by Lars Jerlach
It was but a stroke of luck that it was discovered he was missing. The Coast Guard had assigned a new keeper to the lighthouse to relieve ES, and it was he who immediately informed the Coast Guard that ES was missing from his post. It was first assumed that something unexpected had happened. However, the new keeper could not find any evidence of an accident and although none of ES’s personal belongings could be found in or around the lighthouse, he had nevertheless left everything else as if he was ready to return at any moment. The kettle was on the stove, the teapot had fresh leaves in it and a small white porcelain cup was half filled with water. This had so confounded the new lighthouse keeper, that he mentioned it to his employer, who in turn revealed it to me.
It is difficult to determine exactly when or how ES left the tower, but according to the accounts from the passing ships, the lighthouse had been operating every night, leading up to the very day of his disappearance. It is still a mystery how he managed to leave, what he did or where he lived in the months between leaving the lighthouse and when he was found sleeping on the pier in B habour.
As far as we know, ES has no surviving family members. His parents and an older unmarried brother are dead, as are, we assume, his wife and his two daughters. His wife Emily was an only child and her parents died in the fire in 1872, when she was still a young girl. She was raised by an aunt in N before marrying ES. When ES’s estate was sold, the Coast Guard attempted to contact the aunt, but she had moved away from the area with no forwarding address, so in the end the Coast Guard elected to provide our institution with the necessary cash reserve to keep E.S. as a patient for as long as we deemed it necessary. The money was sufficient to keep E.S. comfortable for the rest of his natural life and his former employer stopped querying about his progress more than a decade ago, most likely because our answers never varied.
When ES became a patient at the institution, he was initially placed in the common area. However, an array of factors made it difficult for us to keep him with the other patients. Due to his deeply ingrained personal habits, his daily routine and internal system was directly opposite to the other patients. He would sleep for most of the day and although his somnambulistic behaviour was manageable and his general demeanor non aggressive, his nightly escapades nevertheless had a profoundly upsetting effect on a large number his fellow patients. As you know, we do our best not to restrain our patients unless absolutely necessary, but though we attempted to alter his behaviour, the nightly wanderings unfortunately created a variety of commotions that were extremely difficult for us to ease. A large number of our exceedingly frail patients became so agitated by his actions, that they had to be restrained at night.
We endeavoured to change his behaviour, but after a few months, and after a particularly long night spent calming down other patients, it was decided that ES was to be moved to one of the cells, that were normally used for our most troubled patients. That is where I, as his assigned physician, met him for the first time.
When I first met him on his own, he was standing by the window looking outside, but was otherwise unresponsive. Although it did seem like his eyes were following the movements of the birds in the sky, he didn’t turn around when I entered the room or when I addressed him by name. In fact there were no response to any external stimuli and there was no obvious sign of a startle reflex. I lead him by the arm to the stool where he sat down. He passively permitted me to listen to his breathing and to his heart. His physical condition was, all things considered, good, and I could find nothing wrong with his motor skills, nor with his physical reflexes. I explained to him why I was there and talked to him about the tests I was performing. I attempted, as is usual when treating a patient, to behave as if this was an altogether normal interaction. The entire time I was there, he gazed unseeingly into the distance. Not once did he acknowledge that he was sharing his cell with another human being. However, my initial belief that ES was completely passive was wrong. You see, he was capable of quite a few specific tasks. For instance, he could move voluntarily and he didn’t need help with feeding. The orderly would push the food tray through the hatch and at some point during the day or night the food would disappear. When I visited there was often an empty tray standing on the table, and yet I never saw him consume anything. Also, after being placed in the cell he never once soiled himself. At night, during his continued nightly excursions, he would, again unobserved, use the bucket provided.
He spent his day standing by the window or sitting by the table in the cell, as if he was a performer in a silent play. To my knowledge he never spoke a word during these sessions and none of the night guards or orderlies that I interviewed, ever heard him say anything at all.
On my early encounters with ES in the general ward, I was convinced that he was suffering from a combination of narcolepsy and stupor brought on by a traumatic event. I believed then that he was exhibiting all the standard symptoms of those particular afflictions. However, after visiting him in his cell and observing his progress, I later began to hypothesize that ES had originally entered into a deep depressive state due to the tragic death of his family and that he at some point afterwards suffered from an inflammation of the brain, possibly Encephalitis Lethargica, causing the disturbance in his sleep pattern and the ensuing catatonic state. Although I realize not all of the resulting symptoms fit that theory, it would certainly explain the extensive behavioral changes and the hallucinatory narrative in his stories.
In the first couple of years, I visited ES three to four times a week. In that time there was no noticeable change in his behaviour. During the day he was asleep and in the evenings, when I would normally visit, he was in the same passive state as when I first met him. I one day discussed my patient’s lack of progress with Dr. K, with whom you are familiar, and it was under his supervision, that we attempted electroshock therapy to see if we could somehow restore or at least alter the patient’s behavioral pattern. Alas, the experiment was less than successful as ES seemed to retreat even further into his self-created adytum. He also temporarily lost control of both his motor skills and his bodily functions as a result, so we halted the therapy after eight sessions and never repeated them.
After a couple of months ES seemed to settle back into his old routine. He was not self- harming or aggressive and in no way a danger to himself or others, so I decided to revert to my former strategy and only use verbal communication in my dealings with him.
Years went by with no radical change in his general attitude and ES continued to function as well as could be expected. However, it was one day discovered that he had begun writing on the walls in the cell. It took some time for me to realize this, due to the fact that the walls in the cell were already covered with small inscriptions made by previous patients and that his initial scribbles were close to the ground by the bed. An orderly who was
in charge of changing the bed linen discovered that ES had used a small piece of grit to scrape his initials on the wall next to the name of his wife.
I was immediately convinced that this was a breakthrough and believed that I had finally managed, through my countless monologues, to rouse something vital within him that had eventually come bubbling to the surface. After the writings were discovered I had an intensive session with ES where I talked specifically about the constitutive memories he might still have of his wife and daughters. He was entirely passive throughout the session and seemed as remote as ever. On the ensuing session, I began to monitor his writings and to copy them in my journal. I had hoped that he would utilize the writings as a direct communication and that he would somehow show me that he understood what had happened to him or where he was. Unfortunately that was not the case. The first sentence was proof that ES believed himself to be someplace else entirely. ‘The sea is calm’, he wrote on the wall by the window. It was clear to me then, that he believed himself to be in the lighthouse still.
Although it was highly inadvisable to supply a patient with an instrument with which he could harm himse
lf, I nonetheless had the carpenter fashion a small wooden handle on which he inserted a small dull piece of metal, that could be used as a rudimentary writing tool. Following my next session with ES, I left the tool behind on the table and ordered an orderly to keep watch, in case ES attempted to harm himself. I had no reason to worry.
The next time I visited his cell, I realized why.
On the wall above his bed ES had started to write the letter to his wife that you have already read at the beginning of his tale. He was more than halfway through and I again tried to talk to him about his actions, but he was completely unresponsive and didn’t in any way demonstrate whether he knew I was talking to him.
Throughout the next year, ES continued to fill the walls in his cell with words and sometimes drawings. On each of my regular visits, I made sure to write down everything he wrote or drew. I then began to pin up the notes in my office, to see if I could discover any specific connecting elements that could aid in the healing of his mind. I must admit it took me a while to understand that there was a definitive system to his writing. Rather than the despaired ravings of a lost soul, ES was through his script describing a complex and multilayered story, that although bizarre, I found exceptionally fascinating.
Soon after I discovered that there was an aspect of lucidity in his writings, I gave a detailed account of the patient’s case, and the extraordinary development surrounding it, to a selective group of my fellow physicians. Everyone seemed astounded by this intriguing development and after consulting with Dr. K., it was agreed to supply E.S. with the appropriate writing tools and a daily quantity of paper to encourage him on his way to recovery. I introduced the items immediately and although ES’s general behaviour and his attitude towards me remained unchanged, he began, almost instantly, to write down the story you have just read. As he only wrote at night during his somnambulations, we supplied him with a candle so he could see what he was writing in the dark. When I later realized that he was an enthusiastic smoker, I added the pipe and the tobacco, initially to ease his anguish, but mainly so he could feel more human. Although he had no trouble lightning the pipe or smoking the tobacco, there was never any indication that he understood why or how the pipe and tobacco appeared. They were quite simply accepted as the other basic elements in his confined life. When he finished the tobacco, he just replaced the pipe on the tray. I never even knew if he enjoyed the tobacco I bought.
I am currently in possession of at least twelve different manuscripts, all telling a slightly different variation of the same story. Each manuscript essentially has the same structure and narrative, but each also has its own unique departure from the norm. For instance, in some of the stories the bull is black not white, and sometimes the black raven is white and vice versa. Also, it seems that the eyes of the raven change colour from time to time. Most peculiarly though, some of the characters seem to alternate.
As an example: In one of the stories, the poet Poe is to be found in the well, where he has a conversation with the white raven about poetry.
The man Toru is, in the same story, found to be inhabiting Poe’s body in the cemetery, where he talks to the black raven about a lost cat. There are probably a slew of other permutations that I have overlooked, but these are, as far as I am aware, some of the more significant changes. I will be more than happy to share these manuscripts with you, should you wish to read them as well. However, the most significant alteration is the addition of the last chapter. It is the only time ES ever wrote about or described his immediate situation. I found the manuscript on the table in his cell the day he passed away.
I have of course speculated at length about the meaning of the dreams and the overall narrative of ES and while I believe it has been possible to make sense of some of the more rational accounts, through my own analysis and the conversations I have had with my fellow physicians on the subject, I must admit I have found many of the tales especially difficult to decipher. I know you are an ardent follower of the latest development of the use of dreams in therapy. I would therefore very much appreciate your professional insight.
I am especially interested in reading your interpretation of the fact that ES, in his apparently ‘lucid’ state, wrote as an observer about his own experience as a lighthouse keeper, and that he as such, read his own writing not realizing that the words belonged to him. Also, I am intrigued to know, if you differentiate between the dreams that have a base in reality and the dreams that are merely fantastical.
I wish that I had thought to ask for your help earlier, but as you have been busy building your own successful career, I always feared it would be too much of an imposition. I am however very much looking forward to reading your professional diagnosis and wait for your answer with anticipation. I truly appreciate your help in this matter. If truth be told, the case of ES has cast a significant shadow upon my life for so long and I hope that your diagnosis will provide just a modicum of much needed clarity to the meaning of it all.
Yours sincerely,
E
He flicked the last sheet of paper down on the expansive tabletop. It floated like a thin membrane on the smooth lacquered surface and came to rest next to the small heap of papers lying near the edge.
He gazed into the distance as he listened to the raindrops beating on the windowpane. He put his hands on the table, pushing the chair away behind him as he stood up.
He slowly walked to the window.
He pulled his jacket close around his neck and looked into the darkness outside.
What had started as a slight drizzle in the early evening, had turned into a veritable downpour that now completely obscured his view.
He poured himself a drink.
The amber liquid flowed like a miniature waterfall from the decanter, and splashed into the bottom of the heavy crystal glass.
He lifted the glass to his lips. He appreciated the almost conflagrant sensation on his tongue. He swirled the liquid around in his mouth before he swallowed.
He waited for the warmth to suffuse his body, as he picked up the pipe and the red can of tobacco from the low blackwood coffee table. He pushed the tobacco into the bowl of a dark briar pipe and lit it with a match that he removed from a small box in his jacket pocket.
There were two matches left.
As he inhaled and exhaled, he looked at the undulating flame weaving its way in and out of the tobacco strands. He blew the smoke into the air, replaced the can on the coffee table and looked at the thin hazy blanket undulating in the air high above his head.
He walked back to the window and tapped on the glass with the end of the pipe.
For a while nothing happened.
He tapped on the windowpane once more and then he at last heard the sound of wings pushing against the air.
The sound stopped and he looked through the glass.
Outside two ravens were sitting on the windowsill.
One was iridescent black and the other ivory white.
They were quietly watching him.
He looked at his reflection in the windowpane.
His eyes were staring back at him. The right was as dark as the bottom of a well and the other icy blue and brilliant as a sapphire. “Why have you called on us keeper of the lighthouse?” The ravens asked in unison.
The sound appeared as if it was spoken from a place inside his head.
“We have work to do,” he answered.
As he opened the window to let in the birds, a delicate membrane of wet cold formed on his skin.
“We are here.” They sang in concert, flying through the air.
“We are here.”
He picked up the manuscript from the table, walked over to the fireplace and tossed it in the fire.
The near diaphanous sheets submitted to the fiery embrace like a long lost lover.
From the back of the chair the devouring flames were reflected in the eyes of the ravens.
He sat back down in the chair and gazed at the piece of paper lying on the table in
front of him.
The sheet was small, not much bigger than a regular postcard, and almost translucent.
It was blank.
He picked up the quill and dipped the tip in the inkwell.
In the background he could hear the sound of waves crashing against the rocks.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my editor and friend Kavi Montanaro for his guidance, insightful advice and patience in the writing of this book. Without the countless conversations and his unwavering enthusiasm for the plight of Enoch Soule, one can only speculate how this manuscript would have presented itself.
Thanks also to Christian O’Connor for his shrewd and humorous caffeine induced input.
I am forever indebted to Kyle Louis Fletcher for lending his time and his marvelously creative talent to the cover design and artwork of this book.
Thanks also to Rita Stringfellow for her continued support during this undertaking.
I would also like to give my sincere thanks to Jesper Magnusson for his ardent belief in me. His changeless loyalty over the years has been next to none and is very much appreciated.