Evening—The attack came just after dusk. Neal has an ugly head wound as a result of it. Two boats attempted to land on the rocks, unseen, but Neal heard their oars creak and challenged them. One man stood up in his boat, shook his fist, and cursed us. Then two others fired at Neal, one shot wounding him. I returned their fire before they could reload. They retreated, not without some wounded, I believe.
November 8, 1799.
Awake all last night. No new attack. The strain of watching shoreward constantly is taking its toll—my head swims with dizziness. If only I could snatch a few hours sleep! But I dare not. Neal needs a doctor’s care, but it would be disastrous to leave the Light unguarded for the fishermen would surely demolish it. Neal is too irrational to be of any help, and certainly cannot resume his watch.
In his delirium, Neal’s nightmares and superstitions seem to be taking conscious form—at least, to him. I found him at dawn with his ear pressed to the stone floor. He was listening to the sound of the sea, he said. He explained that both sea shells and lighthouses were hollow spirals and thus both subject to the same acoustical phenomena. He babbled somewhat incoherently about the architectural similarity of our lighthouse to the Caer Sidhi—the “spiral castle” of Celtic myth.
The fishermen left us alone all day. Perhaps they are waiting for the dark of the moon to try again.
November 9, 1799.
My third night of sleeplessness. Every time I close my eyes I seem to plunge into hallucination or nightmare. Sometimes I feel that I am asleep despite my open eyes and general awareness of my surroundings.
Neal’s muttering about the Caer Sidhi stirred my memories of something I had forgotten long ago. An old farmer I once knew accidentally plowed into a raised knoll in his grain-field—one which had never been planted to grain—and opened a passageway; a local clergyman, an amateur antiquarian, crawled in, and found it an ancient chambered mound whose walls were carved with the Celtic spiral of immortality.
The relics were not Britanno-Roman, he said, and talked a great deal of symbols found before graves in Goidelic legends, of cromlechs, and of obscure philological-mythic relations between the Welsh Sidhi and the Aes Sidhe of Erin, and of Towinoiont and Catair Cu Roi. There was something else about Caer Sidhi of some significance, but my mind is so fatigued that memory of it will not return to me.
I sat on the parapet outside for a long while last night with a lantern. As the clock work mechanism revolved it, I felt the rhythm of the Light winking out in one quadrant and darkness that rushed in to fill the resulting vacuum. Perhaps this is where Neal gets his strange nightmare of a “whirling around without motion”—nothing more than the revolving beacon on top of our stationary lighthouse. And yet…
November 10, 1799.
A smoke-squall has now raged for hours—one of the kind the Norwegians call a Roegflage breeding in the ocean between Norway and the Orkneys. It is in a way a Godsend, for the hostile fishermen will never put out from shore in such weather to attack the Light. So I have been able to sleep and rest.
We had the first hint of it at dawn. The clouds took on a water-green tint. Afterwards I saw an unbroken black line far out to sea; this crept, hardly perceptibly, toward shore.
In an hour it was near enough to study in detail with my glass. It was a black wall of water, fathoms high—the herald of a fearful storm to follow. I saw a ship, too. Did its captain not see our warning beacon in the grey dawn? If he came closer, the monstrous waves would pound him on our reef.
The aqueous wall grew to awesome heights, reaching almost to the waning stars and thrusting its crown through the lower levels of the clouds there. It seemed to me that this monstrous wave would surely roll over and swallow up the earth in its maw—yet it was still leagues away, and growing larger, wearing the aspect of doom.
I took Neal down into the tower and lashed him, and then myself, to the beams, while the wall of water came rushing on like the sound of the last judgment. The roaring of water steadily increased—I thought for hours, but it must have been only minutes—until all existence was one tremendous crescendo of wind and water. It struck at last, and the tower shook as if beset by a cyclopean earthquake. Tons of water crashed into the tower through the lantern and through fissures between the stone blocks, drenching and almost drowning us. Lesser structures would have been torn up into the air and scattered, but our tower was built to withstand the enormous tidal surges and the incredibly high seas that rise from winds and storms blowing across the entire Atlantic without impediment—forces vastly more destructive than anything known to nature.
Then it passed. I untied Neal and myself, and, struggling through the water—some still pouring in—made my way to the top of the tower. A few dead fish and some seaweed littered the interior of the smashed lantern—debris spewed up by the ocean. But outside the world still existed. The force of the wave was still being thrown back by the shore’s mass. Out on the sea a water-logged hulk drifted, with several unfortunate seamen clinging to its masts. The rebounding swell shook the tower and passed on toward the foundering ship. I could not watch the end.
November 11, 1799.
The storm diminishing today, though the wind drives sheets of water still above the boiling sea. Visibility very low.
Evening—I repaired the lantern as best I could and got it into working order. I could not repair the shattered windows, and now the wind whistles eerily within the tower—like a single bass pipe in a church organ, or that sound a boy makes by blowing over the lip of an empty bottle. Several feet of water still stand below.
Neal is much worse. He raves now and then, but is in a kind of torpor, almost comatose. I cannot understand most of what he says, but it is disquieting if not frightening to listen to him babble about the Caer Sidhi coupling it with such other-worldly places as Annwfn and Pedryvan all the more so since the significance of Caer Sidhi occurs to me now, and I remember enough of my boyhood in Erin—of the Celtic lore—to know that the Caer Sidhi was much feared and believed in by the older fishermen—that its name in the Gaelic, meaning “spiral castle,” was well chosen (an ominous symbol of death!)—that it revolved or spiraled at night so that none coming to its base could find its entrance—and more I cannot or would rather not recall…
In many ways—its watery isolation, the spiral stairs, the revolving light—this tower is akin to the Caer Sidhi. Lighthouse geometry and architecture might be precarious!
November 12, 1799.
Someone on shore attempted signal communication today, but the wind is too violent and the atmosphere too full of sea-spray—the Roegflage—to permit reading the signals. Perhaps they saw Neal from the shore…
Last night I put Neal on the parapet outside the tower. I would be more Christian, but I have a horror of him now. I cannot put him into the sea. In any event, they will think that I am mad. Perhaps I am. What I have noticed these past few nights inclines me to doubt my own reason, though I have tried to keep this record sane and balanced. That is the blurring of the view outside the tower, particularly at night—like a landscape glimpsed through a flawed window pane. No natural explanation offers itself for it—if it is an actual phenomenon and not the hallucination of decayed reason.
Another thing—one utterly outré—threatens my sanity. Can the residuum of one man’s nightmares be left over for another’s dreams? I awoke trembling last night from visions like those Neal had, those that cursed his last nights and haunted his days. I seem to recall its beginning in a megalithic place where I wandered among cromlechs, dolman stones and menhirs like fantastically high walls making a maze of spiral design. I was in a roofless, gigantic tower, down which shone a million stars out of heavens virtually alive with those circumpolar stars ever to be seen, heavens in which Draco writhed evilly about that forgotten axis of the skies where once it reigned aeons ago, coiling and twisting around Polaris.
But what drew me in that alien place was
the great nebula of Andromeda, that majestic whirlpool of light whose irresolvable depths held a fascination I could not escape. There was a curious association of ideas dominating all things—that vast nebula—the watery vortex of the maelstrom at the bottom of which the monster Kraken is rumored to lurk—and the endless ascending stairs of a tower that reached up out of blackness and ascended to darkness above.
And, as in my dream, I contemplated these triple spirals, I saw suddenly descending upon me, like a sentient beast, a towering waterspout—a mass of wind-driven water come screaming out of the starlit darkness, blotting out the stars. It fell upon me, and I began a terrible, twisting fall into the endless space of its darkness, and above the shrieking of the wind and the torrent of the water there echoed in my ears that mocking phrase of Neal’s—“the whirling around without motion.” Then I awoke, screaming.
* * * *
II. The late Inspector Mishew’s Letter to the Trinity House of Navigation.
November 24, 1799
Honorable Sirs:
Inspection of the Shoal Light at this place has been delayed by the bad storms which have been raging here since before my arrival earlier this month, great seas making it impossible to put in any sort of boat. Signal flag communication was ineffectual by reason of limited visibility.
As we had been informed, the country people here are very hostile to this new Light; they are probably responsible for tampering with reef markers and other navigational aids in this vicinity.
Concerning the Light—I observed daily through my telescope one of the keepers standing watch on the outside parapet in the worst weather, unaware of the hideous truth about his vigilance, but since I learned that an attack had actually been made on the lighthouse, I supposed that the keepers were determined to prevent another and were thus constantly on guard. The beacon itself, however, has shone steadily; I am at a loss to understand complaints about its unreliability.
The seas calmed last week, and I was able to get out to the Shoal Light with Brian Mackenzie. What I found there was shocking. The vigilant sentry was Neal’s corpse, horribly wasted away; he had been fatally wounded in an armed skirmish with some of the fishermen. O’Malley seemed to be in mortal fear of being blamed for making away with his companion in a fit of madness; he could not abide the corpse, and, rather than cast it into the sea, lashed it where I found it. Perhaps its presence there was intended to deter a second surprise attack, though the weather was enough to do that.
O’Malley’s privations must have been terrible. He existed on stale bread and, of course, water. No more. His overwhelming responsibilities would have finished a lesser man. As it is, he is so subject to the wildest visions, followed by only partial comprehension and logic, obsessed with something he calls the Caer Sidhi, that he cannot be called sane, and perhaps has not been sane for some time. He is surely not long for this world.
Until you send new keepers, I myself will tend the Shoal Light.
Yr. obedient servant,
John Mishew Shoal Light Banff Firth, Scotland
Postscript.
I cannot understand the post rider’s failure to deliver your letter last night. He claimed failure under circumstances that suggest too much ale. Even in the dark he could have found the door if he had but walked around the lighthouse and felt the stone with his hand.
I trust the new keepers reach here very soon, for I seem to be coming down with some obscure illness which is incomprehensible to me. I am conscious of a curious nausea at night—a touch of vertigo—and the stars blur to my eyes and look wrong.
THE ENTITY
Originally published in Weirdbook 2, (1969).
Superstition, like fungi, needs decay in which to be born and grow. The supernatural of a modern city must be, then, vastly different from the supernatural of classic and Medieval mythologies. The classic ghost, demon, and magic beliefs were fertilized in the ruin of ancient and Gothic architecture—ruin which took centuries of erosion and crumbling for its culmination. But the decay of modern architecture is vested not in any such dark grandeur but in mean, dull, dirty slums which totter into debris in short decades; and the supernatural of the slums, like the immature humus—the rotting tenements—from which it grows, is a grimy, soot-smudged, unfinished thing.
The old symbols of evil and the supernatural—Winter, Night, the Sea—are gone in a modern city; electric lights and furnaces have exorcised them. But a nourishing soil—decayed architecture—of the supernatural still remains in a modern city; and whatever roots in it must be a new fear-symbol, born of a modern city’s peculiar atmosphere.
Bedlam—the blatant fanfare of auto horns, the chattering speech of countless people, radios with unending commercials and noxious jive music; all this envelopes the inhabitants in sonic tentacles, rolls over and drowns them in an ocean of sound that towers above cloud-piercing buildings where discordant aircraft roar. They work and slave in this noisy chaos, unaware of the amount of it all, for it has become their life element. But remove the noise, and like a fish out of water, they cannot adjust to such a radical environment, for silence is to them a dreadful thing.
I am prompted to record here these metaphysical reflections by an eldritch mystery I witnessed recently. Accursed insomnia frequently drives me to walk the city streets in the dead of night, often up to false dawn, before sheer physical exhaustion wearies me near death, when I collapse into longed for sleep. During one such fatigue-wracked night when I was possessed with such an abnormal cerebration, in the furnace heat of June, I had paced the streets of New York for long hours of torture; and turning a corner by the elevated near Columbia University, I glimpsed the man’s unusual face. Beneath his eyes were countless wrinkles and a blackened color shadowed such hollows. There was a wild, frantic, appealing expression in his eyes; he looked in the throes of a hopeless despair and wished to cry out to passers-by to save him, help him from a horror which only he knew of. In a moment he had passed me, yet in the brief interval I read a history in my scrutiny.
He would have been forgotten by me entirely if I had not obeyed an impulse to travel in the direction of the 8th Avenue subway. The racket from a train pulling into the station welled up from a subway grating; and there was my past stranger of the harassed expression, standing on the grating. With the diminution of the subway racket, he hurried with a mad energy to the next street where a crowd moved. I followed cautiously so as not to be noticed by him. His manner grew more extraordinary; he retraced his steps many times, as if he hated to be alone anywhere on the street. When the mob thinned out, he transferred his interminable promenade to another street where raucous automobile traffic and a stream of pedestrians abounded. This time he trod the length of that busy thoroughfare and turned into another side street where a jam session was in progress in a late dive. Tiring of that—or was it fear it might suddenly stop, leaving him on a silent street—he resumed his wanderings.
There was a deep mystery about the man; his abhorrence of solitude puzzled me. The strange idea that he might be some accursed wanderer, forced to roam the world through the ages, suggested itself; and I tried to recall what I knew of the stories of Vander Dekken, Melmoth, and Le Chasseur Maudit, doomed to a fearful immortality and seeking an unknown object.
A familiarity about this situation caused me to jettison this idea. In a flash I saw the parallel to Poe’s “Man of the Crowd”, that autobiographic fragment where the master of the ratiocinative method was confronted with a haunter of the street mob; and being unable to solve the mystery, remarked that “there are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told.” For the merest fraction of a second I thought maybe my mysterious companion and Poe’s Man of the Crowd were one and the same; an accursed, immortal wanderer.
Though the accursed wanderer theory was untenable, I could not ignore the sameness in circumstances to the Man of the Crowd trailed by Poe; and a senseless reluctance to fathom out the mystery
made me waver in my desire to follow the man. But mystery compels many against their judgment to ferret it out and I continued.
For hours more we walked amid the peopled streets of the city, tracing our escape (from what?) in its Cnossian maze of skyscrapers by the thread of noise. The metaphor startled me by its unusual aptness and I brooded on what Minotaur-like entity lurked in this maze, which the wanderer sought to elude. A dim premonition filled me.
The eastern sky brightened and the ominous quiet descended everywhere, and the man ahead was visibly on the verge of panic. But the discovery of another noisy street seemed to hearten him. By now I was commencing to tire; the morning sun glinted off the highest buildings.
He entered Morningside Park; and pausing near a water fountain, he took from his pocket a piece of torn newspaper which he stared at, then threw away. He walked beyond to a bench, incredibly weary by his night long wanderings and sat down. Surreptitiously, I picked up the paper he had thrown away, having an idea a clue to his strange behavior might be in whatever he read therein and saved up till now. Only on one side of it was there a complete news story, part of the top remaining showing it to be the Bronx Home News, for June 15, 1931:
When Policeman Talbot went into Mt. Morris Park, at 10 A.M. yesterday, to awaken a man apparently asleep on a bench near the 124th St. gate, he found the man dead. Dr. Patterson, of Harlem Hospital, said that death had probably been caused by heart failure. Later it was found that another dead man was on a nearby bench coincidentally enough.
The Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK™ Vol 2: George T. Wetzel Page 4