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.

The maritime authority, when I raised it carefully, told me the light has had relief keepers report 'continuity of log' before — their phrase — and that it's considered a known quirk of that particular rock, not investigated, not encouraged as a topic. The supervisor actually said, 'The light likes a proper log. Let it keep one.'

I leave the book out now. My token entry up top, and beneath it, most nights, a better keeper than me finishing the job. The handwriting is mine. The diligence is not. On rough nights I sleep easier knowing someone competent has the watch, even if that someone is, apparently, also me.