Karen Runge lives in Johannesburg, but still considers herself a small-town Midlands gal. She has been telling stories since she could draw wobbly crayon pictures, and won't tell you her day job because it is completely irrelevant to her main passions - gargling poetry and locking herself out of her house. She has lived in France, Gabon and England, and would like to move to China someday.

This is Karen's first story for Something Wicked.

extract from The Lighthouse

I have a set of wind chimes that hang from a single crooked nail just outside my bedroom window.  When the winds are soft, they make the sound of tiny bells, tinkling and jangling lightly in the distance.  When the winds are high, they clang and smash together in the ring of joyous anarchy; and when the storms blow in, they swing into the glass pane window, rapping sharply against it in chaotic discord, as though there is a lunatic beast outside trying to smash its way in.
  I am not the one who bought those wind chimes.  Oscar Delphy, who had this position before me, must have hung them up there when he first arrived.  We all like to bring a part of something from the outside world in here with us.  Anything from your most-loved childhood comics, to a bottle of your favourite woman’s perfume, to a set of wind chimes that sometimes ring like the church bells always did on bright, clean Sunday mornings in the town where you grew up. 
  It gets very lonely in here.  This place is unique for that, because usually in lighthouse posts there should be three men living and working alongside each other in their silent, abstract world; more often it’s two, but for almost as far back as the stories go, this lighthouse has refused to take any more than one man at a time.  One man, with nothing but his radio and the promise that once every month a truck will pull up here with supplies, fresh coffee and donuts, and a much-needed chance at a real conversation.
  There are stories that fly around about this place.  Stories about things that happened over a century ago when the lighthouse was first built, and the first groups of men were stationed here.  I’m not a superstitious man, but I do know that living on a remote coastline point for months on end can do terrible things to a person’s state of mind – so it doesn’t surprise me too much that those initial watchmen lost their sanity, that they all came back screaming about strange voices and impossible presences, that more often than not they made wild and cruel accusations against each other, and that more than a few drops of blood have splattered the cold stone floors and twisting spiral staircase that are now my home.  Once those who survived had recovered enough to be questioned, they all insisted that it wasn’t cabin fever – madness brought on by solitude – but nevertheless could never quite explain what exactly it had been, either. 
  My own predecessor, Oscar Delphy – who left me the wind chimes – has a similar story.  I’m told he lasted only two and a half months before finally radioing in a crazed and hysterical message that there was something or someone else living in the storage room below him.  The lighthouse administrators were used to this by now – they were well-prepared.  They sent the white coats to get him the next day with their straps and straitjackets and relief-filled hypodermic needles, and after a spell in the asylum they sent him back on his way; and he lives with his mother now, somewhere further down the coast.  I’m told that he refuses to talk about this place, or the asylum, or whatever it was that he thought he had heard bumping and scratching and crying to him from inside the locked storage room, and when I asked, my new employers warned me that under no circumstances was I to try and contact him.
  “He’s a delicate man, and it wouldn’t be fair to him.  It’s just something in the air around there anyway.” My new boss shrugged when he first described the story to me.  “It happens, but I wouldn’t worry about it too much.”
  But I don’t think it was ‘something in the air’.  I think it takes a special kind of man to become a lighthouse watchman.  You have to like your own company, thrive off of solitude. 
  You certainly can’t be the type who scares easily.