Demon in the Lighthouse

a short story by Nathan Sweem

The lighthouse on Point Leonora wasn't always a blackened ruin. She was the closest thing to a tourist attraction within miles of Hanis before she was wrecked, an Oregon beauty, a gem on the fog-ridden coast. If the look of her now wasn't enough to keep people away, the sulfur smell did.

Most blamed it on an unidentified arsonist despite an astounding lack of evidence. More superstitious types pointed fingers at nameless malevolent forces, or bad medicine sent to the White Man from beyond the grave by vengeful Koosan ancestors. But I knew it was the professor, Dr Khost, because I was there. I saw him.

I watched him ascend to the beacon the night it happened, while the sea was still calm, and call something from the deep which I couldn't explain. I witnessed his bizarre transformation before the flames appeared out of nowhere and devoured everything. No one believed me, of course, so I stopped telling it. But I know what I saw.

I attended Dr Khost's lectures during my first semester at Siskiyou University, at the Hanis satellite campus, "The Northwest Coast: An Anthropological Study". It turned out to be much different than I expected.

Khost was a man of endless peculiarities. He refused to use the English name for our ocean, for example, which he considered a gross misnomer. He used the Koosan name, Sinxuustin, instead. Sinxuustin, he told us, wasn't a place of calm. It sent winter storms and rogue waves without mercy. It stole our loved ones and dragged unsuspecting victims to watery graves in the blink of an eye. It was a perilous place, the realm of the two-headed serpent of the underworld, Ci'Suotl. There was nothing pacific about it, and to call it such denied its darker qualities.

He relished telling us these things and often ended lectures with Koosan utterances no one understood. We chuckled under our breath at how it sounded in his heavy Eastern European accent.

He had a short stature, balding head too big for his slender body, a widened smile that manifested at awkward times, and eyes that protruded, always reddened and sleep-deprived. Nothing about the man spooked anyone. It should have.

I drew closer to the professor than most after I accepted an assistant position he posted. In my first year, I jumped at the opportunity despite his oddities.

Some days he had nothing for me; he didn't even show. I sat around, idle, and caught up on school work. When he was present, he often met me with a list of items to pull from the museum archive. The department kept a meager archaeological collection of its own, but a special relationship with the Siuslaw Indian Museum allowed us access to certain things never put on public display.

The way to the museum was a winding thirty-minute drive down the oldest two-lane highway in the county. The woods were dead-looking, ground strewn with shed leaves and drenched from repeated rains, the air ripe with decay.

Dr Khost's methodology was a mystery. He shared no insight and batted away questions with an irritated, liver-spotted hand and curt phrases in his native Slavic tongue. His selections perplexed the museum curators just as much—the most obscure, damaged, incongruous items in their catalog. It was as if he were searching for the second half of a piece already in his possession, though he never admitted this. I wondered if that was the sole reason he came to Hanis in the first place.

After his disappearance, out of morbid curiosity, I dug through his office and found references that all but confirmed my theory. Several dense portfolios of black-and-white photographs, visual journals of various digs attributed to Pacific cultures from Alaska to Polynesia. He had been hunting for something. For good or for ill, his stash of indigenous artifacts and paraphernalia was lost in the fire. To this day, I remain unsure of what he found that subsequently triggered the disturbing events I witnessed.

I returned from the museum with several sample bins chock-full of artifacts. Khost ferreted these away to his office and locked the door without the slightest explanation. I spent the balance of my time in quiet study. When I left for the day, Khost still hadn't emerged.

After weeks of being left in the dark like this, curiosity got the better of me. I left the office one day and waited in my car. Khost didn't appear until late in the evening, after his and mine were the only cars left. He was more absorbed in thought than ever and didn't notice me.

I followed him.

His was a 1980s Volga with a rattly diesel engine on its last leg, a relic of whatever former soviet republic from which he originated. Old-fashioned reflector headlights ambled into the dark. I kept mine off to avoid being seen. I didn't expect him to veer onto Point Leonora Road, but that's where he went, straight for the lighthouse. The place had been decommissioned for God knows how long. Khost drove right up to the Keeper's Quarters as if it were his own residence and brought the sample bins inside.

I waited up the road. The ocean-borne chill that perpetually haunted the point clawed its way into my vehicle and gripped my bones. When I was certain he had finished unloading and was in for the night, I crept up the way to spy what he was doing.

The space inside was crowded with open volumes and sheaves of loose paper, I observed through a barred window. Khost hunched over piles of these and read aloud in Koosan. His harsh accent distorted what should have been a beautiful language in unsettling ways. He stood, face upturned and hands raised, repeating phrases to the air, to the ceiling; to suspicious masks and artifacts he'd hung on the walls.

Shivering, wintry air burning my lungs, I couldn't tear myself away until his oration reached a crescendo and then stopped. I held my breath, fearful I'd been discovered, and tiptoed back the way I came, infinitely grateful that each step didn't scrape too loudly against the ground.

My car was frigid. Too scared to immediately turn the ignition, I huddled in the dark for a long while, terrified that an angry Dr Khost would fly out of the lighthouse in pursuit any second.

All was quiet. A subtle fog rose from the sea and flooded the path, reeking of salt and sodden beaches, suffocating the woods like a murderous ghost.

Candlelight faded from the lighthouse window, and I thought I might flee. But in moments, the professor emerged in the tower, candle in hand throwing light on the dead beacon that hadn't shined in decades, making a grim silhouette with strange rags hanging off his limbs and a mask over his face in blatant perversion of the sort of shamanic traditions his own texts described.

I was transfixed. I suspected that the piece he wore was one that I'd retrieved for him, but I couldn't tell for sure.

He moved about the dormant beacon lighting candles he'd apparently placed beforehand, encircling it with a ring of undulating orange light.

I exited the car and concealed myself in the woods. The trees ended near the edge of the point, giving a clear vantage of the lighthouse ahead and the ocean, cast in mist and shadow, below a steep escarpment on the other side.

Dr Khost, arms outspread like before, shouted Koosan phrases towards the water. The single panes between him and the open air did little to dampen the sound.

The sea turned violent and pummeled the base of the point, spraying the lighthouse tower with every wave. A biting wind added to the noise. I cleaved to the nearest tree for cover.

A dense cloud formed off the shore, settling above the surface in an unusual spot of black and dark gray. Forks of lightning stabbed through its heart in jagged flashes and struck out onto the water.

Khost raised his voice over the storm until he screamed what sounded like curses, black spells, incantations of evil I was glad I didn't understand. The cloud became a dark green fog, and that was when everything turned too otherworldly to explain.

The circle of candles mutated into vile shades of black and green. The flames lengthened and whipped around the professor, licking him like burning phantom tongues. He took on a wicked aura, radiating a similar sickly shade.

His shouts intensified. The strange cloud thundered and, underneath it, something rose to the surface. I thought it might be a submarine—it was that size—until its length writhed and twisted and curled like it was alive. Frothy cobalt water slicked off black scales. The thing coiled itself within the cloud, and four red orbs burned in the fog like twin pairs of hellish, monstrous eyes.

A web of smoke unfurled, black as from burnt coal, and crawled along the surface, up the beach, up the point to the lighthouse itself. It smelled horribly of sulfur. I coughed and gagged and covered my nose and mouth.

Greenish-black fire followed, sparking along the water and shooting up the tower. It swallowed the entire building, Khost with it.

The last thing I remember was the professor engulfed in flames. With an inhuman screech, his face split in two, screaming twin voices from two separate mouths behind two separate masks, a two-headed aberration of his former self.

I was in my car, bare branches scraping the sides as I sped down dirt roads towards Hanis, unable to rationalize what I'd witnessed.

I later saw the picture in the paper and the banal explanation that went with it. I wanted to believe the speculation as much as the next person, so much less disturbing than the thought that something might live in those waters that couldn't be explained. But what arsonist would leave a sulfurous smell so potent that on some nights it traveled miles downwind? By what means could someone reduce a structure like that, which had withstood decades of earthquakes, tsunamis, and gale force winds, to a charred heap, could melt its beacon and the glass protecting it? Who could accomplish such a feat and leave no trace? And why was the professor never seen again after that night?

If there ever was a demon in that lighthouse, it was Dr Khost in those moments before he met his fate. Whatever awful transfiguration he accomplished, it cost him.

Nathan Sweem is a former Army linguist and high school math teacher who writes fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in History Through Fiction, The Worlds Within, Land Beyond the World, The Antihumanist, and others.