Gabriel Jeroschewitz, September 12th, 2025. I was inspired by The Lighthouse, a film I saw a few years ago, and occasionally, I still dream about it.
The Lantern’s Puzzle
(A Tragic Fable of Two Men, an Unforgiving Sea, and a Light They Couldn’t Stop Worshiping)
I must begin by stating, dear listener, that I was never meant to be upon that cursed rock, nor to watch the two men unravel beneath the glare of the great lamp. I was only meant to bring provisions — barrels of salted fish, sacks of coal, and bottles of gin disguised as medicine. Yet storms anchor more than ships, and the sea, in its wet and wheezing humour, left me stranded, an unwilling chronicler of madness.
The island was a claw of stone rising from an endless bruise of water. The lighthouse — a pale tower with a cataract eye — presided like a god grown weary of its flock, watching, ever watching. The gulls screamed their obscene sermons. The foghorn moaned endlessly, like some beast in rut stretched over eternity. And in this place of sound and fury, there were two men.
Thomas Wake, the elder — a crusty stump of a mariner whose beard smelled of smoked herring and pipe ash, and whose backside was a bellows of impolite winds. He bellowed too, in the dialect of sea gospels: half scripture, half profanity. And Ephraim Winslow, the younger — lean, sullen, full of secrets, eyes like windows cracked by storms. A man who worked hard, though always with the look of one digging his own grave.
At first, their routine had a grim humour. Wake ordered; Winslow obeyed. Wake drank; Winslow sulked. Wake’s farts rattled the dishes; Winslow scrubbed them anyway, jaw clenched tight enough to crack teeth. For days, it was a vaudeville act of maritime misery. I laughed — quietly, of course, as gulls are spiteful gossips and I did not wish my chuckles carried to the ears of their human subjects.
But the weather worsened. The supply boat never came. Gin became breakfast, lunch, and supper. The lantern above — how Wake guarded it! He climbed nightly to commune with its glow, moaning, sighing, whispering, as though into a lover’s ear. Winslow was forbidden entry. That exclusion burned him hotter than any storm.
Isolation eats different men in different ways. Wake grew mythic in his braggadocio: Neptune’s bastard, captain of captains, self-declared prophet of sea law. Winslow, meanwhile, began to argue with shadows. He beat a gull to death with a fury that shocked me — though the gulls had been tormenting him for weeks, cackling, shitting on his freshly scrubbed stones, shrieking that he didn’t belong. Perhaps he believed killing one would silence them all. (It didn’t. The gulls only grew louder, as did his nightmares.)
Meals became theatre. Wake crunched, offering sea tales with the solemn reverence of scripture. Winslow, jaw tight, shovelled in mouthfuls of gruel, as though eating were an act of defiance. Then came the night Winslow insulted Wake’s cooking. I swear on salt and storm that the older man’s eyes bulged like a squid hauled too quickly from the deep. He erupted into a tirade, defending his slop as though it were haute cuisine blessed by Poseidon himself. I nearly drowned in suppressed laughter — yet beneath the comedy rolled something darker, like undertow.
The storm grew monstrous. No departure. No hope. Their ration barrels emptied, yet their bottle pile multiplied. If laughter was my first refuge, silence was now my armour. The two men began dancing — lurching, sweating reels across the sodden floor, clinging to each other as though love and violence were the same embrace. At other times, they fought — fists, curses, furniture thrown. The lines between play and murder blurred like the horizon in fog.
And then, there was the light. That damned, divine, unholy light. Winslow begged to see it. Wake refused with the zeal of a jealous priest. I more than once caught Winslow staring up the spiral stairs, breathing as though the lamp pulsed like a heart. Nights passed when Wake stayed in the lantern room too long, making sounds no prayer book dares record. Winslow’s face twisted with hunger — for understanding, possession, perhaps communion with whatever lived within that glow.
Winslow climbed the stairs one evening — or morning; time had lost all meaning. Wake followed, roaring curses, tripping in his drunken scramble. I crept behind, compelled though terrified, and watched.
Winslow reached the lantern first. The great eye opened, casting him in brilliance, a living figure in some cruel myth. His mouth opened in laughter, ecstasy, horror — I could not tell which, for all were the same. Wake pulled at him, screeching that the light was his alone. They grappled, bodies twisting like lovers at war. And then, the inevitable: a fall, a crack of bone, a silence that seemed to swallow the sea itself.
Wake lay broken on the stairwell. Winslow wheezed, trembling, his face glowing with the residue of whatever truth or lie the light had offered. And then he laughed. Oh, the laughter! Not of joy, but of a man who had finally understood the punchline of a joke no sane soul should hear. It echoed in the tower, cracked and booming as thunder.
When I fled — yes, escaped-for sanity is a ship that must cast off before it sinks, he was still laughing as though the ocean had whispered something obscene and divine into his ear.
* * *
Years later, I sometimes hear echoes when taverns grow quiet and winter presses in. A gull’s laugh rings too sharp, or a foghorn groans too long. I remember the two men — their grotesque dance, drunken embraces, furious sermons on soup and scrubbing—a comedy, but the kind that curdles into tragedy before the final act.
And the light, ever the light. I sometimes dream of it — a great, burning eye that sees me, that waits. I wake in sweat, chuckling without knowing why.
For the sea is a jester, cruel and eternal. And men, ah, men are merely its fools — trapped on their own rocks, quarrelling, drinking, farting, fighting, until one day they, too, stumble into the lantern’s glow and find the joke waiting for them.
