The Midnight Lighthouse Cat

The Town at the Bottom of the Fog

The fog came up the road to meet them, as if it had been waiting all day.

Wren Tully pressed her nose to the car window and watched the town blink in and out. A roof. Gone. A church steeple. Gone. A street of crooked houses all leaning together, like they were whispering secrets they didn't want her to hear. Gone again.

"Nearly there," said Mum, much too brightly. "Smell that? That's the sea."

Wren smelled it. Salt and fish and something colder underneath, like the inside of a fridge. It did not smell like home. Home was three hundred miles behind them, with her old bedroom and her old friends and the crab-apple tree she could climb right to the very top of.

Home was also where Dad used to be, before his ship sailed off to the far side of the world and stopped coming back for months at a time.

In her lap sat the lantern he'd given her the night before he left. It was small, made of green sea-glass and tin, with a stub of candle inside. A light's a promise, he'd said, closing her fingers around it. Light it, and I'll know you're thinking of me. And wherever I am, I'll be thinking of you right back.

She held it tighter as the car bumped down the hill.

Salt Hollow sat at the bottom of the fog like something dropped down a well. There was a harbour with a grey stone wall, a row of shops, and boats nodding on the water. And out past everything, on a spit of black rock that poked into the sea like a crooked finger, stood a lighthouse.

It was tall and white and tired-looking, with a red top like a paper hat.

"That's the Old Bellow," said Mum, pulling up by the harbour. "On account of the foghorn. You'll get used to it. The point it stands on is called the Knuckle."

"Get used to what?" said Wren.

The whole world went MMMMMRROOOOO.

It was so low and so loud that Wren felt it in her back teeth. Gulls scattered off the harbour wall. The car windows hummed. MMMMMRROOOOO, it went again, like a giant clearing its throat under the sea.

"That," said Mum, and laughed.

Wren did not laugh. She was looking up at the lighthouse, at the little window just below the red hat, where the great lamp lived.

Something was in the window. Something large.

It had pointed ears and two round eyes that caught the last of the daylight and threw it back at her, gold and unblinking. It was watching the car. It was watching her.

Then the fog folded over the lighthouse like a closing hand, and it was gone.

"Mum," Wren whispered. "There's a—"

"Harbourmaster Tully?"

A man in yellow waterproofs had appeared at the car window, dripping. He had a beard like wet rope and a frown that looked permanent.

"That's me," said Mum, climbing out. "First day tomorrow, but I'm here. What's wrong?"

"The Sally Mae went out this morning," the man said. "She's not back. Tide's turned, light's near gone, and there's not a breath of wind to have blown her off course." He looked out at the water, where the fog sat thick as porridge. "On a night like this, with the Bellow gone quiet too long . . ."

He didn't finish.

"I'm sure she'll turn up," said Mum.

The man looked at her, and at Wren, and at the lighthouse swallowed in grey.

"They don't always," he said. "Not on the thick nights. You'll want to keep the girl off the rocks after dark, Harbourmaster. Especially the Knuckle."

He pulled his hood up and walked away into the fog, and the fog took him too.

Far out at sea, very faintly, Wren thought she heard the foghorn answered — by something that was not a foghorn at all.

A Cat Called Mortimer

Wren lasted exactly one day before she went looking for the cat.

Their new house leaned over the harbour with the others, and her new bedroom looked straight out at the Knuckle. All morning the fog had thinned to a milky haze, and all morning Wren had told herself she would not go poking about on slippery rocks where a bearded man had told her not to.

By afternoon she had a jam bun from Mr. Penny's shop in her coat pocket and was walking out along the Knuckle anyway.

The causeway was a ribbon of stone laid across the rock, slick with weed and crusted with barnacles. The sea breathed in and out on both sides of her. At the end of it the lighthouse rose up huge and white, its door painted the colour of old blood.

The door was open a crack.

"Hello?" Wren called. Her voice came back to her off the curved walls. Hello-ello-ello. Inside, a metal staircase wound up and up into the dark. "Is anyone — is the keeper here?"

Nobody answered. But something padded.

It came down the stairs without hurrying, one step at a time, and when it reached the bottom and sat down to look at her, Wren's mouth fell open.

She had thought it was a small dog in the window. It was not a small dog. It was a cat — but a cat the size of a small dog, the most enormous cat she had ever seen, orange as a marmalade jar, with a torn left ear, one white sock, and a tail like a bottle-brush that had been frightened by something. He had a face like a furious cushion.

"Oh," said Wren. "You're the — hello, kitty."

The cat's ears went flat.

The look he gave her could have curdled milk. It was a look that said, very clearly, that he had been called many things in his long life, and that kitty was a word he would forgive in nobody, least of all a small, damp, three-hundred-miles-from-home girl who smelled faintly of jam.

"Sorry," said Wren. "I didn't mean—"

The cat stood, walked over, and with one neat paw hooked the jam bun straight out of her pocket. He sat back down, the bun between his feet, and began to eat it while staring at her, as if to say: this is the rent for that word, and you have got off lightly.

"That was mine," said Wren.

The cat did not appear to care.

A voice spoke up behind her. "His name's Mortimer."

A boy was standing on the causeway, hands in his pockets, looking entirely unsurprised by the giant cat or the strange new girl. He was about her age, with a round freckly face and wellies two sizes too big.

"He keeps the light," the boy went on. "Has done forever. There's always been a cat at the Old Bellow — that's what my grandad says. Old Pinch is the keeper, but he fell and broke his hip a fortnight back, and they took him off to the mainland hospital. So now it's just Mortimer up there, and the lamp running itself." He frowned at the lighthouse. "Which is the trouble, really."

"What trouble?" said Wren.

But Mortimer had finished the bun. He stood, looked at them both, and trotted to the open door — then stopped, and looked back. Plainly waiting.

"He wants us to follow," said the boy.

"Cats don't want things like that," said Wren.

"That one does," said the boy.

They climbed. Up and up the cold iron stairs, round and round, past empty rooms and a kitchen with one dirty mug, all the way to the very top, where the great lamp sat behind its huge curved glass like an egg in a glass nest. The window looked out over the whole sea, and the sea was grey, and the sky was grey, and you couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.

Mortimer jumped onto the windowsill. Every orange hair on his back was standing straight up. He was staring down at the water by the Knuckle, and he was making a sound Wren had never heard a cat make — a low, flat growl, like a kettle that meant it.

Wren looked down.

The fog was coming in. That was nothing strange.

But it was coming in against the wind. The boats in the harbour leaned one way; the smoke from the chimneys streamed one way; and the fog came rolling the other way, low across the water, fingers of it creeping up the black rocks of the Knuckle toward the lighthouse door — slow, and steady, and certain, like something climbing.