The spiral stair is honest iron. The fog outside is not.

Your shoes say tick, tick, tick on the treads and then, when you slow down, the tower’s hollow middle says whoom. The lantern room opens like a glass attic. The Fresnel lens stands in the middle, a barrel of stepped rings, a frozen waterfall of glass that used to grab a lamp’s small fire and fling it to ships.

The motor is off. The lamp is cold. The lens is still a puzzle that bends light.

Out there, the answering wink happens again. It is not a person’s shape. It has no deck. It sits on the fog like a coin, then slides, then sits again.

You remember the note. If the light answers, don’t you answer from the rocks.

The light does not answer. It appears. There is a difference, and you are not sure it helps.

A second glow joins the first, then a third, as if the harbor were putting out candles for a party nobody should row to. The air smells like salt and cold metal and a hint of the kerosene that used to live here.

“Hey!”

Tess’s voice climbs the stairwell, delayed, then arrives. She is not in the room. The radio in the cottage coughs static. “If that’s a ship, it isn’t on my list,” she calls. “If it’s the lens being a magician, write it down.”

The nearest wink slides toward a dark patch that does not look like water at all. The glass beside you is still glass. The dark patch is a rumor of a hull.