The Night Mark

by Tiffany Reisz

  “Hang curtains?”

  “Around the lens,” he said. “The sunlight can damage the prisms. So I hang the curtains and clean the windows inside and out. There are many fine things to being a wickie, but washing windows on a skinny gallery in high winds or on hundred-degree days is not one of those fine things. That’s why we do the window washing right after sunrise. The light pops off and I start cleaning. Better do it then before it gets hot out.”

  “That’s smart,” Faye said. “I can imagine the height and the heat have caused a few accidents.”

  “More than one. But I have a rope and harness I strap around myself when I clean the outside the windows. Moving down again, the light in there’s a third-order Fresnel lens. We salute the French for their ingenuity. They’ve saved a million lives.”

  “Vive la France,” Faye said, and Carrick turned and gave a jaunty salute in the vague direction of France.

  “You know all about the clockwork and the sun valve,” Carrick continued. “And the acetylene I’ll show you tomorrow. The cylinders are stored in that building right there.” He pointed down to a small brick shed at the base of the lighthouse. “I don’t want you touching them unless you have to.”

  “Are they really that dangerous, or were you just trying to scare off Hartwell?”

  “A little of both. They used to make the acetylene on-site at one station. Until there was a leak.”

  “What happened?”

  “Goodbye, lighthouse. Goodbye, keeper.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Don’t think about it,” Carrick said. “That was back in ’13, and we don’t make the gas here. The tender brings the cylinders and we store them. It’s safe—I promise.”

  Faye nodded. She didn’t like the thought of living so close to something so explosive, but it wasn’t like 2015 was without its dangers. She’d driven a two-ton death machine every day of her life since she was sixteen years old. Even in 2015, cars ran on gasoline and caught fire and blew up. Nothing and nowhere and no time in existence was without some sort of risk.

  “The room below the lantern room is the one we were just in,” Carrick said. “It’s the watch room. I guess it’s called the watch room because that’s where the keeper keeps watch.”

  “I buy that.”

  “That’s where the clockwork is, as you saw. It turns the rotors that the light sits on. And the counterweights drop all the way to the lighthouse floor.”

  “I didn’t see any counterweights.”

  “Did you see that metal tube running all the way down the center of the staircase?”

  “I did. I thought it was some kind of support beam.”

  “Young lady, this lighthouse is cast iron and brick. The stones are two feet by three feet and take ten men to lift. And inside the stone is copper rebar wrapping this lighthouse tight and holding it together like a corset. It doesn’t need a support beam. That metal tube houses the counterweights as they slide down and turn the light. Then we turn the crank, like winding a grandfather clock to keep it running all night.”

  “I stand corrected. I never intended to disparage the might and solidity of this manly edifice.” She matched Carrick’s feigned Southern accent with one of her own.

  “You are forgiven your lapse in common sense. I’m sure a young lady like yourself was simply overwhelmed by the sheer majesty of this monument.”

  Faye shook her head. Ridiculous man. “So how tall exactly is this majestic monument?”

  “Well, that depends,” he said. “Are we counting the height from the floor to the top of the lightning rod? Or are we counting from sea level up to the light?”

  “From the base to the tip,” she said, and Carrick cocked an eyebrow at her.

  “About eighty-seven feet. Impressive, isn’t it?”

  “Impressive enough to give a lady the vapors. Hunting Island’s light is bigger, though, isn’t it?”

  “It’s taller, I suppose,” Carrick said dismissively. “Mine’s wider.”

  “Width matters, does it?”

  “So I’ve been told. Mine is also younger and will likely last a lot longer.”

  “Are we still talking about the lighthouse?” Faye asked.

  “I have no idea what we’re talking about anymore,” Carrick said, taking her face in his hands.

  “Maybe we should stop talking, then,” Faye said.

  “Bad idea,” Carrick said, but kissed her anyway.

  Carrick kissed her, kissed her good and hard, kissed her until she couldn’t breathe and kissed her until she didn’t want to. She would have let him go on kissing her all night except he kissed her from her lips to her ear and then whispered a word.

  “Faith...”

  It hit her like a bucket of ice-cold water. She wasn’t Faith. Faith was dead and Carrick didn’t know it. It wasn’t right to mislead him. Faye had a choice. She could either tell Carrick the truth or she could stop letting him kiss her.

  “Stop,” Faye said. Carrick stopped. Faye gave him a weak smile. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” he said, panting.

  “Kissing you is too easy,” she said. Her head spun like a top. She felt faint and dizzy and happy all at once. “I keep forgetting who you are.”

  “I keep forgetting myself, too,” he said.

  “Go on,” Faye said. “Tell me more about the lighthouse.”

  “Better call it a night before I do something I shouldn’t. Again,” he said. He stood up straight and put his back to the railing, to the ocean. He looked so beautiful in the starlight and the lamplight—strong and handsome and dependable.

  “I want to stay,” she said. “You know you get lonely up here, don’t you?”

  “Lonely? Me?” He shook his head. “Never. I have Ozzie.”

  “Ozzie?”

  Carrick put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Faye heard the sound of metal rattling, and seemingly out of nowhere, a small gray cat materialized at Carrick’s feet.

  “The Great and Terrible Ozzie,” Carrick said, picking up the cat and carrying him into the watch room. “Principal rat catcher and lighthouse sentinel.” He pulled a bit of food from a tin and fed it to Ozzie. The food looked and smelled like dried fish. “And a rascal. Caught him pissing off the gallery last night. Watered the plants ninety feet down.”

  “That’s quite a skill,” Faye said. “You would never do that, I’m sure.”

  “Course not. Well, maybe no more than once a night. Depends on how much coffee I had. But he doesn’t drink coffee. No excuse.”

  “Don’t listen to him, Ozzie.” Faye stuck her hand out, and Ozzie pushed his head into her palm. She picked him up, and he let her hold him, purring loud enough she could hear it over the roar of the spinning lens. “You can piss off the lighthouse whenever you want. My Lord, you are loud.”

  “That purr could wake the dead,” Carrick said. “I don’t know if he eats the rats or just scares them away by purring at them, but I haven’t seen hide nor hair of a rat or a mouse since the day Oz moved in.”

  “Did you name him after The Wizard of Oz?”

  “Dolly did. She’s a Dorothy, you know. Been Dolly all her life, though, her father says. One of the few words she says.”

  “I didn’t know she could say anything. This is her cat?”

  “She brought him here a few weeks before you came. They had one too many cats and kittens at their place, and her mother was threatening to throw them in a sack and toss that sack in the ocean. Dolly wouldn’t stand for that, so she brought the three toms out here. Two ran off to God knows where, but Ozzie stuck around.”

  Ozzie kneaded her thigh through her skirt, and she tried to enjoy the affection and ignore the pinprick of his sharp little claws. Then he rolled up into a tight furry doughnut on her lap, purring so loudly she could feel the vibration down to her feet.

  “Ozzie of Oz,” she said, stroking the silver V between Ozzie’s ears. The Wizard of Oz. That was exactly what this was, wasn’t it?

  “What are
you smiling at?” Carrick asked.

  “I feel like Dorothy in Oz. You know, since I came here,” she said. “This place is so different from what I’m used to, like another world.”

  “Like Oz?”

  Faye nodded.

  Oz. Of course. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? In The Wizard of Oz, the lady who played the mean teacher looked exactly like the Wicked Witch. The Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow all looked like men who worked on Uncle Henry and Auntie Em’s farm. And here Carrick looked just like Will. And Dolly reminded her of someone, but she couldn’t quite remember who. Like Dorothy, Faye had been swept away and carried off to another world. They’d both woken up in another land where everything was different and yet oddly the same. And Faye, like Dorothy, just wanted to go home.

  Or did she?

  “I keep thinking I’m going to wake up and it’ll all be dream. Just like Dorothy did.” Faye looked at Carrick and smiled. “And all this will be gone, and I’ll be back where I came from.”

  Carrick narrowed his eyes at her.

  “A dream?” he asked.

  “You know,” she said. “At the end of the—” She almost said “the movie,” then remembered The Wizard of Oz wouldn’t come out for years. “At the end of the book, when Dorothy wakes up from her dream about Oz.”

  “You must not have read the same book I did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Land of Oz isn’t a dream,” Carrick said. “Oz is real, and Dorothy goes back to it again and again in the other books.”

  “Oh, yes,” Faye said, swallowing hard. She’d never read the book, although she’d seen the movie so many times she’d lost count. “That’s right. Been years since I read it.”

  “If you ask me, I don’t know why Dorothy ever wanted to go back to Kansas. I’ve been to Kansas,” Carrick said. “Would you pick Kansas if you could have Oz?”

  “Oz had wicked witches, you know. Kansas doesn’t.”

  Carrick touched the bruise on her face, a touch as soft as a kiss.

  “Everywhere’s got wicked witches.”

  Faye wanted to press her face into Carrick’s hand the way Ozzie had butted his head against hers.

  “Tell me something,” Faye said.

  “Anything.”

  “What would you do right now if I wasn’t married?”

  “You are married.”

  “Pretend I’m not.”

  “I can’t pretend. I don’t have that good of an imagination.”

  “Can you imagine this, then? Imagine I didn’t survive when I fell into the water. What would happen to you if I’d drowned that night?”

  Carrick mulled that question over for a good long while. Faye held her breath and waited for the answer. She didn’t know why she’d asked him, except something told her she needed to know.

  “Have you ever seen an abandoned lighthouse?” Carrick asked. “Windows broken, paint faded and peeling and no light shining out from it?”

  “Yes,” Faye said.

  “Aye, then, there’s your answer.”

  16

  On the third morning Faye woke up in 1921, she realized something.

  She wanted to stay.

  She wanted to stay so much that if a man in black showed up on Carrick’s porch and offered her a key to a door to take her to 2015, she would politely decline, wish the man well, close the door and get back to work. The body she’d woken up in was her body. The face she saw in the mirror was her face. The life she inhabited was her life. Whether she had become Faith or Faith had become her, Faye didn’t know and didn’t care anymore. She fit this life like a hand in glove.

  While Dolly cooked breakfast downstairs, Faye dressed, pinned up her hair and went to work in the garden. The garden that was her garden now. According to the almanac, which Dolly consulted on a daily basis, it was time to plant beets and carrots for an autumn harvest. Faye found the seed packets and went to work weeding and sowing. Faye had never been one to cook elaborate meals that required hours of preparation. And yet here she was, planting food in June she wouldn’t eat until September. She caught herself smiling while she pushed seeds into the soil, even though the sun was hot and kneeling on the ground was uncomfortable. How long had it been since the salt in her eyes had come from sweat and not tears?

  Faye sat back on her knees and admired her work. Three rows of carrots. Three rows of beets.

  “Faith?”

  Faye heard Carrick’s voice calling to her.

  “Is breakfast ready?” she called back.

  “Stand up slowly, love, very slowly,” he said, and Faye turned to him. He walked toward her, carrying an ax in his hand. An ax?

  “What?”

  “Stand up right now. Walk across the garden. Walk as fast as you can.”

  “I just planted it—”

  “Now. Right now.”

  Faye heard a sound, a strange sort of shuffling, like footsteps dragging on the ground. Slowly she turned around.

  Faye screamed.

  An alligator lurked not ten feet behind her. At the sound of her scream, it opened its mouth, baring rows of white teeth, a dark cave filled with ivory stalactites. It charged toward her as she scrambled back on her hands, getting tangled in her skirt as she tried to stand.

  She yelled Carrick’s name. In a blur of movement, she saw him rush forward with his ax raised, but she didn’t wait to see what happened next. She clambered to her feet and ran to the opposite side of the garden to the oil shed and hid behind the door. From behind the shed’s door, she could hear grunting sounds, wet thuds and then...silence.

  When she cracked the door open and peeked out, Carrick’s silver ax head dripped with red.

  “Hope you like alligator stew, love,” he said, turning to her, wearing a look of false levity on his face.

  “That... That’s... Carrick, that’s an alligator,” she said, cowering in the oil house doorway.

  “That was an alligator.”

  The alligator, or what was left of it, lay on its side, two fat legs dangling in the air.

  “This island has alligators,” she said.

  “Yes, this island has alligators.”

  “You killed an alligator. With an ax.”

  Carrick nodded. “Didn’t have time to load the shotgun.”

  “You killed an alligator with an ax because you didn’t have time to load the shotgun.”

  “You’re repeating me,” he said.

  “I was almost eaten by an alligator.”

  “I think he was after the goats.”

  “Carrick.”

  “Or you,” Carrick said. “Can’t lie, he might have been after you.”

  “I’m going to faint,” she said.

  “Don’t faint. It’s dead, I swear. You can come out of the shed now.”

  Faye didn’t want to come out of the oil shed, but her rational brain reminded her she couldn’t stay in there forever. Her rational brain also told her she should not be living on an island where an alligator could just sneak up on her.