《Lighthouse ZERO》 Chapter 1: The Edge Marcus stood at the base of the lighthouse, key trembling in his hand. The realtor''s words still echoed in his skull: "The previous owner was quite insistent about you, Dr. Chen. Said you''d be perfect for the property. Funny thing is, I don''t recall telling him about any buyers." Wind whipped at his coat as he climbed the seventy-eight steps to the keeper''s quarters. Each footfall rang hollow against corroded metal, a countdown to his self-imposed exile. Somewhere above, chains rattled against the lighthouse''s bones ¨C the ghost of maintenance long neglected. The door fought him, swollen with Atlantic damp. When it finally gave, the smell hit him first: salt and rust and something else. Something wrong. Like ozone before a storm, but sharper. More deliberate. Dust-heavy light filtered through grimy windows, painting the circular room in funeral colors. No furniture except a metal desk bolted to the floor and a chair that looked like it had been salvaged from an asylum. The walls were bare except for a single note pinned to exposed brick: "The supplies are not your concern. Focus on the patterns. - H. Walsh" Marcus''s hand shook as he unpinned the note. Walsh ¨C the previous owner he''d never met. The man who''d sold him a lighthouse for a quarter of its value with only one phone call and no questions asked. The man who''d known his name before Marcus had given it. He crumpled the note, then thought better of it and smoothed it flat again. Everything was data. Everything mattered. The desk drawer contained a single item: a leather-bound journal, its pages blank except for the first. There, in handwriting too precise to be human, was a sequence of numbers that made his blood run cold. The same numbers he''d found buried in quantum noise at MIT. The same pattern that had cost him everything. A gull''s cry jerked him from his thoughts. Through the window, the October sun was drowning itself in the Atlantic. No boats on the water. No lights on the horizon. Just endless grey waves eating at the rocks below, hungry for whatever secrets they held. His phone buzzed. One bar of signal, clinging to life: "Marcus. It''s Sarah. Please tell me you''re not really going through with this. We can still fix things. Call me." Delete. He had work to do. The quantum analysis computers would take days to set up properly, but he could at least start unpacking the basic equipment. As he turned from the window, movement caught his eye ¨C a shadow passing across the glass. Too big for a bird. Too solid for imagination.A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. But when he looked again, there was nothing. Just the lighthouse beacon beginning its nightly rotation, each sweep marking another second of his new life. The work kept him busy until midnight. Cables snaked across the floor like mechanical kudzu, feeding power to dark monitors that would soon display his life''s work. The pattern analysis that had gotten him laughed out of academia. The impossible mathematics that suggested reality itself was trying to communicate. Sleep found him slumped over the desk, Walsh''s note still clutched in one hand. He dreamed of numbers swimming through quantum foam, of lighthouses that walked on mechanical legs, of Sarah''s face twisted in frequencies that shouldn''t exist. The scream woke him at 3:47 AM. Not a human scream. Not quite. More like radio feedback filtered through whale song, rising from the rocks below. Marcus stumbled to the window, fully awake now. The sound died just as he reached the glass. In the beacon''s sweep, he saw them: three wooden crates on the rocks below. Impossible. The path down was treacherous even in daylight, and his security cameras should have caught any delivery. The cameras. He rushed to his laptop, pulled up the security feed. Rewound. Played. Rewound again. At 3:47 AM, the screen showed empty rocks. At 3:48 AM, three crates sat perfectly aligned, their shadows wrong for the angle of the beacon light. No in-between. No delivery. Just existence manifesting between one second and the next. His hands shook as he pulled up the previous frame. Zoomed. Enhanced. There ¨C in the bottom corner. A sequence of pixels that shouldn''t be there. Numbers hidden in visual static, too precise to be random. The same numbers from Walsh''s journal. The same pattern from his quantum research. The same impossible message that had started everything. Marcus sat back, cold sweat tracing quantum paths down his spine. The world had called him mad for chasing patterns in noise. Had labeled him delusional when he suggested reality itself might be trying to communicate through quantum fluctuations. But now? The beacon''s light swept through his room like a metronome counting down to something vast and inevitable. Outside, waves crashed against ancient stone with algorithmic precision. And three floors below, crates that couldn''t exist waited with supplies he hadn''t ordered but desperately needed. Marcus Chen had come to the lighthouse seeking isolation. Instead, he''d found confirmation. He wasn''t mad. He wasn''t wrong. He wasn''t alone. His hands curled around the edge of the desk until his knuckles went white. The sun would rise soon. He should sleep more, should check those crates, should start properly organizing his research space. Instead, he sat in his salvaged asylum chair, watching numbers dance through quantum static on his laptop screen, wondering what else waited to be discovered in this place where probability itself seemed to fold in on itself like a tidally-locked star. The lighthouse groaned around him, its ancient metal throat singing songs of rust and salt and secrets. Somewhere in the walls, chains rattled their mechanical prophecies. And Marcus Chen, exile from reality''s consensus, began to understand that his research hadn''t led him to this lighthouse. The lighthouse had called him here. He just didn''t know why. Yet. Chapter 2: Silence The first crate nearly broke his foot when it slipped. Pine boards cracked against metal stairs, the sound echoing up through the lighthouse''s core. Marcus caught it three steps down, shoulder wrenching against the sudden weight. Something clinked inside ¨C glass or metal or both. His hands shook as he pried off the lid. Laboratory-grade beakers nested in foam. The same ones he''d left behind at MIT, down to the small bubble trapped in the glass of the 500ml cylinder. He set it aside. Picked up another. Same defect, same location. The second crate held food. His stomach clenched at the familiar brands. Earl Grey tea ¨C Sarah''s brand, the one she''d started bringing to the lab after finding him drinking month-old coffee at 3 AM. Protein bars from that shop near their old apartment. The ratio matched his usual shopping list: four sweet to three savory, just enough caffeine to maintain focus without triggering migraines. His phone buzzed. Third message from Sarah this week: "Please just let me know you''re alive. We can figure this out. Call me." His thumb hovered over the delete button. Memories surfaced: Sarah explaining his research to her parents at Christmas dinner, defending his theories even when she didn''t fully understand them. Sarah bringing tea during all-night coding sessions. Sarah''s face the day he''d chosen his research over their future. Delete. Block contact. His throat tightened. He forced himself to focus on the third crate. Server components wrapped in anti-static bags. Power supplies. Cooling units. Backup drives. Duplicates of what he''d just finished installing upstairs. A note sat on top, the handwriting matching Walsh''s: "The patterns need watching." Marcus studied the paper. Standard printer stock. Fresh ink ¨C the corners hadn''t started yellowing yet. He folded it carefully, tucked it into his pocket with Walsh''s first message. The security footage showed nothing useful. Empty rocks at 3:47:00 AM. Crates at 3:47:01. No glitches, no missing frames, no digital artifacts. Just absence, then presence. Steam whistled from downstairs. He froze. The kettle was still packed away, buried in boxes he hadn''t opened. The steps creaked under his feet as he descended. Empty kitchen. No kettle. No steam. Just the sharp scent of Earl Grey hanging in the air ¨C Sarah''s preferred blend, the one he''d sworn off after she left.This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. His knuckles found the rhythm of §´§×§Þ§ß§Ñ§ñ §ß§à§é§î against the railing as he climbed back up. Dark is the night, only bullets whistle over the steppe. He''d learned it during the worst of the academic battles, when Sarah would find him sleeping in his office, surrounded by printouts of quantum noise patterns. The monitors cast blue shadows across unpacked equipment. Data streams scrolled past. A notification blinked: "Final laboratory access revoked. Card deactivated. Personal effects in storage." Delete. Sarah had helped pack those personal effects. Had stood in his office doorway while he cleared his desk, her silence heavier than any accusation. He''d left his framed doctorate on the wall ¨C her idea. A small act of defiance. He laid out the delivered beakers beside his packed ones. The manufacturing stamps matched. Even the batch numbers aligned. His migraine flared, a knife behind his left eye. Swan Lake rose in his throat. He whistled it soft and low, the way Sarah used to when she thought he was finally sleeping. The lighthouse''s acoustics caught the melody, wrapped it in metal and stone harmonics. Wrong notes crept in. The theme twisted into something that made his teeth ache. Hours bled past. The sun dragged itself above the horizon. Marcus logged serial numbers, compared manufacturing dates. The new equipment matched his own piece for piece. Not impossible ¨C improbable. A statistical anomaly that belonged in his research data, not his reality. Sarah would have appreciated the irony. She''d always said his patterns would manifest eventually. Hadn''t expected them to arrive in wooden crates at a lighthouse''s door. His hands found the kettle he hadn''t unpacked. Steam rose from a cup he hadn''t filled. The tea burned his tongue, grounding him in sensation. Real pain to counter unreal circumstances. The fog rolled in thick enough to blur the horizon. The beacon cut through it in steady sweeps. No ships to warn away. No eyes except his own. He pulled up the security footage again. Played it frame by frame. Empty rocks. Full rocks. Nothing between. Like quantum states collapsing into certainty, probability waves resolving into singular outcomes. The monitors flickered ¨C a microsecond of darkness. Outside, waves crashed against stone with metronome patience. Inside, Miles Davis rose unbidden from his throat. Elevator to Gallows, the soundtrack to choices that couldn''t be unmade. His phone sat dark on the desk. Sarah''s contact blocked. Seven years of history erased with two taps. The psychology of it would come later, he knew. The full weight of cutting off his last connection to the world before. But for now, there were patterns to find. Data to analyze. Deliveries to document. The tea grew cold beside him, untouched after that first sip. Sarah''s blend. Sarah''s cup. Sarah''s absence growing larger by the moment. Marcus started another analysis cycle. Let dark jazz fill the silence. Watched the sun climb higher over empty waters. The lighthouse creaked around him, old metal stretching in the heat. The beacon kept its steady pace. Below, three crates sat on the rocks, filled with duplicates and implications. Nothing impossible. Nothing perfect. Just the widening gap between what was and what might be. Between the life he''d left and whatever waited in the patterns ahead. The silence stretched. The numbers flowed. And somewhere between one moment and the next, Marcus Chen began to understand the true cost of isolation. It wasn''t the loneliness that hollowed you out. It was the choice to embrace it. Chapter 3: The Search The letter sat in the empty crate, weighted down with a stone: "Mr. Walsh - The deliveries arrive precisely. You know my needs before I do. I need to understand why. - M. Chen" Marcus watched the tide rise, waiting to see if the crate would vanish as mysteriously as it had appeared. The morning sun cast his shadow long across the rocks, a stretched-out thing that barely looked human anymore. His mother had wanted him to be a doctor. "People need healing, Marcus," she''d say, arranging flowers in their tiny Brookline apartment. Instead, he''d chosen physics, chasing theoretical frameworks while she tended her garden and tried to understand her son''s obsession with the abstract. The crate remained as the water rose. No response. Just like the twelve letters before it. Back in the lighthouse, his automated scripts scraped the internet for traces of Harrison Walsh. Property records showed the lighthouse transfer, but the documentation ended there. No social media presence. No academic history. No birth records. Like trying to photograph smoke. He''d written algorithms to monitor any mention of Walsh''s name across the web. Set up email accounts under false identities to contact town halls, local newspapers, historical societies. Each response came back empty or contradictory. One clerk insisted Walsh had been a woman in her eighties. Another claimed Walsh had been dead since 1987. The desktop speakers hummed faintly with a Tchaikovsky piece he''d set on loop. Music felt distant now, like something from another life. Like the model rockets he''d built as a kid, dreaming of NASA while his mother reminded him to eat dinner. His screen flashed ¨C another automated response: "Re: Historical Property Records Request No individual named Harrison Walsh associated with lighthouse property prior to your purchase. Previous owner listed as Maritime Historical Trust (dissolved 1998). - County Records Office" He added it to his growing Walsh database. The contradictions mapped like stars in a constellation that refused to form a pattern. His own purchase documents listed Walsh clearly as the seller, but every official record showed a different story. The morning''s delivery sat unopened by the stairs. He''d started leaving them untouched for hours, studying them like archaeological finds. Today''s crate contained replacements for equipment that was starting to wear ¨C protective gloves growing thin at the fingertips, backup drives approaching capacity. Six months ago, he would have called it prophetic. Now it felt like a choreographed dance where he could never see his partner. A childhood memory surfaced: his father teaching him chess, explaining how to think five moves ahead. "Life''s the same way, son. Always know your next moves." But his father hadn''t planned on the heart attack that took him when Marcus was twelve. Some moves couldn''t be predicted. The speakers crackled with static. Bach''s Toccata and Fugue in D minor emerged, though he hadn''t queued it. He''d stopped questioning these musical intrusions. Started documenting them instead, mapping their occurrences against other lighthouse anomalies.The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there. His latest attempt to trace Walsh had led him to a nursing home in Maine. Their response arrived through one of his proxy emails: "No resident by that name. However, our records show a visitor matching your description signed in last week asking the same questions. Please do not contact us again." He hadn''t left the lighthouse in months. The desktop calendar showed his mother''s birthday next week. He''d written a card three weeks ago, using a remailer service to forward it through six different countries before reaching her. The same way he handled all external communication now. No direct contact. No real connections. Just algorithms and proxies and careful distance. Her last email sat in one of his monitoring inboxes: "The garden misses you. The roses bloom but no one explains to them why light bends the way it does." He''d almost broken then. Almost picked up the phone. Instead, he''d written another letter to Walsh and left it with the empty crates: "The lighthouse knows things it shouldn''t. Like you did. What am I missing?" No response. Never any response. The delivery manifests showed perfect anticipation of his needs, down to the brand of soap he''d switched to after developing a rash. He''d started requesting obscure items through encrypted notes left in the crates. They arrived without fail: rare books, specialized tools, specific components that shouldn''t exist yet. Each delivery felt like another move in a game he didn''t understand. Chess pieces advancing while he struggled to see the board. His mother had sent him a bishop piece on his eighteenth birthday. "For my future doctor," she''d written. It sat on his desk now, a reminder of paths not taken. Of the child who''d wanted to explore space instead of ending up in this tower, chasing shadows through data. The latest Walsh lead had dead-ended at a defunct law firm in Boston. Their archived records showed the lighthouse purchase, but listed the seller as a corporation dissolved in 1876. The dates didn''t align. Nothing aligned except the deliveries themselves. He''d started mapping his own movements through the lighthouse. Tracking patterns in his daily routines. Looking for correlations between his behavior and the increasingly precise nature of the supplies. The results suggested something impossible ¨C the deliveries didn''t just anticipate his needs, they anticipated his realizations of those needs. The thought triggered another memory: his first telescope, assembled on their tiny balcony. His mother bringing hot chocolate while he searched for Saturn''s rings. "Sometimes," she''d said, "the most beautiful things are the ones we can''t quite reach." Static crackled through the speakers again. The music shifted to something older ¨C a Russian lullaby his grandmother had sung, though he''d never downloaded it. He added it to his documentation and continued working. The next delivery would arrive in six hours. He''d left another letter for Walsh: "You knew what this place was. What it would show me. I need to understand. The patterns in the data match the patterns in the deliveries. What am I part of?" The lighthouse creaked. The beacon kept its rhythm. Below, waves erased his footprints from the rocks, leaving no trace of his vigil over empty crates and unsigned letters. His mother''s roses would be blooming now, bending toward light they couldn''t comprehend. Like him in this tower, searching for understanding just beyond reach. The next chess move hidden in noise and silence. He logged another day''s data. Documented the music. Mapped the impossibilities. And waited for Harrison Walsh to make the next move in their one-sided game. The bishop sat on his desk, watching. His mother''s garden grew without him. Somewhere, in nursing homes and county offices and dissolved corporations, Harrison Walsh existed and didn''t exist, like light behaving as both wave and particle. The next delivery would come soon. Maybe this time, there would be a response. Maybe this time, the letters wouldn''t go unanswered. Maybe this time, the game would make sense. The beacon swept its arc. The waves crashed below. And in his tower of data and silence, Marcus Chen continued his search for a man who might never have existed, guided by deliveries that shouldn''t be possible, while music he hadn''t chosen played songs he''d tried to forget. The bishop watched, remembering other dreams, other paths. Other moves in games long abandoned. Chapter 4: Resonance Marcus woke to the taste of copper and static. His neck ached from sleeping at his desk again, research papers scattered like dead leaves. The coffee cup by his hand had grown a skin of mold - how many days old? Time blurred in the endless cycle of data analysis and unanswered questions. The latest Walsh lead sat open on his screen: property records from 1923 showing renovations to the lighthouse''s foundation. The contractor''s signature matched Walsh''s exactly. Not similar - identical. Down to the microscopic variations in ink pressure. His throat burned with thirst. When had he last eaten? The kitchen inventory spreadsheet showed three days of missed meals. He''d started tracking everything after the supplies began anticipating his needs. Documenting his own decay. The stairs creaked under his feet as he descended to check the morning''s delivery. His mother''s birthday card had come back undeliverable last week. The remailer service reported her address no longer existed. But he''d checked county records - the house still stood. The garden still grew. Something was interfering with his attempts at contact. The crate waited on the rocks, larger than usual. Inside: winter clothes, thermal upgrades for his equipment, preserved food. Preparing him for something. But what? A sound sliced through his thoughts - pure and crystalline, like sunlight through arctic ice. He froze, senses straining. A voice, but wrong somehow. The notes stretched beyond human ranges, sustaining humanly impossible lengths between breaths that never came. His first thought was equipment malfunction. But the monitoring systems showed nothing. No audio signals, no vibrations. According to every sensor, the lighthouse contained only silence and his own increasingly rapid heartbeat. The melody wound through the air like liquid starlight. No words, no language he recognized. Just pure harmonious susurration that made his chest feel grief hollows. His hands shook as he activated additional monitors, trying to capture whatever this was. The readings remained flat. The voice continued, weaving patterns that shouldn''t exist. Hours bled past. The sun arced overhead, uncaring. The voice never wavered, never repeated. Each phrase built on the last with terrible rigor. Marcus forgot the coffee growing cold on his desk, forgot the Walsh investigation, forgot everything except the endless unfolding of sound that wasn''t sound. When darkness fell, he realized he''d been standing motionless for hours. His legs buckled. How long since he''d slept? Eaten? The voice filled his skull, rearranging thoughts like furniture in an empty house. The monitors still showed nothing. He began dismantling them, checking for malfunctions. Found none. Built new sensors from spare parts. They registered nothing. The voice sang on, beautiful and seemingly impossible. His mother used to hum while gardening. The memory surfaced without warning - her quiet melodies mixing with the scent of fresh-turned earth. He''d tried explaining his research to her once, watching confusion cloud her eyes. Now he wondered if she''d understood more than he knew. The second day brought new patterns in the voice. Symphonies that shouldn''t exist together, somehow cohering into structures his mind couldn''t quite grasp. He forgot to check the morning delivery. Forgot to run his daily Walsh searches. Forgot everything except trying to understand what he was hearing. His hands moved without conscious direction, pulling up old files. The voice wove connections he''d missed. The contractor from 1923. The nursing home records. The law firm''s archives. Points of light in a constellation he hadn''t been able to see. On the third day, the melody changed. Gained urgency. Something was coming. Something wanted to be found. The voice pulled him down the spiral stairs, each step matching the rhythm of his heart. The foundation stones on the northwest side bore tool marks he''d somehow never noticed. Recent ones. The voice rose to frequencies that made his teeth ache as he pried loose the corroded metal panel.Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. A passage led into darkness. The beam of his flashlight caught decades of dust, footprints that vanished halfway down the corridor as if their maker had simply ceased to exist. The voice reached a crescendo that wasn''t sound, wasn''t music, wasn''t anything his mind could grasp. At the end of the passage, a door hung open on rusted hinges. The room beyond held only silence. By midnight, his hands shook as he assembled makeshift recording equipment. Old cassette decks scrounged from storage. Digital recorders. Even a glass-plate phonograph he''d found buried in the lighthouse basement. The voice defied capture, existing somehow between the seconds of recorded time. His throat felt raw from dehydration. When had he last drunk anything? Empty coffee cups lined his desk like abandoned sentries. The supply crates sat unopened on the rocks below - the first time he''d ignored a delivery since arriving. Sleep came in micro-bursts, his body shutting down despite his resistance. Each time he jerked awake, the voice had shifted - new patterns, new impossibilities. His notes became increasingly fractured: Day 3, 0200: Attempted frequency analysis. Equipment shows nothing. Voice modulates between F# above high C and notes that don''t exist. Day 3, 0345: Tried recording on analog equipment. Tapes blank. Sound continues. Day 3, 0500: Voice penetrates soundproof room. No acoustic properties match known physics. The basement phonograph had yielded one clue - microscopic grooves appearing spontaneously on blank plates, but degrading before he could analyze them. Like the voice was trying to leave messages his technology couldn''t quite capture. His automated Walsh searches continued running, forgotten until alerts started flooding his screen. The patterns were shifting. Records that had been dead ends for months suddenly showed new data: 1876: Lighthouse construction overseen by H. Walsh 1923: Renovation contracts signed by Harrison Walsh 1967: Maintenance logs approved by H.W. 1998: Property transfer to Harrison Walsh 2024: Sale to Marcus Chen The dates spread like a constellation across time, connected by identical signatures. Not similar - identical. As if the same moment of signing had been copied across centuries. The voice grew more insistent. Harmonics split and reformed, creating frequencies that made his vision blur. The lighthouse equipment began responding - lights flickering in rhythm, hard drives spinning up and down, even the beacon itself seeming to pulse in sync with the impossible song. His mother''s returned birthday card sat on his desk, the "address unknown" stamp stark against white paper. He''d tried calling the post office, using his usual anonymizing methods. The clerk''s response haunted him: "That address exists sir, but time doesn''t flow there anymore." Click. The line had gone dead. All attempts to call back reached disconnected numbers. Day four brought nosebleeds. The voice had worked its way into his bones, resonating with something deeper than mere physical structure. His reflection showed burst blood vessels in both eyes. Dark fluid leaked from his ears, but tests showed it wasn''t blood. Under the microscope, it moved like mercury but registered as nothing on chemical analysis. The latest delivery contained medical supplies he hadn''t known he''d need yet: gauze, coagulants, specialized cleaning solutions for equipment exposed to unknown substances. As always, the timing was perfect. As always, no trace of who had brought them. Six days without proper sleep. The voice wove through his dreams on the rare occasions his body forced him to rest. In those brief moments of unconsciousness, he saw Walsh - not as a man, but as a M?bius strip running through reality''s fabric. A constant in an equation too vast to solve. The lighthouse logs yielded their final secret at hour 147. Hidden text appearing between entries, visible only when the voice hit certain frequencies. Maintenance notes written in Walsh''s hand, describing changes to the building''s structure. Modifications that shouldn''t have been possible: "Adjusted primary resonance of central column. Building now capable of sustaining temporal harmonics." "Modified foundation geometry. Lighthouse exists in all necessary moments simultaneously." "Final preparations complete. The girl will sing. Time will answer." The voice shifted to a higher pitch. His exhausted mind could barely process the sound anymore. Through bleary eyes, he stared at old data until the numbers blurred together. The lighthouse itself seemed to resonate with the tone - not supernatural, just the natural vibration of metal and stone under constant acoustic stress. The basement called to him. Not through the voice - through the sudden, deafening silence when it stopped. The absence felt like a vacuum, drawing him down the spiral stairs. His legs barely supported him after a week without food or proper rest. Tool marks on the foundation stones. Fresh marks, cut while he slept. The metal panel pulled away easily, revealing the passage beyond. His flashlight beam caught decades of dust, footprints that vanished halfway down the corridor. The door hung open on rusted hinges. The room beyond held only silence. And there lay Harrison Walsh''s skull, jaw frozen in a scream that never ended.