Skeleton Tower

by Vanessa Acton

  GET OUT WHILE YOU CAN.

  Chapter 4

  It’s fair to say I’m weirded out by this letter. But I don’t know how to ask Mr. Shen about it. How do you bring up a curse in casual conversation? So I just stuff the letter in my jacket pocket and rush to catch up with him and Morgan.

  I do my best to concentrate on Mr. Shen’s tour. We head outside and enter the cylinder-shaped building—the light station. On the ground floor, Mr. Shen talks a lot about the clockworks. It’s basically a giant crank full of interlocking gears. “When you turn this handle, it moves the counterweight over there.” He points to a big hunk of heavy-looking metal, hanging from the ceiling by a rope. “That weight is connected to the lens at the top of the light station. So if you crank the weight up as high as it can go—about ninety turns of the counterweight—it rotates the lens.”

  “And why is that important?” I ask. Not to be rude. But not exactly as if I care, either.

  “You’ll see in a minute.” We climb a set of metal spiral stairs. They bring us to the top room, which has glass windows all the way around. “This is the lantern station,” says Mr. Shen. “And that’s the lens.” He points to the roundish mass of gleaming glass in the middle of the room. It looks like a giant Christmas tree ornament. Four curved panels, each with about a million ridges, almost like scales. “Inside this lens, there’s a lamp,” Mr. Shen goes on. To prove it, he opens up a little door set into one of the lens panels. Through the opening, I can see an ordinary-looking light bulb hooked up to some kind of pedestal. “It used to be an oil lamp. Eventually an electric bulb was installed. This one is only a thousand watts. But when it’s lit and the lens rotates, the light reflects off the glass of the lens. The reflection makes the light seem brighter. It can be seen for more than twenty nautical miles.”

  “Do you ever actually use this light anymore?” Morgan asks.

  “The Fourth of July, some years,” says Mr. Shen. “But we keep it in working order all year round. You parents will be cleaning it regularly. That’s our way of honoring what this light used to mean. It helped ships at sea steer clear of the rocks. It assured sailors far from home that they weren’t forgotten.”

  I’m too edgy to listen to much more of this. It doesn’t help that the room has a stuffy Old Place feel. Maybe I just need some fresh air. I notice a handrail running around the outside of the building, on the other side of the glass walls. “Is there, like, an observation deck out there?”

  “The catwalk, yes.” Mr. Shen checks his watch.

  “Can we go out on it?” I ask.

  “Hm? Oh, sure.” Mr. Shen opens a glass-paneled door that I hadn’t even spotted. “After you.”

  I step out onto the wrap-around deck. The view from the top of the light station is pretty sweet. It’s starting to get dark, but the fog has faded a little. We’re right on the edge of the point, so there’s ocean on three sides of us. The waves crash against the cliffs like they have a personal beef with them. The beacon from the skeleton tower sweeps slowly over the water. It reminds me of a flashlight. One that’s constantly looking for something, and coming up empty. Or maybe not. Maybe it can see things I’m missing.

  The whole place feels far away from everything, and not in a bad way. In a you’re on your own but you can handle it way.

  We walk slowly along the platform, doing a loop of the lighthouse. The thought of the curse comes back to me. Maybe the vibe of the place is lying to me. Maybe we can’t handle being on our own here. The previous keepers couldn’t.

  “Hey, look,” says Morgan, pointing toward the steps. “There’s Mom and Dad.”

  Sure enough, there they are. Two distant, tiny figures making their way down the staircase.

  “Excellent!” says Mr. Shen. He checks his watch again. “I’ll go down and meet them.”

  “Mind if we stay up here another minute?” I ask him. Morgan shoots me a puzzled look that I ignore.

  “No problem. Just don’t break anything.” He laughs awkwardly to let us know he’s joking. We laugh back to be polite.

  When he’s gone, Morgan says, “Don’t tell me you actually like it up here.”

  I kind of do. But that’s not the point. I take the letter out of my pocket. “I just wanted to show you this before Mom and Dad get here.”

  She unfolds the paper and scowls down at it.

  “I found it in the upstairs apartment,” I add. “Doesn’t it freak you out a little?”

  “Maybe a little,” she says matter-of-factly. She hands the paper back to me. “But, I mean, a curse?”

  I don’t say anything. She raises her eyebrows at me. “Come on. I know the accident earlier was scary, but—”

  “Sure,” I say. “Forget it.”

  ***

  Mom and Dad are as cheery as ever. The car’s fine. And Mr. Shen is super excited to meet his new keepers. Or maybe just super excited to go home. He says he’ll be back tomorrow to run through their training. For tonight, he’ll get out of our way and let us settle in. He locks up the old lighthouse, hands over our keys, and heads for the parking lot. Am I the only one who notices that he seems to leave in a hurry?

  ***

  Here’s how I don’t want to spend my evening: carrying our luggage from the parking lot to the keeper’s cottage. Down the three-hundred-step staircase. In thirty-mile-per-hour winds. In the dark.

  But I don’t usually get what I want.

  Which is why I’m on step 117 with a wheelie suitcase at 6:30 at night. I’m seriously thinking about just hurling it down the remaining steps. But with the wind, that doesn’t seem smart. I kind of want my clothes to stay out of the Pacific.

  So I’m doing my best to wheel it down. That isn’t really working. Dad, who went down ahead of me, has already reached the bottom and carried his load inside. Morgan’s behind me with a duffel bag, gaining on me fast. At least this is our last load.

  Suddenly the wind picks up by a factor of about a zillion. I pitch sideways and slam into the guard rail.

  And then I flip over the guard rail.

  Chapter 5

  I let go of the suitcase and grab for the railing with both hands. I miss the top rung. And the other two metal rungs below that. And the chain link mesh in between.

  Basically, I miss.

  I hit the rocky slope and start to roll. Fast. I think I’m screaming, but mostly I’m fighting for a handhold. I claw at the rocks, the moss, the scrubby grass. Finally my grip snags on some jutting rock. I feel like I’ve been falling for ages, but actually I’m only about ten feet away from the steps. I can see the railing, lit up by the beacon from the skeleton tower. The blinding beam of light seems to be shining straight at me, without moving, even though I know it must be slowly rotating.

  Morgan’s shouting at me from the steps. “Jason! Hold on! Hold on, I’ll call 9-1-1!”

  “We’re forty-five minutes from the nearest town!” I shriek.

  “Okay, I’ll get Dad and Mom, and we’ll—”

  “I can’t . . . hold on . . . that long! Do something NOW!”

  “Okay, stop panicking! You’ll make it worse!”

  “Make it worse?!”

  “I mean, don’t move! Hang on and don’t shift position. Concentrate on keeping your grip.” While she says this, she rips open my suitcase and pulls out a T-shirt. Then another. She starts knotting the shirts together.

  The wind is battering me, but not like before. Just your average thirty-mile-an-hour wind now. The skeleton tower’s light moves away. I can only see the bare outline of Morgan and the steps.

  Seconds later, the light comes back around. Morgan has a seven-shirt chain now. She wraps the last shirt around her waist and ties it. She ties the other end around the top rung of the guard rail. “Okay, here I come.” She climbs onto the first rung of the railing, then the second. Next she swings her leg over and climbs down the other side. Finally, she crouches down and starts edging down the slope, toward me. With her right hand, she still holds on to the railing. With t
he left hand she reaches for me. At a certain point, though, she can’t get any closer without letting go of the rail.

  So she does.

  The skeleton tower light swings away again, but I can still see Morgan’s general shape. She braces her right hand against the rocks and keeps inching forward, until her fingers brush mine.

  I grab on, and she pulls. With my free hand I try to push up against the rock. My feet scramble for a hold. Between Morgan’s pulling and my slither-climbing, I gain about three feet.

  The light’s back. Morgan and I are even with each other now. Together, we crawl the rest of the way back to the guard rail. Morgan braces me while I haul myself over the railing, and then she climbs back over too.

  I sink down on the steps and try to breathe normally. I fail.

  “That was insane,” says Morgan. She’s shaking so hard she can’t untie her T-shirt rope from the rail. “What happened? How did you go over the railing like that?”

  “It was a freak wind! It was, like, hurricane force.”

  “I didn’t feel it.”

  “Well, I definitely did!”

  “Okay, I believe you. I don’t know how it’s possible, but I believe you.” She gives up on trying to undo the knot around her waist. She just sits down next to me on the steps. The T-shirt rope trails from her like some polyester snake.

  The skeleton tower’s beam pans away from us again. It slowly swivels out over the ocean. One V-shaped strip of water glows under its light, stretching almost to the horizon. But everything around it looks darker, more shadowy than it actually is.

  Something makes me reach into my jacket pocket. Empty. The letter from the previous keepers must’ve blown out.

  “Morgan,” I say. “What do you think the Atlas of Cursed Places is?”

  She sighs. “I have no idea.”

  I keep watching the light from the skeleton tower. It’s coming back around toward us again. Closer, closer.

  “I think we should find out,” I say.

  Chapter 6

  There are certain things you don’t bother trying to explain to your parents. Especially parents who think bad things don’t exist. Just bad attitudes.

  A curse? Turn that frown upside down, Mister.

  When Morgan and I straggle up the stairs with our luggage, we find Dad humming show tunes in the kitchen. “There you are,” he chimes. “You two took your time. Mom’s already in the shower, annnnnd dinner is served.”

  He gestures dramatically at the kitchen counter. Six open cans of beans await us. You can see why the food truck idea didn’t pan out.

  “Dad, did Mr. Shen give you the Internet password?” asks Morgan. “We have to look something up.”

  Before Dad can answer, Mom’s scream almost shatters my eardrum.

  “Meredith?” calls Dad. “You okay?”

  The first answer is the sound of the bathroom door rattling. Not opening, just rattling, like someone was jiggling the doorknob. The second answer is Mom saying, “Ummm . . .”

  Morgan sprints over to the bathroom door. “Mom? What’s wrong?”

  “Well, the water’s scalding hot and I can’t seem to get it to turn off. And the tub is full of cockroaches.”

  “What!?” I burst out. I join Morgan in front of the bathroom door. I can hear the shower running inside. It sounds like it’s on at full blast.

  “And,” Mom adds, “I can’t get the door open.”

  Morgan grabs the handle and shoves. Then pulls. Then shoves again. No dice.

  “Mom, stand back,” I say. “We’ll kick it in.”

  “Whoa, Jason,” says Dad. “It’s probably just swelled shut. That can happen with a wooden door if there’s a lot of water vapor . . .”

  “Well, if the shower won’t turn off, there’ll be even more water vapor pretty soon,” I snap.

  “Mom, how many cockroaches are there?” asks Morgan.

  “Uh—well—none now.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “They’ve—disappeared. Back down the drain. They were swarming all over the tub for a minute, but—now they’re gone.”

  Morgan looks at me. I say, “Mom, I’m breaking down this door in two seconds.”

  Morgan steps back.

  I’m not sure how I’m going to pull this off. I’ve never taken kung fu or anything. But I’ve hit my limit for weird dangers and dangerous weirdness. Slamming my body into a door seems like a reasonable response.

  But suddenly the sound of running water stops.

  “Huh,” says Mom. “Looks like it’s off now.” She’s trying to sound casual, but her voice is pretty shaky.

  “You mean it turned off by itself?” I ask.

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  Morgan clears her throat. “Okay . . . try the door again then.”

  “The wood still might be—” Dad starts.

  The door opens.

  Mom peers out. With one hand, she grips the doorknob. With the other she’s clutching the towel around her waist. She actually looks more spooked now than she did earlier today, when our car almost went off a cliff. Go figure.

  “I—um—I think I’ll wait until tomorrow morning to wash my hair,” she says.

  “Can we also call pest control in the morning?” asks Morgan. “Because, you know, cockroaches.”

  “I think I just imagined them,” says Mom.

  “Imagined them?” I echo. “Mom. When was the last time you saw something that wasn’t really there? College?”

  She chuckles awkwardly. “It’s been a long day. I think we’re all just tired and tense. And with a brand new place to get used to . . .” She shook her head like she was impatient with herself. “I’ll just grab some clothes from my suitcase and get dressed. Then we’ll eat and go to bed. We can get a fresh start in the morning.”

  She scurries out of the bathroom as Dad says, “Sounds like a plan!”

  Accurate. My parents always have a plan. Just not usually a very good plan.

  While Mom ducks into one of the bedrooms, Morgan turns to dad. “So: the Internet password?”

  Mom accidentally left the bathroom light on. I step into the bathroom to turn it off.

  The condensation on the mirror catches my eye. Because some of it has been wiped away. In the shapes of letters.

  BEWARE LAURA LEE

  Chapter 7

  Forty minutes later, Mom and Dad are asleep. Morgan and I are very much awake, sitting on the floor of her new bedroom. She has her laptop open and is typing at eighty miles an hour. I’m trying not to throw up. The beans didn’t agree with my stomach. Neither does the curse, probably.

  “Look up ‘Laura Lee’ and see what you get,” I say.

  Morgan rolls her eyes. “I know what I’ll get. A bunch of people’s selfies. It’s just an ordinary, common name.”

  “An ordinary, common name that showed up on our bathroom mirror.”

  “According to you, anyway.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She glances toward me, then away. “Nothing. Just, you’re the only one who saw it.”

  True. By the time I grabbed Morgan and dragged her into the bathroom, the writing on the mirror had disappeared. There was just a smudge of clear glass, as if the condensation had naturally dried. But I know what Morgan really means.

  “You think I’m making this up?”

  “No. It’s just that—you always hate moving. You always find reasons not to like wherever we end up.”

  “That’s not what this is,” I say. “Look, it would be one thing if I was the only one seeing stuff, or feeling stuff. But Mom and the cockroaches? Plus the accident on the way here. Plus the note from the previous keepers.”

  “Fine! So this lighthouse is haunted.”

  “Well, cursed.”

  “Whatever.” She scowls at her laptop screen. “I’m not getting any useful hits for ‘Atlas of Cursed Places.’ I don’t think it’s real.”

  “Then try ‘Point Encanto Lighthouse, cursed.’”


  “Thanks, Sherlock. I already tried that while you were washing the dinner spoons. Nothing.”

  “Well, Mr. Shen knows something. Remember what he said when we got here? It seemed like he expected things to go wrong for us. Maybe we can get him to tell us more tomorrow.”

  “Maybe.” Morgan looks doubtful.

  I think about all the random stuff Mr. Shen told us during our tour. Too bad none of it will help us deal with a curse.

  Something else occurs to me, though. “Let’s go downstairs.”

  Morgan looks like she might laugh. “You want to check out the museum? You?”

  I don’t tell her what I have in mind. Just in case I’m totally off base.

  Morgan follows me out of her room. We creep to the front door of the upstairs apartment, which my parents didn’t bother to lock. Probably because they weren’t expecting Laura Lee, or anyone else, to get past the locked main door of the cottage.

  I open the apartment door as quietly as I can and step onto the landing of the staircase. Morgan closes the door behind us. “There’s a light switch right at the top of the stairs,” she whispers.

  I find it. And it doesn’t work. I flick it a few times, then give up.

  “Let’s just use our phone lights.” I take my phone out of my jeans pocket and activate the flashlight feature. I’m not saying I like the idea of going down those stairs in the mostly-still dark. Not after my experience on the outdoor steps. But at least I only have thirteen steps to deal with this time, instead of three hundred.

  And I hold on pretty tightly to the banister.

  We reach the first floor without tripping, falling, or seeing cockroaches. So far so good.

  The visitors’ center looks way creepier in pitch blackness. Most places do, I guess. The light from the skeleton tower shines in through the little window in the front door. That light reflects off the glass display cases and the shiny surfaces of the postcards. Every dim shape in the room reminds me of a wild animal in a nature show: crouched, watching us, waiting to move.

  Morgan feels around for another light switch. I head straight for the bookcase near the counter. I pan my phone light over the titles of the books, starting with the top shelf. This feels like a long shot, but I know I spotted a couple of atlases in this mix.