An original work of horror fiction, written from scratch for Vaulted Century. Rock of Ages Lighthouse is a real steel tower standing on a bare reef five miles west of Isle Royale, Lake Superior. The keepers, the inspector, the child, the logbooks and the records in this story are entirely my invention.

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Five miles off the western tip of Isle Royale there is a rock about fifty feet across with a hundred and seventeen feet of riveted steel standing on it, and nothing else — no island, no beach, no soil, nowhere to walk and nowhere to drag a boat ashore. Four men kept it. On the morning of the nineteenth of September, 1917, the second assistant keeper went down the inside stair before daylight to look at the boilers and found the door at the bottom bolted shut. There were four men on that rock and three of them were above him on the stair. He drew the bolt himself and went in, and there was a boy of about seven asleep on the plate floor with his back against the cold boiler, perfectly dry. The water that morning was forty-eight degrees.

The room has one door. The coal chute is padlocked from outside and tarred shut, and that seal had not been broken since June. There are no windows.

This story follows a head keeper with fourteen years of clean service, a district inspector who was famous among keepers for being impossible to lie to, eleven hundred pounds of coal missing from a sealed bunker feeding a boiler nobody had lit, and a set of orders that arrived on a vessel the district never sent — correct in every particular, properly sealed, properly numbered, and signed by nobody who could afterwards be found.

It is a story about fog signals. About seventy years of men being required by law to make a very loud noise into the dark at regular intervals, and to account for the fuel, and to write down each time they did it. They were told it was so that ships could find the shore.

Nobody ever asked them to write down what found them.

Headphones on. Lights off. Don't rush this one — it is built out of a coal ledger, and the ledger balances, and that is the worst part.

⚠️ Original fiction. All characters, events, records and documents in this story are invented. Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is coincidental.

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