Wrought Iron and Old Diesel

Aldara’s hand yanked hard at the sleeve of my parka, her knuckles digging into my arm.

"Tell me that was just feedback," she whispered.

"Feedback doesn’t cough, Aldara."

"It could be static with phlegm. I don’t know, analog tech does weird things when it’s humid."

The left earpiece, the only one still giving a clean sound after the patch job with black electrical tape, vibrated with a new crackle. Then, silence. Nothing more than that monotonous fifty-hertz hum drilling into the back of the track, as if someone had left a seventies transformer running in the middle of nowhere.

The black water of the Atlantic was already licking the first step of the breakwater. Two fingers of freezing foam covering the concrete. We had a little over three hours before the passage went completely underwater.

Walking toward a stone tower boarded up in the nineties was already a terrible idea on its own. Doing it behind Aldara, buttoned into her uncle's oilskin like a suit of armor, bordered on negligence. And all to check if a dead man cleared his throat with the exact same phlegm as the skipper of the Nuevo Amanecer.

"It sounds like his cough, fine," I said, adjusting the strap of the recorder over my shoulder as I stood up from the concrete block. "But my grandfather coughed like that too when he smoked Celtas Cortos. The whole village coughs in that frequency after fifty."

"Uncle Gonzalo didn’t cough," Aldara retorted, walking on tiptoes so she wouldn’t wet her canvas sneakers. "He made that little noise with his uvula before chewing you out for not tying off the lines properly. I recognize it in stereo, Candela. And so do you."

I sped up across the damp stones. The wind whistled with a hollow groan as it slipped through the loose copper sheets of the lantern, high above, silhouetted against a thick fog that turned the sodium streetlamps of the dock into sad, yellowish smears.

Two hundred meters back toward the village, the windows of the Rúa do Porto stayed dark, but any flash on the rocks would light up the shutters of half the guild. People here didn’t call the civil guard; they leaned out the doorway in quilted dressing gowns and yelled warnings at the top of their lungs.

"Turn off your phone’s flashlight," I hissed at Aldara.

"I can’t see a damn thing."

"Well, use your sense of touch. And zip up that oilskin if you’re gonna bitch about the cold."

"No way. It still smells of diesel and tobacco. It still smells of him."

The base of the lighthouse smelled exactly like it was supposed to smell: decades of compacted seagull guano, rotting kelp fermenting in the cracks, and a dense, almost sweet background of old diesel pooling in the pit.

I walked over to the perimeter railing. When I pressed my palm down, a crust of dry saltpeter and orange rust crumbled between my fingers like stale pastry. I wiped my hand against the leg of my corduroy trousers.

"Look at the latch," Aldara whispered, pointing her chin toward the solid oak door with its iron studs.

There was no municipal padlock. The main bolt, a crude hand-forged bar, rested in its anchor. But it wasn’t stuck with rust. Around the shaft shone a viscous, dark film with that unmistakable greenish tint of freshly applied marine gear oil.

Someone had gone to the trouble of greasing it very recently.

"Tell me Heritage Preservation has a budget for maintenance," Aldara muttered.

"Preservation doesn’t even know this rock is still on the map."

I pushed with my hip. The wood creaked for barely a second before giving way inward with insulting smoothness, opening a mouth of shadow that breathed a warm, stale draft.

The silence inside wasn’t peaceful. It was thick.

"Let’s stay outside," Aldara suggested, though she had already stuck half her head in.

"Ten minutes. I’m just looking at the generator panel to rule out the ground wire and we’re out of here."

"If a rabid badger comes out, I’m using you as a shield."

"Deal."

The circular foyer still had its white tiles with cobalt blue trim, pitted by moisture and splattered with condensation stains. The lead wiring ran along the wall like ruptured veins.

I took two steps toward the base of the spiral staircase. The cast-iron treads shuddered beneath the soles of my boots, letting out a metallic groan that seemed to spiral up into the empty dome.

"Don’t you dare go up there," Aldara warned me from the threshold, her arms crossed as she rubbed her elbows. "Those steps won’t hold two people at once, no way."

"I’m not going up. The sound didn’t come from above."

On the recorder screen, the VU meters jumped rhythmically. The jack connector was still humming because of the saltpeter in the plug, but underneath that electromagnetic grain there was something mechanical: a dull heartbeat, a pulse that made the slab floor vibrate.

I followed the black cable hanging loose against the wall down to the trapdoor of the machine room, below rock level.

"Candela, seriously. The tide."

"Five minutes, Aldara. Shut up for a second."

The machine room still held the rusted shell of a two-cylinder diesel engine, gutted and covered by a rotting tarp. But the floor wasn’t covered in uniform dust: there were recent boot prints from wide-calf rubber boots, the yellow ones with tractor soles used by inshore skippers.

And in a corner, next to a truck battery hooked up to a homemade transformer that hummed with a guilty softness, three blue plastic auction crates were stacked.

I tripped over a tangle of gillnets, matted and moth-eaten, that gave off an odor of salt-fish and mold.

"What’s there?" asked Aldara’s voice, muffled by the stairwell.

"Not much bread and a lousy circus."

I shoved the mesh aside with the toe of my boot. Among the rusted lead weights, a black oilcloth notebook peeked out, its corners chewed away by the friction of a raincoat pocket. I picked it up without thinking.

On the first page, there were no catch numbers or weather reports. There was small handwriting, slanted to the left, written with the blue ink of a worn-out Bic pen. A handwriting I would recognize among a million official papers because it was the very same one that signed my school permission slips and the recipes stuck with a magnet to my kitchen fridge.

«The sea gives back rotting timber and hollow hulls; family lies are the only things that refuse to float.»

Beneath it, dated four years back, the week of the shipwreck, was the log of tides and landing times.

My mother had been buried in the San Amaro cemetery for three years, and never, as far as I knew, had she set foot in this lighthouse.

A sharp, definitive, metallic thud echoed from the upper floor.

The oak door had just slammed shut, followed by the unmistakable screech of the iron bar sliding into the latch from the outside.

We had been left in total darkness.