The Lamplighters

by Frazer Lee

  After removing the offending piece of metal, Marla got to work fashioning a crude dressing for the wound using a length of bandage and some tape. Jessie rattled on, suggesting Marla head back to the lighthouse and load up with whatever supplies Vincent could spare them. The repair job on the genny could take quite some time.

  “We need this fucker up and running or the laptop will zone out…and our signal will stop,” she said delicately. “I don’t know who in the hell would want to cut the fuel line on purpose… I don’t really want to know.”

  Marla shivered, suddenly feeling very cold.

  “Leave the flashlight here, toots, I’ll catch up to you when I’m done.”

  After fighting her way through the wind, Marla closed the heavy metal door and trudged back upstairs to Vincent’s control room prison. The scent of oil and Jessie’s skin was gone. She was preoccupied with the problem posed by having to move Pietro again.

  At his bedside, she could see his normally olive skin had taken on a deathly pale hue. He shivered and groaned on the cot bed, physically burning up and freezing at the same time, a torrent of cold sweat pasting his obsidian locks to his clammy forehead. Mentally, thank heaven, he was in another place, his injuries short-circuiting his consciousness and muddying his head with fever.

  “You’ll have to leave him here.”

  Vincent had read Marla’s mind; there was simply no way they could risk moving Pietro without distressing him further, or maybe even causing him additional harm.

  “We can’t just offload him onto you…” she said.

  “Be glad of the company. Such as it is,” deadpanned Vincent as he scanned the horizon beyond the filthy windows.

  “Will he be okay?”

  “No way of telling, ’til he gets to a doctor. That bastard Fowler will know what to do with him. We’ve done all we can to patch him up, make him comfortable, that’s for sure. Damn fool thing your friend did, swimming out in the ocean like that.”

  “He spoke so fondly of swimming in the sea. I imagine when he saw the boat, he just couldn’t control himself.”

  “Yeah, well. He should’ve learned to control himself by now, especially on this rock,” Vincent grumbled. “Too many goddamn sharks in that sea. And Sentry Maiden’s the biggest damn shark of them all.”

  Just then a flicker, like the sepia wings of butterfly, caught Marla’s eye. It was the meager light from a grubby emergency light above the hatch leading out onto the lighthouse walkway. Vincent looked at the flickering light as it faded then returned to unsteady life inside its housing. He nodded to Marla with a wry look of approval plastered across his face. Jessie must have got the generator running again.

  Minutes later, the door below opened and shut with a loud clang and Jessie bolted up the stairs and into the control room. Breathless, she gasped for air, her hair wet with oil and perspiration.

  “Vincent suggested Pietro might be better off if we leave him here,” Marla said as she filled the flannel with cold water and mopped Pietro’s brow.

  “Damn right we will,” Jessie said.

  Then, tossing the flashlight back to Vincent, she asked him how long it had been since the lighthouse lamps had been activated. Vincent looked dumbfounded for a few seconds, as if Jessie was speaking in tongues like a woman possessed. He honestly couldn’t remember the last time the lighthouse had been operational.

  “I did you a favor, old man, I got the genny running,” Jessie said firmly. “Now you have to do us a favor. Light the lamps, one last time. We have to go right now, so as soon as we’re gone, get them running.”

  Marla spoke up. Jessie’s action heroine persona was beginning to grate a little. “What’s this?”

  “We have to get to the Big House before Fowler figures out I’ve hacked into the computer system.”

  “But… Won’t they just come and get us, once they’ve figured out where we’ve gone?”

  “Of course they will. I’ve included the location of the Big House in the SOS subroutine. Anyone who answers our call will know where we are. The trade-off is that Fowler and his mob will know too.”

  “That’s mental.”

  “Yes, yes it is.” Jessie looked like she was enjoying herself. “But I’ve also triggered an automatic lockdown in the Big House’s security system. We should have enough time to get there if we quit standing around here chatting. And once we’re in,” she made a dramatic “shunking” noise, “Down come the shutters, leaving Fowler locked outside and us safe inside.”

  “And then what?”

  “We sit tight, wait, and pray someone picks up the SOS beacon before Fowler can shut it down.”

  “Or see the lights,” Vincent said.

  “Exactly,” Jessie replied triumphantly.

  “Light the lamps, one more time,” Vincent whispered under his breath. His voice sounded like a distant sea shanty, dying on the surface of the waves outside. “That’s if they’re still even working.”

  Marla shuddered. They were both as insane as each other. And so was she for going along with a plan like Jessie’s.

  “Grab whatever food and water you can carry, we have less than an hour to quick march over there.”

  Actually the action heroine thing suits her rather well, thought Marla as she did exactly as she was told, shoveling supplies into a backpack.

  “That cool with you, old man?” Jessie asked.

  Vincent didn’t turn from the window, but just nodded and replied, “You’d better hurry. They’re coming.”

  Heart in her mouth, Marla ditched the backpack and rushed over to the window.

  She saw the black-clad men approaching over the headland like soldier ants.

  Fowler’s men.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Fowler was livid. His tired heart pounded out a fast drumbeat in his chest, a tribal call to arms, an invitation to fuck with whoever was fucking with him. His duty officer had spotted it, while routinely scanning the monitor screens in The Snug. How he hadn’t noticed it himself was beyond Fowler’s comprehension. Was he losing his touch, finally? Had he been on this godforsaken rock for so long that he’d let his standards slip so badly? No, it wasn’t that. Whoever was responsible for duping him was going to pay, and pay dearly. Their manipulation of the image had been so well executed he could perhaps excuse himself for missing it after all. The subtlety with which the surveillance footage of the Big House had been copied and looped was almost admirable. But the eagle eye of his duty officer had proven more than a match for any such digital trickery. A subtle detail had revealed the ruse for what it was, two long-tailed parakeets, launching their sleek bodies from a branch and across the screen, only to miraculously reappear and repeat the exact same movement some time later. Darkness falling would have alerted them to the deception of course; the Big House stuck in a daylight loop while the rest of the island hunkered down into lengthening shadows. But nightfall was still a ways off, and so Fowler felt grateful for the providence of this head start. Then they’d discovered many more of the camera feeds had been tampered with too. His technicians had traced the source of the bogus camera loops to a networked drive hidden behind a series of firewalls. Someone had actually had the audacity, and hardware, to hack into his security network under his nose. Once he found the hardware, Fowler was sure he’d find the hacker, and his retribution would be swift and merciless. The culprit was certainly tricky and had made it very difficult for his boys to trace then decrypt the source of the network breach. Fowler found it difficult to wait for such tiresome tasks to be completed, urging his men to cut the technobabble crap and give him something he could sniff out and arrest for Christ’s sake.

  And eventually, after an agonizing wait that felt like hours, they did. The network breach was sourced at the lighthouse.

  The lighthouse. A barnacle on the ordered surface of Fowler’s empire. Home to a useless, senile old busybody who was now proving himself to be a threat—just as he’d predicted. Fowler had requested The Consortium allow him to c
arry out a termination order but, for reasons unclear to him, they had rejected the request. Never one to question the chain of command, Fowler now felt anger on his very breath. If they’d just allowed him to do his job, to take the old man out of the picture, then this security breach would never have happened. He knew his men had a soft spot for the old man’s stories, for his lies. That’s how he’d compromised the island’s security, right under their noses. The old timer had something to do with Anders’ disappearance and Fowler knew it. He was sure the wrinkly bastard was the one who had broken curfew. How else to explain the unauthorized figure skulking past the security cameras at night? When questioned, the old fool had blinked those narrow bloodshot eyes of his and played the innocent. But he was guilty, and he’d been out wandering despite the rules laid down for him year-in, year-out. It ended here.

  Wiping the sweat from his brow Fowler pushed on towards the rocks. He was flanked by his men and had the reassurance of cool gunmetal beneath his fingers. He was an unstoppable force, and the old lighthouse keeper was far from being an immovable object. He’d get to the bottom of all this once they reached the lighthouse, and when he did Vincent would wish he’d drowned himself a long, long time ago.

  Looking out across the landscape that had become his world, Vincent was fixated by the long shadows of the approaching men. He’d seen them before in dreams, coming to him en masse like a fleet of black ships with hard uncaring hulls, their only cargo a deep unerring woe.

  Pietro’s coughing whimpers of pain caused him to turn from the window, even though he knew the terrible sight that would greet him. Sure enough, rivulets of blood trickled from the boy’s mouth, pooling in the craters formed in his neck by tightened and agonized tendons. Grotesque little bubbles of blood formed around his nostrils, popping wetly. Pietro coughed again and the smell of metallic bile tore away Vincent’s brief olfactory memory of sweet, powdery candy wrappers. Casting a shadow over Pietro’s face as he stood there blankly looking at him, Vincent saw the fear burning in the lad’s eyes. Tears streamed down the injured boy’s face, expressing the intricate, deeper pains that his cries could not find sounds for. His throat sounded like it was splitting as he emitted a single, massive, cracking cough. An eruption of hot blood, like lava from shattered rock, spat from the boy’s lips. Vincent took the spare pillow from his chair, knowing now what he had to do, what he must do.

  Pietro struggled at first, but as Vincent pressed the pillow harder and harder into his face he seemed at once to relax into his fate. His arms and legs thrashed and trembled wildly as his windpipe clogged with blood from his ruptured organs. The boy clung to his shoulder with one hand and Vincent pressed with all his might. He was at sea again, in the rage of a storm, clinging to his young son with all his might. As the waves crashed into him over and over until they broke his grip and took his little boy from him again, Vincent let go. Then he realized two things; he’d let go of his hold on the pillow and Pietro was serenely still, and he had a gun pressed to the back of his head.

  The men’s voices were just sounds to him. Background noise as if from a television set he’d forgotten was there for all these years. He knew not, nor cared, what the voices were saying. He got the gist soon enough anyhow as they punched and kicked him to the floor. At the sharp impact of a gun butt against his lips, the taste of his own blood was like salt water rushing into his mouth. He savored the flavor of an eternal ocean he was ready to slip into, ready to sleep forever until the waves delivered him to his boy. His child would be waiting for him cold in the currents with his little arms floating limp like a puppet’s awaiting their strings, the strong, comforting arms of his father. He wanted it more than anything, but a dark shape battered against his eyelids. He recognized the shape, spiteful and ugly as a wolf fish—Chief of Security Fowler. The security man was older and heavier, tired somehow. Sure, the hair was thinning and wrinkles were etching their testimony into the flesh around his eyes, but this was unmistakably his jailer. The very same man who had been keeping him prisoner all these years. He heard Fowler’s voice through the fog of violence in his ears, every syllable a month spent in exile, every word a year apart from his beloved Susanna, a year in mourning for his dead son. Fowler barked loudly and a heavy blow knocked him unconscious taking the very light from his eyes.

  Questions. So many questions. Vincent had been very confused when he woke from his dream to find himself tied to his chair. It was a lot less comfortable in this position. And with the lumpy old cushion taken away, now it was just a chair. They’d found the American girl’s computer gizmo behind the service hatch below of course, and Fowler was busily rattling off a tedious list of idiotic questions about it. What the hell did he know about computers, an old man like him? They could see he only had books and papers here, and most of those had turned greener than envy. A “canker” Fowler had called it, Jessie’s laptop. A canker in a hedgerow of wires, ready to be pulled out. Vincent laughed and spat saltwater from his teeth and said whatever, I don’t know a damned single thing you’re asking me and probably never will neither. All I have is this godforsaken lighthouse and the ghost ships that circle it. Which is still a darn sight more than you’ll ever have you petrified, grizzled little bastard. At that, Fowler had shrieked like a horse and flew back downstairs to give his men some grief while they toiled over the damn fool computer like it was a hot griddle. Vincent laughed and laughed, then looked down at what they’d done to his fingernails, all peeled back like petals. She loves me, she loves me not. Little petals on the floor. Oh where did you go my sweet, beautiful Susanna. Hot red petals hanging by a thread from his fingertips. Did you see our boy, did he brush pass you in the hallway? Did you feel his seaweed skin? Help me daddy. And then he passed out again with his brain all filled with blood. Help me son.

  It wasn’t like he was asking the impossible, Fowler merely wanted the laptop disconnected from his network and he wanted it disconnected now. He could hear the logic in his tech guy’s warnings that simply ripping the thing out could leave them open to all kinds of risks. Viruses, Trojans, the dreaded “blue screen of death”, fuck-fuckety-fuck. But not even the prospect of a full security meltdown could temper Fowler. The old man had left him riled that was for sure, stubborn lips clamped shut despite their very best efforts to break through them and loosen his tongue. Even worse, his patrols had now confirmed the Lamplighters missing from their posts. With the Italian boy, or what was left of him, here at the lighthouse he could only assume the kid had helped Vincent rig the laptop. This left the American girl and the new arrival, Miss Neuborn, to be accounted for. It didn’t take a great leap to figure out where they had gone to. Fowler flinched, a facial tic that spasmed across his furrowed brow as he pictured the twin parakeets flapping across his security monitors, bright as fucking day. Swallowing down the beginnings of a bout of acid reflux, Fowler instructed one of his men to get on the radio and find out what the fuck was going on with Adam’s patrol over at the Big House. This was the perfect opportunity for Adam to show what he was made of. Made of shit, and he’ll mess up—if my lousy day thus far is anything to go by, thought Fowler bitterly. He instructed his tech team to get a goddamn frigging move on and stomped back upstairs with his head full of new questions for the lighthouse keeper. He was all out of fingernails, so he’d have no choice but to start on the toes next. All ten of them.

  High up in the trees, a vivid green form rose up from a branch. It spread itself wide and embraced the gentle crosswind, gliding into an expanse of blue. Moments later, it was followed by its twin. The beautiful green birds soared high then weaved in and out of each other’s flight path, lovers and nest-fellows entwined in an invisible trajectory above the dense foliage.

  Far below, Marla and Jessie sweated and struggled on. Marla paused and rotated her shoulders in a circular shrugging motion, giving herself a moment’s blessed reprieve from the clammy patch of sweat forming between the backpack and her spine. She cursed as Jessie, a few steps ahead, pushed past a branch that
swung back and almost took her eye out. All fun and games ’til someone loses an eye, Marla thought darkly. Oblivious to the swinging branch, Jessie pushed on and Marla had no choice to but to follow. She had no idea how long they’d been marching like this, like conscripts plucked from the city and thrust into the jungles of some far flung conflict they had no desire to fight. Cursing under her breath as she almost lost her footing in some brambles for the umpteenth time, Marla found herself missing the city. London. She pictured herself in her bed-sit, filling out the personality test again. The person who’d done that seemed distant to her now, even after just a short time on the island. She wondered if she’d have been so eager to sign her name on the dotted line if she’d known what she’d put herself in line for. Exploding boats, scrambling through tunnels listening to conspiracy theories from a whacked out American hippy chick and, worst of all, leaving poor injured Pietro behind. Not only that, but with only an apparently senile lighthouse keeper to tend his wounds. It didn’t seem decent, or fair. If her legs didn’t hurt so much she’d probably laugh, or cry, or both.

  Just then, she noticed a dark form lying in the foliage just inches from her feet. She stopped to take a look, peering down at the shape to make out what it was.

  The bird lay flat on its back, one eye completely closed—the other open. A tiny fly skated across the black ice surface of the eyeball. Both the bird’s wings were tightly closed around its brown body like formal dress—a tailcoat of funereal finery. There it lay, looking to Marla like it was sleeping. Before she knew what she was doing, she’d crouched down and was gently cradling it in her cupped hands. She lifted it from the leaves and studied it more closely—she could see no sign of trauma. Most of all, she felt surprise at its lightness, its fragility in her hands. She placed it back into its shroud of leaves. There was nothing she could do for the bird now. It looked as though it had simply fallen out of the sky, and Marla found this unfathomably sad. Even the skies around this godforsaken island, it seemed, were filled with death. Inescapable.