The Lighthouse: A Novel of Terror

by Bill Pronzini, Marcia Muller

  Jan stopped before the closed gate. The force of the wind was considerable on the exposed headland—enough to shimmy the Ford, as heavy and laden as it was. Alix felt the chill of it when he got out to open the gate; it made her shiver. She hadn’t expected it to be this windy or this cold, not on a reasonably clear and otherwise warm late-September day. If it was like this on a good day, what would it be like during a winter storm? The thought was a little unsettling; she put it out of her mind.

  Jan drove them over more rutted gravel to where an old rust-red pickup was parked near the largest of the outbuildings. The bed of the pickup was loaded with boxes, a chest of drawers, an old wheelbarrow. When he shut off the engine Alix could hear the wind skirling outside, the hissing pulse of surf against the rocks far below.

  “That’s Bonner’s pickup,” Jan said. He sounded the horn a couple of times; no one appeared. “Well, where is he? Inside somewhere sulking, I suppose.”

  “You can’t blame him if he is, can you? We’re taking his job away from him.”

  “I don’t have much sympathy for him.”

  “No?”

  “No. He’s unpleasant and lazy. Look at all this. He hasn’t kept it up.”

  “He’s only a caretaker, not a maintenance man. . . . ”

  “Doesn’t make any difference. He’s lived out here for three years; he ought to have taken some pride in his surroundings, whether he was paid for it or not.”

  “Not everybody feels about lighthouses as you do, Jan.”

  “That’s no excuse either. This is an important piece of history; he should have kept it up.”

  There was no arguing with him on the subject, so she let it go. But he was overreacting: the buildings didn’t look all that bad, really, at least not from the outside. They could have used a fresh coat of whitewash—and the fence needed repair—but for a coastal light that had been out of service for more than twenty years, everything was in fairly decent shape. Especially the lighthouse itself. Alix studied it through the windshield. It was a variation on the Cape Cod style of lighthouse architecture: a compact two-story rectangular frame building—the watch house—with its three-story tower rising through the center. The tower had been fashioned of bricks made from nearby clay deposits, Jan had told her, the surrounding structure from the timber that had once covered this headland. High above, a catwalk circled the outside of the glassed-in lantern room. She could just make out part of the massive Fresnel lens mounted inside, a marvelous piece of nineteenth-century engineering rendered obsolete by modem technology.

  She asked Jan. “Does the light still work after all these years?”

  “I’ll answer that after I’ve spent some time with it.”

  “You’re not going to try operating it?”

  “No,” he said, “of course not. Come on, there’s no sense in sitting here. We’ll track down Bonner ourselves.”

  They found him inside the garage, in a workshop area toward the rear, packing tools into a wooden crate. “All of this stuff is mine,” he said, as if challenging Jan to call him a liar. He also said he hadn’t heard the horn, which likewise may or may not have been the truth. He was a dried-up little man somewhere in his fifties, with a bulbous head and dry brown hair combed sideways across the top. His eyes were dull and unfriendly, and so was his manner. Alix decided Jan was justified in calling him unpleasant.

  “Need another hour to clear out the rest of my belongings,” Bonner said in sullen tones. “That is, if you don’t mind.”

  “Why should we mind?”

  “Keys on a peg inside the lighthouse door. I didn’t leave you no provisions. Didn’t see why I should.”

  “We didn’t expect you to.”

  “Kitchen stove’s almost out of propane. Enough for one more meal, maybe.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Jan said. “Where are the empty cylinders?”

  “Pantry.”

  “Where do we get refills?”

  “A-One Marine.”

  “In Hilliard?”

  “Closest place, ain’t it?” Bonner looked at Alix for the first time. “You going to live out here too, missus?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, you won’t like it.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “Just won’t. No place for a woman.”

  “They had women lighthouse keepers at Cape Blanco a hundred years ago,” she said, quoting Jan. “Or didn’t you know that?”

  Bonner grunted. “I’ll finish my packing now,” he said to Jan. “You can find your own way around; you been here before.”

  It was cold in the garage; Alix felt chilled inside her light jacket. But the wind outside set her teeth to chattering. “I’m going to get something heavier,” she said. She went to the station wagon, rummaged around among the clothing bags until she found her heavy pea jacket. Jan helped her put it on.

  “It’ll be warmer in the house,” he said, “even if Bonner didn’t bother to set a fire.”

  “God, I hope so. It’s not always going to be this cold, is it?”

  “Most of the time until March, probably. You’ll get used to it, California girl. You lived in New York and Boston, remember?”

  “How could I forget?”

  “Suppose we take the grand tour? When Bonner leaves we’ll unload the car; then I’ll make us hot toddies.”

  “I could use the hot toddy right now.”

  “Hey, where’s your pioneer spirit?”

  “It froze to death about five minutes ago.”

  He laughed, a sound that was lost in the shriek and bluster of the wind, and started away across an expanse of thick weedy grass. Shivering, hunched inside her pea jacket, Alix followed his broad back toward their home for the next twelve months.

  Alix

  The kitchen depressed her.

  It was a combination of things. For one, the walls were painted a battleship gray and the plaster ceiling was so smoke-stained that it approached the same color. All that gray made it gloomy, even when the sun shone obliquely through the window over the sink. The propane stove was another problem: it was old and crochety and you couldn’t get it lighted without an effort. It was better than the one in the living room, though, the old wood-burner; that one smoked like crazy when the wind shifted and began baffling around the lighthouse tower and down into the kitchen chimney. They had had to open the first-floor doors and windows to air the place out, which of course robbed the first-floor rooms of most of their heat.

  But the kitchen . . . it was still the worst room. The well water that came out of the taps had a brackish, mineral taste; they’d have to buy bottled water in Hilliard tomorrow. The refrigerator made funny humming, rattling noises, as if it were about to break down—or explode—at any second. As for the pantry, it wasn’t even attached to the kitchen; you had to go down three steps and through a small cloakroom to get to it, which made it inconvenient and not much good for anything except as a storeroom for bulk supplies. But at least it had an outside door, so you didn’t have to trundle the supplies through the kitchen and cloakroom.

  And then there was the other well, the abandoned one under the trapdoor in the pantry floor. One of the early keepers, a man named Guthrie, had sunk the well in 1896 on open ground a short distance away from the original building; it was slightly less than twenty feet deep. When the next keeper took over in 1911 he had built the pantry as an addition and cut the trapdoor to give access to his water supply. (Jan knew all about this but had neglected to tell her beforehand.) The well had long since dried up, and once that happened it had been used as a refuse dump for a while. Jan had shone a flashlight down inside it to reveal rocks and scrap metal and God knew what else. Rats, for all she knew. She had a horror of rats.

  Well, there wasn’t much she could do about the pantry—except to put up more shelves, maybe, and make sure the trapdoor stayed shut—but the kitchen itself would have to be dealt with. There was no way she was going to live here a full year surrounded by all that dingy gray
. Repaint the walls, and either paint or replaster the ceiling, depending on whether or not she could get the smoke grime off. Put some color in, some of the Metropolitan Museum posters she’d brought. . . .

  She smiled wryly, aware of the fussy domesticity of her plans. Here they were at the beginning of their big adventure, and all she could think about was painting the kitchen.

  But was it going to be an adventure? she thought wistfully. At the moment it seemed no more exciting than a child’s vacation at the seashore. Well, perhaps that was appropriate. Often when she thought about herself, she felt as if she were a mere child; felt that nothing real had ever happened to her, nothing that constituted a test of her mettle. Everything in her adult life—after a bit of initial career and romantic disappointment—had been too easy. And she herself had remained untouched by life, growing from a pleasant, smiling child into a pleasant, smiling woman with few problems.

  True, Jan had remained in love with her, hadn’t tired of her or outgrown her. But sometimes she wondered just how much good she really was to him. There was a dark, brooding side to his nature that she didn’t really understand and in which she couldn’t share; there were problems he encountered with which she couldn’t help. If she had experienced more, lived more, felt more, wouldn’t she have grown in step with him? Or was she one of those people who were condemned to forever exist in the shadowland between childhood and adulthood?

  Weighty questions, Ryerson, she told herself. Too weighty to be thinking about tonight. Fussy domesticity suddenly seemed a better subject, and she began to contemplate the rest of their living quarters.

  They were habitable enough. No, she might as well be fair: they were more or less comfortable. Along with the kitchen, cloakroom, and pantry, the ground floor was comprised of the living room and one large bedroom. The bedroom had two good-sized windows facing seaward, and since it offered the most natural light, they had agreed she should use it as her studio. The second floor consisted of a bathroom and two bedrooms—the largest of which they would sleep in, the other use for Jan’s study. Above that, built into a bubble-like niche in the tower, was the lightroom, where the keepers had stored cleaners, polishes, and supplies for servicing the light. There was even a barrel of sand in there, for use in the event of fire.

  One drawback was the small hot water heater—only thirty gallons, barely enough for one of Jan’s protracted showers—but that wouldn’t be a problem. She’d taken cold showers for years, had gotten to like them when they’d been living on the back of Beacon Hill in Boston, in a building that lacked heat of any kind, including hot water. But the main drawbacks to the rooms and their arrangement were the drab white walls, their chilliness—small propane heaters were the only source of warmth in the bedrooms—and the enclosed inner stairway that took up part of the living room and led upward to the second floor and then through the tower into the lantern room. But she felt she could live with all of these too. If the dingy white color in the bedrooms and living room became too oppressive, she could always talk Jan into helping her paint them, along with the kitchen.

  She finished drying the supper dishes—she and Jan had always taken turns with the domestic chores—and glanced up at the ceiling and thought again that she would have to get out the Ajax and 409 and see how much of that accumulation of grime would come off. But not tonight. She was so tired her legs felt achey. Some preliminary cleaning; Bonner was not much of a housekeeper. Unpacking. Finding places for things, rearranging other things. Making up the four-poster bed; setting out towels. And she had only just scratched the surface. A move like this was no summer vacation lark; it was a transplanting of an entire household, the same sort of upheaval you went through when you made a permanent move.

  She thought of their big mock-Tudor house in Palo Alto and wondered when she would see it again. Not until Christmas, at the earliest—if they decided to go home for the holidays. But the house was in good hands: her cousin June was dependable and conscientious—you couldn’t ask for a better house-sitter.

  Alix went into the empty living room. Jan had gone upstairs after supper; she wondered what he was doing. Whatever it was, he was being quiet about it. Curiosity took her up to the second floor. In the hallway that skirted the curve of the tower wall, she called his name. But he wasn’t in their bedroom or in his new study; his answer came echoing down from above.

  “Up here. In the lantern.”

  She went back to the stairs. The hollow of the tower was like a speaking tube: from the lower floors you could hear clearly when someone spoke from the lantern room in a voice not much louder than normal, and the same was true vice versa. Not even the constant muttering of the wind affected the acoustics inside.

  The two flights of stairs leading up to the lantern were steep, creaky, and worn to a shine in the center of each riser. Just above the second-floor landing you had to pass through a metal trapdoor, hinged open and fastened that way with a hook; the reason for the trap, Jan had said, was so that men working in the lightroom and the lantern above wouldn’t disturb their family members below. A pair of low-wattage electric bulbs, one on the wall halfway up each flight, did little to dispel the damp gloom. Climbing, she thought it was a good thing neither of them would have to do this every day—Jan especially, with the extra weight he was carrying. She wondered again if she could get him to diet while they were living here. Probably not. Well, maybe she could at least talk him into doing aerobics with her. She had started working out a couple of years ago, after her second miscarriage, and had kept it up because she knew it was good for her, kept her own weight down. And it was better than tennis or racquetball, the big “in” sports back home, neither of which she had ever been any good at. Too uncoordinated: all arms and legs, with an uncanny knack for stumbling over her own feet. Anyhow, lifting a book was the second most strenuous exercise Jan ever indulged in. “I’d prefer to have my heart attack screwing or reading quietly in a chair,” he’d said more than once. A sedentary Viking. . . .

  There was a three-foot-square opening in the floor of the lantern room, but no trapdoor there. Dusky light showed above it; it must be about eight, close to dark outside. She climbed through the opening. Yes, almost nightfall. Through the lantern windows she could see that the sun had set and there were hints of violent reds and purples among the clouds massed on the horizon.

  Jan was on his hands and knees to one side of the massive light, using a flashlight to do something she couldn’t see. He said, “Be with you in a minute,” in a distracted voice.

  She moved closer to the light. It fascinated her—its size, its intricate construction. A First Order Fresnel, Jan had told her, built in Paris in 1872 by the firm founded by Augustin Fresnel some fifty years earlier. A beehive of glass prisms set in brass—more than a dozen bull’s-eyes, around which other triangular prisms were placed—it measured fourteen feet in height and six feet in diameter, and weighed better than three thousand pounds. The hand-polished prisms were capable of taking all the light that struck the inside surfaces of the glass and redirecting the rays into one flat beam that could be seen more than twenty miles at sea. The lenses were rotated by hand-wound clockworks powered by means of a descending weight. It was the clockworks, she saw, that Jan was examining with his flashlight.

  The huge lens took up most of the space in the lantern room. The enclosure was decagonally shaped, each of its sides constructed of heavy iron-plate for the bottom two and a half feet, then of window glass some thirty inches by thirty-six inches set in narrow metal sashes topped by six incbes of metal. The metal parts and the floor were painted a dark red color, faded and peeling now in places; the window sashes were a dull white, as was the domed ceiling. On the north side, set into the metal a few inches above the floor, was a door that reminded Alix of an oversized pet-door. This led out onto the catwalk—a railed metal deck three feet wide and built at a slight downward angle, so as to shed rainwater. The thought of having to walk about out there, exposed and unprotected sixty feet above
the ground, with that harsh wind pummeling her body, gave Alix a sharp pang of vertigo. She didn’t mind heights when she was enclosed like this, or up in an airplane; but out in the open, where one false step could send you plummeting . . . no, thank you.

  Jan straightened up finally from behind the lens and switched off his flashlight. The twilight had begun to deepen so that shadows obscured part of his face.

  She asked him, “Something wrong?”

  “Clockworks don’t look good. Bonner could have at least come up here once in a while with cleaners and polishes. It’ll take me weeks to put the lens in working order.” He shook his head in annoyance.

  “Aren’t there inspectors?”

  “Not for out-of service lights. No one with any expertise has inspected this one in at least three years. It’s a crying shame. I told Channon that, for all the good it did.”

  “Channon? Oh, the assistant to the State Parks administrator.”

  “Right. He’s also on the Advisory Committee on Historic Preservation, which claims to be satisfied that the light is being maintained and cared for in an acceptable fashion. Channon’s an idealist; he’s convinced there’ll be both state and Federal funding to complete restoration by the end of next year.”

  “Don’t you think he’s right?”

  “No,” Jan said flatly. “I don’t.”

  She wasn’t sure she shared his pessimism. He was such a fanatic on the subject of lighthouses, and such an ardent conservationist, that impatience and anger at the slow-grinding wheels of bureaucracy made him cynical. Other lighthouses along the rugged four-hundred-mile Oregon coast—and along the California and Washington coasts as well—had been restored and turned into historic monuments; some of these were still working lights. There was no reason to believe the same thing wouldn’t eventually happen to the Cape Despair Light, even if the lens itself remained dark. It was a matter of funding, that was all. The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 had saved it from deterioration and ultimate destruction when it had been abandoned by the Coast Guard in the early sixties, after more than a hundred years of continuous service. (It had been rendered more or less obsolete in the thirties, however, when a powerful radiobeacon was installed at Cape Blanco, not far down the coast—a beacon that could be picked up by ships as far as two hundred and fifty miles out to sea. The Coast Guard, which had inherited it after the U.S. Lighthouse Service was disbanded in 1939, maintained it as a standby station until the cost of manning and operating it became prohibitive.) Once the state of Oregon had assumed control of the light, a grant from the Department of the Interior’s Historic Conservation and Recreation Service, coupled with funding obtained by the State Historic Preservation Officer, had resulted in partial restoration and the appointment of a full-time caretaker. The Federal grant and most of the state funds had been exhausted three years ago, and budget cuts had prevented the acquisition of additional monies. But it was only a temporary setback. Private conservation groups within the state were working to raise funds that, they had been promised, would be matched by another Federal grant and by state allocations. Channon’s prediction that within fifteen months the necessary funds would be available to complete restoration, pave the three-mile access road, establish tourist facilities, and turn the outer reaches of the cape into a state park struck her as likely to come true.