The Lighthouse on Christmas Eve

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The story

On Christmas Eve a lone lighthouse keeper on a frozen northern coast hears sleigh bells far out over the sea ice, then a polite knocking on the door at the very top of his tower, a hundred feet above the ground. The knocks move down the tower one landing at a time, each with a courteous request to come in out of the cold for the season.

How it begins

The lighthouse stands alone on a spit of black rock at the top of the world, where the land gives up and the sea freezes into a grey, groaning plain. Nobody has walked to it in three winters. The supply boat stopped coming the autumn the ice closed in, and the keeper, a thin, careful man named Harald Brisk, has learned to live on tinned herring, lamp oil, and the sound of his own breath. Every night he climbs the hundred and nine iron steps to the lamp room, turns the great brass lens, and watches the beam sweep out across the dark water like a long white arm searching…