The Last Keeper of Gull Island

• Chapter 1 The Crossing at Low Tide
• Chapter 2 Gull Rock's Narrowing Spine
• Chapter 3 The Spiral of Iron and Salt
• Chapter 4 Winding the Clockwork
• Chapter 5 Echoes in the Fog
• Chapter 6 The Shrinking Shoreline
• Chapter 7 Keeper Thorne’s Logbook
• Chapter 8 High Tides and Hollow Stones
• Chapter 9 Polishing the Fresnel Lens
• Chapter 10 The Ghost of East Point
• Chapter 11 Footprints Lost to the Surf
• Chapter 12 Lessons in Nor'easters
• Chapter 13 The Midnight Watch
• Chapter 14 Saltwater in the Cellar
• Chapter 15 Secrets Beneath the Granite
• Chapter 16 A Crumbling Foundation
• Chapter 17 The Rhythm of the Prism
• Chapter 18 Signals Through the Gale
• Chapter 19 When the Causeway Vanishes
• Chapter 20 The Unmarked Shoals
• Chapter 21 The Night the Light Died
• Chapter 22 Fighting the Surging Deep
• Chapter 23 The Final Sunrise on the Tower
• Chapter 24 Handing Over the Brass Key
• Chapter 25 Abandoning the Outpost
• Chapter 26 The Light Still Burning

The engine of the ancient station wagon cut out with a dry, shuddering cough that sent a flock of herring gulls scattering into the pale morning air. For three miles along the dirt track leading down to the shore, the exhaust pipe had dragged through the gravel like a wounded snake, but here at the dead end of Point Mistaken, there was nowhere left to drive. Beyond the rusty hood lay the North Atlantic, flat and gray as a sheet of galvanized tin under the June fog.

Maeve shoved her door open, the hinges screaming for oil, and swung her legs out. Her sneakers sank an inch into the wet mixture of sand and crushed clam shells that passed for a parking lot. The air smelled intensely of cold salt, mud, and the sharp, sulfurous tang of rotting rockweed baking slowly in the damp heat.

"End of the line, kiddo," her mother’s partner, Earl, said without turning around. He leaned over the steering wheel, his thumbs tapping a sluggish rhythm against the cracked plastic. He hadn't turned off the ignition key, only let the engine stall out, and the dashboard still hummed with a faint, dying electrical rattle. "You’re sure this is where he told you to be?"

Maeve reached into the pocket of her oilskin jacket and pulled out the folded piece of thick yellow paper that had arrived in her mailbox three weeks earlier. The handwriting on it was thick and blunt, pressed so hard into the grain that you could read it with your fingertips like Braille.

Be at the Point Mistaken causeway at 0610 hours on the fifth of June. Tide drops to negative one foot. Wear rubber boots if you have them. If you don't, bring extra socks. Don't be late. The ocean doesn't wait for girls from Portland.

She looked at her watch. It was 06:08.

"This is the place," Maeve said, sliding out of the bench seat and grabbing her canvas duffel bag from the back floorboards. The bag held everything she owned for the next three months: three pairs of stiff denim work pants, five wool sweaters that smelled like her grandmother’s attic, a box of graphite pencils, two blank ledgers, and a pair of heavy leather boots she’d oiled until the hide was black as river silt.

Earl tilted his head back, peering at her through the rear-view mirror. "He seems like a cheerful old bastard."

"He’s my grand-uncle," Maeve replied, though she had never met him. "And he's the only keeper left on the bay."

"Well, he’s a keeper who lives on a rock that’s washing away," Earl muttered, unlocking the trunk with a clunky thud. "Your mother still thinks you ought to have taken that summer job at the bakery in South Portland. Frosting cinnamon rolls pays three dollars an hour more than whatever state pittance this apprenticeship gives you, and the flour doesn't drown you twice a day."

"The sea isn't going to drown me, Earl."

"Tell that to the road," Earl said, nodding toward the edge of the embankment.

Maeve hauled her bag out of the trunk and walked to the crest of the gravel bank. Below them, the coastline opened into a wide, shallow sound framed by dark spruce trees that dropped off into sheer granite drop-offs. Straight ahead, roughly three-quarters of a mile across the grey water, the shape of Gull Island rose out of the mist like the spine of a sleeping whale. It was small—far smaller than it looked on the blue-and-white navigational charts she had studied back in the library. From this distance, the white cylinder of the lighthouse looked thin as a pencil stub, perched on the highest hump of stone at the island's southern tip.

Connecting the mainland to the island was a long, dark ridge that seemed to be lifting itself straight out of the retreat of the ocean. It was the causeway—a narrow bar of granite boulders, packed glacial gravel, and dense beds of bladderwrack seaweed that only emerged from the sea for two hours during the lowest tides of the month. Right now, the water was pouring off its slippery flanks in hundreds of tiny, white-water waterfalls, revealing a dripping, treacherous path no wider than a two-lane driveway.

"You're really going to walk across that?" Earl asked, coming up beside her and shoving his hands deep into his greasy trousers. "Looks like a good way to break an ankle and get eaten by crabs."

"It's low tide," Maeve said, setting her duffel down to tighten the laces on her leather boots. "It's the only way on or off the island without a heavy dory. Uncle Thorne said boats can't draw enough water over the shoals when the tide runs out, and when the tide runs in, the current through the gut will pitch a skiff into the jagged teeth of East Point."

"Delightful," Earl said. He stood there for a moment, shifting his weight from one worn boot to the other, looking visibly relieved that he wouldn't have to carry her luggage across the seaweed-choked bar. "Look, if the old man turns out to be half as crazy as the folks down at the gas station said, you call the shop. I’ll come down on the afternoon tide and pick you up at the public dock in town."

"There isn't a phone on Gull Island, Earl."

Earl paused, frowning. "No phone?"

"Just the radio light," Maeve said. "And that's for the Coast Guard."

Earl blew a long sigh through his mustache, spraying a fine mist into the chill morning air. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a rolled-up pack of spearmint gum, and shoved it into her hand. "Take it. It keeps the taste of sea salt out of your teeth."

He didn't wait for her to start down the bank. He just nodded once, hauled his frame back into the driver's seat, and slammed the door. The station wagon roared back to life with a cloud of blue smoke, reversed clumsily into the turnout, and rattled back up the dirt track toward the highway, leaving Maeve standing alone at the edge of the bay.

The silence that settled over the shoreline after the car vanished was immediate and absolute, broken only by the cold, rhythmic slap-hiss of the receding tide and the distant, dry croak of a raven perched in a dead hemlock overhead.

Maeve adjusted the strap of her canvas bag across her chest, took a deep breath of the wet sea air, and scrambled down the crumbling dirt bank to the edge of the causeway.

Up close, the path didn't look like a road at all. It was a prehistoric rib cage of black granite boulders and slick river cobbles, carpeted in deep yellow-green sea lettuce and bladderwrack that popped underfoot with tiny wet snaps. Tide pools flickered in the clefts of the stone, brimming with pale green anemones, tiny darting minnows, and hermit crabs dragging their stolen shells across the sand. The air down here was cold—colder than it had been on the bank above—as if the retreat of the water was drawing all the warmth out of the earth and dragging it out to sea.

She picked her way forward carefully, testing every stone with her toe before putting her full weight down. The boots she had spent three days rubbing with mink oil gripped the wet rock reasonably well, but the heavy duffel bag kept shifting on her shoulder, threatening to throw off her balance.

To her left, the water of the sound was calm and brown, stained with cedar tannin from the mainland river runoff. To her right, open ocean swells rolled in from the Gulf of Maine, smashing against the far side of the bar with a low, thunderous roar that vibrated through the soles of her shoes. The sound was a constant reminder of the clock ticking beneath her feet. In less than ninety minutes, the ocean would stop its retreat. It would hesitate for a few minutes at slack water, and then the Atlantic would come rushing back through the channel, filling the gut with ten feet of swirling, freezing brine and erasing the causeway until the next moon tide.

She had covered perhaps two hundred yards when she noticed the line of wooden stakes driven into the gaps between the boulders. They were bleached gray as old bones, wrapped in salt-crusted twine, and spaced about thirty feet apart. Someone had driven them into the rock to mark the highest crest of the gravel ridge—a crude trail to follow when the thick summer fogs rolled in and blotted out both the mainland and the island.

Maeve paused beside one of the stakes to heave the canvas bag onto her other shoulder. As she did, she spotted a movement on the island shore ahead.

A tall, narrow shape had emerged from the stunted spruce trees at the far end of the spit. It stood completely motionless on a high shelf of granite, watching her approach. From this distance, the figure looked less like a man and more like an old harbor piling left behind by a long-abandoned wharf. He wore a dark canvas coat that hung almost to his knees and a flat-topped mariner's cap pulled low over his eyes.

Maeve wiped a trail of cold sea spray from her forehead and pushed forward, speeding up her pace despite the treacherous footing. Her knees ached from the constant twisting on the round cobbles, and her right heel was already beginning to rub a hotspot against the stiff leather of her brand-new boot.

As she closed the distance, the details of Gull Island began to resolve through the wisps of lifting fog. It was a harsh, vertical place. Unlike the soft, rolling farm country fifty miles inland, this was a wedge of dark pink granite thrusting violently out of the ocean. The lower skirts of the island were stained black by the sea, cleared of all life except barnacles and limpet shells by the relentless battering of winter ice. Above the high-water line, a thin cap of yellow grass and stunted, twisted pine trees clung to the rock, leaning heavily toward the west—a permanent posture of retreat forced upon them by decades of winter gales.

And high above the trees, anchored directly to the crown of the highest ledge, sat the light station.

The tower was built of heavy, mortar-jointed granite blocks, whitewashed so bright that it seemed to glow even under the dull gray sky. Beside it stood the keeper's house—a two-story wooden cottage painted a dark, salt-damped red, with thick white trim around the narrow windows. A covered wooden catwalk connected the rear door of the house to the base of the tower, floating ten feet above the bare rock on iron stilts so the keeper could reach the lantern room during winter storms without being swept into the sea by incoming waves.

When Maeve reached the base of the island shelf, her breath coming in ragged gasps, the figure above her finally moved. He didn't offer a hand down to help her haul her bag up the steep granite ledge. He just stood there, his large, knuckles-bared hands shoved deep into his coat pockets, watching her climb.

"You're three minutes late," he said.

His voice sounded like two gravelly river stones grinding together at the bottom of a bucket.

Maeve hauled her bag over the edge, planted her boots on the firm, dry granite, and stood up straight. "The road was washed out near the creek. Earl had to go slow."

"Don't know an Earl," the old man said flatly. He turned his eyes away from her, looking past her shoulder down the length of the causeway toward the mainland. "And the road isn't washed out. It’s just rough. People from the city think if a path isn't paved with hot asphalt, it’s broken."

He stepped closer, and Maeve got her first clear look at her grand-uncle, Keeper Thorne.

He was past seventy, she knew, but he had the thick, square shoulders of a man who spent his life hauling wooden lobster traps and lifting oil drums. His face was a map of deep, wind-carved furrows, tanned to the color of an old boot, and his beard was a short, bristly line of white stubble that ran along a jawline that looked like it had been chiseled out of the same pink granite as the island. His eyes were small, watery blue, and sharp as fishhooks.

"Maeve," he said, not as a greeting, but as if testing the word to see if it had any weight to it. "Your mother wrote me three letters. I answered one."

"I know," Maeve said. "I have it in my bag."

"You shouldn't have brought so much plunder," Thorne said, gesturing with his chin toward her canvas duffel. "Everything you need is already up at the house. Everything you don't need will just rot from the salt damp."

"It's mostly wool socks and pencils," she said, squaring her jaw. "And I carried it myself."

Thorne gave a brief, dry grunt that might have been a laugh if there had been any humor behind it. He turned on his heel and began walking up the steep, narrow path that wound through the bayberry bushes toward the house, his stride long and unhurried despite the sharp incline.

"Pick up your kit," he called back over his shoulder without looking to see if she was following. "The water’s already turning. Look behind you."

Maeve paused and turned around.

She had only been standing on the island for two minutes, but already the landscape had changed. The far end of the gravel spit—the part nearest the mainland where Earl’s station wagon had dropped her off—was gone. A broad, swirling ribbon of green ocean water was slicing through the lowest dip in the causeway, tearing at the seaweed and tossing foam against the wooden markers. As she watched, one of the gray stakes wobbled, tipped over, and was swept away into the dark current of the sound.

The path home was officially gone.

"Come on, girl," Thorne’s voice echoed down from the pine grove above. "The tea is getting cold, and the brass in the lantern room doesn't polish itself."

Maeve pulled her duffel higher on her shoulder, took a deep breath of the pine-and-salt air, and began the long climb up the granite spine of Gull Island.

The ascent from the wet, black teeth of the landing ledge to the safety of the keepers’ compound was a vertical scramble that left Maeve’s lungs burning with the sharp flavor of cold salt and crushed spruce needles. The path was not a road, nor even a proper trail, but rather a series of natural shelves in the pink granite that had been notched here and there by a mason’s chisel to give a boot heel some purchase. It wound through a dense, miniature forest of white spruce and balsam fir, trees that had been stunted by a century of salt spray and relentless northwesters until they grew sideways, their branches woven together into a dense, impenetrable thatch that looked like gray moss.

Maeve kept her eyes pinned to the heels of Keeper Thorne’s heavy leather boots. He moved with a peculiar, swinging gait, his knees slightly bent, his torso tilted forward to balance the grade. He didn't use his hands for balance, nor did he look back to see if she was keeping up. Every few yards, her duffel bag would catch on a dead spruce branch, dragging her back with a jerk that threatened to send her tumbling down the steep slope toward the frothing channel below.

When they finally broke through the tree line, the wind hit them. On the mainland side of the channel, the air had been heavy and still, but up here on the high crest of the island, the ocean breeze was a living thing. It blew clean and hard from the open south-southeast, carrying no smell of mud or forest, only the deep, cold vitality of the open sea.

The island, Maeve realized as she stood catching her breath on the gravel terrace, was incredibly narrow. To her left, the cliffs dropped seventy feet down to the churning waters of the gut, where the incoming tide was already swirling in violent, tea-colored whirlpools. To her right, the granite sloped away more gently but ended abruptly in a crescent of white, polished cobbles known as East Point, where the rollers from the open Atlantic smashed themselves to pieces against the submerged ledge. At its widest, this high spine of the island was perhaps no more than eighty yards across. In every direction, the horizon was a gray, shifting line where the sea met the low sky, leaving them marooned on a tiny, isolated wedge of stone that felt as if it were tilting under the weight of the water.

Thorne stopped by a heavy wooden bulkhead that led down into the cellar of the red house. He unhooked a rusted iron latch, flung the hatch back with a dry scrape of hinges, and pointed down into the darkness. "Leave your heavy gear down there on the dry-bench," he said, his voice cutting through the constant roar of the surf. "The stairs to the loft are too narrow for that canvas monster, and I won’t have you dragging damp shore-dirt through the kitchen."

Maeve looked down into the cellar. It was dark, smelling intensely of dry rot, coal dust, and old potatoes, but it was dry. She lowered her duffel onto a wide bench made of rough-hewn pine planks that sat well above the concrete floor, then pulled her small leather satchel containing her pencils and ledgers over her shoulder.

"Is the house always this quiet?" she asked, stepping back out into the wind and letting the wooden bulkhead drop shut with a hollow thud.

"Only when the wind isn't blowing," Thorne replied, though the wind was currently whistling through the stays of the iron flagstaff near the cliff’s edge. "And when the sea doesn't have its teeth in the cellar walls. In a winter gale, the basement sounds like a bowling alley. The stones move. You can feel the whole island shudder when a thirty-footer hits the eastern face."

He led the way around the side of the red house, past a small garden plot that had been carved out of the rocky soil. It was enclosed by a low wall of stacked granite blocks, clearly built to protect whatever grew inside from the salt gale, but the only things currently surviving the harsh climate were a few stunted potato plants and a thick patch of wild rhubarb with leaves as large as dinner plates.

Inside, the keeper’s house was surprisingly warm, heated by a massive cast-iron cookstove that occupied nearly half of the small kitchen. The air smelled of woodsmoke, kerosene, and the sharp, medicinal tang of pine-tar soap. The walls were sheathed in narrow tongue-and-groove pine boards that had turned the color of dry honey over the decades, polished to a dull sheen by generations of shoulders leaning against them.

Thorne pointed toward a small, ladder-like staircase that disappeared through a square opening in the ceiling. "Your berth is up there. The old assistant keeper's quarters. It hasn't been occupied since the Coast Guard took over the maintenance budget back in fifty-three and decided I was enough man to run the light alone. Mind your head on the rafters."

Maeve climbed the narrow steps, her boot heels clattering against the pine risers. The loft was small, with a sloping ceiling that followed the pitch of the roof so closely she could only stand upright in the center of the room. A single small window looked out toward the east, offering a view of the white surf curling over the outer ledges. The furniture was sparse: a narrow iron cot with a mattress stuffed with dried straw that rustled loudly when she touched it, a washstand with a chipped ceramic basin, and a low three-legged stool. A thick wool blanket, dyed a dark navy blue and stamped with the faded letters U.S.L.H.S.—United States Lighthouse Service—was folded neatly at the foot of the bed.

She set her leather satchel on the stool and walked to the window. The glass was old and wavy, distorting the horizon into a series of rolling, liquid hills. Down below, she could see the narrow spine of the island stretching away toward the north. The tide had completely swallowed the causeway now, leaving only a line of white foam where the road had been. The mainland looked miles away, a dark, indifferent smudge of green forest fading into the morning mist.

When she descended the ladder back into the kitchen, she found Thorne sitting at a long pine table that had been scrubbed until the grain of the wood stood up in white ridges. He had poured two mugs of black tea from a blue enameled pot that sat on the corner of the stove. The tea was strong, smelling of woodsmoke and chicory, and tasted faintly of iron from the rainwater cistern beneath the kitchen floor.

"Your mother says you can draw," Thorne said, not looking up from his mug. He was tracing a thick, yellowed fingernail along a seam in the tabletop.

"I keep a record of things," Maeve said, taking a seat opposite him. "Plants, birds, the shape of the shoreline. Mostly just whatever I can find in the woods around Portland."

"There are no woods here," Thorne said simply. "Just the rock, the light, and the water that’s trying to take them both. If you're going to spend your summer drawing, you might as well make yourself useful. The Coast Guard wants a weekly report on the erosion at the eastern boat slip. They want to know if the winter storms have shifted the granite foundation blocks under the oil house. You can draw that."

"I can," Maeve said, feeling a small spark of utility. "I brought several hard-lead pencils that won't smudge in the damp."

"Good. Because if the oil house goes, the light goes, and if the light goes, we might as well all pack our kits and head for the mainland with the rest of the sheep." Thorne drained his mug in three swallows, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and stood up. "Drink your tea. The fog is lifting, which means we can see the shoals. It’s time you saw what we’re actually guarding out here."

They walked out through the back door and entered the covered wooden catwalk that connected the house to the lighthouse tower. The catwalk was like a long, narrow bridge, suspended ten feet above the bare rock on iron pillars that had been driven deep into the granite. Below them, the surface of the island was a jumble of jagged fissures and deep tide pools, some of them filled with dark, stagnant water that had been trapped by the highest winter tides.

"Why is the walkway raised?" Maeve asked, her voice echoing inside the narrow wooden tunnel.

"Because the sea doesn't stay on the beach where it belongs," Thorne said, his boots making a steady, rhythmic thud-thud-thud on the spruce planks. "During the November gales, the rollers come right over the low neck of the island. They sweep through this gulley under us with enough force to carry a three-ton boulder from one side of the island to the other. If you were walking on the ground during a big blow, you’d be in Nova Scotia before you could draw a breath."

He stopped at the end of the catwalk, where it met the heavy, iron-studded oak door that led into the base of the granite tower. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a large, heavy brass key. The key was worn smooth, its teeth rounded by decades of being turned in the same lock, but it slid into the keyhole with a solid, satisfying click.

The interior of the lighthouse tower was cool and damp, smelling of lime whitewash, brass polish, and the heavy, sweet scent of lard oil. A spiral staircase made of cast-iron plates rose from the center of the floor, winding upward into the darkness like the interior of a giant, metallic seashell. The walls were six feet thick at the base, constructed of massive blocks of local granite that had been fitted together so precisely that not even a knife blade could be slid between the joints.

"One hundred and twelve steps," Thorne said, pointing up the spiral. "No stopping on the landings unless you’ve got a weak heart, and if you’ve got a weak heart, you shouldn't have come to Gull Island."

He began the climb, his pace steady and unhurried, keeping his hand light on the curved iron railing. Maeve followed close behind, her knees already protesting the vertical climb. Each iron step had a delicate, openwork pattern cast into the metal—a series of small, star-shaped cutouts that allowed the light from the lantern room far above to filter down into the lower levels of the tower in a pale, dusty checkerboard.

As they climbed, the temperature began to rise, and the air grew thick with the smell of warm metal and glass. They passed three narrow window slits, each one deeply recessed into the thick granite walls. Through the glass, Maeve could see the horizon expanding with every step she took, the vast gray circle of the Atlantic widening until she felt as though she were rising out of the sea itself.

Finally, they reached the watchroom—a small, circular chamber just below the lantern room. It was furnished with a simple wooden desk, a high stool, and a brass-rimmed barometer mounted on the wall. A glass jar filled with clean cotton rags and a tin of polishing paste sat on the corner of the desk, next to a heavy, leather-bound logbook with the words Gull Island Light Station stamped in gold on the cover.

"This is where you’ll spend your night watches," Thorne said, gesturing toward the desk. "Four hours on, four hours off, when the fog is thick. You keep the log, you check the oil levels every hour, and you watch the horizon for any sign of a vessel standing into danger. But the real work is up there."

He nodded toward an iron ladder that led through a hatch in the ceiling. Maeve climbed up first, her head emerging into a world of brilliant, blinding light.

The lantern room was a circular dome of plate glass, held together by a delicate framework of cast iron. In the center of the room, sitting on a massive pedestal of black steel, was the lens. It was a magnificent, multi-tiered crown of sparkling glass prisms, shaped like a giant beehive and standing nearly six feet tall. Every surface of the glass had been polished until it was completely flawless, catching the pale morning light and splitting it into dozens of tiny, brilliant rainbows that danced across the white-painted iron floor.

"A second-order Fresnel lens," Thorne said, his voice dropping to a tone that was almost reverent as he stepped up onto the brass platform beside her. "Made in Paris in eighteen hundred and seventy-four. There isn't another one like it left on this part of the coast. Most of the other stations have been converted to those ugly, spinning plastic beacons that look like airport runway lights, but this one... this one still has its soul."

Maeve stepped closer, looking at her own reflection distorted in the curved outer prisms. "How does it work?"

"It doesn't just shine light; it bends it," Thorne explained, pointing to the thick, central bullseye prism. "A single kerosene wick in the center of that glass cage produces a flame no bigger than a teacup. If you stood on the mainland, you wouldn't see it past the tree line. But when you put it behind this glass, the prisms collect every single stray ray of light—the ones going up to the sky, the ones going down to the rock—and compress them into a single, flat beam that can cut through twenty miles of sea-fog."

He reached out and gently tapped one of the brass frames holding the prisms in place. "But it only works if it’s clean. The salt damp is our constant enemy. It leaves a white film on the glass that scatters the beam, making it look like a dim yellow smudge instead of a sharp white flash. That’s your job, Maeve. You’ll spend three hours every morning with a chamois leather and a bottle of spirits, polishing every single one of these prisms until you can see your own eyes in them."

Maeve looked out through the tall glass windows of the lantern room. From this height, the narrowing spine of Gull Island was laid out below them like a map.

The island was shaped like a long, thin wedge of stone, pointing north toward the mainland. To the east, the granite was scarred by deep, jagged fractures where the winter sea had torn away huge chunks of rock, leaving a series of narrow, white-water channels that boiled even on a calm day. To the west, the water was calmer, but the bottom was a treacherous maze of yellow sandbanks and dark, submerged ledges that showed through the clear water like giant, sleeping beasts.

"Look there," Thorne said, pointing toward the southern reef, where the water was breaking in a long, continuous line of white foam. "That’s the South Claw. In a heavy gale, you can’t tell where the reef ends and the deep water begins. If a coal schooner or a fishing trawler gets caught on the wrong side of that foam, the tide will drag them onto the rocks before they can even drop an anchor. That’s why we’re here. To keep them off the spine."

He turned to her, his blue eyes boring into hers with an intensity that made her want to look away. "The townspeople on the mainland think this island is just a scenic spot for a summer postcard. They think the government keeps this light burning just for old time’s sake. But they don't see what the sea does to this rock when the winter storms come. The island is shrinking, Maeve. Every year, the high-water mark moves a little closer to the foundation of the house. The causeway is open for twenty minutes less each tide than it was when I was a boy. The ocean is reclaiming this place, foot by foot, and we are the only ones standing between the ships and the granite."

Maeve looked down at the white foam washing over the rocks far below. For the first time, she felt the true isolation of the place. There was no road back to the mainland, no telephone to call for help, and no one to rely on but an old man who seemed to belong more to the stone and the sea than to the world of living men.

"I understand," she said quietly.

"You don't understand yet," Thorne said, turning back toward the iron ladder. "But you will by August. Come on down. The tide is at the slack, and we have to haul the coal up from the bulkhead before the water starts coming back over the path."

As they made their way back down the spiral staircase, the sound of the ocean seemed to grow louder, filling the stone tower with a deep, rhythmic thrumming that felt less like the movement of water and more like the very heartbeat of the shrinking island itself.