Well, I was having that feeling again. There was no music, but I could see myself sitting up in my bed, my black hair in messy strands across my face, staring down at my phone and I, and everyone else in the world, knew that something heavy had just been handed to me. Like I was given a superhero power to save the world.
That, of course, was ridiculous, as the only power I could ever have would be an overactive imagination. But the feeling still remained.
I slowly got out of my bed, enveloped in future mystery and drama, and let myself indulge in the moment.
When the indulgence hit an all-time high, I went to my computer and quickly put in a new blog post. I knew that Ada would have a hissy fit over my impromptu post, but I didn’t care. I wanted to tell the world that the blog posts weren’t for nothing. Something big was going to happen. I didn’t flat out say what it was, lest I jinx it or get Dex in trouble, but I definitely alluded to the fact that I would be revisiting the lighthouse again with a proper ghost-hunting team. I didn’t mention that the team was just Dex and me, but I did say it would possibly be aired on a prominent website.
Then I brushed it aside, got dressed and went to work.
***
I could only see blackness at first. My eyes fluttered upwards; my lashes were wet and thick as they tried to focus. Slowly, light appeared in patches, a damp glow that moved and swirled in all four corners of my sight.
My other senses kicked in lazily. I was wet and cold, and could barely feel my limbs, floating, bobbing up and down with rolling swells of water. A light shone in the distant black and grew bigger with each wave. I felt as if I was gradually being sucked toward a tunnel of brightness.
Was this death? I thought. My thoughts themselves were distant, as if someone else were thinking them for me, someone I had no attachment to or concern for. If it was death, it didn’t seem to matter. Any gravity associated with that concept was lost.
The light continued to get bigger until I found feeling in my body. Pressure was pushing from underneath. My skin was raked. I was lying down on a hard, wet surface. A beach. The waves lapped behind me. I looked down at glistening rocks mere inches from my face. A tiny white crab, luminous against the void, scuttled on top of my arms and headed up a slope. My eyes followed it up and I recognized the source of the light. It was not death or the afterlife. It was coming from the top of the lighthouse.
This lighthouse seemed familiar to me. I felt like I had been there before, as if it had some kind of purpose in my life. But I couldn’t recall how that was possible. I had come from the ocean, from distant lands. This place could not have existed in my life.
I got up slowly. My legs shook with each wave that hit and my feet slipped on top of the smooth, wet rocks. Someone appeared in front of me and blocked the light, causing it to splay outwards into the night. I realized someone had been standing there the whole time, but I just hadn’t allowed myself to see them. The person raised an arm and pointed in my direction. I knew somehow this person wasn’t pointing at me. I turned around and looked back at the ocean.
There was nothing there but inky blackness. Then a weak beam of moving light. There was another lighthouse, perched on a tall rocky mound just offshore. It illuminated the dark waters below, where familiar shapes danced. I strained my eyes. They looked like human bodies floating up and down with the waves. There were at least a dozen of them.
Then the lighthouse shut off. The darkness was sharp, ominous, suffocating.
When it came back on, I was back in the water, the dark shapes floating around me. Something bumped my back.
I quickly splashed around to find myself face to face with a bloated, puny visage. His eyes were missing, his skin was leaking dark liquid from each pore, and slimy kelp oozed from his haphazard jaw. He sank underneath the water and I felt a bony hand clutch both my legs. I screamed just in time to be pulled underwater, the ocean seeping into my open mouth and filling up my lungs. The light on the surface rippled as I was pulled further and further into the depths until darkness filled my eyes once more.
***
It was Saturday morning, nine fifty a.m. I sat outside on our front steps with a huge, scalding hot travel mug of coffee in my hand. Though I didn’t turn around, I knew my mother and father were standing at the kitchen window watching me, watching for Dex, and making sure that their eldest daughter wasn’t going to be picked up by a murderous filmmaker.
To be honest, I wasn’t feeling as 100% positive about this whole thing like I had been the day before. I guess my horrific dream put a damper on things.
The creepiest thing was that I woke up in the middle of the night absolutely drenched in sweat. I was so wet that I couldn’t be sure that I hadn’t just been drowned in the ocean. It was just as sticky and salty, and just as out of place.
And of course, I was naturally as nervous as ever. It didn’t help having breakfast with my parents and hearing their opinions on the matter. My dad was overprotective of me, as most dads should be. My mother was more concerned that I would be made a fool of. Both of their worries were not out of place. I was thinking the same things myself. But I think deep down inside, they knew I was levelheaded and could defend myself if I needed to. Either way, I knew I could defend myself and that’s all that mattered.
Uncle Albert also wasn’t as accepting of our plans as I had thought he would be. He said several ghost hunters had harassed him over the last few days, all wanting access to his lighthouse. ‘Tis the season, I guess. I hadn’t explicitly said the whereabouts of his lighthouse in my blog entries, but I guess there are only a few privately owned lighthouses on the Oregon Coast. Luckily he gave in, but only if I could someday give him royalties. Of course I couldn’t promise him anything, but I figured one day, if this project was a success, you never knew what could happen (I was leading him on a bit).
Suspiciously, Ada was absent through all of this. I didn’t want to wake her up before I left but I had thought for sure she would have pried herself out of bed to watch the start of it all. You know, just to make sure I wasn’t actually heading off to the Pacific with Beelzebub himself.