The Place the Water Left

It was the night the fourteenth tide came in. There was no moon. I raised the wick of the lamp longer than usual. The light grew past the length of a fingertip, and the revolving lens, wound on its brass clockwork, cut its twelve-second arc. That perfect regularity had not slipped once in four days.

I carried a separate flame into a hand-lantern — not the great light of the gallery, but a small light I could hold. The decision to take it down onto the flats I did not call a duty. I could no longer. Only that, in the place the water left, something — the light — I had to finish the sentence that had broken off four nights before.

I passed the tidal rocks and set foot on the flats. The mud was cold and firm. The circle the lantern reached was small, and beyond it the place the water left ran on black — past where any printed table allows. Not even at the spring tide does it withdraw so far. The sea had never drawn back this far, not within any printed tide table at least.

Behind me, the great light of the tower cast my shadow long across the flats every twelve seconds. Each time the light turned away the shadow vanished, and each time it came round the shadow stood again. I did not stop walking. If I stopped, I felt I would see what stood in the interval when the light did not fall.

That Latin on the brass mount, now, stood always in my mind, unbidden.

It keeps the light above the abyss. I know the sentence now. The light does not keep the abyss. Nor does it keep us from the abyss. The light must be above the abyss — and so someone must, below it, hold the light so that it does not go out. As my predecessor did. As Yun ██ did.

At the end of the place the water left, something stood. When I raised the lantern to it, the place was empty. When I lowered the lantern, it was there again. Even when the great light of the tower came round and swept the place, it was absent while the light fell and present only while it did not. At last I knew what came after the sentence broken off four nights before. In that place, something — the light — was waiting for it.

The lantern flame guttered once, hard. There was no wind. Behind me, the great light of the tower that had turned every twelve seconds — that had not rested for five months and four days — faltered, for the first time, a long faltering. The light, its arc half-cut, pooled on one place of the flats. And into that pooled light the thing of the place the water left did not come. Because into a place where the light is, it does not come.

I took a firmer grip on the lantern. With the tower's light stopped, the only light left above the abyss was this small flame in my hand.

The sentence stops there. After it, only blank leaves remain in the log.