The Keeper of Nothing

A new keeper arrives at a lighthouse that was decommissioned forty years ago — yet a supply boat still comes every month, the lamp still runs on someone's payroll, and the logbook demands he record every ship that passes a coastline with no shipping lane.

1. He starts logging ships out of boredom, inventing names and tonnages to fill the pages, and the next supply boat leaves him a printed reply thanking him for "confirming the Aldergate's safe passage" — a ship he made up.
2. Terrified, he tries logging nothing, leaving pages blank; a week later the sea delivers a splintered hull with ALDERGATE stenciled on it, as though his silence had let something sink.
3. He digs up the previous keepers' logs and finds decades of invented ships, each entry in a different hand, each keeper eventually writing the same line before going silent: "The light doesn't warn them away. It calls them in."

💡 The engine is a bureaucratic ritual whose true purpose inverts everything a lighthouse is supposed to mean — protection becomes summoning.