#lanternkeeper

Fog has a way of changing the shape of things on Bidna Hill. It softens the thorn bushes, smothers the gravel underfoot, and takes the sound out of the world. On nights like this, even the estuary goes quiet, the tide holding its breath somewhere far below, waiting for something.

I had climbed the ridge for a long-exposure shot of the lights along Irsha Street. But the fog rose quicker than the tide ever could. By the time I saw the old lookout cottage, it was already dissolving into the white. A stone blur with a roof.

Inside, the air tasted like cold ash and old fishermen’s coats. I dropped my camera bag beside the window ledge and wiped the pane with my sleeve. Nothing but fog. You could’ve convinced me the whole village had slipped into the river while I was walking up.

I don’t know how long the silence lasted. It felt like a kind of waiting.

Then the light appeared.

Not sudden — more like something being revealed. A warm, amber glow sliding between threads of fog. A lantern. Heavy, old-fashioned, the type with a glass dome and iron ribs. It swung gently, the beam brushing the gorse like a hand checking for wounds.

At first, I assumed a hiker or a farmer had lost their way. But the light didn’t behave like a lost person. It moved with a patience I didn’t recognise — a steady, deliberate rhythm, sweeping the path as though searching for something specific.

Or someone.

I leaned closer to the window.

The figure holding the lantern was little more than a dark outline, softened by the fog. Shoulders hunched, head bowed, moving with the weight of a memory rather than a destination. Every few steps, the lantern paused mid-air, and the figure seemed to listen to the silence.

Then it turned toward the cottage.

Or toward me.

The lantern lifted, the way you raise a lamp to check a boat’s name on a dark tide. Its glow pressed against the fog until only a thin membrane separated us — me in the stone room, it on the windswept path.

There was no face. Only the impression of a man who had walked that path many times, long before the cottage was abandoned. Someone with a duty carved into his shoulders.

For a moment, I thought he was going to step into the room, or call out, or lower the lamp and beckon. But he simply stood there, as if waiting for my acknowledgement.

Something old inside the fog was being asked of me.

I stayed still.

After a long, breathless pause, the lantern dropped back to its original height. The figure turned away, continuing its slow sweep along the ridge. The fog wrapped around it, thickening until the light thinned to a smudge… a flicker… and then nothing.

The hill swallowed it whole.

By the time I stepped outside, the fog had thinned just enough to see the path. No footprints. No lamp smell. Only the heath grass shifting in a wind I could not feel on my skin.

Appledore looked small and far away beneath me, its lights trembling along the water.

I should have gone home then. But for a while, I stood by the cottage door, looking into the fog, listening for the scrape of a boot or the creak of a lantern handle.

Nothing came.