The Waterline

The figures did not move with the waves.

Mara stood at the edge of the cliff and watched them gather in the darkness below. There were seven of them, perhaps more, arranged in a loose line across the black water. The moon caught their shoulders and the pale ovals of their faces. They stood where the ocean should have swallowed them, motionless from the waist down.

Beside her, Lena made a small, strangled sound.

“That isn’t the lighthouse,” Jonah said.

The lighthouse stood farther out, on a tooth of rock beyond the figures. Its lantern was dark, but every few seconds a weak pulse glimmered behind the glass, as if something inside were breathing.

Shaw stared down at the water. Her composure had finally cracked. “We have to leave.”

“You said the island was the only place it could operate,” Jonah said. “Now you’re afraid of a lighthouse.”

“I said nothing about a lighthouse.”

The emergency radio clipped to Mara’s belt clicked on.

There was no battery in it. She had removed the battery herself at the motel, after the voice had spoken through the dead television. Still, static poured from the speaker.

Then Mara heard herself say, “You came all this way to ask the wrong question.”

Her own voice was calm. Almost affectionate.

Jonah reached for the radio, but Mara caught his wrist. “Don’t answer it.”

“I wasn’t planning to.”

“You always answer,” the voice said through the radio. “That’s why you’re useful.”

One of the figures below raised an arm.

A second later, another radio crackled from the darkness behind them.

Caleb Voss stepped out between the pines with a pistol in one hand and a small metal case in the other. His government SUV had stopped crookedly on the service road, its headlights washing the trees in white. He looked at the group, then at the water, and for the first time since Mara had met him, he appeared genuinely frightened.

“Get away from the cliff,” he said.

Jonah laughed once. “You followed us here to give safety advice?”

“I followed you because Shaw lied about the route.” Caleb’s eyes remained fixed on the figures. “And because the road was never meant to reach the coast.”

Shaw’s face hardened. “You knew there was a secondary access.”

“I knew there was an observation route.”

“What’s in the case?” Mara asked.

Caleb looked at her. “A key.”

The radio on Mara’s belt hissed. “He brought the seventh door.”

Lena backed away from Caleb as if he had become contagious. “No. No, that door stays shut.”

Mara turned toward her. “What happened behind it?”

Lena’s eyes remained on the water. “Nothing happened behind it. That was the point.”

A low vibration passed through the ground. Pebbles rolled over the cliff edge. Beneath the sea, something vast shifted, and the figures seemed to rise with it, their bodies lifting above the surface until Mara saw that they were not standing in the water at all. They were standing on a submerged road.

The old road ran straight from the cliff toward the lighthouse.

“Blackwater had a causeway,” Jonah said.

“Before the storm,” Shaw replied. “It was flooded when the surge came.”

“No,” Lena whispered. “It was flooded before the storm.”

The lighthouse flashed.

For an instant, the beam crossed the water, and Mara saw the figures clearly. They wore yellow evacuation slickers. Their faces were gray and swollen, their mouths open as if they had been calling out for months. Daniel stood among them.

He lifted one hand to the glass of his throat, then pointed toward the lighthouse.

Mara took a step forward.

“Don’t,” Caleb said.

Daniel’s face turned toward her. His mouth moved. No sound reached them, but the dead radio supplied the words in Mara’s own voice.

“He’s not in the lighthouse.”

Mara stopped.

Shaw seized her arm. “The voice is baiting you.”

“It said he isn’t there.”

“It says whatever makes you move.”

“Then why tell me not to go?”

Shaw did not answer.

Jonah had moved toward Caleb, eyes narrowed at the metal case. “You said the seventh door was sealed.”

“It was.”

“Was?”

Caleb opened the case. Inside lay a narrow black key, wet with seawater though the case was dry. Along its shaft, seven tiny notches had been cut. The seventh was filled with something red.

Mara recognized the substance before she understood why.

Blood.

The figures below began walking toward the lighthouse. Their feet broke the surface with slow, deliberate steps. Each footfall sent a ring across the ocean.

The radio spoke again, this time in Daniel’s voice.

“Mara, I’m sorry. I tried to keep it from learning you.”

She could barely breathe. “Learning what?”

The voice paused. In the silence, she heard the distant squeal of metal turning beneath the lighthouse.

“Which one of us you would save.”

The seventh notch in the key began to glow.

Behind them, the SUV’s headlights went out. From somewhere under the cliff came seven heavy knocks, answered by seven more from inside the lighthouse.

Caleb shut the case.

“Now,” he said, “we find out whether the door is still locked.”