Eleanor’s job was unique: she mapped the topography of human trauma. People paid her handsomely to trace the physical manifestations of their emotional scars onto a digital canvas. She didn't use ink; she used a specialized scanner that picked up subtle variations in skin texture and neural pathways.
Mr. Harrison, her latest client, was an octogenarian with a back covered in a complex, almost beautiful lattice of pale lines.
"This one here," Eleanor said softly, pointing to a swirl near his left shoulder blade, "This occurred when you lost the farm. A sharp, searing line of financial grief."
"Yes," he whispered. "The bank took it in '68."
"And this cluster of faint starbursts? This is the fear of meeting your first grandchild, the worry you’d fail them."
Eleanor felt the weight of the world’s quiet sorrows every day. She logged the map of Mr. Harrison’s life, a topography of endurance. He paid her and left, lighter than when he arrived.
She sat at her desk, staring at her own hands. Smooth, unmarked skin. She had mapped thousands of people’s pain, but she had never scanned herself. She was a hollow cartographer, tracing outlines of mountains she had never climbed.
She reached for the scanner, her fingers trembling slightly. Maybe tonight, she would finally start drawing her own map.
Old Silas maintained the lighthouse on Serpent's Tooth Island for forty years. He was the last of his kind; automated lights were coming in the morning. His final shift was tonight, a clear, moonless night where the sea seemed to breathe in the darkness.
He polished the brass railings until they gleamed and wound the clockwork mechanism that rotated the massive Fresnel lens. The light spun, a reliable heartbeat cutting through the void.
Around midnight, the fog rolled in, thick and silent, a white wall ignoring the weather forecast. Silas cursed. Fog meant the horn. He flipped the switch. The mournful BWOMP echoed across the water.
He was pouring a cup of coffee when he saw it. A faint red light in the mist, flickering erratically, too low for a ship’s masthead. It was the color of a distress flare.
He grabbed his binoculars. The light moved strangely, dipping beneath the waves, then resurfacing. It wasn't modern. It looked like an oil lantern, swinging wildly.
The horn blared again. Silas felt a chill that had nothing to do with the sea air. That red light was exactly where the Empress, a packet steamer from 1888, had gone down, claiming eighty-three souls.
He ran up the stairs to the lantern room. The Fresnel lens spun, casting its white beam. The red light vanished the moment the white light touched it.
Silas maintained his post until dawn broke and the fog lifted. When the crew arrived on the supply boat to relieve him, they found him sitting by the light mechanism, gray-haired and shaky.
"Bad fog last night, Silas?" the Captain asked cheerfully.
Silas just nodded, staring out at the empty, calm blue ocean. He never told them about the red light. The new automatic system didn't have a soul to see the ghosts, anyway.
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