Lighthouses

by Trost, Cameron

  Tony nodded, not bothering to hide his disappointment. ‘I think he was sold. The father’s a pilot.

  ‘Don’t worry, lad. That could only be Andrey Cowan. He flies cargo all over the place. I can fix you up with his address. He’s a great man, and if he knows it’s your dog, I’m sure he’ll return him.’

  ‘Does he live far from here?’

  ‘A day on foot, but Roger here is heading that way first thing in the morning, only take you an hour. I’m sure he’d be happy to help.’

  The drive was bumpy and mostly silent. As the sun slowly rose, the outline of the houses and cottages in the distance began to take shape.

  ‘That’s it over there!’ Roger pointed to a small tower that protruded from the rocky hillside to their left. ‘A few of the small aircraft have come a cropper on that hillside, but that’s the price you pay for living in these parts.’

  The control tower grew steadily in size as the van rattled along the narrow partly paved road. Each time a car approached, one of the vehicles was forced to veer off the road to allow the other to pass.

  ‘This is you,’ Roger said when they reached the gate to a small dirt road. The road darted off through a thicket of trees. ‘It’s not far,’ he added, seeing the concern on Tony’s face. ‘Good luck.’

  Tony waved to Roger as he began the short walk. The side of the road was dotted with holes that were big enough for a badger or mole. As the road veered to the right, Tony was able to see a rose-coloured wooden house. A woman sat reading on the balcony that stood just a few feet from the ground. She raised her head and looked toward Tony, almost as if she were expecting him.

  ‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ Tony said as he came to a halt at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Come up here and sit yourself down.’

  Tony made his way up the five stairs, even stopping on the third to place his hand on the railing and smile so as to not cause alarm.

  ‘Take a seat,’ she said, stretching her open palm toward a cushioned wooden chair that sat a few feet from her long flowing dress.

  ‘As Tony sat, he felt a cool breeze pass over him. He looked back along the pathway. The sun was now pushing its way through the tops of the trees.

  ‘You’ve come looking for someone.’

  Tony looked at her, his mouth open. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I’ve seen that look before,’ she said calmly, while weighing up an idea. ‘But I’m afraid I can’t help you, at least, not in the way you’d hoped.’

  ‘I’m looking for my dog. His name’s Jimmy.’

  ‘I know your being here isn’t by chance. She looked at him closely. ‘My husband and I are pilots. We run a small company and fly to all sorts of places. We’re looking for someone to load cargo. Maybe you’d be interested. You’d get to go all over, so you could look for Jimmy wherever we went.’

  ‘I’ll do it.’

  #

  A few hundred flights later, Tony found himself several thousand feet above the ground. A parachute tied to his back. ‘It’s just like we practised Tony, except this time, you’re on your own. The shoot will open at five thousand feet.’

  Tony could barely contain his emotions as the door of the plane opened. The fear, adrenaline, and hope rushed around his body.

  ‘Twelve thousand feet,’ came the cry from the cockpit.

  And before he knew it, Tony could see the plane trail off above him as he plummeted to the ground, his head swirling with a million thoughts. The countryside below, dotted with hills, paddocks, and fence lines, was now rapidly moving toward him.

  As Tony approached the ground, he focused on the steps he’d gone through in preparation. At step five, he realised his landing was further advanced than expected as he was at a more elevated spot than anticipated.

  Tony prepared to hit the ground.

  Landing awkwardly, he rolled several times in the long grass toward a barbed wire fence that staggered its way up the rocky slope.

  He grabbed his ankle as the stabbing pain shot up his leg, then lay on his back for a few moments and thought about the thirty minute walk ahead. He was expected in the village before sunset.

  Tony heard some rustling in the long grass behind, and his thoughts turned to the wild dogs he’d been warned about. Putting pressure on his good leg, he tried his best to get up. Before he had reached his feet, a dog appeared through the grass.

  ‘Jimmy!’

  Jimmy barked several times, then leaped on Tony, knocking him back to the ground.

  Tears flowed readily from Tony’s eyes as Jimmy happily licked his face just like he’d always done.

  ‘I can’t believe it!’ Tony hugged Jimmy tight. ‘We’re going home.’

  And so their long journey began. Passing through valleys and hills along treeless rugged coastline, they skirted the edges of larger towns and many a small village. Tony was desperate to see his family once more. He anticipated their faces lighting up as Jimmy burst through the kitchen door and into their lives once more.

  On the last day of their journey, Tony found his way back to the long corridor where he’d bought Shadow from the elderly man. He whispered in Jimmy’s ear, ‘We’re going to run now, Jimmy. Just follow me, and don’t look back.’

  They bounded past the shop and up the flights of stairs until they came to the door of the lighthouse once more. Tony pulled at the door with all his might. Suddenly, the sunlight exploded through the doorway and out they rushed.

  Jimmy let out several barks and Tony shouted out to the vast empty sea. ‘Jimmy, we’ve made it!’

  A short time later, as they made their way back up the hill, Tony spotted a mirror that stood at the back of one of the houses. It stood against the wire fence in all the elements, a few bits of rust eating away at its edges. He decided to have a look, thinking it couldn’t hurt to tidy up his appearance a little before heading back home to his parents.

  He stood in front of the mirror, opening and closing his eyes several times, even looking behind him, thinking someone must have been standing there. To his amazement, the vision that stood before him was that of an elderly man with a beard. He pulled at his beard, his ears, and smiled a few times to be doubly sure of the image that lay before him. He looked around the hills and noticed other changes too. A stone wall that lay a few hundred metres to the east was gone, and a narrow road now stood in its place. A few of the houses had new roofs and the brewery was now in ruins. He turned around but Jimmy was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Come on, Jimmy. It’s time to go home.’

  INTO THE LIGHT

  Alice Godwin

  Seeing a distant light, I said: My fire is in that fire:

  that is the shore that holds my light.

  - Ovid

  Drowned Town Tours, I think the sign ghoulish but go along anyway. There isn’t much else happening in this small town. We all sit in the glass-bottom boat drifting along the lake’s surface, which gleams blue like some exotic cocktail. The sun is an embrace, its beams wrap around me. I feel I could easily drift away.

  ‘There it is. Everyone look down.’

  We all stare past our shoes, into the depths.

  I see the blackened trees, preserved like specimens in formaldehyde. There is no movement at all in their skeleton branches. They form an avenue of phantoms that we glide over in our boat resembling a bloated pterosaur.

  I begin to glimpse walls and buildings far, far below in the depths, the crumbling façade of a bank. The church spire, a lonely sentinel above a roofless, silted slab with shadowy stairs leading downward. A bride stands with her new husband, both smiling as confetti is flung over them and drifts away in the current. She tilts a bouquet over her shoulder and it slowly wafts downward into the outstretched arms of a young girl wearing a red dress. On the other side of the church, a coffin balanced on rigid shoulders is being carried stiffly up the stairs, followed by weeping mourners, their black clothing sweeping behind them like elegant waterweeds.

  Drowned shades stalk the stree
ts of this submerged town. The more I look, the more substantial they become. Drifting by, these watery wraiths draped in silk-washed garments as ephemeral as a late summer butterfly, converse and browse. One denizen glances up, his face pale like salt, the strands of his dark hair wafting, his eyes like bones in the moonlight. He smiles up at me and blows me a kiss.

  I feel myself falling, through the glass floor, shattering it as I plummet down into this deluged hamlet.

  ‘That was a waste of money,’ a voice grumbles. ‘Not like you could bloody see anything.’

  The boat is rocking wildly as the others disembark. I sit staring out across the still waters of the lake, feeling like I have somehow been dispossessed. Been made homeless. I cannot comprehend the emotions that are flowing through me. I don’t know where they have come from. I run my fingers through my long brown hair. The strands feel wet like I have been swimming.

  The boat is emptying; I am the last still sitting. I stand and glance up at the young man, who reaches for my hand as I clamber onto the jetty stairs. His face is as pale as salt, his lips smile, and his lake-bright eyes stare into mine.

  ‘It takes a special soul,’ he whispers as I pass. ‘Not everyone is privileged to see the tour as it truly is.’

  I don’t know what to make of his words as I walk away, but they have a hold on me like a broken record, they go around and around in my head, until I can barely think.

  I go down to the bar well before dinner and have a bottle of wine and listen to old songs on the Retro jukebox in the corner. I can’t be bothered eating, so I walk down the main road that leads to the jetty and the lake. All is quiet here; the boats rock gently on some mellow current and above a half moon sits in the hollow between the mountains.

  The lake is dark, a sheet of shimmering blackness deeper than the surrounding landscape. I’m at the end of the jetty and I sit on one of the wooden pillars. Yet this jetty is not old, built only after the lake came into being, after all a jetty cannot exist unless there is a reason for its existence. I notice a flash of light in the middle of the lake. One moment it is gone, and then it appears again. I watch and realise there is a rhythm to the flashes. I count the seconds, three seconds then eight seconds, followed by three and then eight. I know this means something, can feel it there knocking at my skull, trying to tell me something. Something important.

  He stands beside me, having walked up so quietly that I almost jump out of my skin when he utters those words, ‘You see it too, don’t you?’

  I look into his moon pale face, so young but not so innocent, and even in the darkness, those eyes are unbearably ancient.

  ‘Lights from a boat — night fishing,’ I say. My heart is beating too fast and I know that’s not what I’m thinking at all.

  He laughs. A laugh that makes me think of wooden sailing ships with decks of polished burnished timbers, of gleaming copper instruments, of billowing sails held taut by miles of rigging. I can practically smell the ocean, feel the salty air, and taste the brine. Here, hundreds of miles inland, he has the taint of the ocean all over him. I lick my lips and they are salty.

  ‘Try again.’ There is a seductive quality to his voice. He is very handsome in an unearthly kind of way. I think of drowned sailors as I look at his lips. His black hair blows gently in the breeze and I see black kelp undulating in the current.

  ‘A lighthouse,’ I whisper.

  ‘Would you like to see?’ he asks.

  I sit in his boat, the only guest, and we glide across the black water. The engine throbs very low and small ripples flow from the prow. I look below and see blackness, and wonder what sort of fool I am to be doing this with this stranger who, if I was totally rational, I would class as a harmless loony at best, and well, I don’t wish to even think of what the worst-case scenario would be. But tonight, I’m not rational. Tonight, I am infected with my own sort of madness. Tonight, I am touched by what the gods might have once called divine folly.

  I see it, the light streaming below, and then it is not there. I wait and count and there it is again. I sit and stare as we drift along silently, the engine off now. In the flashes, I see the skeletons of the trees and then the buildings, almost insubstantial, charcoal slashes against a shimmery current. They disappear and reappear, slightly different angles, a shell of a house, a wisp of a roof, the outline of the steeple, and as we glide above, the strobe below cuts through the water like some ethereal watery lightning. And then we are above it, the ghostly tower of what must be stone wavers below me as the light flashes on and off, and in its glow I see them floating, the drowned and the dispossessed, their garments fluttering in the current, their arms reaching for me, their faces, slender and eerie, luminescent and pale. Two faces repeated in some doll like way, his face on the men and mine on the women. I gaze at them, and as I lose consciousness, I think, it’s all so ridiculous; there was never a lighthouse here in this town. There was no sea, no lake, just a small river that was dammed, and it eventually filled up over years and years, submerging the town and becoming this lake, so therefore, there could never have been a lighthouse here. Oh, so very lucid of me.

  I wake to find myself lying on the glass floor of the boat. He sits on the seat, staring across the water. His profile is like cut glass, hard edges and skin stretched so tightly over those cheekbones that all I can think is, if my fingers traced those cheeks, would they be so sharp they would make the tips of my fingers bleed? He senses my gaze and turns and smiles at me. He leans over and helps me up, his hands are so warm I almost don’t want to let go, but I do.

  He walks me to my hotel and we don’t talk. What is there to say? Too much, it’s better if we don’t start. We may not be able to stop. He opens the door for me, and as I pass, I feel that warm hand of his grab my hand and he lifts it to his lips and kisses it so very gently. His lips are very cold and his eyes, with the golden glow from the overhead lanterns shining onto his face, are fathomless blue. The scent of the briny ocean wafts over me, and as he lets my hand go, I can see the scattering of salt on the skin. It glitters in the shape of his lips.

  The next day, I drive my car along the road that takes me up, higher and higher, so the lake below shimmers and recedes. The bare paddocks of sunburned grass look forlorn and desolate. I stop at a gate covered in clambering roses; the green lushness of the leaves and the deep blood splashes of the flowers are surreal, and I wonder if I may be coming down with a fever. I wander through the gates and I feel that strange mixture of dread and elation that I felt the last time I was in a place like this.

  That time, the sun had not been overhead, it had been going down and the shadows were long and deep. It was in a cemetery not that dissimilar to this that I married a thief, and below the spot where we exchanged our rings and our vows, a sea had crashed against the sheer cliffs, sending up spumes of foam and salty spray that had misted and settled into my hair for days. Of course, I hadn’t known he was a thief, this tall slender man who was so effortlessly graceful and good-looking in his suits of shark grey. I hadn’t known then that he was into plunder on such a momentous scale that he made your average pirate seem like some petty schoolboy stealing lollies. Very few people knew that. He hid it very well. When I finally realised where his wealth had come from, two long years into our marriage, I had two choices, stay and enjoy this endless holiday of opulence and avarice, falling further into the wonderful Aladdin’s cave of excess, or leave. I left. Not for any moral reason, mind you, I just knew that my days as his number one object of desire were numbered. I threw my ring, no doubt a dirty blood diamond, into a fast flowing open drain, and hoped someone might find it and put it to good use.

  I left with enough money in my bank account that I probably wouldn’t have to work again, and I began my new life, which seemed to consist of me moving endlessly through places. Now here I was, standing among these weathered graves, the writing so faded I could barely make out a name or date. Splotches of muted lichen grew like desiccated coral on the stone, creating whorls and fanc
y spirals on the grey-black stone. The dry grass below my feet crackled. Below shimmered the lake and the small town, the one road and the twelve houses, the hotel, the three stores, the police station, and the medical centre. I can see the few boats tied to the jetty and his small hut with that sign written in some old-fashioned font. I look at the lake again. From up here, it looks so natural, as though it has always existed. On the far bank, I can see the thin, dried up bones of drowned trees. They stand in the water with arms stretched toward the mountains, their branches bare and wind worn, as though they have waded in and stuck in the mud.

  I walk to my car and drive back to the town. I park near the jetty and walk over to the hut. There is a sign on the glass door. Closed for the winter. It hadn’t been there yesterday. I feel a horrible dread like I have somehow lost something terribly important. I walk back to the hotel and into the lounge. He is sitting at the bar having a glass of red wine, a small travel bag reminiscent of a carpet bag from the nineteenth century propped against his boots. He is draped in black and I know that is the colour he wears, black and only black. He looks at me and I feel the imprint of his kiss on the back of my left hand, there are still tiny grains of salt embedded in my skin, still in the shape of his mouth. He has branded me.

  I walk toward him as though he is a lighthouse and I have no choice but to throw myself against the rocks and break apart on those cliffs. The warning light that should spell danger, that should help me steer a safe course away, is doing the opposite, it is pulling me into those dangerous currents that can only end with a wreck, that will tear me apart, shatter me so completely that I will become nothing but flotsam ebbing in and out with the current.

  He slides over a glass of white wine as though this has been prearranged. I sit in the seat next to him and sip it. His eyes are a subdued grey today with just the hint of a shifting swell.

  I look at the other occupants; two older men in the far corner are studying the form guide and arguing in a good-humoured way. A woman, young, about my age, is having a glass of wine with what may be an older sister or even her mother, the resemblance between them too strong to be anything else. She keeps glancing at the man beside me, a mixture of attraction and fear. In the opposite corner, four men, probably not even twenty, are taking turns playing pool. They have obviously been here a while, judging by the empty bottles lined up on the table and their swaggering, slightly aggressive stances. Their bare arms are covered in tattoos. It is all going to get nasty soon.