I am the Sea

by Matt Stanley

  “It is my property.” I snatched for it but missed.

  “Forget it, lad. I know your game. You want to destroy the evidence.”

  We shuffled around the workbench. He noticed that I was still holding the joiner’s hammer.

  “Ah, so it’s like that, is it?” He snatched the hatchet from its spring bracket and brandished it. “Stop this nonsense, Meakes.”

  “I will not!”

  “So help me God, I will strike you!”

  He wildly swung back his arm.

  That’s when it happened.

  Principal Bartholomew was entering at that very instant, no doubt to investigate the fuss. The hatchet hit him square on his crown. He paused momentarily, stunned by the blow. Blood began to flow from his hairline down the side of his nose and over his lips. He dropped to the ground.

  “What have you done? You’ve killed the principal!”

  Our tools clattered to the ground and we rushed to attend the fallen principal. His body was twitching alarmingly.

  “He’s not dead,” said Mr Adamson. “But he’s in a bad way.”

  “We should signal the shore station. We should show the signal ball.”

  “And what, lad? They’ve missed low tide today. They won’t come out after dark. We’ll have to put him to bed and signal shore first thing tomorrow.”

  “He could die before then.”

  “That’s the reality at Ripsaw. Bartholomew knows it. We all know it.”

  “If he dies…”

  “He’s not going to die.”

  “But if he dies… You may hang for it.”

  “Hang? It was an accident, Meakes.”

  “You struck him.”

  “During an argument with you. If anybody hangs, it will be both of us. It looks bad. After the commissioner. After Spencer. They would hang both of us.”

  The principal was very pale. He had stopped jerking but was entirely immobile. There was a lot of blood on his face and on his clothes. Carrying him two levels down to his bedroom would be very arduous. It occurred to me that it might not be the first time Mr Adamson had carried a body through the lighthouse.

  “Hold his head. I’ll get bandages,” said Mr Adamson.

  I looked at him and in that moment I felt I could read his thoughts: Wait until dark and throw the principal to the sea. It would look suspicious, certainly but there would be no body and no proof. Even if he was later washed upon the reef or the shore, what would it show? A head injury consistent with a fall. Wasn’t the principal always up on the balcony playing with his wind gauge? It was slippery after the snow. Perhaps we could inculpate the principal regarding the commissioner’s disappearance…

  “Meakes! Concentrate. Hold this end of the bandage and I will wrap it. That’s it. Now, support his head. Lift it a little more. Good. I think he’s stopped bleeding.”

  That may have been true, but the principal’s face was oversized with coagulate gore, his white hair clotted with it. Banquo at the dining table.

  “All right, Meakes. I will tie this rope around his armpits and lower him down the stairs. You go down to receive his legs.”

  I went down and waited for the dangling figure to descend, its lifeless feet shuffling and slipping off the steps. In order to prevent another fall, I had to embrace and support the bloody body, besmearing my own clothes and hands. His sticky face was wet against my cheek.

  Thus, with much grunting and muttered expletives from Mr Adamson, we managed to carry and drag Principal Bartholomew to his bedroom, which was locked. Mr Adamson had to look through the unfortunate man’s pockets to find the ring of keys. We looked like two murderers there, blood besmirched and robbing our victim. All of the clumsy manoeuvring had started the bleeding again and the bandage glistened. The air was sharp and coppery.

  “Should we try to revive him?” I asked as we stood, finally, in the bedroom looking down at the body laid out on the bed.

  “No. If he wakes, he wakes. Sleep is good for him. We’ve done all we can. And you should wash yourself, Meakes. You’re quite a sight.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I’m going to sleep. With the principal like this, we’ll have to do longer watches tonight. I advise you to do the same.”

  “You can sleep? With the principal possibly dying?”

  “What else so you suggest, Meakes? Praying? Pray if you like. I’m going to rest.”

  He left.

  I went to the mirror in the principal’s room. My cheeks and hands were badged with blood. I saw my blanched reflection at a different time, tricked with blood, each droplet fresh and ruby bright, runnels of it tickling down my neck and arms. It will have blood, they say. Blood will have blood.

  I washed my face and changed my clothes. I scrubbed the light-room store’s stone floor. But still I could not expunge the smell of it. It seemed Ripsaw was a charnel house.

  It seems so still, as I sit here writing in the library.

  I cannot stop thinking of the principal lying there below, his face a viscous mask of haematite, his sanguineous crown still stiffening with its dudgeon gouts of blood. The herring gulls scream murder in his name.

  They say that before Caesar fell, the graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead did squeak and gibber in the streets, and the stars were with trains of fire, and there were dews of blood, and disasters in the sun, and that the moist moon was sick with eclipse.

  Something has changed at Ripsaw. The column leans askew.

  Something is unbalanced. There is a sense of dread. We wait until tomorrow, when we will summon the cutter.

  The bottle message is safely folded inside my jacket pocket.

  * * *

  We ate dinner almost in silence, Mr Adamson and I: birds he had collected from the balcony and cooked into a stew. I did not appreciate the flavour. He, too, ate without any evidence of pleasure.

  We had visited the principal in his room, both together and separately. The man looked like a tomb-carving of a medieval king once we had mopped daubed gore from his face and changed his bandages. His skin was stony white and pitted as if by passing centuries. His hands lay crossed upon his chest. His pulse was weak, his breathing weaker. Neither one of us said what we were thinking.

  I was first on watch. I lit the stove in the light-room and then the lamp in the lantern. The flame seemed smaller and duller than usual. It was probably due to the freezing air and the chilled pump tubes, but I imagined the lighthouse knew about its principal and was subdued.

  I set the lens revolving and stood for a while outside it, watching twilight fold into night and darkness roll across the sky. I considered that it might be my last watch at Ripsaw if the cutter came the next day with replacement keepers. They hadn’t planned to take me back to shore, but in the light of recent events…

  Was it necessary to grant them access to our castle? What if we bolted the door? What could they do? There was no castle keep across the kingdom more inaccessible than Ripsaw. No siege engine could breach its walls. No invading force could raise ladders against it. The enormous cost of building it meant that no cannon would ever be aimed at its slender shaft. All they could do is leave us inside to starve. But would we? The fish of the sea, the birds of the air would feed us. The clouds would give us water. They say that certain kinds of seaweed are nutritious.

  I was in the light-room, half dozing, when a sense of dread jarred me quite awake. The room was suffused with an unearthly red light so that I fancied myself drowning in blood. I looked to the stove, expecting a fire to have started in its flue, but it was closed and calm. The truth was even more unnerving: the red light was emanating from outside the lighthouse. The sky through the north window was a mixture of carmine and magenta. The light through the mesh ceiling was incandescent.

  I rushed up the metal steps to the lantern and into the lens, which had become a great faceted garnet flashing with peridot and emerald sparks. I was inside the bowl of an alchemist’s alembic, where magic swirled and where immutable
properties transformed against the will of nature. Supernal luminosity was magnified upon me, robing me as cardinal, as jester, as caliph or maharajah.

  The light outside was moving, undulating, the sky aflame. Was this Judgement? Was this apocalypse?

  I ducked under the lens and went into the lantern. The horizon was decorated with luminous cathedrals: arches, spires, buttresses of vermilion. Viridian ribbons soared as flames. Tourmaline currents swelled and ebbed. Its palette stained the sky as drops of blood in water: whirling, twisting, tinting the medium of night with their cold mineral fire.

  I stood quite transfixed at the spectacle, watching the great band of greens and reds writhing through the heavens. Emerald, violet, amethyst. The lantern had become a limpid pool amid a world of darkness and I, the solitary fish within, gaped at a firmament afire.

  I spread my arms and thought I saw the holy conflagration swell. Massed celestial armies were contending there beyond: heaven, arrayed in gold, empyreal from before her vanished night, shot through with orient beams, when all the plain covered with thick embattled squadrons bright chariots and flaming arms and fiery steeds reflecting blaze on blaze. It was an angelic conflagration. Azazel, Belial, Mulciber and Gabriel. Abdiel, Ithuriel, Urania and Zephron…

  I leaned against the lantern panes, momentarily overcome. The glass was cool against my hands. My reflection, shorn head spiky and features blurred with misted breath, did not seem my own. A short shadow flitted behind me.

  “Jimmy? Is that you?”

  SIXTEEN

  There was no need to signal shore the next morning. The day was clear, the sea calm and the cutter visible through a telescope. I sat waiting with Mr Adamson in the kitchen. We were both in uniform. We had checked on the principal just after dawn. Faint pulse. Barely perceptible breathing.

  “They’ll be bringing relief keepers,” said Mr Adamson.

  “But they know nothing of Principal Bartholomew.”

  “Doesn’t matter. They were probably planning to take him anyway.”

  I waited for him to suggest some mutiny or other strategy to remain, but he sat lugubrious and passive, seemingly accepting of his fate. We had met twice during the night as we exchanged watches and stood together briefly watching the aurora borealis. But he said he had seen it before and went to the light-room to read. The principal’s accident seems to have subdued him greatly.

  “What do we tell them?” I said. “About his head?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it looks bad for us. It is our responsibility.”

  “You mean my responsibility. It was I who struck him. What do you suggest? That we lie? Do you want to claim that he fell?”

  “I don’t know… I…”

  “And what happens when he awakes and tells the full story?”

  “Will he awake? His skin is the colour of his hair.”

  A hard stare. “He has a pulse, Meakes. He’s breathing.”

  “Then going to shore is the best thing for him. He needs a physician.”

  He nodded, but slowly, watching me.

  “Meakes – I want you to give me that so-called bottle message.”

  “I have destroyed it.”

  “I don’t believe you. I will not have you spreading your absurd lies.”

  “What does it matter if you are going ashore?”

  “It matters because I will have no man falsely accuse me. Very well. A compromise: you can destroy the message. Throw it into the stove now and we’ll watch it burn together. That’s the best thing for both of us. I think you know what I’m talking about.”

  “I threw it in the sea. It was the cause of Principal Bartholomew’s injury and I could not bear to look at it.”

  “Meakes…”

  “I am telling the truth.”

  “I think you very seldom tell the truth, Meakes. The Commission knows it. You think they are coming for me and Bartholomew and maybe they are, but it’s you they’re worried about. They’ve been investigating you.”

  “You are an eavesdropper.”

  “No worse than you.”

  He went to the window.

  “The cutter approaches, lad. Here comes your reckoning.”

  * * *

  It was clear that no new keepers were aboard the cutter – just the usual crew and one other man. Another commissioner come to enquire about his predecessor? He didn’t look like a commissioner. He looked like an undertaker: thin, grave, humourless. Mr Adamson said he looked like trouble.

  Through the telescope’s watery gaze, the gentleman was stern and serious. He seemed unused to being on the sea, judging by the way he held on to the rail, his eyes fixed on the unmoving lighthouse. Indeed, it appeared he was looking directly at my face, though he could not possibly have known which window I was occupying.

  We went down to the main door like condemned men and then onto the rock to secure ropes.

  “Where is Principal Bartholomew?” called the skipper.

  “Injured,” I said.

  “In bed,” replied Mr Adamson at the same instant.

  “Injured how?”

  “An accident. Can you take him back to shore?”

  The skipper conferred with the new man.

  “I’ll send a couple of men to help with the principal. This is Mister Jackson from London. He’s come to visit the house while the tide is low.”

  They all jumped to the rock and we ascended the ladder without a word being exchanged, though Mr Adamson and I shared glances as we led them to the principal’s room.

  “Is he dead?” said one of the crewmen. “He looks dead.”

  “He’s very unwell,” said Mr Adamson. “I think you’ll need to carry him out. There’s a litter in the light-room store. I’ll show you.”

  “No,” said the “visitor” Mr Jackson. “The crew can fetch it alone. I need to speak to you two gentlemen.” He nodded his permission and the crewmembers ascended with downcast gazes.

  “What’s this about, then?” said Mr Adamson “I don’t think you’re a commissioner.”

  “I am not. But I am here at their behest to discern the truth of what has occurred. Now that I am here, I see that there is an additional question about the condition of your principal.”

  “It was an accid—”

  He cut me off with an upraised hand. “I am going to spend an hour or so looking over this house. Then I will interview each of you in turn. I ask that you, Mister Adamson await me in the kitchen. You, Mister Meakes, may settle yourself in the library.”

  He turned and ascended without waiting to see if we would obey his orders.

  Mr Adamson waited until the footsteps had gone up two levels before muttering: “Listen, Meakes. I don’t like this one. The Commission has it in for us – that much is clear. They’re looking for scapegoats. Tell him whatever you like about the commissioner and Bartholomew, but don’t you try to incriminate me in any way, do you hear? In turn, I won’t say anything about your morphia or about your bottle message or… Your background. Do we have an accord?”

  “My background?”

  “Meakes! We don’t have time for this. Do we have an accord? Tell the truth, but no mud-slinging or imaginative fancies. That’s what they want us to do.”

  “I have nothing to hide.”

  “Right. I am going to the kitchen to await him. We’ll talk later… If we’re still here. I’ve seen no replacements. And Meakes – I swear I’ll throw you from the balcony if you incriminate me in any way. Understand?”

  He went down and I went up to the library. I looked out of the weather-side window to check that the cutter couldn’t see and dropped the bottle to the waves. I didn’t see it land.

  And I waited. The commissioner had said that they were planning to further investigate the unfortunate circumstances of Mr Fowler’s death, but had he formally communicated this intention before his visit to the house? Or had the loss of his notes marked the end of that enquiry?

  I was not afraid. A bloodied cudgel h
ad been found in Tibbotson’s bed, and Tibbotson had always been the most unpredictable. He had struck Mr Fowler previously on occasion and was the most obvious candidate. He will likely hang, protesting his innocence to the last. As for the disputed date on my recommendation letter, it was clearly just an error. Nothing to worry about.

  “Mister Meakes. I am ready for you.”

  I stood as Mr Jackson entered the library and seated himself at the table. I thought I could see a roll of newspapers under his arm. The ones from Mr Adamson’s bed? He was also carrying a logbook I didn’t recognise. Principal Bartholomew’s?

  “Sit, please,” he said. “Time is short.”

  He did not look at me. Instead, he took a small notebook from his breast pocket and flicked to a page. He read for what seemed a disproportionate amount of time – no doubt some trick to unnerve. Finally, he fixed me with an unblinking stare. His eyes were pale grey.

  “What was your part in the commissioner’s death?”

  “I… I had no part in his disappearance.”

  “He has not disappeared, Mister Meakes. He is dead. That much is clear.”

  “He was on the balcony and then he was not.”

  “Do you surmise that he fell?”

  “That is the only possible conclusion, is it not?”

  “And why would he fall? I have checked the weather logs. There was no wind and no ice that night – only fog. The balcony rail would have been at chest height; he could not have toppled accidentally. Nor was he a man for jumping. Therefore, he was thrown. Did you throw him?”

  “No! Why… What possible reason would I have to do such a thing?”

  “Perhaps to thwart or evade whatever measures he discussed with you in his interview. I understand his notes are missing?”

  “Yes, sir. We looked all over the house. The three of us.”

  “That is very convenient. I will not make another search now – there is no time and I am certain they have been disposed of. Fortunately, there is a record of what the commissioner intended to discuss.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Indeed. So I will know if you are lying when you tell me what you discussed with the commissioner in your interview.”