“I told you, I’m not different.” A little grumpier than he’d meant to be.

“But you are,” she said, ignoring his tone.

“It’s because of the splinter,” he said, finally, to keep it simple.

“Splinters hurt but they just make you bleed.”

“Not this one,” he said, putting his back into his work. “This one was different. I don’t really understand it, but I’m seeing things in the corner of my eye.”

“You should go to the doctor.”

“I will.”

“My mother’s a doctor.”

“So she is.” Her mother was, or had been, a pediatrician. Not quite the same thing. Even if she did give unlicensed advice to residents of the forgotten coast.

“If I was different, I’d go see her.” Different. But different in what way?

“You live with her.”

“So?”

“Why are you really here? To interrogate me?”

“You think I don’t know what ‘interrogate’ means, but I do,” she told him, walking away.

When Henry and Suzanne left for the day, Saul climbed to the top of the lighthouse and looked out onto the rich contrast of sea and beach, the deep bronze glint of afternoon sun. From this spot, a light had shone out through storms and human-made disasters, in calms and in crises. Light that cascaded or even interrupted itself. Light that pulsed and trembled, that pulled the darkness toward it and then cast it out.

He’d been standing in the lantern room the first time he’d seen Henry, so many months ago. Henry’s trudging across the sand toward the lighthouse had been a kind of travesty of progress, as he sagged and lurched and fought for purchase. Henry squinting against the glare, the wind half ripping his shirt from him—so big on him that the back of it surged right and left off his shoulders like a sail, as if mad to get free. It obscured the lagging Suzanne, whom Saul hadn’t even noticed at first. The sandpipers had hardly bothered with the usual nervous pitter-patter-glide away from Henry, choosing instead to poke around in the sand until the last moment and then take wing to escape the clumsy monster. Henry had looked in that moment like an awkward supplicant, a pilgrim come to worship.

They’d left their equipment—the metal boxes with the strange dials and readings. Almost like a threat. Squatters’ rights. We will return. He didn’t understand half of what he was looking at, even up close. And he didn’t want to—didn’t want to know what was on the séance side and what was on the science side. Prebiotic particles. Ghost energy. Mirror rooms. The lens was miraculous enough in what it could do without trying to find some further significance in it.

Saul’s knee was acting up, putting too much creak in his step as he went through the Light Brigade’s equipment. As he searched for something he knew he probably wouldn’t recognize, he was reflecting that a man could fall apart from any number of ailments, and a bit of maintenance couldn’t hurt. Especially since Charlie was seven years younger. But that just hid the thought that came now in little surges of panic: that something was wrong, that he was more and more a stranger in his own skin, that perhaps something was beginning to look out through his eyes. Infestation was a thought that crept in at moments between wakefulness and sleep, sleep and wakefulness, drifting down the passageway between the two.