The Whisper Man

Dingle watched the young man as he, mercifully, took the path leading down to the shore rather than the one that ran precariously out along the top of the cliff. Then Dingle sighed a satisfied sigh and withdrew into the base of the lighthouse, which was also his living quarters—his bedroom the next level up and then the bath and a small laundry. Two smaller floors of storage rooms rose above that in the narrowing tower, with his “operations” room at the top, capped only by a strobing light chamber bulbing out over the whole, erect structure.

You had to be in great shape to manage the stairs in a lighthouse, and Dingle was, even though he was well into his fifties. He was in great shape. Working out was his second favorite activity. There wasn’t much else he could bide his time with on this isolated promontory jutting out to sea over the entrance into the harbor. It was a solitary life, and the requirements of the lighthouse weren’t onerous. The harbor town, such as it was, was a good twenty miles inland, the harbor being long and narrow, and the shipping and fishing industry hereabouts not being what it used to be.

There were moments when Dingle was afraid they might close down this lighthouse. But the passage through the straits here was treacherous and there was a more modern, bustling, and heavily populated harbor city beyond here just up the coast requiring an assurance of safe passage through this patch of difficulty.

Dingle didn’t know what he’d do if they closed him down. This had been his life for nearly fifteen years now.

There were no working family farms or sheepherding ranches out this way anymore. A large conglomerate had bought just about everyone out with the stated intention of putting a power plant out here and also going into cattle raising for the market down at the big city in a big way. But the downturn in the economy had put that on hold.