The Lamplighters

by Frazer Lee

  Marla looked from him back to Jessie, her mouth sucking air and her eyes searching for answers.

  “You mean death, don’t you?” Marla knew she was right. “The only way off this island is if you die?”

  The old man’s eyes seemed to glitter wetly as he looked up at them both.

  “Better get the stove burning again,” he said quietly.

  A piercing chill had descended on the room, like a sharp winter fog.

  It was getting dark outside, the dying sun a thin vein of crimson bleeding into the sea. Marla sat watching Pietro sleep fitfully as she listened to the wind whistling by the lighthouse windows. He hadn’t so much fallen asleep but rather blacked out, the shock of his injuries and the stress of being dragged to the lighthouse finally getting the better of him. She glanced over at Jessie, who had bedded down on a pile of old magazines and was finally getting some shut-eye beneath a thick woolen blanket. She had made a compelling argument; Fowler’s men were the very same people who’d mercilessly blown Pietro out of the water in the first place—but had they actually seen him before the boat blew? Perhaps it wasn’t an attack but an accident, a gas explosion or the like. Whatever the reason, the reality of Pietro’s injuries was undeniable. Looking at Pietro’s clammy skin and the bloodstained bandages barely holding him together, Marla felt sure Vincent was right. He’d lost too much blood to survive without proper medical attention. Marla was certain Jessie’s paranoia and fears were preventing her from thinking straight. Hopefully a few hours’ sleep would see her right and they could discuss their options in the clear light of morning. Too wired to sleep, Marla mopped Pietro’s brow with a damp rag and felt his flesh burning angrily with the beginnings of a fever. Her fingertips were dry and flaky and her hands bore mystery cuts that she couldn’t remember acquiring. She thought of her cozy summerhouse on the other side of the island with its hot shower, moisturizer, well-stocked larder and fragrant garden. Then she imagined Adam and the security patrols, their flashlights cutting through the gloom of the night to find her and Jessie’s beds empty. Spy cameras would show no lights on in the main houses, nor any sign of life at Pietro’s place, no chores being done. Then Fowler’s men would come looking for them. It was just a matter of time. She grew frightened, Vincent’s disturbing mantra looping inside her head like an old stuck record, only one way off this rock…only one way. With these fears weighing heavy on her already troubled mind, Marla fought to keep her eyes from closing and giving in to sleep. She imagined those awful hollow black eyes staring at her through Jessie’s kitchen window again, and tumbled into their depths.

  Her own loud yelp woke her and she sat bolt upright, opening her eyes. Marla shivered and looked down at Pietro, still sweating in Vincent’s old cot bed. His eyes were closed and his mouth clamped tightly shut behind dry lips. He looked awful; sleep was the best place for him. The crick in her neck told Marla she had drifted off with her head hanging over him. Massaging her neck with a cold hand she got up carefully, not wishing to disturb their patient.

  Crossing to the window, Marla saw the first moments of morning and the sky she’d fallen asleep beneath was in reverse. This time the sun’s rays were spiking upwards, creating watercolor blurs of yellow, green and muddy reds where they met the sky’s vapors. For a moment the surreal quality of her situation struck her—here she was taking shelter in a lighthouse on the other side of the world under an alien sky.

  “Strange, the light this time of morning.”

  It was Vincent. Marla hadn’t even noticed him, sat in his chair with his feet propped up on a rickety wooden stool.

  “It’s beautiful,” she replied before crossing to sit in the chair opposite him. “You must have seen so many mornings like this one.”

  “Oh I’ve seen ’em all right. Winter sun is best, sharp and cold as a shark’s tooth out here. But the seasons drag. Seen too many mornings and far too many nights.”

  “How long have you lived out here Vincent? What brought you?”

  Vincent reached over and picked up a pipe, filling it with coarse, dry tobacco as he gathered his thoughts.

  “Truth is, in a way I was the first of the Lamplighters.”

  Marla listened intently as Vincent went on to describe arriving at Meditrine Island as a young man in his early twenties, to take up the post of lighthouse keeper. The island was then, as now, owned and operated by The Consortium Inc. on the mainland. The great white stucco mansion houses had just been built back then and soon enough The Lamplighters had arrived to look after them. Fairest of these was a girl called Susanna, pink in complexion with flowing blonde hair and a Nordic lilt to her accent. Marla found herself smiling wistfully as Vincent described falling in love with Susanna on first sight of her as she gathered seashells in the cove near the lighthouse. She’d fallen pregnant not long after they began their courtship, her visits becoming more frequent as they conspired about their future together. They were both happy on the island and so approached the Master of the Watch, Chief of Security Fowler’s predecessor, to ask The Consortium’s permission for them to live in the lighthouse together with their child. After she gave birth however, Vincent never saw Susanna again. The Watchman told him she’d been sent back to the mainland, never to return to the island again, as punishment for breaking her code of conduct as a Lamplighter. Vincent’s own punishment was to raise their child, a boy, alone in the lighthouse until he was old enough to replace his father as lighthouse keeper.

  One night, Vincent took a boat from the island determined that he and his boy should return to the mainland together and find the boy’s mother; his beloved Susanna. The Watchmen used his own lighthouse against him. By its light, they pursued him through the waves in a skiff and ran him and his son to ground. Their discipline was harsh and Vincent was told he and his son were confined to the lighthouse, their only contact with others being the sporadic food drops made by the security staff on their rounds. One or two of the men were decent enough types and showed some pity in the reading material they smuggled out for Vincent and his boy. With each box of canned food and powdered milk came a puzzle book, comic book or novel—the foundations of the mildewed library that helped keep the draft out in the control room today. The years passed and as Vincent’s son grew, so too did his desire to see beyond the lighthouse windows, to run across the beaches and explore the island’s coves. Vincent woke one morning to find his boy had snuck out during the night. He heard barking from outside and from the window saw the lad tearing across the sand in hot pursuit of a black dog. The animal was ragged and skinny and, as is often the case with such black dogs, proved to be a portent of doom. For as the beast was swept away by an almighty wave, as big as a house, so too was Vincent’s son. The waves crashed down on the rocks like heaven’s thunder, drowning out Vincent’s cries as he battled his way through the wind and spray. Upon his next delivery of supplies he sent solemn word to the Master of the Watch that he would remain at the lighthouse as agreed, but that his son would no longer be able to replace him. And here he had stayed for over forty years, amassing the books and periodicals his kind jailers bestowed on him month after month, year after year.

  “I like puzzle books the most. Their solutions are always the simplest.”

  He sighed dryly and Marla blinked a tear from her eye. The old man’s story had touched her more than she’d realized. Vincent stood, breaking the spell conjured by his oration, and busied himself making the now customary fresh pot of coffee. Only then did Marla realize Jessie had gone.

  It hadn’t taken Marla long, about a nanosecond, to figure out where Jessie had gotten to. Walking down the lighthouse’s winding stairs, she could hear faint sounds emanating from the service closet down below. Avoiding the pool of stagnating water, Marla approached the service hatch and sure enough found Jessie squatting inside working intently at the old laptop.

  “Sleep well?” Jessie asked. Her voice had a “just another day at the office” tone to it. Maybe it was the laptop. Computers have that effect on
some people, thought Marla, turn them into robots.

  “Kind of. How long have you been down here?”

  “Dunno, toots, maybe a coupla hours. Had to try another subroutine, had to dig deeper, see if I could boost our signal some.”

  “Did it work?”

  “We’ll only find that out if someone comes to save our sorry asses.”

  “Speak for yourself. My ass is toned—I went jogging, remember?”

  Jessie sidestepped her remark.

  “So you’re on side now you’ve had some time to think?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, you were looking at me like I was crazy or something when I told you we had to get off the island. I know I can come across as a bit…paranoid sometimes, but it’s not like I don’t have my reasons.”

  “Jessie, I’m sorry I doubted you, it’s just—it’s all been a bit of a whirlwind since I got here and I can’t take things at face value you know. But for what it’s worth I do believe you that Fowler and The Consortium are up to something. After what Vincent just told me well I…”

  “That old looney? What’d he tell you?”

  Marla recounted his account of how he arrived on the island, his lover’s disappearance and the tragedy of their young son. Jessie listened intently, her eyes darkening as Marla described The Consortium’s betrayal of Vincent’s basic human rights, his imprisonment on the island.

  “Hate to say I told you so,” Jessie said bitterly after Marla was done. Marla smiled in spite of herself.

  “There’s more,” Jessie continued. “When I said I had to dig deep, I meant real deep. I found something.”

  She moved the laptop around on her lap so Marla could see the screen. Several windows were open on the display, running complex background programs that looked like something from a science fiction movie to Marla’s eyes. Then she saw a window that looked different from all the others, a spreadsheet of some kind with dozens of rows and columns of data.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “The Consortium Inc.,” Jessie said triumphantly, “More specifically some of their employee records. Look, on that line you can see the German girl I told you about, Vera. See?”

  Marla leaned in closer to the screen, peering at the data entry.

  “How did you get this?”

  Jessie grinned, “I sure can dig, can’t I? Do you see the line or not?”

  “Yes, I see it. Name, date of birth… Termination date?”

  “That’s the date Fowler said she’d left for breaking contract.”

  “Oh, okay, that makes sense…”

  “Now look a little further down.”

  Marla’s eyes traced across and down the next line.

  Pietro’s listing.

  “Look at his termination date Marla.”

  It was yesterday, the day of the explosion.

  “Now the next line.”

  “I don’t…”

  “Read the next line Marla.”

  Marla’s eyes found Jessie’s listing.

  “And the next one. Go on.”

  A chill began to clog Marla’s throat as she read her own listing. It too had a termination date.

  The date was the same as Jessie’s. Today’s.

  No one knows we’re here. Expendable, Jessie had said. Marla felt her skin prickle.

  Then Marla jumped at a sudden loud fizzing sound from deep within the wiring inside the service closet, the shock making her cry out. The security light above the door blanked out. The stairwell lights flickered violently in tandem with the electrical cacophony, then died. The laptop made a painful grinding noise, its screen the only light inside the cramped space. The battery indicator popped up on the screen counting down its forty-five minute lifespan.

  Jessie took a sharp breath.

  “We haven’t got much time.”

  A sudden, violent piercing sound, like that of a kettle’s whistle began to ring out in Brett’s ears and he opened his eyes. A troubled sky was far above him, and for a moment he imagined himself stranded on his back, high up in the branches of some vast tree. Then he felt the waves lapping gently at his face and he realized he was on his back all right, but still in the bloody ocean. And it was bloody. He rolled over painfully and began to tread water and as he did so, saw the carnage all around him. Debris from the yacht was floating all around him on the waves, which were stained blood red. He spat out water as his disbelieving eyes took in the horror of the severed limbs and other body parts of his crewmembers as they bobbed horribly on the undulating surface of the red water. Perversely a section of arm drifted past him, its elbow hooked over a life preserver. Salt-water bile churned in Brett’s stomach as he screamed and splashed, desperate to find a way out of this fleshy minefield. The waves moved all around him, churning up the soup of dead bodies and pieces of broken yacht. His screams died in his throat as he saw Idoya’s beautiful hazel eyes looking right at him. She’d made it, she was a survivor too, and together they could… Then the waves barreled and churned again and the girl’s head capsized in the water revealing a mess of shredded flesh and tube-like innards at the place where her neck and shoulders used to be. Brett could feel blood pulsing from his wounds now. If there were sharks in these waters, they’d be along soon enough. Brett tried to swallow his tears and began to swim, his fevered imagination feeding his mortal burning terror—of swift black predators snapping at his heels.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  They met Vincent when they were only halfway up the stairs. As they stopped to talk urgently to each other, Marla thought of her foster mother’s old superstition. Should never cross anyone on the stairs—it’s unlucky. Oh well, thought Marla, bit late for worrying about that now.

  “Generator’s down,” said Vincent. “Have to get it going again.”

  “Okay, we’ll keep an eye on our patient,” Marla replied.

  Vincent looked perplexed for a moment. “No, I can’t leave the lighthouse. More than my life is worth, which ain’t much I admit, but there you go. No, I meant you have to go down and restart the genny—don’t worry none, it’s easy. I’ll tell you how…”

  “Where is it old man?” asked Jessie.

  “It’s in an outbuilding at the foot of the steps below.”

  She and Marla listened intently as Vincent described the procedure to restart the genny. It sounded simple enough, but Marla repeated the instructions aloud to Vincent, just to be sure.

  “Turn off, turn on, pull lever out then press ‘restart’. If it fails, thump it. If it still fails, start over.”

  Then, a question struck her.

  “And what do you usually do in situations like this? When you’re alone, I mean, if you can’t go out?”

  Vincent looked at Jessie like she was a dozen kinds of stupid. “Well I wait of course. I light a damn candle and wait. Here, take this…”

  He tossed a flashlight to Marla. As he turned and headed back upstairs to look after Pietro, Jessie gave Marla a wide-eyed, sarcastic look behind his back.

  They both stepped outside, Marla repeating Vincent’s instructions over and over to herself and Jessie cussing under her breath. As the buffeting wind enveloped them, their voices were silenced like the cries of drowning children.

  The term “outbuilding” was something of a stretch. The rickety structure was seemingly held together by a random series of coincidences involving masonry and timber. When Jessie pulled open the door, she thought she’d fly away with it—all the way to Oz. As Marla helped her inside, she swung the flashlight beam around, looking for the generator. It was hard to miss. The rusty old metal contraption was mottled and stained with age and the ghosts of past oil leaks. Jessie crouched down to survey the damage, tutting and cursing. She reminded Marla of an old tugboat engineer she’d seen in some movie back in London. Marla couldn’t help but snigger when Jessie hit her head on a metal support poking out of the generator housing, giving rise to further colorful language.

  “I’m glad you find this so amu
sing. Here, point the flashlight over there, will you? Can’t see a damn thing…”

  Marla stifled her giggles and held the flashlight as steady as she could. Only then did they see the root of the problem—a large puddle of oil on the floor beneath a sepia-stained pipe that dangled uselessly from the tail end of the genny.

  “Jee-zus. Main line’s cut, look…” Jessie said, now wriggling on her hands and knees beneath the generator’s bulk. She grabbed the pipe and studied it carefully, noticing a jagged tear right through it.

  “Looks almost like it’s been cut on purpose…” Marla said.

  “Damn right, that’s exactly what it looks like,” Jessie replied, looking up at Marla with a worried expression on her face.

  “Could’ve been a wild animal I suppose?”

  “Out here?” Jessie shook her head. “Why don’t you take a look around, see if we can’t patch it up with something…”

  “Like what?”

  “Like anything.”

  From Jessie’s antsy tone, Marla thought it best to do as she was told and started rooting around on dust-covered shelves and in rotting storage boxes for anything useful. To her surprise, she found some duct tape and an old box of bandages—they’d have to do. Then, she jumped out of her skin at a sharp cry coming from beneath the generator.

  Stumbling across the debris-strewn floor, Marla called out to see if Jessie was okay. Hearing more cursing, she guessed that whatever had happened, Jessie would live to tell the tale. She found her sitting with her back against the genny and sucking on her thumb, which was bleeding profusely.

  “Let me take a look at that.”

  “It’s fine, really,” Jessie mumbled. “Saliva, best antiseptic known to man. And woman.”

  Ignoring Jessie’s protests, Marla took a closer look at the injured thumb. A sliver of rusted metal was poking out of the deep cut in Jessie’s flesh.

  “Might need stitches,” Marla said.

  “Screw that. We seem to have left Doctor George Clooney on the mainland anyway—how careless of us. What you got there?”