The Harbour Master's Rule Book

Sorcha Reyne arrived at the Lighthouse’s foot at first light with a quarantine seal, two staff, and the specific, unhurried thoroughness of a woman treating an unknown as an unknown rather than waiting to be told it mattered.

“Nothing about this is officially hazardous,” she said, logging the cordon regardless. “I’d like that on record before we start, so nobody reads this as me overreacting later. I’m treating the gallery as unknown, not as dangerous. There’s a difference, and I intend to still be able to point at it afterwards.”

“Noted,” Rolf said, “with the appropriate degree of respect for the distinction.”

“Two staff on the base, one on the stair, and I’m coming up with you.” Reyne said this the way she said most things — not a request. “If there’s genuinely nothing up there, I’ll have wasted a morning, and I’ve wasted worse mornings than that on considerably less evidence. If there’s something up there, I’d rather already be standing in the room than be sent for.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way, Officer Reyne.”

“You never would. That’s precisely why I keep having to invite myself.” She was already checking the seal on her own kit as she said it, which took most of the sting out of it.

She turned to the two staff at the base before they started up — a broad-shouldered woman named Cael and a younger man Bjorn didn’t recognise, both already in harness. “Nobody comes up after us on a timer. If we’re not down inside two hours, that’s not an emergency signal, that’s a note in a logbook that we’re taking our time. I don’t want anyone deciding to be a hero because the clock told them to.” She looked at Cael specifically. “That means you too.”

“Understood,” Cael said, in the tone of someone who had clearly heard some version of this speech before and mostly ignored it the last time.

“I mean it more than usual today.”

“Understood,” Cael said again, differently this time, and Bjorn filed away that whatever Reyne had just not-quite-said had landed.

Ardal met them at the second landing with a coil of rope over one shoulder and the specific, deliberate calm of a man who had decided, sometime overnight, that being frightened wasn’t going to be useful to anybody and had put the feeling away accordingly. Bjorn recognised the expression. He’d worn a version of it himself, walking here.

“Eleven years,” Ardal said, by way of greeting, looking up the last flight of stair toward the sealed door. “Eleven years I’ve tended that lamp and never once gone past this landing. I’d tell you I wasn’t nervous, but you’d know I was lying, and I’d rather not start the morning on a lie.”

“Nobody’s required to go up who doesn’t want to,” Rolf said.

“I want to. That’s the part that’s actually strange.” Ardal hefted the rope. “Eleven years of not asking. I’d like to stop not asking, if it’s all the same to you.”

The second-landing seal had rusted into something closer to a single fused piece of ironwork than a door, and it took Bjorn, Ardal, and the better part of ten undignified minutes with a pry bar to convince it otherwise — a process that ended with Bjorn sitting down hard on the landing, door abruptly cooperative, dignity considerably less so, while Ardal offered him a hand up with the carefully neutral expression of a man who had decided, professionally, not to laugh, and Reyne made a note of the door’s own resistance on her clipboard with the flat, procedural satisfaction of someone confirming that at least one piece of evidence was behaving the way evidence was supposed to.

“Sealed from this side,” she said. “Whatever’s up there, it isn’t coming and going through this door. Log that.”

The gallery beyond it hadn’t been touched in decades, and looked it — dust thick enough to hold a shape, a rail gone soft with rust, glass in the sealed windows fogged pale with age rather than weather. Rolf went first, testing each board with his own weight before he trusted it with the rest of him, and said nothing for a long moment, taking in the whole room the way he took in a case file, cover to cover, before committing to a single line of it.

And through the centre of all of it, cutting a single, worn, unmistakable path from the door to the rail and back again, ran a track in the dust that nothing in the room’s own undisturbed decades could account for.

“That’s not old,” Ardal said quietly. “That’s recent. That’s — Harbour Master, that’s maintained.”

Rolf crouched at its edge without touching it. “Somebody’s been walking this path. Regularly enough that the dust hasn’t had time to settle back over it between visits.”

Bjorn followed it along the room’s edge before he followed it to the rail, and found, along the way, the rest of what eleven undisturbed years should not have left behind: a smear at shoulder height on the window glass, exactly where a man leaning his weight against it might rest, repeated so many times the dust had worn thin rather than thick there. A single chair, its cushion long since rotted to nothing, turned deliberately to face the same window. And, scratched into the sill beneath it, so faint he had to angle his own lamp sideways to catch the shadow of it at all, a set of marks — not words, not quite, just short vertical strokes in groups of five, the specific, universal shorthand of someone counting something they didn’t want to lose count of.

“Tally marks,” he said, and heard his own voice come out quieter than he meant it to. “Rolf. Somebody’s been counting up here.”

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Rolf came and looked, and was quiet himself for a moment. “Counting what, I wonder.”

“Nights, maybe. Or turns of the lamp.” Bjorn thought of Ardal’s own count, thirty-nine where it should have been forty-one, and didn’t say the rest of what he was thinking, because it didn’t need saying twice in one morning.

Reyne, crouched at the sill with her own lamp angled low, counted the groups herself, lips moving slightly. “Forty-one full groups. Then a partial — three strokes, no more.” She sat back on her heels. “If that’s nights, that’s forty-one nights and change. Not one bad evening. Not even one bad month.” She looked up at the room around them with an expression Bjorn hadn’t seen on her before — not fear, exactly, closer to the specific discomfort of a professional whose categories had just stopped being useful to her. “I don’t have a form for this. I want that said out loud, because I always have a form for this.”

“Keep counting anyway,” Rolf said. “The form can catch up later.”

Ardal, still by the window, hadn’t moved. “Forty-one,” he said, quietly, to no one in particular. “That’s the turn. That’s my own count, near enough, near enough it isn’t comfortable.” He didn’t finish the thought, and nobody asked him to.

Bjorn followed the worn path the rest of the way to the rail itself, where a scrap of fabric sat snagged on a rusted bracket — dark grey, or possibly just dark, the specific dull colour of cloth that had been through weather it wasn’t built for. Exactly, unhelpfully, precisely what Wren had described.

“Reyne,” he said, and heard his own voice come out flatter than he meant it. “You’ll want to see this.”

She was halfway across the gallery floor when the board gave way beneath Ardal.

It happened fast and entirely without ceremony — no warning creak, just the specific, sickening absence of floor where floor had been a half-second before, and Ardal dropping through to his waist, arms flung wide, weight already committing the rest of him after it.

Rolf moved before Bjorn’s own body had finished deciding to. A small, unhurried reach into an inside coat pocket that had no business holding anything at all, and then it simply wasn’t empty — and Ardal went rigid mid-fall, stopped dead, held, suspended half through a floor that very much still wanted him the rest of the way down.

“Now, Bjorn.”

Bjorn didn’t remember crossing the gap. He remembered his own hands closing round Ardal’s forearms, remembered the specific, unglamorous effort of hauling a full-grown man backward out of a hole in a floor while every instinct in his body insisted this was somebody else’s job, and remembered, distantly, Reyne already shouting for a second board to bridge the gap before he’d finished pulling Ardal clear of it. It took, by any honest accounting, no more than four or five seconds altogether. It did not feel like four or five seconds.

Rolf released the hold the instant Ardal’s whole weight was back on solid boards, and Ardal came back to himself with the particular, full-body flinch of a man who has just been perfectly still for longer than his own nerves could account for, breath returning to him all at once, unevenly, like something remembered rather than resumed.

“I’m all right,” he said, to nobody’s question, hands shaking regardless, and sat down hard on the nearest solid board rather than trust his own legs with the rest of the decision. “I’m — that floor should not have gone. I’ve walked past the base of that stair a thousand times. Nothing about this room should be load-bearing enough to matter, because nothing’s meant to be up here at all.”

“Nothing’s meant to be,” Rolf agreed, and looked, for a long moment, at the worn path in the dust, and did not finish the thought aloud.

Reyne crouched beside Ardal rather than beside the hole, which Bjorn noted and filed as its own kind of evidence about her, and waited until his breathing had properly settled before she spoke again.

“You did nothing wrong,” she said. “The floor failed. That’s a fact about the floor, not about you standing on it.” She looked up at Rolf. “I want this whole room surveyed properly before anyone else so much as breathes on it. Structurally, not just for whatever’s been walking it.”

“Both,” Rolf said. “In that order.”

“I’ll want a full day for it, minimum. Maybe two.” Reyne was already thinking ahead, Bjorn could tell, the specific forward-planning look of someone converting a bad morning into a schedule before the fright had even finished leaving her hands. “I’m not sending anyone back up here on a rushed survey because the Harbour wants a tidy answer by tomorrow’s shift change. If that’s a problem for anyone above my rank, they can take it up with the hole in the floor.”

“It won’t be a problem,” Rolf said. “Nobody above your rank is asking for tidy. I’d actively prefer thorough.”

“Good. Because thorough is the only kind I do.” She looked back toward the hole, jaw set. “I want photographs before we touch anything else, the path, the tally marks, the chair, all of it, exactly as it sits. If this room’s telling us something, I’d rather not be the one who accidentally erased half the sentence.”

Ardal nodded slowly from where he still sat. “I can tell you where I’ve walked and where I haven’t, if that helps narrow down what’s old and what’s new.”

“It helps considerably,” Reyne said. “Write it down for me before you leave today, while it’s still fresh.”

“I will.”

They found the second scrap of fabric near the door

Cael’s voice came up the stairwell a moment later, careful and pitched to carry without shouting. “Everything all right up there? We felt that through the floor down here.”

“Everyone’s accounted for,” Reyne called back, level, betraying nothing of the last thirty seconds. “Hold your position. We’ll be another while yet.”

“Understood,” came back, and Bjorn thought, not for the first time that morning, that the word was doing a great deal of quiet work for people who plainly didn’t feel as steady as they sounded saying it.

Ardal took a slow breath, in and out, hands still not quite finished shaking. “I’ll want to know,” he said, to nobody in particular, once the breath was done. “Eventually. Not today. But eventually I’ll want to know what nearly had me, and I don’t think that’s an unreasonable thing to want.”

“It isn’t,” Rolf said. “You’ll be told the moment there’s anything true to tell you. Not before, and not a guess dressed up as something truer than it is.”

They found the second scrap of fabric near the door — snagged lower, at roughly a child’s own height rather than an adult’s, which nobody said anything about for a long moment, because nobody wanted to be first.

“He faces the window,” Bjorn said slowly, working it through as he said it. “Every night, near enough. The same path, worn in from repeated use, to the exact spot where Wren says she saw him standing. Counting something on the sill while he does it. That’s not a haunting. That’s a routine.”

“A routine somebody’s kept up for longer than dust takes to settle,” Reyne said. “Which means whoever or whatever’s doing the walking has been doing it considerably longer than one night, and nobody official has ever caught it before a nine-year-old did.” She looked, briefly, almost unwillingly, toward the window and the ordinary grey morning beyond it. “I don’t like how much sense that makes and how little of it I can actually write down.”

The door slammed shut behind them with no wind to explain it, plunging the gallery into a sudden, complete, and entirely unnatural dark.

End of Part 2