I saw it even before I saw her—a spearpoint-shaped thing, an impossible thing, a thing blacker than black yet giving off light—which levitated straight as an arrow at the center of the Fresnel and somehow caused it to turn, to warp, to change its shape and then back again, to be at once physical yet abstract. Nor was it the size of even the largest lightbulbs but rather tall as a man, with no surface features whatsoever—like one of those cars which has been painted Vantablack and so absorbs all incidental light—a thing as perfect as it was paradoxical, and which had no color of its own yet somehow radiated multitudes.
A thing beyond which—out on the catwalk—stood Amelia: barefoot but wrapped in the keeper’s bathrobe; facing away from the black light and myself; facing the sea which rose u
