The Lighthouse and the Phantasmograph
Book Three of the Dunning Cycle
"A story best told in a storm."
When a hurricane descends on the Florida coast, Alistair Dunning seeks shelter at the foot of the St. Augustine Lighthouse. What he finds within its keeper's house is not safety, but the echo of older storms: lantern-light that shifts when no hand guides it, voices moving up the spiral stairs, and records that refuse to stay fixed on the page.
Drawn into the lighthouse archives, Dunning uncovers fragments that point to something more than folklore. A weather log scrawled with a stranger's uneven hand. A fractured Fresnel lens shard, etched with the Latin words LUX MUTATUR-"light is changed." A set of journal entries describing shadows that appear where no figure stands. And, most unsettling, a verse fragment from the Delta blues tradition that ties Elias Lassiter's centuries-old bargain to the crossroads of railroads and storms.
Each artifact points to a hidden continuity: the same pacts that once bound Lassiter at sea now ripple inland along ribbons of steel, drawn north toward Chicago. In the interplay of storm, lighthouse, and phantasmograph, Dunning finds himself caught between history and something far older than history-an arrangement written not only in ink and glass, but in thunder, fire, and shadow.
The Lighthouse and the Phantasmograph continues the acclaimed Dunning Cycle, a series of ghost stories told in the tradition of M. R. James. Through the eyes of Alistair Dunning-archivist, podcaster, reluctant witness-the Cycle brings together folklore, archival fragments, and supernatural encounters to reveal a world where the past is never silent, and the bargains made long ago still demand their price.
For readers who love ghost stories rooted in real places, histories that bend toward the uncanny, and tales where storms carry more than wind and rain.
