“And if it was a real city, and pictured well enough from memory,” Lessels said, “then he could not only walk its streets but speak to its people, and do exactly as he liked.”
Fleming nodded in mock understanding. “Only he had become weary of this witch doctor’s imagination.”
“Aye.”
“It wasn’t spacious or fresh enough for him.”
“Aye.”
“He was hunting for fresh lodgings.”
“Aye.”
“And so a little girl was selected for him.”
“Aye,” Lessels said. “The wean.”
Fleming looked at her for a moment, as though waiting for her to admit it was all a jest. But she did no such thing, and so he threw up his hands in disdain. “Preposterous,” he said, turning away.
“Go on…” breathed Inspector Groves.
For Abraham Lindsay there is never any question as to the selection. The little one so fanciful and disobedient, so fetching in her way, and so much like his departed wife.
In the role of her lost father Ainslie removes her from the orphanage to Colonel Munnoch’s hastily refitted hunting lodge, mindful that she record in her mind no room or landscape that might later form the geography of her dreams. He introduces her first to the actress playing his sickly wife and then to the African fetish priest. The regal black man, so long the devil’s landlord—and as such the beneficiary of untold pleasures and gratuities—is nearing the end of a prolonged and gifted life, and quite happy to have his apartment vacated. He wanders around the hunting lodge, absorbing its every chamber into his memory. He is introduced to the young girl, whom he knows only as the daughter, the one whose mind has been offered in payment for the wife’s cure.
He delights in contemplating the infinite pleasures that await her and the adventures that in turn will occupy her tenant.
He is presented with a sheaf of her drawings in which an avuncular lamplighter appears repeatedly. It is immediately apparent what shape his lodger will assume when he appears to the girl. And when he meets Ainslie’s seriously ill wife, he strokes her hair warmly and assures her in his broken words that her complete recovery is imminent. His lodger, he says, has never been late with a payment.
After his departure it takes several days for the hunting lodge to appear in his dreams, but when it does his tenant is packed and ready to move.
“It’s me, Eve,” he says affectionately. “It’s Leerie…”
In the sepulchral bedroom he speaks to the girl for close to an hour, relishing her company, charming her with his wit, indulging her with sweet words, and by the time he departs he is deeply and irreversibly printed on her memory and imagination.
In the ensuing days Ainslie repeatedly asks Evelyn if she has dreamed of the lamplighter. When she admits, almost inadvertently, that she has, they know the transaction is complete, the bait taken, and Ainslie discreetly withdraws as the Mirror Society springs into righteous action.
Evelyn had been proceeding well to this point, but now she froze, staring fixedly at the candle flame, which in response seemed to flare and flutter under the intensity of her gaze.
“What is it, Evelyn?” McKnight asked, bending forward. “What do you see?”
Her eyes widened.
“Where have they taken her?”
Nothing.
“What are they doing to her?”
Her lips buckled. “I see the little girl…”
“Aye?”
“I see her in a closed room…”
“In the house? The big house that you mentioned?”
“In the cellar…”
“They have locked the little girl in the cellar?”
Evelyn swallowed.
“Are they starving her, Evelyn?”
“There is…much food.”
“Are they beating her?”
“No…” Evelyn shook her head, as though considering the reality to be much worse.
“What are they doing to her, then?”
No answer.
“You must tell us, Evelyn. We still might be able to save her. What are they doing to her?”
Evelyn looked as though she could not believe it. “They are…”
“Aye?”
“They are indoctrinating her.”
“I attended to all her needs,” Lessels said, twisting the rag on her knee, “and I saw that she was never without. Dr. Bolan examined her nearly every day. I never hated her. None of us hated her. But she was so hard to control….”
Groves nodded in personal understanding. “She snarled at you?”
“She spat and she kicked, and would not obey.”
“And how did you reprimand her?”
“I was not there to reprimand her.”
“Then what were you doing to her all this time?”
“It was not me, I tell ye. I was doing nothing to her. I was only—”
“Yes, yes,” Fleming interjected, exasperated. “You’ve made that plain, madam. But what of the others? What do you claim they were doing to her?”
“They were…reading things to her. To him. The one in her mind.”
“What things?”
“The Bible…catechism…it never stopped.”
“They were reading Scripture to her, is that it?”
“Scripture, and other things.”
Fleming shook his head. “Why, by God?”
“They were trying to tame him. Convert him. But he could not be converted.”
“The devil could not be converted?”
“Aye, the de’il.”
Fleming sighed incredulously.
“We never touched her,” Lessels insisted. “Not to begin with.”
“To begin with?” Groves queried, but the woman lowered her gaze.
It is an onslaught: psalms, prayers, missives, adjuration. It is a military engagement conducted on the battlefield of a little girl’s mind. And in truth, though they have begun with the ambitious intention of returning Lucifer, as a shining seraph, to God’s court, they quickly have no aim but to kill him.
Leerie himself is furious at the apostasy and buries himself deeply in Evelyn’s imagination, into the depths of a rapidly expanding and meticulously constructed hell. He throws out hooks and barbs, constructs a stockade, then a fortress, and readies himself for Armageddon. To have been lured into such a trap only proves that he has become too complacent. But now alert to their game, he will not be evicted, and he will never be killed.
His assailants are astounded by his resilience. They paint Evelyn’s consciousness—her very soul—with Scripture, and still the lodger will not wilt. They bombard him with fire and brimstone and he will not budge. They judge him and call him to account for his crimes, but he accepts no verdict. The invective inevitably turns on Evelyn herself.
“Do ye protect him, child?” Smeaton screams, his lips white with froth. “Are ye in collusion with him?”
They are careful never to be in the room when the girl is asleep. For when she dreams Leerie sometimes is released into the cellar, shrieking his displeasure and hammering on the walls with the intensity of regimental drums. Sometimes he materializes in Evelyn’s former bedroom. On the staircase. In Drumgate Cemetery, which she has glimpsed though the broken shutter. And once even in the dormitory of the Fountainbridge Institute for Destitute Girls.
He is no longer the Bearer of Light, however, for the onslaught is beginning to transform him. And since the hunting lodge is no longer adequate as a holding place, a new prison must be found.
“She was a cunning one,” Lessels observed. “It was hard not to think she was in league with him.”
“With the devil?”
“She would pretend to be awake—her eyes would be open—and then in a snap she would fall down and start dreaming, and he would appear. It was lucky we escaped sometimes. Lucky we got out of the room.”
“Did you see him yourself?” Groves asked curiously, still with the afterimage of his own encounter fresh in his eyes
.
“Aye.” But she could barely tolerate the memory.
“And it was the same beast that chased you home last night?”
“Oh, no…” She looked up, pale. “’Tis much worse now.”
“But still nothing human?”
“A man…a bat, with wolf teeth…he began that way, and got worse.”
“Then how did you contain him?”
“It was no longer safe at the lodge. But Colonel Munnoch, he had a small island north of the firth, and on the island was a lighthouse.”
They strip the hunting lodge, lay upturned nails and broken glass on the cellar floor, and ultimately incinerate the place, along with the Fountainbridge Institute for Destitute Girls. They secrete Evelyn in a sloop, secure a black felt bag over her head, and transfer her by night to the isle of Inchcaid. When she protests, she is thrashed. When she squirms and screams, Dr. Bolan administers chloroform.
They come upon the lighthouse at dawn, a pillar of olive sandstone rising out of the fog. They lock Evelyn in the windowless provision room with surplus supplies of cotton wick, coal, castor oil, and oatmeal. She has no sense of the outside world but for the thunder of the waves and the massed shrieks of kittiwakes and gannets. The Mirror Society visits regularly to continue the onslaught, but what has been envisaged as a brief skirmish, and a rapid suppression of the Adversary, has developed into a full-scale war.
There are two permanent lighthouse keepers, whose families live in Arbroath with vegetable gardens and poultry. One, Colin Shanks, is a heartless brute who joins in the battle simply to relieve the boredom. The other, Billy Connor, is a reformed drunkard of faltering spirits. One day, alarmed at what they are doing to the wee girl, Connor sneaks a look at the dreaming Evelyn from the sealed door of the kitchen above. He sees a bedraggled, bloodless urchin curled up in the protecting arms of a winged demon.
“I never went to the lighthouse until…” Lessels could not bring herself to say it, as much as she found it necessary.
“Until what, madam?”
She shifted focus. “We had little time for Papists, all of us, but the wean, she had worn us down. Dr. Bolan, he got the idea that we should call in a Roman priest, a specialist in such things. It was something none of us would have thought of, but seeing as we had no choice…”
“An exorcist,” Groves said, almost delightedly.
Lessels looked up at him.
“Monsignor Dell’ Aquila, of Italy,” Groves added, when the name returned to him in a flash.
“Aye, he…he was the one,” she agreed. “Three weeks he was at the lighthouse, they say—I was not there, I saw none of it—and in all that time he did no good. He only made it worse.”
“What was this man’s purpose, you claim?” Fleming asked, confused.
“To smite the de’il with his potions and smoke,” Lessels said, and shook her head disdainfully. “To wear him down with his fine Latin words. But the one inside her would not be done so easily. He laughed at the priest through her. He said he was no ordinary foe.”
“And the priest retreated,” Groves said.
“Aye.”
“And the girl? What of her?”
Lessels gulped and fidgeted and tore at her handkerchief. “We never set out to hate her,” she insisted weakly.
Monsignor Dell’ Aquila dries his brow, feeling immeasurably old. He has battled demons in Sicily, Prussia, and Egypt, and chased them through the Alps of Austria. He has had his faith challenged and his soul shaken by unimaginable powers. He is now in a vibrating Scottish lighthouse at the request of some coldhearted Calvinists, and he feels saddled with the entire credibility of his creed.
He looks ruefully at the ragged little girl, who is held down with cords and netting and kept awake with smelling salts, and wonders if the torment she has endured is possible to justify. But the equanimity she continues to exude is positively sinister, making a mockery of pity. And her eyes have darkened so much it is impossible to read her mind.
He sighs despondently and returns to a Rituale Romanum blotted with his own sweat.
“Exi ergo transgressor. Exi seductor, plene omni dolo et fallacia, virtutis inimice, innocentium persecutor….”
But his voice, initially forceful, has become despairing, because he knows this is a battle that will never be won with mere words. A more drastic statement—an insuperable talisman—is required. Because he has faced many demons before, but never one with the power of Leerie.
They never set out to hate her. For personal reasons Abraham Lindsay in particular has never liked her, but even he recognizes this is partly irrational. They have selected her fully realizing that she will be confused and possibly traumatized, and suffer emotional consequences that might prove incurable. They are not even certain how much she will be harmed physically. But the stakes are of a magnitude that makes such considerations insignificant.
They never set out to hate her. Their enmity is directed solely at the one she houses. But the longer it goes on without success, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish the tenant from the host.
When she is racked with anguish, it is difficult not to interpret guilt.
When she is resistant, and screams invective, it is impossible not to see her as his agent.
When she is quiet, it can only be a sign of complicity.
They never set out to hurt her. But by the time the exorcist retires, defeated, they have squandered months and a small fortune on the engagement. They have wrought so much damage on her that it is impossible to believe she might ever salvage a worthwhile life. They are riddled with doubts about their own accountability and are terrified of their own fates. But they cannot surrender. They are condemned to victory.
When they think of Evelyn now they experience only revulsion and shame. They can barely begin to contemplate the terrible ordeal they have visited upon her. They have flayed from her a personality and replaced it with something hideously mutilated. And all the time Leerie has offered not a hint that he is weakening.
The girl is beyond hope—she is the manifestation of their own self-loathing—and any action becomes justifiable.
They never set out to hurt her.
But desperation has given them no option.
“A lighthouse? What do you see?”
Evelyn was shivering violently, and Canavan looked away, savaged by pity.
“They have removed the little girl to a lighthouse, is that it?” McKnight tried again. “What are they doing there? Continuing the torment?”
Her lips staggered forward and withdrew.
“It is perfectly well that you protect her, Evelyn,” McKnight whispered. “In fact, it is decent and honorable. But please share with us your vision, so that all of us can be enlightened. It is not too late to save the little girl. You must tell us what you see.”
“There are…”
“There are what, Evelyn? We only want to save her.”
“There are waves.”
“You hear the waves? Booming against the rocks?”
“The little girl…”
“Aye?”
“She is in a boat…and there are waves.”
“In her mind, Evelyn? Is she manufacturing a rescue?”
Evelyn shook her head decisively. “She is being saved.”
“Saved, Evelyn?”
“Rescued…”
“Rescued? From what, Evelyn? What has happened at the lighthouse?”
“Waves as high as houses…the girl is so scared…it is so dark…and the boat is so frail….”
The boat is barely adequate and the seas unexpectedly hostile, but Billy Connor will not be daunted. He has seen enough of what they are doing to know that he can no longer live with inaction. He has no illusions about the audacity of his deed, but he is empowered by an enormous redemptive spirit. He is a good man, a true Christian, and he will not tolerate those devils acting in the name of God.
He has rowed out to Inchcaid in progressively more agitated seas. His brother
and sister-in-law, fine people, are waiting ashore for his return. They are muttering prayers for him, though he mutters none himself, for he reckons the girl has heard enough of prayers.
He has entered the lighthouse furtively, an hour before dawn, and broken into the storeroom hardly breathing, his shoes wrapped in cloth. He has swaddled the vacant and unprotesting girl in thick blankets, hugged her close to his chest, and bundled her out of the storeroom and down to the landing jetty, a daring operation unthinkable ten years earlier, when he was rarely sober. The only keeper present is Colin Shanks, and from the light room above he has been too preoccupied with the lenses to notice anything through the great dashes of spray. The storm is like a gift from God.
But now a massive swell lifts and sucks them from the island. Billy tries to angle the oars, to find leverage in the water, but they are entirely at the sea’s mercy. The rain is sweeping over him in great horizontal drifts, soaking his pullover and dripping from his uniform cap. He knows that in the lighthouse library there is a plaque for six builders drowned in similar conditions, and if he is washed overboard now, there will be no one to rescue them.
Two waves collide in an explosion of froth, gathering the little boat up and hurling it toward shore. When the swell subsides Connor has the briefest moment to glance at the girl, to see her hopeful eyes gleaming above the blankets.
“I will not let ye down, lassie,” he breathes, the first kind words she has heard in weeks.
He works the oars ruthlessly. The lighthouse beam scythes through the mist and rain. A ship’s horn bellows in the distance. The little boat rises and plunges with the mountainous waves, and in no time they spy the flickering lamps of shore.
“Not long now,” Billy Connor says. “I won’t let ye down. We’ll find a new home for ye, I promise ye that.”
But his words are hardly uttered before a brutal wave crashes over the gunwale and sweeps him into the abyss.
The Lamplighter Page 29