What The Sea Took
~ an introduction ~
Log of Keeper Matthias R. Dane
Grimleigh Rock Light, Dogger Bank
Entry dated: October 19th, 1892
12 October
Wind from the north-east. Clouds low and flat. Sighted a fishing vessel at dusk, some hundred yards off the starboard reef. No lights shown. Attempted signal, no reply. She drifted westward, hull deep in the water, listing hard. Could make out no crew. Lantern seemed cold, yet smoke issued faintly from the galley vent.
Recorded her as Martha’s Wake for want of any name. Likely a trick of mist and waning light, though I thought I heard a voice carried on the tide - not a cry, more like humming.
15 October
Heavy fog. Bell sounded thrice in the early hours, though I had not set the hammer. Suspect damp affecting the wire housing.
Heard knocking from the iron stairwell sometime past two. Not the usual groan of the tower in wind - this was sharp, deliberate. Inspected the braces and railings; all secure. Noise ceased while I descended. Resumed after I returned to the keeper’s room.
At 02:10, a gull struck the lantern glass with force enough to kill itself. Neck broken. Blood and feathers on the gallery. Cleaned what I could. One smear remains, just left of the centre pane, out of reach without unbolting the catwalk.
17 October
Air strangely still. Sea too calm - like glass stretched taut. Felt pressure behind the eyes all morning.
Lens mechanism halted at 13:49. Clockwork was wound, no cause found. Restarted by hand. Resistance in the gears, as if something thickened the motion.
Later, while polishing the brass along the west wall, I thought I heard a footstep above. Paused. Nothing. Continued. Then another, directly overhead this time. Lantern room was empty when I checked. I am alone here.
19 October
Fog returned. No wind, but the bell sounded again - three times, and once more, long and low.
18:40 – Light engaged itself. I had not yet wound the regulator.
20:05 – Visibility poor. A schooner passed heading south by southeast. White hull, low in the water. No flag, no signal. Noted her as Velora. No such vessel listed at Whitby or in the harbourmaster’s records.
Midnight - movement in the gallery. I saw it from below - the shape of a man in oilskins cast across the lens. But when I climbed to the lantern, there was no one. Only the smear of blood and the echo of a slow whistle.
01:33 - Base door found locked from within. I do not recall latching it.
03:00 - If I do not write again, and this log is found, let it be known that the light must be kept burning.
It watches the water more than it watches the ships.
~ entry ends here ~
Somewhere off the Scottish coast, where the Dogger Bank gives way to deeper channels, lies a black tooth of granite known as Grimleigh Rock. It does not appear on common charts. It is uninhabitable, save for the tower built atop it, and even that is a generous word.
Grimleigh was chosen for its placement, not its welcome. In the year of our Lord 1847, British surveyors charted a more direct passage to Copenhagen, bypassing the storm-torn Skagerrak and shaving nearly two days off the Baltic trade route. But it was a route choked with fog, sandbanks, and sudden shallows - and so, a lighthouse was ordered.
The East India Company, whose Baltic cargoes fed half the ports of England, lobbied heavily for a fixed beacon near Dogger Bank. Parliament hesitated. The Board of Trade deliberated. But the Crown approved it, and Trinity House was instructed to draw the plans. It took five winters to build. The labourers worked in shifts between tempests, anchored to the rock by rope and prayer. Three men died during construction: one swept into the surf, two buried when the eastern foundation collapsed in a gale. The final lantern was lit in the spring of 1852, five years before Finnegan Gray made his final entry.
He was the first man to take the post; an Irishman of grave bearing and pale eye. He spoke little, drank less, and kept his log with military precision. He had sailed with the Erebus as a young man, under Sir John Franklin’s command. When the expedition vanished into ice and silence, Finnegan was one of the few to make it back - skeletal, frostbitten, but alive. He never told the full story.
It was said he feared no wind, no dark, no hunger - but he refused ever again to set foot on snow. Grimleigh, cold as it was, had no snow. Only stone, and wind, and the endless grey pull of the sea.
The entries in his log begin brisk and unremarkable. But by the sixth week, they fracture. By the seventh, they cease altogether.
What follows is an attempt to reconstruct the history of Grimleigh Rock through the fragments left behind - the logbooks, the weather reports, the missing persons notices, and the uncorroborated testimonies of passing ships.
Some claim to have seen figures moving behind the glass. Some report the bell tolling when the fog is clear. Some say the light has never truly gone out…
~ to be continued ~