The Night Mark

by Tiffany Reisz

  tried to hold on to it, the more fell through her hands. Maybe she should just let it all go.

  “Hello?” Faye called, and heard her voice echo off the stone walls.

  “Ahoy down there!” came the echoing answer. “Come up if you dare.”

  “I dare,” Faye shouted in reply and started quickly up the winding iron stairs. Halfway up the steps, Faye slowed her pace considerably when her screaming thighs reminded her she wasn’t running a race.

  “Okay, maybe I don’t dare,” she yelled up.

  “Buck up, sailor,” Carrick called back. “I used to climb more steps than that carrying a fifty-pound can of kerosene.”

  “Did you walk two miles to school every day and back?” she yelled.

  “Four miles.”

  Faye shook her head, sighed. “Never trade hardship stories with a man born in 1886,” she mumbled to herself as she started her climbing again.

  Carrick opened the hatch to let her in, smiling at her as she gulped air and fanned herself.

  “That’s a lot of stairs,” she said, panting still. “You must have amazing quads.”

  “Quads?”

  “Leg muscles,” she said.

  “Ah, they get the job done.” Carrick shut the door hatch behind her and locked it.

  She’d been so eager to see Carrick again, she’d raced right up the lighthouse. Now with him, she had no idea what to say. She felt as awkward as a schoolgirl with a crush.

  She looked around. “This the watch room?” she asked. In 2015 the windows of this room had been boarded up, but they were uncovered now and looked out onto the island and the sea. Various instruments hung on wall pegs—she saw binoculars, a spyglass, plus a large, beautifully carved barometer. And in the middle of the room sat a strange box made of brass, glass and steel.

  “This is it.” Carrick pointed at the glass box. “And this is the clockwork.”

  He took her by the hand and pulled her around the box. She peered in through the glass sides and saw large metal wheels and gears clicking and turning. On the side was a large handle, a crank of sorts.

  “It’s really a clockwork.”

  “It really is,” Carrick said. “Like a giant watch. You have to wind it.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “It turns the light. I have to crank it every two and a half hours or it won’t rotate and the light won’t flash. But we’re lucky here,” he said. “I heard there’s a few lights where the clockwork needs cranking every half hour.”

  “Can’t they run the clockwork with an engine or something?”

  “They could, but the Bureau is in no hurry to spend the money to make that happen. It’s a miracle we have the sun valve here. They’re all over Europe already.”

  “Sun valve?”

  “It’s up there,” he said, pointing at a shape atop the clockwork box that Faye couldn’t quite make out. “It uses sunlight to turn the beacon on and off. Sunlight warms a metal plate and the plate expands. That flips the switch off in the morning. At sunset it cools and contracts and flips the switch on. Acetylene gas powers it all night. All I have to do is replace the gas cylinders and crank the clockwork.”

  “That’s amazing,” Faye said. “All that without electricity.”

  “It’s quite something,” he said, a master of understatement. As he took a small oil can and rag to the crank’s handle, she studied him, trying to see something in him that wasn’t Will. He dressed differently, that was for sure. Carrick had on khaki-colored work pants, a white undershirt and suspenders. Will had never worn suspenders. If he had, she would have snapped them all the time, which would have landed her in all sorts of fun trouble. Carrick’s hands were different, too. Little white scars on his fingers and the backs of his hands spoke of a lifetime performing manual labor. His eyes were a darker brown than Will’s and his hair a shade redder. She clung to these differences, not wanting to love the man simply because he looked like Will. Maybe Faith had loved him with all her heart and Faye felt it like a sort of muscle memory. The heart was a muscle, wasn’t it? Was that why hers beat so hard around Carrick?

  She watched as Carrick took a watch out of his pocket and stood at the window. He clicked a button twice, then clicked it again.

  “Perfect,” he said. “Runs like clockwork.”

  “You were timing the light?”

  He nodded. “Have to. A second’s delay could mean life or death to a ship out there.”

  “How so?” she asked.

  “Every lighthouse does double duty by day or by night. The paint job is the day mark. The light pattern is—”

  “The night mark,” Faye said, remembering what Ty had told her.

  “That’s right. Ships out there know that seven seconds between flashes means Seaport Station. Hunting Island Light has a different night mark. That’s how you tell us apart in the dark. You see, a light’s night mark is its heartbeat. You know a man by his heart. You know a lighthouse by its beacon.”

  Faye smiled at him. Impossible not to. “You have a bit of poet in you,” she said.

  “You spend a lot of time alone with your thoughts up here. They can turn fanciful.”

  “I know what you mean. I think I might have had a religious experience eating Dolly’s pie last night.”

  “No shame in that. Dolly’s pies can save a man’s soul.”

  “Count me among the saints, then,” Faye said.

  “My first job was on the Boston Light, and all the wickies had to cook for each other. I saved no souls and might have damned a few stomachs.”

  “Wickies? Is that what they call you?”

  “Before they converted this light to acetylene, they ran it on kerosene. And most lights are still run on kerosene. Gotta trim the wicks every few hours.”

  “Sounds like a lot of work.”

  “It was. Fill the well, trim the wicks, clean the soot off the glass...”

  “Walk up those stairs again with a fifty-pound bucket of kerosene in your hand?”

  “You get used to it,” he said.

  Faye walked around the room, eyeing the spyglass, the other instruments. Carrick had a book open on his desk, a large leather journal he’d apparently been writing weather reports in when she came up. She read what he wrote and smiled.

  Temp at first light—78. Light wind. Clear skies. Every day here is more beautiful than the last. I am a lucky man.

  “You really love it here, don’t you?” Faye asked.

  He shrugged. “Aye, it’s a good job. You want to see the lantern room?”

  “I’d love to. Can I?” Two nights ago in 2015, there’d been nothing in the lantern room but empty space where a light should be. But the lens wasn’t gone in 1921.

  “It’s right up that ladder. I’ll open the hatch and you can peek in. But don’t look directly into the bull’s-eye of the lens. It could hurt your eyes. That light’s about fifty thousand candlepower.”

  Carrick opened the hatch, and Faye climbed the short ladder from the watch room to the lantern room.

  “Oh...” she breathed when she stuck her head inside. It was all she could say. The entire room was alive with light. The lens glowed like a giant white flower throbbing as it bloomed. And the prisms of the lens caught stray beams like butterflies in a net and released them across the glass in a flurry of a thousand wings and a thousand colors.

  The sound was nothing she’d ever heard before. Faye closed her eyes and put her hands on the floor of the lantern room, feeling the sound as she heard it. Had anyone ever created a museum for lost sounds? She’d read somewhere that kids born in the year 2000 and after would never hear the sound of a telephone dial tone. It was an aural artifact. This sound should be in that museum, the whooshing hum of a living lighthouse run on gas and clockwork gears. She heard the gears turning and clicking in the box beneath her. The sound on her palms felt like a cat’s belly as it purred or Will’s chest when he snored, another artifact for the museum of lost and forgotten sounds. She was listening to th
e last heartbeats of a dying way of life.

  “Like it?” Carrick called up. He stood at the base of the ladder, his hands on the backs of her calves to steady her.

  “It’s beautiful...” She had to shout for him to hear her but by his smile she knew he’d heard.

  “I know. Come out to the catwalk. It’s easier to talk out there.”

  Faye came down the ladder and followed Carrick out to the catwalk. Catwalk? She liked that term so much better than widow’s walk.

  “It’s so pretty in there I can’t stand it,” she said. “All those prisms. It was like standing in a kaleidoscope.”

  “It’s not too bad out here, either,” he said, turning his gaze to the sea.

  “No,” she said. “Not bad at all.”

  They stood on the ocean-side edge of the watch room gallery. The lighthouse beacon flashed and shone over their heads, illuminating the water below them. White-maned breakers crashed on the sand and rolled back down into the water, where they gathered their strength to crash again and again. The breeze was salt scented and cool at the top of the lighthouse. It lifted her hair and tickled her legs.

  “Did you always want to be a wickie?” she asked, hoping it wasn’t a question Faith had ever asked him.

  He shook his head. “Never really occurred to me. Went into the navy at eighteen. After the war, I needed a job. They were looking for a navy man for the Boston Light, and I qualified. Right age, I could read and write, haul heavy cans of oil, keep good records and stay up all night when it was my shift. I took the job because I needed it, not because it meant anything to me but a roof over my head and steady pay.”

  “It seems to suit you.”

  “I thought it would be just another job. But then I got out to the Boston Light and met Dan Chisholm—he was principal keeper there. He shook my hand and before he let it go he said to me, ‘I know you’re a military man, but the war’s over and this is a civilian light. We keep people alive out there, and we don’t ask what flag their ship flies. Everyone deserves light, Morgan. Whatever you do, keep the light burning.’ Then he let my hand go. For an ex-navy man, that was quite something to hear, but I liked the sound of it—everyone deserves light. Lord knows in the war I got sick and tired of worrying about what flag the ships around me were flying.”

  Carrick shrugged and flashed her a sheepish smile. “I guess that sounds fanciful to you.”

  Faye swallowed a hard lump in her throat.

  “No. It sounds...right,” she said. “It sounds like something a good man would believe.”

  “Chisholm is a good man.”

  “I meant you.”

  He smiled again. “I try. All any man can do is try.”

  “Is this what you want to do for the rest of your life? Tend a light?”

  “I thought about that. Truth is, I doubt I can count on this job for the rest of my life. If I live long enough, that is. They put the sun valve in here. Next will be the engine to turn the light. Maybe in ten years, twenty, all the lights will be run on electricity. Everybody thought horses would be around forever and, lo and behold, now we have automobiles. Won’t be long before lighthouses go the way of the dodo.”

  “Progress always wins in the end,” she said.

  “You can’t fight time. And you shouldn’t even if you could. That is a losing battle.”

  Faye was losing her battle with time. Or winning it. She couldn’t tell yet.

  “Well...I have to say you might have the nicest office in the world.” She waved her arm to indicate the island, the ocean and the wide night sky above. “And no mosquitoes up here.”

  “The sea breeze mostly keeps them away, and you don’t get them much this high up,” he said. “But you do have to watch out for birds. They think the light is something else and they fly toward it, and it kills them.”

  “Poor birds,” she said. She knew just how they felt. She looked at Carrick, who looked so much like Will that it was impossible for her not to fly toward him, even knowing she might be flying toward a false light.

  Standing at Carrick’s side, she marveled at the view and the silence between them. It was a companionable silence, not the silence of strangers but of friends or lovers who knew each other intimately enough that words weren’t necessary when the moment spoke for itself.

  Faye yawned. “Sorry,” she said. “Just woke up from my nap.”

  “You should go down, get back to bed.”

  “I’m fine. I’m waking up. I’ve never worked so hard in my life as I’ve worked in the past two days. And still, Dolly did five times the work I did. And she’s what? Fifteen? Sixteen?”

  “Seventeen. Just turned.”

  “Seventeen... So much work for a girl so young.”

  “Everybody works,” Carrick said.

  “Except ladies?”

  He sighed. “Even ladies,” he said. “So I’ve been told.”

  “Yes, even ladies. So tell me more about the lighthouse. If I’m going to be your assistant I suppose I should know everything there is to know about it.”

  Carrick stared at her a good long while, stared without saying anything. He did that a lot, and it worried Faye, made her think she’d done something wrong, something Faith wouldn’t have done.

  “You really want to stay here with me?” Carrick asked. “I mean, for good?”

  “I keep asking myself that question,” Faye said.

  “Got an answer yet?”

  “I don’t know how long I’m going to be here. But I’m here now. And while I’m here, I want to learn everything I can.”

  It sounded good and it sounded true. And it was true in a way—Faye still had no idea what her purpose was back in this time, but she knew she wouldn’t figure it out hiding in her room. But the real truth was—and this she would not tell Carrick—that she simply wanted to be with him. With him and near him and around him and close to him. And if he spent his nights at the top of a lighthouse, then that was where she wanted to be, too.

  “All right,” Carrick said. “I’ll teach you what I know. We’ll start at the beginning—do you know how a lighthouse works?”

  “Um... I know there’s a big light up there.” She pointed upward. “And it shines out there.” She pointed at the ocean.

  “It’s a start.”

  Carrick dropped his arms to his sides, turned around and rested his lower back against the railing. Faye matched his pose and followed his finger where it pointed high up in the air.

  “Working our way from top to bottom, that pole way up there is the—”

  “Lightning rod?”

  “Give the lady a prize.”

  “What did you say?” Faye stared at Carrick.

  “Nothing. Just ‘give the lady a prize.’ You know, since you knew it was a lightning rod.”

  “Sorry. I just...” Will always said that to her. Give the lady a prize. It was what he said when she guessed something right, when she beat him at bar trivia, when she gave him a particularly good blow job that merited more than a simple “Thank you.”

  “It’s grounded, right?” Faye asked to cover her confusion. “The lightning rod?”

  “Of course it’s grounded.” Carrick’s brow furrowed. “At least I think it’s grounded. I hope to God it’s grounded. I’ll check on that tomorrow. Moving on down—that big ball on top is the vent.”

  “Very big ball,” Faye said, nodding her head in solemn agreement.

  “The bigger the lighthouse, the bigger the ball.”

  “I’m thoroughly impressed with your big ball,” she said, and from the corner of her eye she saw Carrick grin.

  “You should be. Moving down farther is the roof. Nothing special there except it keeps the rain out. Then that room up there is the lantern room, which you’ve seen. Every morning and every evening that gets cleaned. I clean the windows, I clean the lens, I clean off any dead birds that hit the glass. Then I drape the lens and hang the curtains—”