The Lighthouse Keeps a Log I Didn't Write

The light is automated now; my job as relief keeper is mostly maintenance and presence — insurers like a human on the rock. There's an old logbook kept out of tradition, and I make a token entry each evening: date, conditions, initials. Nobody reads it. I do it because the previous keepers did it and the habit felt owed.

Three weeks in, flipping back to check a date, I found entries I had not made. In my handwriting. That is the part I need you to sit with — not a stranger's hand, MINE, the specific way I cross my sevens and abbreviate 'visibility' to 'vis' with a full stop I always forget elsewhere.

The entries recorded nights I'd logged nothing, or logged only 'quiet'. They were detailed: wind backing to the northeast, a swell I hadn't noted, and on one line, 'vessel E-W approx 0300, no lights, close in, warned off.' Warned off. The light is automated; I don't warn anyone off anything. I sleep at 0300.

I started photographing my entries each night, timestamped, then locking the book in the equipment case. It made no difference. Mornings, there'd be a new line below my photographed one, my hand, ink matching my pen, recording the night's real weather — which I'd then confirm against the automated instruments and find correct. Once: 'keeper unwell, took the watch.' I had gone to bed with a headache and slept eleven hours.