in when you're six feet under, buried beneath the worms and the dirt. The sort of darkness that’s so thick the pressure of it is almost suffocating.

My hands scrambled across the surface, looking for the hatch I’d come through, but it was nowhere. Gone. I shouted and I hollered, cursing the lighthouse, cursing myself for being foolish enough to stroll onto Satan’s doorstep with nothing but a rock and an old pocket knife, but predictably that didn’t solve my problem either.

Eventually, out of options, I sat down in the void and cried.

I cried for my mother, who would wake up tomorrow worried sick, wondering where I was, calling me in as missing to the sheriff. They’d search and search and never find me and she’d just tell them to search some more because there would be no way, no possible way, that she could go on living if she knew both of her babies were gone.

I cried for my father, who was out of town on business and would no doubt blame himself for him always being away or abroad, and then maybe one day he’d get so fed up with all the guilt that he’d turn it around on my mother and tell her she should have been watching me better.

Most of all though, I cried for my brother. I cried for George because he had always told me to steer clear of Cold Rock Keep, and even though he died to teach me that lesson, I still stuck my nose up at him. I decided I knew better than he did, even though he was the fisherman and I was the stupid little brother, and I came out here looking for revenge and all I managed to do was make things so much worse.

“Look at this one,” a nasally voice said. “He hasn’t any light.”

I wheeled around, terror jolting through me. “Who’s there?”

“He will join the others.”

“The others?” I shouted. “You mean my brother?”

“Give him time, Agatha,” came another voice, this one more shrill.

“Time?” the first voice snapped. “He is here for violence! He is angry, desperate and murderous and would see us killed and our home burned to ashes. Don’t you see? He has no light, Beatrice, and therefore the cretin has no time.”

I scrambled backwards on instinct. It was difficult to pinpoint which direction the voices were coming from, but I was certain there were two of them.

“Don’t be so overdramatic, Aggie,” the second voice said. “Can’t you see the source of that anger? It’s his brother. He’s been hollowed out by grief and filled up with pain, poor thing.”

“You’re them—” I stammered, my mouth too dry to properly speak. “You’re the witches, aren’t you?”

Agatha’s nasally voice snickered. “Oh, look how perceptive the child is, sister. I hardly think the world will miss a lightless dunce she as he. Let me do it now. I’ll be quick about it.”

“Hush, Beatrice. Child, I sense a haunting in your soul, a longing for your brother. Do you miss him?”

The question made me furious. It was proof, I realized, that the witches knew about the murders they were committing, knew about the pain they were causing, and yet still chose to reap our community again and again. Tears welled in my eyes.

“Yes,” I said, lips trembling. “Yes of course I miss him! Do you have any idea how many innocent folks you’ve gone and killed?”

“Do you have any idea how many we’ve saved?”

Agatha’s words caught me off-guard. I tried to voice a response to her then, something well thought-out and appropriately accusatory, but all I managed to do was stand there slack-jawed.

“See, Agatha? Look there— near his chest.”

“Please, that’s hardly anything. Still well-worth a purge.”

“It’s proof the child’s got some light in him, that's what it is.”

“Just about anybody’s got some light in them, you bleeding heart!”

The situation was the most bizarre and unsettling thing I’d ever encountered. “What do you mean ‘people you’ve saved?’ ”

“What we mean,” Agatha began, somewhat impatiently, “is that Beatrice and I lived peacefully on Cold Rock island for many, many years. We practiced the magic of the land. Grew our crops. Caught our fish. We didn’t hurt anybody, but one night a vessel goes and lands on our shores, ties us up in the middle of the night and burns our bodies in a pit. A pit! They drink for hours and hours after that, a real revel, exchanging high-fives and how-do-ya-dos—”

Beatrice sighed. “They slept in our ashes.”

“Not terribly hygienic, were they?” Agatha said. “Course, we had seen their ship on the horizon already. Saw it getting loaded on the docks for some time, and so we knew what was coming our way. Took precautions.”

“I took precautions,” Beatrice said. “You tried to beat them with a club.”

“Must you always interrupt? I’m being kind enough to give this little cretin some context before we Snip him. The least you could do is pipe down for his bedtime story.”

Agatha took a moment, and I could sense the two witches glaring at one another in the darkness. “Anyway, dunce boy, where was I? Ah yes, we made damn sure our murderers met an end that suited them. Sent them all into a rage, didn’t we? Made em’ chop each other up. Ha! Poetic justice, you might say. Beattie and I figured we’d just go ahead and get rid of that bad lot before they infected anybody else with all that hatred.

“Then, wouldn't you know it? We found out that once you’re dead you’re much more in tune with the spirits of folks! Learned we could measure the worth of a man from a thousand yards based on the size of his glow. And often we did. Not a lot to do when you’re dead you see, and my sister and I do like to keep busy, so we set to work doing the town a favor. We used our magic to lure the worst souls into the rocks. Mangled em’ up good, and saved folks the grief of dealin’ with ‘em.”

I shook my head, stunned. “So many ships crashed on those rocks. So many. You’re telling me that everybody, all those sailors were evil?”

“Not in the least, sweet little fool,” Agatha said. “We only killed the bad eggs. The rest of the folks washed up on shore and somebody came around for them… eventually. Same goes for those lighthouse keepers— most of ‘em, anyhow. There was that one doing work on the roof before a storm. Poor sod got blown halfway across the island before making a mess on the rocks.”

“Oh,” Beatrice added. “And there was Howie. The sweet man who liked to journal— I did so like him. Awfully handsome.”

“Howie… you mean Howard?” Agatha let loose a snort of laughter. “Poor lad was a smidge clairvoyant and never knew it. Said he heard voices, and I suspect he did! Overheard me and Aggie arguing til’ the break of dawn like a couple of braying donkeys. It’s no wonder he drank himself to death.”

“A shame!”

“Yes, a shame. The man had a great taste in whisky.”

The void, once pitch-black, grew brighter. It became bright enough that I could make out shapes flitting around me, formless, like laundry in the wind.

“Oh,” Agatha said, somewhat shocked. “He can see us now, can he?”

“Course he can, look at him. He’s glowing, isn’t he?”

A question lingered in my mind. “Why is it that your magic became more powerful after the lighthouse was built?”

“More powerful?” Beatrice said, confusion lacing her words. “Whatever do you mean?”

“It’s just that the folks back in town always said there were more deaths after the lighthouse was built. Did it… did it help you kill folks?”

“Ha!” Agatha laughed. “The child’s stupidity is beginning to grow on me, Beattie. I’ll give you that. No, you toad-brained fool, the lighthouse didn’t make us any stronger or smarter or more devilishly beautiful than we already were. All it did was convince folks to come sailing into the harbor, since they figured what could it hurt with the lighthouse guiding them away from all that ails ‘em? More sinners, more shipwrecks. Easy as that.”

“Oh,” I said, and another thought crossed my mind. As it did, the shapes slowly faded from view. My glow, I realized, was dimming and the void was beginning to grow suffocating all over again. “And my brother? Why did you kill him?”

“Oh,” Beatrice said, pausing. “Well, we didn’t kill your brother.”

“This is awkward.”

“Hush now, Aggie. Have a heart.”

Tears formed in my eyes, and I quickly dabbed them with my sleeve. “What do you mean you didn’t kill him? He died out there on those rocks! His boat capsized not a hundred yards away.”

“Well,” Beatrice said, slowly. “We had only ever intended for… Oh, heavens. Who was it?”

“Reed Vallas,” Agatha offered.

“Reed Vallas, of course. Yes. We had only intended for that fellow— he was the first-mate on the boat your brother captained. That man was an urchin. A rapist. A murderer. He was a stain on this town, and frankly the world is much better off without him.”

I sucked in a breath. A sort of weepy, deep breath, the kind you take when you’re beginning to calm down, but you’re not quite ready to be done with being upset. “Then why did you kill George?”

“Dunce, child!” Agatha said. “Weren't you even listening? We just told you that we didn’t—”

“Aggie!” Beatrice snapped. “Look at him. The boy is glowing again! Faint as it is, we should really be nurturing that light.”

Agatha mumbled something, sounding equal parts impatient and frustrated.

“Your brother was meant to wash safely ashore, child. Honest. Reed panicked after the Trout’s Kiss capsized, and not wearing a life vest, grabbed onto your brother to save his own skin, and ended up drowning the both of them.”

The words washed over me like a winter tide. Cold. Painful. “And you let Reed pull him down? You didn’t try to help?”

“How to explain this,” Agatha said with a sigh. “Our magic is less of a scalpel and more of a sledgehammer. Small incisions in destiny like pulling your brother free from Reed proved impossible for us. It was an unforeseen outcome.”

“Then can you bring him back?” I said, desperate and heartbroken. “Since he wasn’t meant to die? I never even got a chance to say goodbye and—”

“No,” Agatha said. “We can’t.”

It was exactly what I expected to hear, and yet it still hurt like the day he died.

“Are there many moments like that?” I muttered quietly, the light radiating from me flickering in the dark. Off and on. Off and on. It was as though it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to stay or go. “Do many innocent people die because of the things you do?”

Silence filled the void. If the darkness had been thick and suffocating, then this silence was like the bottom of the ocean. It felt heavy. Crushing.

“Sometimes,” Beatrice said. “Sometimes I suppose that innocent folks do get washed away.”

“Is that okay?” I asked, my tiny voice cracking under the weight of the question. It didn’t feel okay to me. Why did innocent folks have to die so bad people could be punished? “Should you really be doing that?”

“I…” Beatrice began. “I’m not sure.”

“Beattie,” Agatha said, and her voice was hushed. “You’re glowing.”

“Oh,” Beatrice said, and the formless shape of windy laundry sort of bent down, as though examining itself. “It appears that I am. I’d almost forgotten what that felt like… Why! Look at you, too Aggie! I can almost see your icy heart with all that light.”

True to Beatrice’s words, the both of them were beginning to radiate a faint glow. The shapes danced upward, bickering to one another in words I couldn’t quite understand. They swirled and snapped and whipped above my head, until eventually they stopped and floated back down, now bright things.

“We’ve had it out, Aggie and I, and we’ve decided you’re right.”

“I am?” I said.

“Course you are, dunce boy,” Agatha said. “We got so wrapped up in keeping busy and trying to do good, that we forgot to nurture the most important light of all— our own.”

Beatrice snickered. “Oh, look at you, Aggie. First you wanted to purge the poor child and now you’re doting on him.”

“Well that was before he started glowing like a candlestick, wasn’t it?”

“She’s right, child. And so are you. It’s become clear to us that we can’t rightly keep helping other people if we’re out of sorts. So we’re going to focus on us. Get back our light."

"You are? That’s good!” I said, feeling joy for the first time since George had died. The light surged inside of me. “That means you won’t hurt anybody else?”

“Mhmm,” Beatrice said.

“We’ll leave the hurting to the folks still living and breathing,” Agatha added. “Which reminds me, we’ve done some hurting ourselves.”

“ 'Fraid that we have,” Beatrice agreed.

Just then, the two formless shapes began to materialize into something tangible. Human. A pair of glowing corpses appeared before me with flesh sloughing off their frames, and boiling wounds upon their faces.

One smiling, the other scowling.

“We know you didn’t get to say goodbye. Which is partly our fault.”

“It's all our fault, Agatha. And it’s true that we can’t bring George back, or take back what we took from you.”

“So,” Agatha says, rubbing her mangled hands together with a sigh. “We’ve decided to do one last bit of magic, you know, before we leave for good. Consider it a parting gift.”

Beatrice pulled me into a tight hug. “It isn’t much, child, but it’s the best we can do.”

________________

That was my last memory of the witches of Cold Rock Keep.

I woke up in my bed, with salt in my hair and seaweed down my shirt. My mother shrieked for joy when I did, and another man— a man I didn’t recognize, but would later learn was a doctor, told me I had been asleep for some fourteen hours. The police, he explained, found me washed up on the shore. They thought I’d suffered a serious concussion. Perhaps fallen into a coma.

“You slept like the dead,” he told me.

I told him that I felt fine, and that I was sorry for causing such a stir, but that right now more than anything I needed a little space to get my head in order. Just five minutes, I said. My mother and the doctor voiced their concerns, but ultimately respected my wishes. They left the room.

Alone, I went to my window. My house sat at the top of a hill and had a nice view of the town. From my perch, I looked out over a hundred sleepy houses. I looked out over a silent schoolyard, a run-down movie theater, and twenty or so boats bobbing at the dock.

Then I looked past that.

I looked out to the sea, to a little island with a stone spire. I looked out to Cold Rock Keep, and quiet as a breath, I said thank you. Thank you for everything.

You see, dreams are strange things. Sometimes a dream is merely a vignette, a slice of time so infinitesimally small that you wonder if it was ever there at all. Other times dreams are sweeping, so long and so vast that you live a second life inside of them.

That night, my dream had been longer and more real than any dream I’ve ever had. It spanned years. Decades. In that dream I played catch, traveled the world, shared pints of beer, and did lots and lots of fishing.

In that dream, I said goodbye to my brother.

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