The cottage had a heartbeat. It was a low, rhythmic thrum I felt more than heard, a vibration that travelled up from the stone floor through the soles of my feet and into my bones. It was the diesel generator, Andre had informed me with brusque efficiency upon my retreat from the lighthouse, housed in the base of the tower. It ran for a few hours each evening to charge the batteries that powered the great light through the night. Do not touch it, he'd said, as if I were a child likely to fiddle with knobs. The sound was a constant, mechanical reminder of his presence, of his vital, all-consuming work, from which I was so pointedly excluded.
The main room of the cottage was the stage for our silent, awkward ballet. It was perhaps five paces from the heavy front door to the stone fireplace, and four from the worn couch to the small kitchen counter. Every movement was a negotiation of space. If I was at the sink, filling a glass with the cool, slightly metallic-tasting cistern water, and he needed to get to the pantry—a deep, cool cupboard stocked with tins of fish, sacks of lentils, and jars of pickled vegetables—we would have to perform a careful, wordless sidestep, our bodies turning to avoid contact with the practiced avoidance of strangers in a crowded lift. The air between us was thick, charged with all the things we weren't saying.
My room was my sanctuary, my cell. The iron bedframe groaned like a dying animal if I so much as shifted my weight. The mattress was thin, the wool blanket scratchy. But it had a door, a solid, wooden barrier I could close against the oppressive silence of the main room and the even more oppressive presence of the keeper. The tiny, adjacent bathroom was a luxury I hadn't dared hope for, with a small, electric water heater that afforded brief, lukewarm showers. It was my territory, the only square meters on this entire island I could claim as my own.
That first evening, after the brutal dismissal in the lighthouse, I had retreated here. I'd sat on the edge of the bed, listening. The cottage was silent save for the generator's hum. I heard the crunch of his boots on the gravel path outside, the creak of the front door, the sounds of him moving about in the main room. He didn't call out, didn't check on me. I was a ghost in his house, an inconvenient apparition he was choosing to ignore.
Hunger, a persistent and undignified force, eventually drove me out. I emerged from my room, trying to look as if I belonged. He was at the counter, slicing a dark, dense loaf of bread with a wicked-looking knife. He didn't look up.
"I… is it alright if I make something to eat?" I asked, my voice too loud in the quiet.
He gestured with the knife towards the pantry. "Help yourself. There is a gas camp stove in the shed if you want hot food. The main stove is for canning, in season."
A camp stove. In the shed. Of course. He wasn't offering to share a meal, to break bread. He was delineating boundaries. Your food, my food. Your space, my space.
"Thank you," I said, the words tasting like ash.
I rummaged in the pantry, my pride warring with my stomach. I settled on a tin of sardines in olive oil and a handful of dry biscuits. I took my pathetic supper to the small wooden table and ate in silence, the oil glistening on my fingers. He finished his bread with a piece of hard cheese, washed his knife and his plate at the sink, and then, without a word, picked up a book from the chaotic shelf and sat on the far end of the couch.
The silence was a physical weight on my shoulders. I could hear myself chewing, a horribly intimate sound. I could hear the soft rustle of his pages turning. I could hear my own heart beating a frantic, lonely rhythm. This was the profound solitude I had craved? This was worse than being alone. This was being alone with someone.
I finished eating, cleaned my tin and plate, and fled back to my room. I tried to read, but the words on the page were meaningless. I tried to write notes for my article, but all I could scribble was: *Subject: male, approx. mid-30s. Uncommunicative. Hostile. Story: nonexistent.*
Frustrated, I finally gave up and extinguished the small battery-powered lamp on my chest. The room was plunged into a darkness so complete it felt solid. There were no city lights bleeding through the curtains, no distant glow of streetlamps. This was a primeval dark, the dark of caves and deep space. I lay in the narrow bed, staring up at a ceiling I couldn't see, and felt the vast, empty night pressing in on the cottage walls.
And then, it happened.
A blade of pure, white light sliced through the crack in my shutters, sweeping across the room. It moved with a slow, stately grace, illuminating the dust motes in the air for a fleeting second before plunging the room back into blackness. A few heartbeats later, it came again, a silent, celestial beacon.
The lighthouse.
The hypnotic rhythm was irresistible. I slipped out of bed and went to the window, pushing the shutters open. The night air was cool and carried the rich, damp scent of the sea. Before me, the island was a study in monochrome, all silvers and deep blues under a canopy of stars so dense and bright they looked like a spill of salt across black velvet.
But the lighthouse was the star of the show.
The great beam erupted from the lantern room, a concentrated column of light so powerful it seemed to solidify the air it passed through. It swept in a perfect, 360-degree arc, a slow, relentless metronome marking the passage of the night. One… two… three… four… I counted the seconds between each pass. It was mesmerizing. It was a pulse, a heartbeat for the sleeping sea. It was a warning and a promise all at once. Stay away. I am here.
And then I saw him.
A dark silhouette against the glowing glass of the lantern room. Andre. He was up there, inside the heart of the light. I could see his form moving, a shadow puppet behind the brilliant scrim. He was checking the mechanism, ensuring its smooth rotation, performing his nightly ritual. He was a part of the machine, the human element that gave the automated light its soul.
Seeing him there, a solitary figure in that tower of light, something shifted inside me. The anger and humiliation I'd felt earlier began to soften, replaced by a grudging, awe-filled curiosity. This wasn't just a job to him. This was a vocation. A calling. He wasn't just a rude, antisocial hermit; he was a priest tending an altar, a sentinel standing a watch that had been kept for over a century. His hostility towards me wasn't just personal; it was a defense of this sacred space, this ritual, this silence.
The beam swept past my window again, and for a fleeting moment, it felt as if it was looking right at me, acknowledging my witness. I stood there for a long time, watching the light, watching his shadow, until the cool night air raised goosebumps on my arms. I finally returned to bed, the rhythmic sweep of the light painting silver stripes across my closed eyelids. My last thought before sleep claimed me was that the story was here. It was etched in the lines of his face, encoded in the rhythm of the light. I just had to find a way to crack the cipher.
The dawn broke clear and loud with the cries of gulls. The generator had fallen silent sometime in the night, and the cottage was once again enveloped in its deep, natural quiet. I woke feeling surprisingly refreshed, the hypnotic effect of the light having lulled me into a deeper sleep than I'd had in months.
The main room was empty. A clean mug sat upside down on the draining board. Andre was already out, his absence a palpable relief. I made coffee on the camp stove I'd dutifully retrieved from the shed—a rickety, single-burner affair—and took it outside to drink on a rough-hewn wooden bench by the cottage door.
The morning light was gentle, painting the grey rock with a golden hue. The sea was a sheet of hammered silver, calm and serene. It was beautiful, undeniably so. I could feel the tension in my shoulders begin to ease, just a little.
I spent the morning exploring the immediate vicinity of the cottage, mapping my new, tiny world. There was the shed, which housed tools, fishing gear, and the generator's fuel drums. There was a small, walled garden, long fallow, its soil dry and cracked. A path led down to a concrete cistern, collecting rainwater from the cottage's roof. It was a life defined by utility and self-sufficiency.
I avoided the lighthouse path. That was his domain.
He returned for lunch, his arrival announced by the crunch of his boots. He nodded curtly in my direction as he entered the cottage. I was sitting at the table, attempting to write.
"The weather will turn this afternoon," he said, his voice a low rumble. It was the first unsolicited sentence he'd spoken to me.
I looked up, surprised. "Turn?"
"The Bura wind. It comes from the north. It is… sharp. Do not wander far from the cottage."
It wasn't a suggestion; it was an order. But it was also a flicker of concern, however practical. A thread of communication.
"Thank you," I said. "I'll be careful."
He grunted in acknowledgment and set about making his lunch. The silence returned, but it felt slightly different today. Less hostile, more… observational.
Later, as I was attempting to sketch the view from my window in my notebook, I heard a crash from the main room, followed by a low, sharp curse. I hurried out of my room to find Andre on his knees, a shattered ceramic plate at his feet, a pool of olive oil and scattered olives spreading across the stone floor.
"Damn it," he muttered, carefully picking up the larger shards.
"Let me help," I said, moving towards the kitchen for a cloth.
"I have it," he said, his voice tight with frustration.
"It's no trouble," I insisted, my own stubbornness surfacing. I wet a rag and came over, kneeling opposite him. Our fingers brushed as we both reached for the same piece of broken plate. A spark, sharp and electric, jolted up my arm. We both froze for a fraction of a second, our eyes meeting over the mess on the floor.
His stormy eyes were wide, startled. I saw a flash of something in their depths—not anger, but a raw, unguarded surprise. The fortress walls had cracked, just for an instant.
He looked away first, snatching his hand back. "Be careful of the pieces," he said, his voice back to its usual gruff tone, but I detected a faint unevenness in it.
We cleaned the mess in a silence that was now thick with a new, different kind of tension. It was no longer just the tension of animosity, but the charged, unsettling tension of physical awareness. I was acutely conscious of the breadth of his shoulders, the strength in his hands, the scent of sun and sea salt that clung to him. He worked with a fierce efficiency, as if trying to erase the moment of our contact.
When the floor was clean, he stood up, disposing of the broken pieces. "Thank you," he said, the words seeming to cost him effort.
"You're welcome," I replied softly.
He didn't look at me again, simply turned and walked back outside, leaving me standing in the middle of the room, my heart beating a strange, unsteady rhythm. The air in the cottage felt different. The unspoken words were no longer just about my intrusion; they were now about that spark, that fleeting, electric connection.
As he had predicted, the Bura wind began to blow in the late afternoon. It didn't arrive as a gust, but as a sudden, sustained force, a cold, dry torrent that screamed down from the Velebit mountain range. It whipped the sea into a frenzy of whitecaps and tore at the shrubs on the island, making them flatten and shudder. The sound was incredible, a constant, roaring wail that made conversation inside the cottage impossible.
We were prisoners of the storm, forced into even closer quarters. He brought in an armload of wood and lit a fire in the great fireplace, the first real gesture of shared comfort. The flames danced and crackled, pushing back against the howling dark outside. He sat in one of the two armchairs, mending a torn fishing net with a deft, practiced hand. I took the other chair, a book open on my lap, though I wasn't reading. I was watching him.
In the flickering firelight, his severe features were softened. The shadows played across the planes of his face, highlighting the concentration in his brow, the strong line of his jaw. He was completely absorbed in his task, his movements rhythmic and sure. This was a man who knew how to do things, how to fix things, how to survive. It was a quiet, potent masculinity that was utterly foreign to the men I knew in Zagreb, with their designer glasses and their existential crises over which craft beer to order.
He must have felt my gaze, because he looked up. Our eyes met across the fire. The howl of the wind filled the silence between us. He didn't smile, but the hostility in his gaze had been banked, like the embers of the fire. There was a question there now, a cautious, wary assessment.
I held his look, refusing to look away. I wanted him to see that I wasn't just a nuisance, a "journalist" from the city. I was a person, sitting in his chair, sharing his fire, weathering his storm.
After a long moment, he gave a slow, almost imperceptible nod, as if acknowledging a truce. Then he returned his attention to his net.
I looked down at my book, a slow smile touching my lips. It was a small victory, but it felt monumental. The unpacking was over. The real work of understanding, of unraveling the mystery of Andre, the Keeper of the Light, had just begun.
That night, as the Bura continued to scream its fury against the cottage walls, the lighthouse beam cut through the raging dark, a steady, unwavering eye. I lay in bed, listening to the dual symphony of the storm and the generator's hum, and I thought of him up there in the tower, a solitary king in his kingdom of wind and light. And for the first time, the thought wasn't accompanied by a pang of loneliness, but by a thrill of anticipation.