kabbos
By : Baraa – Egypt
I swore, swear by all that I can swear by, swear that there is a strange sound coming from that lighthouse. It’s now two o’clock in the morning , I just woke up, I’m not hysterical and never came close to be, the thing is that when I wake up more than twice to the voice that coming from the lighthouse, when the lighthouse works at 2 am on its own, then I see something standing there in the light room .. All this means nothing but that there is ghost, and this ghost is mastering his work, makes me scared!. But I am a practical man who doesn’t believe anything that is unbelievable, not for anything but because it is unbelievable, even if I see evidence to the contrary. My father once said: “The thing is not something unless we see it with our own eyes”, he was a wise man, may he rest in peace.
And this is why you find me rowing my boat, and it is over two o’clock in the morning, to get to the lighthouse! My mind in such situations is a large mass of madness and stupidity, because I know from the movies and what happens in them, that the fool hero will take courage to inquires with curiosity about the strange events that kill him at the end of the film often, I knew this and warned myself to not becoming that fool hero! But my mind was saying that this was just a film and that I was trifle to look at from this angle.. What a fool! Life is just a movie.
In the end I will learn my lesson well: Never inhabit an island facing the island on which the lighthouse is located, or don’t wake up from your sleep and suddenly decide to go to the lighthouse only because it is illuminated on its own, and because there is a shadow in the lighting room, Or something like that .. I will learn this lesson and get this wisdom while I fall from the lighthouse after the smuggler of weapons pushes me from there when he realizes that I have become aware of his secret. I will end up dead on the rocks.
These thoughts rolled through my mind as I climbed the old staircase of the lighthouse. The first observation! There are footprints on the dust; I mean a place like this, not much footed, on a small island that no one inhabits. This was a good and bad sign because the remaining possibilities for lighting the lighthouse without leaving footprints on the dust were not at all pleasant!.
Everything here tells me to run away, you idiot, get away from here, you fool.. but I never find an idiot running away or fool go away!.
Finally, I reached the top and did not find anything, or, more precisely, I did not find anyone. But there is someone who lit the lighthouse and “someone” definitely mean a sane person, that’s what we learned at school. I went to the balcony and looked towards the horizon. Now I know that it is very dark and I know that the distance is far away, but I am blind if I do not realize that this light on the horizon is the light of my house
As I recall, there are no other houses on this side of the island, and what about that shadow that passes in front of the light, the house is far away but there is definitely someone who shines the light of my house and sits in it. Yes I turned off all the lights well before I came out with my boat. If it meant something, it means that someone is messing with me, and it’s of the kind that infuriates me! Again, I found myself rowing, this time towards my house.
I left the boat on the beach between the rocks without even tying it to something and jumped from it on the nearest rock, I almost fell but I got myself and ran back home, I will cause some real damage to this villain if I found him.
I didn’t find him! The house as I left it completely, no lights and no open doors and no traces of anything. I went out of the house to catch my breath after all this effort, and here I saw it, the light.. The light of the lighthouse again! , it have lit up again, and swore that there was someone standing on the balcony in the same place where I was standing, the light falls on him well.. and..
Do I imagine or that person waving at me? Do I imagine, or does that person climbed on the balcony wall? Has he just jumped?!!
I think everything is clear now; ghosts like to bring back the last thing it did before die. But now I have to sleep, I’m not the trivial kind that worries about the daily activities of a ghost, what kind of men would I be if I did?. Of course I loved this explanation very much, it seemed logical to me, although it was illogical, perhaps I found some reassurance in this explanation.
The next morning I found two people standing in front of my house asking me about the body of the young man found under the old lighthouse! They told me in the middle of my surprise that the young man had died because he jumped out of the lighthouse, fell on the rocks and it’s over. The ghost was not a ghost after all, all that beautiful.. But how did they find his body so quickly?!
Later I knew that the man who was with the officer was a witness, and he saw a boat in the middle of the water at about 2 o’clock in the morning, the witness was walking at night on the beach when he noticed in the moonlight that there was something moving in the middle of the water. When he checked more, he found it to be a boat, and thought that boat presence at a time like this was something suspicious enough to make him tell the authorities, the authorities sent someone immediately after the sunrise to check it out and then found the body, and with a little research, they learned about the lighthouse guard who lives not far from the lighthouse. Of course, the idiot witness does not know that I was the person who was paddling at night and he did not know that I would lie to them about what happened.
-” I ?!! I was sleeping like a dead man that night and I do not know what you’re talking about. With respect, sir, my job is to run the lighthouse all the days except the day you talk about it. Otherwise, I do not know what you’re talking about”. It seemed to me a good speech when I reviewed it in my mind as I stood in front of the officer. Pardon me, you have the right to deny what I told the officer, but I have my reasons, because the story, as I saw it, can only be told by a crazy man, maybe this is true and maybe I exaggerate, but what I know is that I will never tell them anything about what I saw. I think the question they didn’t ask were: what was this witness doing on the beach at such a late time ?!
Inside my house sat the officer and the witness; the officer asked me about what happened last night? , I narrated the story that I had prepared in advance, after which the witness began to speak and recounted what happened with him from the beginning when he was walking at two o’clock after midnight and ended by informing the police. When I asked him why he was on the beach at this time of night? He said that he went out to breathe pure air on the beach and then he saw what he saw.
I was wondering about the extent to which the officer was convinced of his story if it proved to be a murder. But all indications were that this was a suicide, no trace of resistance or beatings on the boy as the officer told me, meaning that if I was lucky they would assume that the boat that the witness saw at night was the boy’s boat and he was on his way to the lighthouse to commit suicide there, I was lucky!
The officer told me to stay away from the lighthouse so that they could examine the crime scene. He ordered me to stay away for a week. I reluctantly agreed because of the length of time. When I and the witness came out of my house, the officer was gone and it seemed to us that he almost believed that what happened was just a suicide and deserves no further investigations, he just told us to be ready because they might call us back. When he left, we stood talking a bit, and gradually I discovered that what happened with this guy was the same thing that happened to me! ..
He says that he was asleep before hearing a voice calling him by name. He woke up to find that there was someone who lit the lighthouse. Ironically, the man went up to the lighthouse, too, but found nothing. An exciting story! So he went there like me and did not find anything like me and returned like me and saw the boy commit suicide like me and did not tell the police what happened because of fear of not believing him like me. At that point it seemed to me that there were many things that did not make sense, for example, if the man went to the lighthouse like me, why did not I see him?!
It may be logical to think that he went after or before me, but he went when the lighthouse lit up, just like me, this means that we should have met. I did not pay much attention to it, the police might know everything soon.
After a week they wrote in the newspapers about the biggest drug smuggling in recent history, they wrote that they had hidden the entire quantity somewhere, and when the Coast Guard inspection ended, the smugglers returned and took the drugs and left. Now the drug is spread in the markets. The police are investigating to see how the drugs were smuggled through.
I found a small paper on my door that day that read:
“Thank you for your kind cooperation. We have left you a small gift in the lighthouse.”
And in the lighthouse I found the gift, almost a kilogram of white drug, a quantity that could make me rich if I sold it, and make me trance and die if I used it, but what really happened? I imagined it in my mind:
On Saturday night, the ship loaded with drugs sailed relentlessly when they saw something on the horizon that looked like a lighthouse and seemed to be closed. On Saturday, the lighthouse was not working. Their boss says with a malicious look after the plan went into his mind:
– Men, we have found the desired place.
Someone asks him about the lighthouse guard. The boss says:
– We will use him for our plan.
He sends one of his men to the lighthouse to lit it and make some strange noises and then hide somewhere, after that, the guard, who is me, wakes up and goes to the lighthouse in his little boat to see what is going on. In the meantime they sent someone else to my house to lit its lights to attract my attention, of course it was not difficult for them to know that this is the guard’s house, there is no other houses near, and sure they saw me get out of it and go to the lighthouse. Thus they succeed in deceiving me and make me rush back home from the lighthouse.
After that it will be easy to fake a person’s jump from the top of the lighthouse, perhaps tying him with a rope or something like that, the man jumps and I saw what happened with shock and surprise .. And their plan succeeded! .. They made me confused, overwhelmed, do not know whether what I saw was real or not. So, of course, I did not tell the police about such confusing and difficult to believe story, and I would stay in my house thinking that there was a ghost, or something extraordinary. “
All that remains is for the boss to visit me disguised as an officer with one of his men – the false witness – to make me think that someone has really committed suicide and tell me not to go to the lighthouse for a week until they finish what they are doing!
I think I did not ask about the insignia of the officer who visited me, and I did not ask why he came with the witness to my house and not me who would go to the police station? I did not ask why they took a whole week to see the incident scene. And I did not pay attention to the strange and contradictory account of the witness.
But why did not they kill me or get rid of me easily instead of this long plan?
Well, the disappearance of lighthouse guard is suspiciously enough to search for him and then they will discover it. While by leaving me alive, with a small reward, they will have a funny story to tell in their evening parties about an idiot lighthouse guard whom they managed to trick and make him participate in the biggest smuggling operation without he knowing it.
