The Midnight Tide

They left the North Point lighthouse turned off since the twenties, when McReady realized that it was what brought the Midnight Tide. He was carried back out to sea with it, the secret drowning with him. For thirty-two years, the lighthouse sat abandoned on the corner of the property until finally it was bought by a couple from across the country. They had never heard of the Midnight Tide.

They lived in the enormous old house for a month before Elliot found the lighthouse while he was out exploring. It was covered in cobwebs and layers of dust, but the only reason it didn’t work, he found, was that the main power had been cut with an axe. He replaced those cables and the light was as bright as it had been fifty years earlier.

Elliot never left it turned on. There weren’t any ships that came around that part of the coastline, not since the pass was built out to the Atlantic. But there was one night in the middle of July when he did. The Armature Finals were scheduled to go that way, and the competition was fierce enough that most of the boats would sail overnight. This was why the North Point lighthouse was on that foggy night.

The O’Hares sat on the deck of the lighthouse that night drinking wine and watching the pale lights of the boats go by slowly, masts wide. The wind suddenly picked up and immediately the trees were in full bend. A few ships lowered their masts in time, but the rest capsized, and Elliot and his wife watched the pale lights disappear one at a time. The wind grew thunderous. Walls of water knocked them down the stairs as they ran for safety, and they never saw the rest of the pale lights rise high into the air before going out forever.

And the strange wind died.

The fog was blown off the sea. Every few seconds when the light came around they saw nothing out across the water. No lights, no ships. An unnerving calm. The Midnight Tide was gone.

Since those twenty-nine ships disappeared, the Armature Finals never went through that area again, and so Elliot never had a reason to leave the lighthouse on. He thought about it every now and then, because he hated to see it sit unused. It seemed like such a waste. But on the occasions when he went out to turn it on, there was a breeze of echoes that stirred by, tired. So he let them be.