by Matt Stanley
“I have not seen that message.”
“But you have seen the others. In the privy. In the kitchen cupboard. I like the principal’s leeches. And the birds that crash into the lantern.”
“When have you seen the birds? There is always a man on duty when the lamp is lighted.”
“Sometimes you sleep. That’s my chance. I can sneak about like a mouse. Nobody sees me.”
“I can assure you that I never sleep while on duty.”
“You were sleeping just now. And when you took your morphia.”
“How do you know about—?”
“Mister Adamson is a bad man. Do you know why?”
I stared at this sickly apparition, who spoke to me with such unnerving familiarity. His presence in the lighthouse was not possible, but there he stood with his earnest, pallid face.
“He has a secret,” he said. “We can find his secret together if you like. I can creep like a mouse.”
“Where do you sleep, boy?”
“Different places. Mostly in the provision store. There’s a blanket. When it’s colder, in the water store beside the stove. Nobody sees me in the shadows.”
“You must remain hidden, boy. You should not be here in the light-room. Mister Adamson must not know about you. Stay in the house’s depths. Will you do that?”
“If you say so.”
“Go. Go now. Mister Adamson may come at any moment.”
He went, offering a weak smile and a wave before descending.
Something in his demeanour unsettled me. Something infirm and pestilent. Whey-faced. Linen-cheeked. There was something tombal about him. He was from a different place.
I thought back to my arrival. Could he really have been a stowaway on that vessel? Where? Under a tarpaulin amid the cargo? If so, how had he entered the lighthouse without anybody seeing? Hidden among the fresh provisions? Hoisted unwittingly inside a bag?
It was not possible. And yet here he was. He had spoken to me.
I sit writing this at the light-room desk. It is three o’clock in the morning and Mr Adamson has still not come. The coal in the stove has burned down and I cannot fetch more from the store without leaving the light unattended.
I know that probably nothing would happen – that I could quickly descend and fetch more coal without anybody noticing. But I must maintain the light. I must not leave the light. I am cold and my legs are stiff.
Also, I don’t want to encounter the boy again. I would not like to see his face emerging from the shadows – a thing of shadows itself. If it is true that he has always been here, he has become bolder now that the principal has gone. I preferred it when he was scuttling murine and unseen about the house.
EIGHTEEN
I write this feeling grateful to be alive. Cold has penetrated my bones. Not only cold, but fear.
It started when I went out on to the balcony to relieve myself around four o’clock this morning. I knew I should not do it, but what choice did I have with Mr Adamson absent and the light depending on my presence? I left the lee-side door ajar, unbolted, and spent no more than thirty seconds completing my business.
On returning, however, I discovered the door bolted in the closest of the countersunk boltholes. Had the door blown shut? I kneeled and tried to raise the bolt, but the gap was barely a finger’s width: too narrow for any kind of manoeuvring. I remained calm. I went to the weather-side door, which was closed and bolted quite flush with the jamb. The lee-side door was my only source of ingress.
The wind was moderate but bitingly cold, carrying flecks of ice that equivocated between rain and snow. The sea’s surface was a wilderness of choppy troughs. I tried again to prise the bolt from its hole with no success. There was no chance of waiting until dawn, or whenever Mr Adamson might notice my absence.
I put my face to the gap and shouted.
“Mister Adamson! Mister Adamson!”
But my voice at the crack was lost to the sky and the air. It was a wave breaking against a letterbox – only a meagre quantity of water entering. I began to kick the bottom of the door, but the thick metal absorbed my blows. Downstairs, they would be no more audible than the beaks of birds against the lantern.
It was only then that I wondered: had Mr Adamson closed the door and bolted it?
Had he discussed something with Mr Jackson that angered him and compelled him to seek revenge against me? Had he found something in Principle Bartholomew’s room that cast me in a negative light? It’s true that he saved my life in the lantern that snowy night, but my death would have fallen on his watch. He would have looked guilty. Now, it would appear my own fault if I had locked myself out of the light-room and been chilled to death.
I wrenched at the door. I sat on the hard, hobnailed floor and braced my feet against the wall to pull. But the bolt had been engineered to withstand implacable elements. Did I have more force than a tempest gust? Would the metal budge for me but not a screaming squall?
Or had it been the boy? That anaemic spectre pervading the house. That lurking imp. Perhaps this was a game for him: to lock me out and chuckle from the shadows at my increasingly urgent cries.
If I could survive until dawn, I could raise the signal ball and summon help. But the sea was boisterous. The sky was an angry palette. I might wait days until anyone came, snow settling on my body, my fingers frozen to the railing.
Three possibilities existed for ingress, each one as suicidal as the next. I could jump two hundred feet to the sea, swim to the pediment and beat at the main door. The fall would kill me, naturally. Or I could dangle from the balcony overhang and somehow swing in vertiginous terror to reach a light-room window with a foot. Pure fear would assuredly cripple that attempt. Or I could climb up on the railing and jump up to the parapet around the lantern. This risked a fall and a broken limb. Or a slip and a plummet to the devouring void.
Was this how the commissioner had died? Trying to gain access to the light-room because the door was locked?
The railing was beaded with moisture and dripping. Slippery. I would have to mount it facing the sea and without any support; I’d have to then pivot to face the house like a funambulist isolated on his wire; then leap, fingers splayed, to grab the parapet, where the full weight of my body would dangle until I could either hoist myself up or feel my hands disjointed.
The view to the sea below was abominable. The tower mocked me with its height. The reef beckoned with its mendacious surf. Nothing to fear here! This whiteness is mere down to absorb your fall. There are no rending pinnacles beneath to smash your bones! Come! Come!
I gripped the rail. It was level with my breast. I could not possibly mount it and stand upon it without falling headfirst to my death. No man could manage that feat of balance. No, not even a circus aerialist could vault atop this two-inch ledge when faced with a horizon of sheer nothingness. One’s mind revolts from the mere thought of it. The soul shrivels in fear.
But a thought occurred. I could straddle the railing like a gymnast’s horse and perhaps work myself into a standing position from sitting. That way, I could face the lighthouse. If I fell, I’d fall towards the balcony, Better to break a wrist than dash my brains against the rock.
Wait and hope.
Or climb and jump.
I pressed my palms against the cold metal and pushed myself up so that I could swing a leg over the rail. I was sitting on it – the lighthouse on one side, death on the other. I gripped the rail with white knuckles. I was shaking. The vacuity of sea and sky seemed to lure my body and tug at the leg that dangled there. Come! Relinquish your grip!
I tried lifting my foot and placing it on the rail: an awkward position that caused my head and torso to lean towards the house. I could see only one possibility: use that tentative foot and my arms to compel the other foot to rise and then, in the instant when both feet were on the rail, before I had time to topple, use both legs to leap for the parapet.
Blood roared in my ears. My throat was constricted. A cold weight squatte
d in my chest. I took a deep breath…
I strained with hands and foot to raise my body and the heavy, pendulous leg. I placed the second boot upon the rail and – Oh God! The fear, the insanity of it! – I was standing on the rail, balancing twixt salvation and annihilation – my arms held up for equilibrium like a clumsy bird about to assail the light.
I tottered. I swayed. I wavered in stability for the most infinitesimal of moments, counterbalancing my earthly, mortal body with jerking arms and shaking knees.
I looked up at the parapet and this small change in symmetry was enough to provoke the beginnings of a fall. I swung my arms. I flexed my legs. I leaped for the parapet with the energy I had left and felt its metal mesh bite into my fingers.
I clenched my hands. A nail ripped. My body hung like a side of beef from its hook, heavier with every passing second. If I could not pull myself up to a level above my head, I would have to do it all again.
I strained my arms and swung a heel up to grip the parapet. Now I was hanging by two hands and foot. I levered myself with preternatural effort until my hip was level with the metal and swung with all my might to land panting and sobbing beside the lantern panes.
I must have lain there for some moments, wanting to sleep, wanting to bathe in the cold beam that washed over me every thirty seconds. The beam could revive. The beam was light in darkness. Snowflakes kissed my skin. Now I would have to shatter a pane to enter the lantern.
The glass is thick and strong, made to withstand wind, ice, bird-strike and debris flung by storms. I had no tool to break it. My knuckles, my elbows would surly fracture before the pane would. Gross impiety was the only option.
I kicked with the toe of my boot at the broadest part of the triangular pane. As hard as I could. It cracked with a sharp report. Again, and a silver web spread. Again and the pieces tumbled over my foot and lower leg. Salvation!
I crawled over broken shards, feeling the glass slice through my clothes and skin, and fell into the lantern. Inside was warm. Inside, the ventilator whined at the new influx of air. The mechanism droned. The lens’ great vitreous eye stared impassively at this bedraggled figure that had violated its sanctum sanctorum.
Sleep weighed heavily upon me. My limbs were iron. Gravity held me against the floor. I had not slept for the whole night, and darkness still lay before me. My watch was not over.
I must have slept. When I awoke, it was to a diluted dawn: a fragile and apologetic sky. The sea rolled and spat. Hunger throbbed inside my knotted viscera.
I extinguished the lamp and stopped the mechanism. I raised the counterweight with weary rotations of the crank. I noted the temperature and the pressure. Later, I wondered that I had done any of these things without thinking. It was pure habit. Monks will wake just moments before the bells that call them to prayer. Prisoners learn to associate the rattle of keys with mealtimes.
And I examined the door that had locked me out. The bolt sat comfortably in its bored hole but the arm was not turned sideways and secured in a lateral slot. It looked as if the door had blown closed and the bolt had dropped accidentally. Mr Adamson would have known this. Perhaps the boy, too.
One thing was certain: Mr Adamson had not relieved me. I was angry despite my fatigue. I would go and talk to him.
I did not have to go far. He was not in his room. He was in the commissioner’s room – reading in bed with a cup of coffee steaming on the bedside table.
“What do you mean by leaving me on duty all night?” I said.
“Ah, Meakes. You look terrible, lad.”
“I waited all night. I called you on the whistle.”
He pointed to the wall. “There’s no whistle in this bedroom. I will be sleeping here from now on.”
“Access to the commissioner’s room is forbidden.”
“By whom? The principal? The Commission? They don’t know where I am, lad. They don’t know where I sleep or if I do my watch. They can’t see me.”
“But…”
“But… the rules. The regulations. I know. But I’m the acting principal now. I’m in charge of this house. I’m king of this castle! And I say that this room is mine. I say that there will no be more watches for Adamson. Nor more cleaning for Adamson. No more ash bucket. Only comfort. Reading. Eating well. You, Meakes – you may do as you wish. Light the lamp or don’t. It doesn’t matter to me. Live as you please.”
“We are responsible for lives!”
“No, lad. Every captain, every sailor is responsible for his own life. Do you really think the Commission is bothered about saving lives? Every vessel in every port in this kingdom pays a toll to pass these houses. How many vessels is that each year?”
“But when they come… When they come in the boat and find you here as dissolute as a sultan and neglecting your duties?”
“What about it, Meakes? It’s not a crime to be insubordinate. All they can do is dismiss me without pay. They’ve been threatening that for so long now… Well, no more!”
“And if they try to prosecute us for Principal Bartholomew? For the commissioner? Two men have died here. Three men.”
“I’ve killed nobody, lad. Accidents and disappearances. These things happen. While they deliberate and collect their evidence, I’ll live as a free man. You – you do as you wish.”
“We are responsible. We have a duty.”
“They chose well when the picked you as a keeper, Meakes. But think about it for a moment. When does the light ever go out for want of a witness? It can’t go out! It’s not necessary for man to be there in ceaseless vigil every night. If the oil pump breaks, the bell stops ringing. If the light goes out, we can see it from the bedroom window. You… You and old Bartholomew – you’re like those ancient priests offering their idols sacrifices of blood and fire and prayers. And were their battles always won? Did the plague pass safely through their lands? Did the storm leave ships undamaged and souls undrowned? Were people saved from being slain and exploited and abused? Of course not! They were praying to an effigy! They were pleading with a stone! Their sacred rites were fantasies that existed only in their dreams. Wake up, Meakes! Light the lamp if you must, but don’t nurse it. Don’t make it your idol.”
He had become quite red in the face. I had thought were now just two here in the lighthouse, but now I see I am one alone. I, and the boy lurking in the depths.
NINETEEN
The weather has turned worse. The pressure is falling slowly day by day and the wind is increasing. Sight of land is often lost amid the speeding spray. Waves beat about the bottom of the column like a man interred alive and thundering at his coffin for salvation. I hardy hear them now. Only the heaviest impacts compel me to pause momentarily as plates rattle and glasses tinkle.
Rain has lashed us for days, switching its assault according to the wind direction. I like to stand in the lantern and watch the deluge strike the panes in spewing gouts, cascading in silver frills and leaving liquid lacework dripping. The drops quiver lonely, seeking others to conjoin and swell and weep together down the glass. I have passed unmeasured time in this manner.
Likewise with the sea, which is a canvas forever in transition. Its brushwork swirls in bottle-green and turquoise, sapphire and cobalt, slate and charcoal. Crests fleck phosphorescent in the night. Waves heave and roll and crash against the tearing reef. Here, nature rages at the artificial imposition of man.
I have not relinquished my responsibility to the lamp. I cannot. I know that routine is good for me. The bottle message reminded me of as much. Routine and order. Every night, I ascend and light the lamp. Only now, I have fastened the kitchen hand-bell to the light-room trapdoor so that I can hear if anyone enters. I leave a chair between the balcony doors and the jamb to prevent closing, accidental or otherwise. I am the only acting keeper, but not the only actor in this drama.
I often wonder how they view the lighthouse from the shore station. Are their telescopes trained on us at all times? Do they see this slender column and imagine a nest of murd
erers within? Do they wait for a tiny figure to appear on the balcony, or watch for shadows passing at the windows and comment to each other: there is one of them! There is one who threw the commissioner to his death and assaulted poor old Bartholomew. Do they watch the lights move as man passes up or down with his lamp, and do they postulate what fresh horrors must be afoot? We are ants to them, going about our puny business. But we are mostly hidden beyond sight. They must use their imaginations.
Assuredly, they cannot imagine the changes that are occurring here. As the elements threaten, Mr Adamson, likewise, has become unsettled. Initially, he was merely grumpy and uncommunicative. Now, it transpires that he has used the principal’s keys to gain access to the strong box with its bottles of wine and whisky.
He spends all day asleep or crapulous, moving between bedroom, provision store and kitchen: a king in exile, his greatcoat around his shoulders like a cape. He does not wash. He eats whenever he likes, including at night when I am on my watch. The cooking smells rise with the house’s respiration.
He is a different man. Ardent spirits will do that to a person. Sometimes, when he approaches the apogee of intoxication – before he lapses into incoherence and then unconsciousness – he assails me with diatribes and orations. Thus was it this morning, as I returned weary from my watch to make some breakfast. He was sitting at the table with his quasi-regal cape, a bottle of wine and a cast-iron goblet. All he lacked was a crown askew atop his matted hair.
“Why does anyone become a keeper, Meakes?”
“I am tired, Mister Adamson.”
“Why did you become a keeper?”
I did not answer. I was learning it was better not to agitate him.
“It’s no life for a man, Meakes. One rusts one’s life away out here on the rock. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting for the sun to come. Waiting for the oil to burn so we can refill it. Soiling the lamp so we can clean it. It’s futile! It’s a punishment. It’s purgatory. Our entire existence is inertia.”
“Then why did you become a keeper?” I said.