Miriam searched for something ordinary.
“The kitchen roof leaks near the western beam.”
“Good.”
“The generator consumes twice as much fuel as the manual claims.”
“Keep going.”
“You still owe me for the replacement window you broke in March.”
“I told you a gull did that.”
“The gull did not leave a wrench on my floor.”
A small laugh escaped him.
The faces in the wall opened their mouths.
Each one laughed with him.
Ellis stopped.
“Don’t react,” Miriam said.
They continued downward.
At the base of the stairs stood the foghorn chamber.
The room was far larger than the lighthouse above it.
A copper mechanism filled the center, shaped like an enormous gramophone horn directed into a shaft in the floor. Thick cables disappeared into the stone. Banks of control wheels lined a circular platform.
Beyond the platform, the shaft descended into darkness.
Warm air rose from it in slow breaths.
Naomi stood beside the main console.
Her yellow diving coat dripped onto the floor.
Ellis rushed toward her.
Miriam seized him by the collar.
Naomi turned.
Her skin was colorless.
Both ears were missing.
Smooth skin covered the sides of her head where they should have been.
“Ellis,” she said. “You brought the listener.”
Miriam felt the room contract around her.
Ellis whispered Naomi’s name.
Naomi smiled.
Then every mouth in the stone walls spoke through her.
“Begin the final transmission.”
The copper horn lowered toward the shaft.
The machine activated.
A sound beyond hearing rolled through the chamber.
Miriam felt her teeth vibrate.
The pale guardian inside Ellis’s ear unfolded, trying to block the signal. Blood streamed down his neck.
He dropped to one knee.
“I can’t hold it out.”
“You don’t have to.”
Miriam dragged him toward the console.
The controls carried no labels, only symbols: waves meeting, waves separating, a closed eye and an open mouth.
The memories returned more quickly now.
She had operated this machine before.
The night Celia died, the signal beneath the sea had awakened. Miriam had been the only technician capable of distinguishing its frequency from the storm.
She had entered the chamber.
She had generated the cancellation tone.
And she had failed to maintain it.
The signal had taken Celia’s voice because Celia had been the last person Miriam desperately wanted to hear.
Afterward, the navy had suppressed Miriam’s memories and left her at Griefwater Point as an unwitting guardian. Her presence completed part of the circuit.
She had not chosen to live beside the lighthouse.
She had been placed there.
“Miriam!” Ellis shouted.
Naomi crossed the platform toward them.
Her jaw opened wider with every step.
Miriam turned the first control wheel.
The horn changed position.
She adjusted a second wheel, watching the waveform on the monitor.
Two patterns appeared.
One belonged to the thing below.
The other had to be created manually.
“I need a stable tone,” she said.
“What tone?”
“The last clear sound I remember before the original transmission.”
“Celia’s voice?”
“No.”
Miriam remembered the rescue ship.
Rain striking the steel deck.
Warning bells.
The captain shouting orders.
And beneath it all, Celia singing through the lighthouse transmitter to keep the frightened survivors calm.
Not a lullaby.
An old workers’ song their mother had taught them.
Miriam began to sing.
Her voice cracked on the first line.
The waveform barely moved.
Naomi lunged.
Ellis intercepted her.
They struck the floor together.
Naomi moved with impossible strength, her fingers closing around his throat.
“Louder!” Ellis gasped.
Miriam sang again.
The copper horn rotated toward her.
The chamber repeated the melody in Celia’s voice.
Miriam nearly lost the rhythm.
The imitation was perfect.
Then it made a mistake.
Celia had always paused before the final note.
The voice from the horn did not.
Miriam understood.
The thing could reproduce sound.
It could reproduce words and memories.
But it could not understand hesitation.
It did not know why a human voice sometimes broke.
It did not know why grief changed the spaces between notes.
Miriam sang the line once more.
This time she included the pause.
The second waveform aligned with the first.
“Ellis, now!”
He kicked Naomi away and slammed his hand onto the symbol of two colliding waves.
The chamber erupted.
The cancellation frequency passed through Miriam without sound.
Every light shattered.
The stone faces screamed.
Naomi fell beside the shaft, clawing at the smooth skin where her ears had been.
The pale guardian inside Ellis’s ear released its grip.
For one moment it emerged into view, its translucent wings spread across the side of his face.
Then it dissolved into clear liquid.