Читать книгу Secrets At the Cove - Honey Perkel - Страница 3

My name is Bernard. I lived in Seaside, a small town on the northern Oregon coast, from 1930 until the summer of 1948. That summer I graduated from Seaside Union High School and met my demise while surfing at the nearby cove.

It was a warm, sunny day. A beautiful day to die. Though I was an experienced surfer, I was taken by surprise as the waves swept me under and threw me sideways for miles along the shore. I washed up on the gray sandy beach days later, my life having been cut tragically short.

Mine was not the first death at the cove, nor was it the last. Throughout the years I’ve witnessed the loss of many lives on that rocky apron of shore, home to sea creatures and birds. Life at its beginning, and all too often, at its end. I just couldn’t save them all, you see. It was the timing of a life. It had to be like that.

The Tillamook Head Lighthouse sits a mile or so offshore from the forested point of Tillamook Head. Terrible Tilly, so named long ago because of the severe hardships and loneliness experienced by its caretakers, now abandoned and rusted. I live there along with others of my kind. A Specter’s Hotel, if you will. The accommodations are fair. Quiet except for those who rant as they walk in the night. This sometimes happens with folks like us. It’s the energy still rushing inside our pores and through our veins, as thick as nourishing blood once had. Talk around town is that howling can be heard out on the lighthouse bridge when the moon is but a sliver of silver. I never hear it, as I sleep like the dead. Decommissioned some fifty years ago, one could assume a place like this might be haunted, but certainly not by me. I don’t play those vacuous games. There are more important things in death.

So, what do I do here? you ask. I keep myself busy with many jobs. I’m the handsome young surfer beautiful women dream about on those lonely and blackened nights. But mostly I’m guardian of those I love in this world ... and in others. Some call me an angel, a ghost of many, a keeper of some who believe in me and some who don’t. I watch people. I study them. I love them. But do I keep them safe? I can’t do everything.