They give me my clothes, my phone and field kit the next morning along with the full documentation and my cover identity that was prepared thoroughly and a contact frequency.
When I am about to leave, Director Harlow hands me a contact. "Will help you reach there."
The supply ferry leaves from a harbour town called Dunmore Point, which takes me a day of travel to reach. I spend the night in a motel that smells of damp carpet and radiator dust, and I lie on the bed without sleeping and read through the briefing packet, which is thorough on the history of the lighthouse and thin on everything I actually want to know.
Twelve miles off the northern coast. Built in 1889, original stone construction, decommissioned in 1943, recommissioned in 1962, decommissioned again in 1978, and recommissioned a final time in 2009 when revised maritime legislation reinstated its operational necessity. It sits on a rock formation called Sable Firth, sable for the black stone, firth for the channel it guards, though the channel has no formal cartographic name and the lighthouse itself appears on most nautical maps as a symbol without text.
The harbour town itself is small in the way of places whose primary relationship with the wider world is the water. There are boats and there are the things that serve the boats and the people on the boats, and there is a fish smell that gets into your clothes within ten minutes of arrival, and there is a particular quality to the light, silver-diffused, already filtered through the idea of fog, that makes everything look slightly less than certain.
I check in with the ferry contact. He is a weathered man of indeterminate age between fifty and seventy who tells me the ferry runs once a month for supplies and that today is a run day and that the weather is managed , which in his vocabulary appears to mean bad but not unsurvivable . He looks at my bag and then at me and then at my bag again with the expression of a man recalculating something. The sun has already set down and stars slightly blinking in the sky when we set out.
"First time to the Firth?" the frry man, whose name I don't remember or maybe he nver told me, says.
"Yes," I say.
"People keep dissappearing on the firth." He says with little concern, "You should have chosen a safe place for whatever you want to study".
I have told him about what I am currently, a weather researcher.
"That is exactly why I chose this place." I say as I look at him pulling the rope, removing it from the anchor. The ferry moves out of the harbour. The water is dark green-grey and the sky above is the same colour from a slightly different angle and the horizon between them is a suggestion rather than a line.
I have my jacket zipped to the collar and my hands around a container of coffee that is going cold fast in the salty wind, and I watch the mainland recede and I think about the ward and the white room and the mattress and the scratched marks underneath it. I think about the photograph in my inside pocket. I think about Harlow's reading glasses and her careful precision and the things she chose not to tell me.
"But I think the firth chooses for itself and then engulf them without a trace." I look at him weirdly.
"No one dissappear without a trace," I inhale in the hazy air, "There are always traces. There are always clues."
"Can be, but not on firth." He is looking ahead in the fog a it thickens around us. "The Firth devouvers with no crums left." He looks at me wide eyed, an attempt into scaring me.
I ignore him and look ahead. I have been to places that could not be explained until they became explainable, treated and studied people that were acting weird until their behaviour became predictable and had motives.
The fog has thickened with nothing in sight for an hour or so and then all at once the lighthouse emerges at the far end, only a shadow of it, a light blinking.
"We will stay here for the night," Says the ferry man as he stops the motor.
"Isn't it near. We should be moving."
"The water here gets unstable at this time of night. No one knows why. I hope you can find an answer for that." He smirks.
"I sure will and will come find you to give you the facts." I walk to the room that has beend assigned to me.
I can see the grey silhouette of the lighthouse from the small window beside my bunker bed. I look at it and an unexpected weird flutter slowly takes place in my chest. Will I be finally able to sleep there or will the dreams follow me here too, as I lay awake while Daniel stands at the foot of the bunker bed, water flowing from him, his mouth constantly moving.