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I
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"What?"
I mumbled aloud as I caught myself on the doorframe, swaying, eyes adjusting to the interior. Where was… my head throbbed with a sharp white pain, like I was a passenger in someone else's dying memory, ghosting a consciousness that was already a ghost to itself.
It was only when a light clicked on from my hand that I realized I - or this body - was holding an electric torch. The inside was strewn with trash and old rotten wooden tables, and the only natural light was from the small shattered windows.
Ahead of me was a small room with a toilet, the door long since rotted off its hinges. I took a step deeper in and to the right was the small workroom attached to the lighthouse itself.
The trash underfoot cracked loudly as I stepped further in. On the filthy floor were old pages of sheet music, torn and wet and unrecognizable. Rotted wooden tables held old ledgers still open, but even flipping through them the ink faded to smudges.
This body felt as rotten as the room. I listened carefully for the voice that had spoken in my head when I woke up, but - it was silent. Had it been a hallucination? Had it been someone else? It was clear nobody had been in this building in ages. The light in my hand passed over the far corner of this small room - there was a door, but - I couldn't open it. It was swollen shut to its frame, and the line of small windows beside it were only a few inches in size, too small and broken to see through to what lay behind this building.
Turning back, the light caught a small pile of old playing cards stacked on what remained of a wooden table - whoever had last been here must have been fond of them. Not fond enough to take them when they left.
That only left the back of this small room to explore, another empty doorframe without its door - that should be under the lighthouse, but stepping in it was immediately clear that the metal spiral stairs that led upwards to the top of the lighthouse would be impossible to reach - its lower sections had rusted clear through and fallen to the ground. I was careful looking up lest anything more fall - the upper stairs looked to be in better shape but I had no way to reach them. Nor reason to, I supposed.
More and more I wondered if this body was truly mine. It didn't feel like it, but - maybe I just didn't remember. I was here, wasn't I? So of course it was. But then I turned back from under this rotting metal staircase and the glow of a chemical formula painted on the wall behind me - it was glowing? A bucket, underneath - glow-in-the-dark paint. But why?
I looked up again through the circle of rusted-out stairs, then shrugged and turned back. A curiosity - it had nothing to do with me. Except… for that other voice I had heard, in… my head. My body. This body? I couldn't… remember.
Walking back out of the lighthouse I coughed as a slap of cold salt wind caught my face, waking me up as I stepped clear of the broken lighthouse. It was a small miracle it hadn't collapsed into the surf already, but I had no time to dwell on that. To the right of me was the slow blink of the red radio tower on a hill in the foggy distance, and the two paths that might lead to it, one along the trash-strewn beach, and one up a slow path halfway up along the scarp.
To the left of me was the ocean past the rocks of the shore, ahead was the rocky boat ramp I'd woken up on - if I wanted to find anyone else here or any sign of people, I could only explore along the beach, and so
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I
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