Chapter One
The Empty Lantern
Lighthouses are honest buildings, and empty ones do not lie well.
Nell Harper had assessed nineteen abandoned lights in her career, and she knew the smell of true abandonment: gull and rust and rain got in, the particular sourness of a room the world has stopped visiting. She climbed the hundred and four steps of Point Verity on her first morning, stepped into the lantern room, and stood very still, because the room smelled of window cleaner.
The tower was sound, which the town's grant application had claimed, applications always claimed it, and this one was true. The ironwork was painted. The stairs did not flex. The lantern room's storm panes shone, the bronze cage that had once held the great lens stood empty at the room's centre, oiled, and the floor, she noted, kneeling, running a cotton gloved finger along the boards, the floor of a lantern room supposedly untouched since 1968 had been swept within the week.
