Discovery Park: Sisyphus

Lighthouse at Discovery Park

The Evergreen Echo

Rain lashed against the lighthouse windows, and wind howled through the cracks and crevices of the paneling.

Alfred closed his eyes and listened. A cacophony. A symphony.

The ceiling leaked. Drops, thick and rhythmic, plummeting into the metal pail he had set beneath it. Outside, the waves pulsed and raged against the sandy spit like the heaving breaths of an ailing god.

Here, at the cusp of Neptune’s domain, Alfred kept watch, kept time. 

The fog bell tolled, swinging, striking, singing to mark the seconds before the sound of it, too, fled with the wind. 

The storm had come suddenly. One of those rare, horrific squalls on the edge of the changing season. Alfred had watched its approach in fleeting glimpses through the revolving lantern flashes. 

White—Red—White—Red—White—

Dark clouds drawing ever nearer, rallying the waves to their vengeful cause. 

Lightning tore through the sky in a jagged streak and ripped the darkness asunder. The night cracked with a cataclysm of thunder, and the dark surged again over the sea with only the lantern left to illuminate the water in bloodied hues. 

Nights like this, on the lonesome beach where the land speared the Sound, time was measured by these minute details. By flashes and bells and the ebb and flow of the raging tide. 

The waves swelled and thrashed. Void-like waters of eternity. 

In the light of the white lantern, Alfred spied the broken bowsprit of a tall ship advancing laggardly for the shore. The poor fishing vessel dipped and shuddered in the waves, its hull torn open like the ribs of a rotting beast. Its sails flapped listlessly in the gusts, and its ropes hung slack, unmanned and fraying. 

The fog bell tolled, a long and mournful note. 

Alfred lifted his spyglass and peered out at the ghostly ship. A southerly wind set its sails blooming, pushing the ship toward the shore before they drooped and whipped at the mast once more. 

Then, through the lens of the glass, Alfred saw a man strung to the fractured remnants of the prow. 

“By God,” Alfred muttered. He leapt to his feet and leaned closer to the window, peering out again at the seeming apparition. 

There, as surely as before, was a man, waist lashed to the foremast, head and arms drooping. A portrait of death. Red light roved over the bleeding ship, and the dead man looked up, breaths rising and falling with the sea. Alive. 

Before he could think better of it, Alfred hurried down the tower and rushed out into the storm. He heaved a row boat from beneath its covering and dragged it over the sand, muscles straining. The waves lapped at the wood, pulled the sand from beneath it, then rushed forth to beach the vessel again. Alfred braced his arms against the stern and pushed with what little might remain to him. His joints twinged with the pain of a long neglected act, but the boat lurched forward, and the sea scooped it from the shore and held it in its trembling grasp. 

Alfred scrambled into the boat and cut the waves with his oar, urging the row boat forward against the ruthless tide. But the water rose up, and with a terrible momentum, it bore Alfred and his boat back onto the sands. 

He swore and tried again. He just needed to make it past the breakage. 

But his strength was not what it once was. With a desperate outcry, he tried once more, only for the sea to spit him back ashore. 

Death waited for him in those bleak, black waters; certain as the rising sun, he knew. Nonetheless, he was determined to try again. But as he set to launch, a large swell sent him running for solid ground.

The keel of the fisherman’s ship sank below the water in the surge and emerged with a savage spray. White light caressed the vessel and cast the man in stark shadows. His body bent grotesquely, and his gaze bore into the heavens. He screamed, the sound of it backed by the roaring wind. A plea for help, for salvation. 

Then the ship cracked beneath him—a horrid sound like the rupturing earth. And the vessel was pulled bodily down by the fearsome weight of the water, decimated and splintered against the rocky shallows. 

Alfred could do nothing but bear witness. Watcher of the wretched sea. He took off his rain-soaked hat, held it to his heart, and stood vigil over the watery grave. 

Splintered fragments of the ship’s hull surfaced with violent speed, crashing and clashing in the tumultuous waves, and the red light of the lantern swept gently over the wreckage. 

The Evergreen Echo

Alfred stood knee-deep in the calming tide, wood shards drifting around with the push and pull. And there, just ahead, he saw the mast of the fisher’s ship bobbing on the waves. It slunk at last toward the shore in the gilded light of dawn, sail spread behind it like a great flag of surrender. Fate succumbing to death-immanence. 

Alfred grabbed at a bit of rope and pulled the mast closer, letting it fall and settle in the sand when the tide no longer aided him. The red stained ropes where the man had been tethered had snapped, his body lost to the Sound, gifted to the carrion eaters. Alfred knelt in the salt sea and said a silent prayer for the man’s immortal soul. 

A gull flew overhead, basking in the moisture-thick wind. It circled thrice, scoping the scene of the wreck before it settled on the lighthouse rail. Its omniscient eye bore down upon Alfred, and the fog bell tolled behind it.