The Whistle of the Broken Flashlight

The darkness inside the tower wasn't black, but a dirty, pasty gray that clung to your eyelashes.

"Please tell me that thing outside was a gust of wind with a really bad attitude," whispered Aldara, glued to my back.

"Sure. The Atlantic wind, which suddenly has arms and likes to throw deadbolts with gear oil."

"I hate when you get sarcastic in situations of imminent death, Cande."

I turned on my phone screen. Marcos's smiling face was still frozen in a notification from seventy-two hours ago that I still hadn't answered: «Are we meeting Sunday at the rúa do Porto or are you going to keep pretending your final project is consuming your life?».

Saved draft: «Marcos, I'm probably being consumed by some guy we thought drowned, don't wait for me».

I locked the screen. The bluish flash left us even blinder than before. It smelled of fuel oil burned a decade ago, of hardened guano on the ledges, and of that rotting seafood that gets trapped between the breakwater rocks when the undertow pulls outward.

"The cable," I said in a thread of voice.

"What cable?"

"The mic cable. It got snagged."

I groped around, crouching down. My fingers bumped against the rusted edge of the blue plastic fish market crate and then the metal connector. It was soaked in cold condensation; as I brushed it, the headphones hanging around my neck let out a harsh crackle, followed by that intolerable fifty-hertz hum drilling into the left channel. Because the right one, obviously, had been broken since November.

And then the left earpiece transmitted something else.

Cloc.

A dull, metallic thud. Above.

We stood motionless. We didn't even breathe. Through the broken glass of the lantern, several dozen meters above our heads, the gale whistled through the loose joints of the copper plates with the howl of an old kettle. But what rang through the earpiece wasn't the wind.

Cloc. Cloc.

They were hard rubber soles on cast iron steps. Heavy, deliberate footsteps coming slowly down the spiral.

"Cande." Aldara's whisper was almost a tiny groan, her chin pinned to my shoulder, "tell me that's being played by the tape."

"The recorder is on pause, Al."

"Shit."

"Yeah."

I unplugged the jack from my neck, wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans, and felt along the first stretch of the spiral banister. Rough flakes of peeled paint and dry rust dug in beneath my nails, like coarse sand caked with salt spray. Every three or four seconds, the dirty yellowish light from the port's sodium-vapor streetlights cut through the highest window, filtered by a dense fog that turned the air into soup.

The footsteps continued. Rhythmic. Seven steps above. Then six.

The entire staircase swayed a millimeter, a sharp, pitiful screech of fatigued iron that echoed in the tower's well like a muffled gunshot.

"If we go up we'll run right into him," I muttered, pulling her toward the blind nook formed by the auxiliary generator bench, "and the door downstairs is jammed from the outside."

"It's my uncle. I swear on my mother that way of dragging the right heel is my uncle Gonzalo's. He always walked like that since he fell off the deck of the Nuevo Amanecer."

"Your uncle has been buried at sea for four years, Aldara."

"Well, he brought his boots with him!"

"Don't yell."

"I'm not yelling, I'm having a breakdown in whispers!"

I bit my lower lip so hard it tasted like salt spray. I pressed the black oilcloth notebook against my chest, shielding it under my sweatshirt fabric. In the gloom, my mother's tight handwriting seemed to burn through the paper like glowing embers. What was her handwriting doing there? What were any of us doing in a lighthouse that had been breeding cobwebs and rust for thirty years?

The weight of the footsteps stopped.

Right at the last curve before hitting the concrete floor.

The silence that followed was worse than the sound of the boots. The whistle of the wind-battered copper up there turned into a dull hum. Suddenly, a plastic click cut through the humidity.

A white, violent, inhuman flare.

The beam of a heavy-battery industrial flashlight swept the chipped wall, bounced off the remains of the two-cylinder engine, and hit us square in the face. I covered my eyes with my forearm, completely blind, stumbling backward until the freezing iron of the handrail dug into my kidneys. Aldara let out a choked scream and shrank against my side.

"Turn that off!" bellowed a broken, raspy voice, shattered by an old cough we knew way too well. "Turn the fucking recorder off before it's too late!"

I blinked through tears caused by the glare. Behind the barrel of light there was no specter or seaweed-drenched corpse. There was a flesh-and-blood man, bundled in a greasy work jacket, with unkempt graying beard and a face haggard with a fury that seemed about to overflow.

Gonzalo.

He was alive. He breathed with a bronchial bellows that whistled in sync with the wind on the dome plates.

"Uncle..." Aldara stammered, breaking away from my arm with her mouth open, unable to process the miracle or the nightmare.

Gonzalo didn't look her in the eyes. He wasn't able to. He diverted the flashlight toward the muddy floor and took two clumsy strides, contemptuously tossing a bundle of grease-stained folders at our feet. The papers fanned out across the cement: official maritime captaincy seals, insurance policies for the Nuevo Amanecer with dates that didn't add up, and bank signatures that should have been under seven locks in a courthouse.

"Sometimes guilt does not hide in the gloom out of cowardice, but out of the sheer, terrifying fear of dazzling the eyes of those who still harbor innocence," he blurted out with a poisoned bitterness, pointing a trembling finger at my microphone cable. "Cut that transmission, damn it! The coast guard boat has already left the estuary and they're going to seal the mouth in ten minutes."

I looked at the green light still blinking faintly on my audio panel.

We weren't broadcasting anything.