Vladimir — Jakopanec

The figure was a woman. Or she had been. Her dress was a dark, heavy wool, the kind from a sepia photograph. Her hair was piled high, and her face was bone-white, smooth as a porcelain doll, with eyes that held no light. She was not rowing. She was just sitting, one hand frozen on the gunwale, the other holding a small iron bell.

And sometimes—if you listen very closely—the faint, contented sound of a bell that has finally been answered.

He climbed back up. He did not sleep. He sat in his lantern room with the old Fresnel lens, and he polished it until the glass was indistinguishable from the morning light. vladimir jakopanec

His father, Ivan Jakopanec, had told him a story once. A story he’d never repeated to anyone else. In 1944, a partisan courier boat had been trying to reach the island of Vis, carrying a British liaison officer and a local teacher who knew the German troop movements. They were intercepted. A patrol boat ran them down. The only survivor was a woman. She reached the rocks of St. Nicholas, but the sea was wild, and Vladimir’s father—young, terrified, with a wife and a baby at home—had not heard her cries over the wind. By dawn, she was gone.

“I am here now,” Vladimir said, his voice steady. “My father was afraid. I am not.” The figure was a woman

“Who are you?” Vladimir called, his voice a rusty scrape in the Croatian night.

It wasn’t the storm that bothered him. He’d seen jugo winds that could strip paint from stone. No, it was the quality of the dark. The sky was clear—a blade-sharp canopy of winter stars—but the water between the lighthouse and the mainland had turned into a slab of black glass. No phosphorescence. No chop. Just a terrible, waiting stillness. Her hair was piled high, and her face

Why?

A cold like a knife slid into his chest. Then it was gone.

Vladimir stood alone on the rocks, his lantern flickering in a sudden, warm breeze from the south. The sea was moving again, a gentle swell of phosphorescence glittering like scattered souls.