Day 331

There's a lighthouse in our village which is odd as we're just about landlocked.
Closest bit of water here's the lake and no one bothers fishing there any more.
It was overfished in the sixties and it's basically just a massive outdoor pool nowadays.
Still, the lighthouse is there and nobody seems to know why.

There's no mention of it in any local history books,
Most people either ignored it or had some fabricated story about its origins.
Some said an earthquake made the shore rise up and the lighthouse was put out of use.
Others said that it was a monument to all the lives lost to the lake.

I came close to the truth and I would have gotten all the way were it not for the village.
There's something they won't let me know but god was I close.
You see, I found an old map in the back of the library.
It was quite worn but with a little digital help I managed to get a workable copy.

The coastline had changed, and drastically too.
That map dated back to 1572 but there were no other records to confirm this.
Every other map (though none dated that far back) had the coastline as it currently was.
It took a while to make sense but from what I gathered a huge cover up had taken place.

The lighthouse was just the tip of the iceberg.
Apart from a huge coastal shift there was also a dramatic change in population density.
According to the church records the population around the late 1500s had been five hundred.
Come the early 1600s it dropped right down to just over one hundred.

This certainly gave a lot of credit towards coastal shift theory but it still didn't seem right.
I moved on to look at the population on the other side of the lake - on the new coast.
There are no records of that place before 1650, like it never existed until then.
Besides that some kind of of outbreak occurred just after the first records.

The church's book had many deaths on both sides of the lake from 1650 to 1724.
Seventy four years of some illness called "Dyscrasia".
The only thing I've been able to find on that is that its a mediaeval term for "an abnormal body
condition" meaning unusual material found in the body, specifically the blood.

Whatever it had been it decimated the populations on the old coast and the new region.
In fact it seemed to have come from the new coastal area, maybe some deep sea thing?
Regardless I've been banned from all church records and the libraries.
It can only mean I was close to finding out the truth and whatever it may be, its bad news.

All I know for sure is that somehow the other side of the lake was just ocean 500 years ago.
Something happened,it all rose up and within thirty ears it had a steady populace.
Then a disease struck and decimated the whole area, some contaminate in the blood and/or body.
If only I knew the symptoms, I mean what if it comes back?

We don't stand a chance.
The village is conspiring against me.
What do they know that I can't be a part of?
It has to be in the lighthouse.

It has to be.