I am the Sea

by Matt Stanley

  He drank from his goblet and refilled it. “The same reason as anyone. But there’s no use. You can’t escape. You can’t escape, Meakes. Not here and not onshore. Do you see? We’re all our own lighthouses. We’re all trapped in the lanterns of our own towers, waiting for the oil to run out, trying to withstand the constant buffets and billows… Prisoners in… Inside our dreams.”

  “Now you sound like a poet,” I muttered.

  “What, lad? What did you say?”

  “Nothing. It was nothing. I was thinking what to eat.”

  “Well, the bacon is finished. If you want bread, you’ll have to bake it.”

  I thought of asking him about the boy. It seemed likely that Mr Adamson had seen something – some shadow, some fleeting impression. It was not possible that the boy could have evaded the attention of every one of us for so long.

  Spencer. Spencer had seen the boy that night on the balcony. Spencer who was now dead from asphyxiation in the lower chamber. What had he written? I saw again a dark shadow of small stature like a boy. But the child had told me he’d arrived with me. Spencer was already dead.

  “You have that look again,” said Mr Adamson.

  “What look?”

  “You know what I’m talking about, Meakes.”

  “I’m sure I do not.”

  He drained his goblet and winked. Banquo’s ghost with bacon fat.

  * * *

  They say that everything that may be said or thought has already been expressed – only lost and repeated through the ages. The Greeks intuited and conjectured our scientific advances through logic alone. The Egyptians and Babylonians understood the stars and geometry before Newton’s brilliance. The Renaissance alchemists pulled aside the veil of nature before religion silenced them. But secrets remain undiscovered. Profundity lies in plain sight if we know where to look.

  I am reading almost indiscriminately now. Homer and Milton. Psalms and fiction. Dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Sometimes, I find myself caught in the eddy of a thought that sends me circling and circling within a paragraph, looking for the way out. There are labyrinths of meaning in which one must stop and retrace, re-read and search for the thread. This afternoon, I found myself caught in the vortices of an idea in whose shallows I languished, while aware of depths that still escaped me:

  Language being the leading instrument by which men communicate their thoughts to one another, it is to it that we undoubtedly owe the most important improvements of which our intellectual character is susceptible. Each quality is an independent object of knowledge: but the ideas of different qualities are strongly associated in the mind, and the activity and versatility of its operations produce a proneness to conjoin each one that comes into view with others conceived to be collateral.

  “What are you reading?”

  I started at the voice directly behind me.

  I turned. The boy. He was still dressed in his little burial suit, tarnished-pewter shadows in the hollows of his cheeks and around his eyes.

  “You shouldn’t sneak like that,” I said. “You frightened me.”

  “But I’m always here.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You oughtn’t to read. Don’t you remember what Mister Fowler told you?”

  “You know Mister Fowler?”

  “Of course I do. He told you that reading excites the mind and overheats the cerebrum.”

  “Well, I have finished my work for today. This is my reward.”

  “But you oughtn’t to.”

  “Don’t you know that Mister Adamson is about? If he sees you, I won’t be responsible for his actions.”

  “He won’t see me.”

  “He might. He is very unpredictable these days.”

  “I can kill him if you like.”

  I looked hard at this devilkin. His face bore all the signs of candour and intent.

  “Don’t speak of such things,” I said.

  “It would appear an accident. Nobody need know. A fall. A slip. A piece of bread inhaled at night while he’s intoxicated…”

  “Stop, child!”

  “An atmosphere of only five or six per cent carbonic oxide can kill a man as easily as him falling to sleep. He will not even realise it.”

  “How do you know such things?”

  “There are worlds of knowledge even in this small library.” “Well, do not think of such evil. Do not suggest such things to me.”

  “He is a bad man. He is dangerous for you.”

  “Mister Adamson is rough and rude, but he wouldn’t hurt me.”

  “And that business with the hand-crank? And all his derision? And locking you outside the light-room?”

  “That… The last one was an accident, I think.”

  “You should thank me.”

  “I won’t countenance what you suggest, boy.”

  “For the commissioner, I mean. You should thank me for that.”

  “What? What are you saying?”

  “He was bad for you. He doubted you.”

  “What do you know about the commissioner?”

  “He fell. He was heavy, but I gripped him by the ankles and toppled him right over. He fell into the big pillow. The fog, I mean.”

  I stared.

  “His note-case went after him, but I burned the notes. Just ashes now. Ashes at the bottom of the sea.”

  “You’re a murderer!”

  “We are all murderers, James. Only the vagaries of circumstance direct whether we act on our true natures.”

  “I… I don’t agree at all.”

  “The cutter is coming.”

  “What?” I had not seen him look out at the sea.

  “Look. Here it comes.”

  I stood and went to the window. The cutter was indeed coming out despite the heavy weather.

  “They are bringing replacement keepers,” said the boy. “Your time has finished here at Ripsaw. You should prepare your chest.”

  “But I have done nothing wrong.”

  “Principal Bartholomew is dead. If the loss of blood did not kill him, the sea will have. You and Mister Adamson are both to hang.”

  “It was an accident!”

  “And the commissioner? And Mister Fowler?”

  “You are a demon child!”

  “I can help you.”

  “Go! I cannot stand the sight of you.”

  There was a cry of surprise from below.

  “Meakes! Meakes! They are coming, Meakes!”

  Mr Adamson. He was coming up the stairs from his boodour.

  “Hide, boy!”

  “They are coming, Meakes!” panted Mr Adamson at the doorway. He swayed drunkenly. “I am going up to the balcony. If they try to take me, I will jump. I swear it! They won’t take me.”

  “Mister—!”

  But he was gone, banging clumsily upwards.

  “The boat will turn back,” said the boy, again at my side.

  I ignored him. That was the best approach. He would disappear if I ignored him.

  “Look to the south-east,” said the boy, standing at that window and pointing. “See the black bar of clouds? A squall is coming. It’ll arrive before they reach the lighthouse.”

  I watched the boat. Evidently, the skipper had seen the same. It started to put about.

  “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” shrieked the boy. “Rage! Blow, you cataracts and hurricanes. Spit, fire! Spout, rain! You sulph’rous and thought executing fires, vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts…”

  A curtain of rain descended to envelop the cutter in shifting gauze. The sea’s surface was chisel-gouged, spray splintered. Louring clouds roiled.

  “We are lords of the sea!” crowed the child. “Howl, howl, howl, howl!”

  I thought I heard a banshee wail from the balcony. The birds, perhaps, protesting at the sudden tempest. Or Mr Adamson, deranged.

  I tried to ignore them both. Too much noise. Too much distraction. The circling room was becoming oppressive.

&nb
sp; I selected a newspaper at random from the pile and tried to focus on the words.

  Cambricks, thread lace, German linen and bed ticks. The accused was seized with a fit. Aberdeen-built fast-sailing copper-fastened barque. The Mocmain patent lever truss. Belladonna for whisky. Seventeen centenarians. Charles Frederick Kenward, Cheriton, Folkstone. Sugar in tierces. Twelve chapters on Nervousness of Mind for those suffering from depression of spirits, confusion of thoughts, groundless fears, unfitness for society, failure of memory, delusions, sleeplessness, restlessness, wretchedness, indecision, giddiness, suicidal thoughts, fear of insanity. Good useful shirts. Fine strong shirts. Full dress shirts.

  TWENTY

  Morning arrives without light. The sky is heavy, the sea vexed. Sleet and hail patter against the lantern, sliding down the panes. Out on the balcony, my breath steams and the air stings my cheeks. By the clock, it is day, and yet dark night strangles the lamp. Is it night’s predominance, or the day’s shame?

  I have ventured out a few times during the night, hoping that the chill would cure my soporific fug. Still, I believe I must have slept for moments. On one occasion, I thought I saw the boy’s shadow standing at a window, but it could not have been. The hand-bell fastened to the trapdoor didn’t ring. Nor, of course, did Mr Adamson make any attempt to relieve me.

  He haunts the house. Not like the benign presence of Principle Bartholomew, but like a tortured spirit trapped inside this jar of stone. His wine and spirits have quickly run dry and he is enraged, bellowing taurine, haranguing the shore through the windows. I’ve seen him emptying every drawer and cupboard in the principal’s room in search of hidden stores or keys to secret sources.

  I have pondered much on his wild intention to throw himself from the balcony yesterday. What motivated that outrageous threat? Has the alcohol provoked some imbalance in his brain? I know that many men have been tipped from steady equilibrium by excessive drink. Or is it something else?

  There is a pamphlet in the library, a souvenir from the Fire Monument in London – another lofty column erected in a wilderness, but a wilderness of people and buildings. It is almost exactly the same height as Ripsaw and has a lamp of golden flames upon its peak. People are drawn to it for the views, but also to leap unto their deaths.

  The catalogue of these few suicides are interesting. Not a soul considered taking his life from the viewing gallery during the first 121 years of its existence, despite the railing being low and there being no other impediment to jump. The occasional fellow fell by accident, but a baker was the first to take his life on purpose. That was 1788.

  The next unfortunate case was in 1810 when a melancholy diamond merchant decided to end his life. And here the pattern emerges, for the very same year saw another baker plummet. Two deaths in 133 years, and then two within months of each other. Coincidence?

  The next was a daughter of a baker in 1839 – an intermediate period that seems arbitrary enough. But then a boy of fifteen years was next to jump barely a month afterwards. Two in the selfsame year!

  What persuaded two people in 1810 and two in 1839 to end their lives in such a grisly, violent and dramatic way? To count the seconds of paralysing fear as the street rushed up to destroy them? To dash out their brains and smash their bones before the horrified crowd? What might explain this statistical anomaly?

  Imitation. Emulation. Influence. Incredible as it may seem, an idea may be put into a man’s head merely by being propagated at large. A story appears in the newspapers. It is hotly discussed in the streets. The incident attains a kind of fame or infamy. And someone carrying the seed of self-destruction is drawn to that same method, though countless opportunities exist. Why is Waterloo Bridge more notorious than any other in London for its suicides? For no other reason than that so many have already used it so.

  One might also ask why so many bakers, or those related to bakers, launched themselves into the aether from the Monument. Simple proximity. That area of London was where the bakers congregated – indeed where the Great Fire itself had started at a baker’s. The man who seeks oblivion does not want to travel far to the site of his end. It would give him time to change his mind or meet an understanding soul. The Monument stood there against the sky as a perpetual choice.

  I saw a similar phenomenon myself in Mr Fowler’s house. His gentlemen were delicate weathervanes of sensibility. If one of them put his hand through a windowpane and screamed and bled, the effects of that accident would ripple through the house. Parkinson would rush gibbering to his wardrobe. Mayhew would gnaw himself raw. Cuthbert would shriek about his pudding being full of cyanide. And Tibbotson, of course… Tibbotson would commit some outrage that stirred the whole cacophony to ever greater heights. Some days, it seemed that the storm would end in murder or collective self-destruction.

  But Mr Fowler was wise. He understood what lighthouse-men know: the greatest waves strike after the storm is over. They have grown and swollen in the fury of the wind and in the ocean’s embryo. They travel from a distance, rolling, massing, hunching their great shoulders to assail the slender tower. He knew that the worst might arrive in that frail aftermath and strike him, slender tower that he was, light-giver that he was amid a sea of darkness.

  Thus: Mr Adamson. A rational man. A man not given to fancy. And yet he has inhabited this house while his fellow keeper Spencer suffocated and was strapped to the balcony rail; he has experienced the strange and fatal disappearance of the commissioner; he has witnessed the sanguinary and submarine travails of Principal Bartholomew who fell into the sea. All of this, and he has also had to endure the interminable uncertainty of his fate, waiting for the cutter to come out. Might not all of this turn the tides within a man’s tranquillity and tempt him to copy events unfolding close to him? Even a man of such telluric and unsophisticated tendencies? Might even he be roused by this declension of sorry circumstance to the riotous madness where he now raves?

  Yesterday afternoon, I encountered him asleep on the kitchen table. He was snoring, the noise reverberating through the wood. His cast-iron goblet lay on its side with a trickle of rusty spirit at its mouth. The smell of stale sweat and whisky breath were repugnant. I stood and watched him breathing.

  “Now is our opportunity,” said the boy, squatting by the coal store.

  I paid him no heed. That is what he wants.

  “The heavy frying pan would do it,” said the boy. “Or the serrated knife drawn quickly ’cross his throat.”

  I did not reply.

  “The carving fork. One tine could pierce his temple as smoothly as through butter. A spasm. A sudden liquid cough… And finished.”

  I left the kitchen. I could not spend another moment in his morbid company. I had to sleep. It seems I always have to sleep. To sleep – perchance to dream. A great perturbation in nature, to receive at once the benefit of sleep, and do the effects of watching!

  * * *

  With the nights growing longer, the lighthouse is using more oil. Today, after cleaning, I had to go down to the oil store. On a calmer day, I might have rigged a rope and pulley to hoist it up the outside of the tower to the balcony. But the wind continues fierce and I didn’t want to risk smashing a window or losing a canteen.

  Going down meant entering the boy’s territory. It is darker down there with fewer windows. It is also practically beneath the sea with the waves currently running so high. Billows redound thunderously from the walls, seeking impossible ingress through dowelled and dovetailed masonry mazes. The flood is tireless. Eternal repetition is its nature and its ultimate triumph.

  I passed the provision store with its perfume of overripe fruit, cold iron and oats. He was not there. I entered the oil store with its horseshoe of separate cisterns and its glistening coal. He was not there. Indeed, there was no sign of him: no wrinkled blanket or foetid juvenile nest.

  I filled my canteen with care, spilling not a drop. The boy’s absence perturbed me. I had passed down the lighthouse from the lantern and not seen him anywhere, as
suming he was not hiding inside the principal’s room or in the commissioner’s room with Mr Adamson. He could not have slipped past me on the stairs. Therefore, he had to be in the water store below. In the lighthouse’s very bowels.

  I left the oil canteen and went down the stone staircase. The sea was a rumbling cannonade fulminating against the lighthouse base. Spray hissed beyond the main door and I imagined the dripping mandibles of some manxome foe. ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves. Did gyre and gimble in the wabe. But the boy was nowhere to be seen. Only the squat cast-iron water tanks. I lifted the lid on one and watched fascinated as the surface responded to the tower’s vibrations in quivering quicksilver.

  On such days, the lighthouse seems alive. It shakes and mutters, wainscot creaking, crockery clacking, draughts whistling through window cracks and gasping thorough the ventilator. The sea, too, has its personality and speaks with many voices. I listened to the slaps and gurgles, the massy impacts and the water’s chuckling dissipation. Listen long enough, and words materialise in the vortices and convolutions, the wash of rushing elements – a tumbling, random lexicon. Whittawer hypabyssal. Syncope bursiculate zerumbet. Onychomancer hellebore. Elytrum murrion. Areopagitic. Tephritic. Nephritic. Protomartyr protomartyr somnolescent sesterce.

  I can make no sense of the words. Perhaps they are the cries of countless drowned souls trying to be heard. Shipwrecked men. Fallen keepers. The commissioner. Principal Bartholomew, who had surely left his soul amid the reef’s hidden fissures.

  But there was something else: a tapping that was too regular for wind-driven drops. A fragile knocking, rather, as if a person was requesting access at the main door.

  I opened the inner door. The vestibule floor was partly flooded: a dark mirror that reflected me reversed. It shimmered as I trod through it with the lamp, fearful of the din without. And still there was that too-regular tapping from the main door. The boy? Had he somehow trapped himself outside the house and even now was cowering on the rock?

  I approached tentatively. Water was washing constantly at the door and, despite the finely engineered sills, was seeping inward. The stone trembled beneath my boots. I pressed an ear against the sturdy wood. A tiny, vanquished voice.