Into the Light

"The storm is coming, so batten down the hatches and let Lighthouses guide you into the darkness. This anthology of dark tales about lighthouses and beacons offers you, the most daring of readers, fourteen original stories of horror, mystery, suspense, and adventure."

~ Black Beacon Books

It will be 10 years on the 15th of November, since the launch of Lighthouses: An Anthology of Dark Tales, at Byron Bay, beneath the shadow of the Byron Bay lighthouse.

My story, 'Into the Light," begins far away from the ocean, but it is here that Marissa meets Andre and everything changes ~

“Pres“Presume you would like a lift out of here.” I say.

“Presume we are heading in the same direction,” he replies as he opens the door for me.

“Which direction is that?” I ask.

“All roads lead to the sea.”

But first we must rewind a few pages to where it began for Marissa, because Andre's story goes back a very long way.

Drowned town tours, I think the sign ghoulish but go along anyway. There isn’t much else happening in this small town. We all sit in the glass bottomed boat drifting along the lake’s surface, which gleams blue like some exotic cocktail. The sun is an embrace, its beams wrap around me like loving arms. I feel I could easily drift away.

“There it is. Everyone look down.”

We all stare past our shoes down into the depths. Below I see the blackened trees, preserved like specimens in formaldehyde. So still, no movement in their skeleton branches, an avenue of phantoms that we glide over like some bloated pterosaur.

I begin to glimpse walls and buildings far, far below in the depths, the crumbling façade of a bank. The church spire, a lonely sentinel above a roofless, silted slab with shadowy stairs leading downwards. A bride stands with her new husband, both smiling as confetti is flung over them and drifts away in the current. She tilts a bouquet over her shoulder and it slowly wafts downwards into the outstretched arms of a young girl wearing a red dress. On the other side of the church, a coffin balanced on rigid shoulders, is being carried stiffly up the stairs, followed by weeping mourners, their black clothing sweeping behind them like elegant waterweeds.

Drowned shades stalk the streets of this submerged town. The more I look the more substantial they become. Drifting by, these watery wraiths draped in silk-washed garments as ephemeral as a late summer butterfly, converse and browse. One denizen glances up, his face pale like salt, the strands of his dark hair wafting, his eyes like bones in the moonlight. He smiles up at me and blows me a kiss.

I feel myself falling, through the glass floor, shattering it as I plummet down into this deluged hamlet.

“That was a waste of money.” A voice grumbles. “Not like you could bloody see anything.”

The boat is rocking wildly as the others disembark. I sit staring out across the still waters of the lake, feeling like I have somehow been dispossessed. Been made homeless. I cannot comprehend the emotions that are flowing through me. I don’t know where they have come from. I run my fingers through my long brown hair, the strands feel wet like I have been swimming.

The boat is emptying; I am the last still sitting. I stand and glance up at the young man who reaches for my hand as I clamber onto the jetty stairs. His face is as pale as salt, his lips smile and his lake-bright eyes stare into mine.

“It takes a special soul.” He whispers as I pass. “Not everyone is privileged to see the tour as it truly is.”

I don’t know what to make of his words as I walk away, but they have a hold on me like a broken record, they go around and around in my head, until I can barely think. I go down to the bar well before dinner and have a bottle of wine and listen to old songs on the Retro jukebox in the corner. I can’t be bothered eating so I walk down the main road that leads to the jetty and the lake. All is quiet here; the boats rock gently on some mellow current and above a half moon sits in the hollow between the mountains.

The lake is dark, a sheet of shimmering blackness deeper than the surrounding landscape. I’m at the end of the jetty and I sit on one of the wooden pillars. Yet this jetty is not old, built only after the lake came into being, after all a jetty cannot exist unless there is a reason for its existence. I notice a flash of light in the middle of the lake. One moment it is gone and then it appears again. I watch and realise there is a rhythm to the flashes, I count the seconds, three seconds then eight seconds, followed by three and then eight. I know this means something, can feel it there knocking at my skull, trying to tell me something. Something important.

He stands beside me, so quietly he has walked up that I almost jump out of my skin when he utters those words, “You see it too. Don’t you?”

I look into his moon pale face, so young but not so innocent, and those eyes even in the darkness are unbearably ancient. “Lights from a boat, night fishing.” I say. My heart is beating too fast and I know that’s not what I’m thinking at all.

He laughs. A laugh that makes me think of wooden sailing ships with decks of polished burnished timbers, of gleaming copper instruments, of billowing sales held taut by miles of rigging. I can practically smell the ocean, feel the salty air, and taste the brine. Here hundreds of miles inland, he has the taint of the ocean all over him. I lick my lips and they are salty.

“Try again.” There is seductive quality to his voice. He is very handsome in an unearthly kind of way. I think of drowned sailors as I look at his lips. His black hair blows gently in the breeze and I see black kelp undulating in the current.

“A lighthouse.” I whisper.

“Would you like to see?” He asks.

I sit in his boat; the only guest and we glide across the black water, the engine throbs very low and small ripples flow from the prow. I look below and see blackness and wonder what sort of fool I am to be doing this with this stranger who, if I was totally rational I would class as a harmless loony at best and, well I don’t wish to even think of what the worst scenario would be. But tonight I’m not rational; tonight I am infected with my own sort of madness, tonight I am touched by what the gods might have once called divine folly.

I see it, the light streaming below and then it is not there, I wait and count and there it is again. I sit and stare as we drift along silently, the engine off now. In the flashes I see the skeletons of the trees and then the buildings, almost insubstantial, charcoal slashes against a shimmery current. They disappear and reappear, slightly different angles, a shell of a house, a wisp of a roof, the outline of the steeple, and as we glide above, the eerie strobe below cuts through the water like some ethereal watery lightning. And then we are above it, the ghostly tower of what must be stone, wavers below me as the light flashes on and off and in its glow

I see them floating, the drowned and the disposed, their garments fluttering in the current, their arms reaching for me, their faces, slender and eerie, luminescent and pale. Two faces repeated in some doll like way, his face on the men and mine on the women.............

And there we must stop but if you must keep reading & you know you really want to

, the book is available at Amazon & Thriftbooks (where I discovered I have an Author page) & possibly a few other places.

We all love a good review.......

Alice Godwin's 'Into The Light,' the lines between life, dream and death are beautifully obscured here, with a climax that builds to epic proportions - PanReview

Into the Light - At times it is a terrific love story, at others, it is a convincingly frightening tribute to the power of a good horror tale. Woman meets man. Man likes woman. They fall in love. Man is eternal, it seems, but this fact doesn't stop the emotion or physicality of their relationship building. His true nature is revealed at story's end, and I must confess to feeling disappointed the male character wasn't a vampire, but not as disappointed at seeing the story actually end. INTO THE LIGHT is my new favourite to win STORY OF THE BOOK award. It's deep, its fascinating, its scary, its moving, and as I said at the start, it's simply gorgeous.

Amazon Review Lighthouses: An anthology of Dark Tales