I am the Sea

by Matt Stanley

  Four mariners. They are not of these British Isles, but from somewhere such as Holland or Iceland or Denmark. They understand something of English, but cannot communicate as yet. They are men – I can offer little more in illustration for the present. One is hairy, his back and chest like a pelt. One has a blonde beard. One is fatter, with a bulbous wineskin gut. The last is slight and very young – perhaps the ship’s boy. Doubtless, they have names.

  How long will they stay here at Ripsaw? How long will we have to live with these interlopers? We can signal shore for aid, but the weather has now fully entered its hibernal phase. The cutter might not come out for weeks. Weeks sharing just a few chambers with these men who do not understand the house, who will deplete its resources and contaminate it with their smells. It was thus at Mr Fowler’s house, where each new arrival would disrupt the delicate clockwork of routine and throw us into chaos.

  Mr Adamson has become quite maniacal about attempting to reclaim barrels from the sea. He believes them to contain whisky or wine and has been down at the main door trying to hook or harpoon or net them any way he can before the wind and currents carry them ashore. I wonder if he has seen the sea chest that I saw. None of this bodes well. I feel myself a lean-looked prophet suddenly enrapt. I see that this day augurs ominous. It whispers fearful change. When or how, I cannot say.

  I pass my time reading in the library.

  The ancients knew of many ways to see the future and uncover secret knowledge. The Hebrews practised divination with a holy cup, through examination of entrails, or by the selection of denuded arrow shafts. Some sought occult wisdom in a holy book, opening a page at random to see which signal word was beneath the thumb. The Persians favoured readings of the ovine speal. For many, a sieve suspended from scissor points would sway to speak its wordless wisdom. The Greeks, however, were the genuine masters of augury and omen. A ring suspended on a cord was called dactylomancy and would twist or sway according to truth’s impulsions. Chilomancy enquired into the hidden power of keys. Pyromancy, and its brother capnomancy, stared within the fire for answers in the shapes of flames and curling smoke. Onieromancy revealed visions in our dreams, cleromancy in the throwing of lots or dice. Cledomantic practitioners, meanwhile, focused on the veiled mystery of chance utterances, whereby an innocent speaker (a child, an overheard passer-by) voiced a word or phrase that meant nothing in particular to them but contained some fortuitous consonance or pattern in the heeder’s heightened attentions. A clue. A sign. A warning hidden in the random flow of words.

  I have not seen the boy. It seems inconceivable that he can remain unseen with such a crowd of men inside the house. He will have to skulk about the tanks and cisterns like a rat if he wants to remain unseen. Frankly, I am content not to see his sickly countenance or have him appearing at my side to mutter darkness in my ear.

  When finally the sailors find their strength, it will be necessary to acquaint them with the house and make clear the rules and regulations. No access will be permitted to the light-room or lantern. They must not take anything from the provision store, nor trespass in the light-room store. Their world will be the kitchen and their bedrooms: three chambers only.

  Will they suffer from this limited containment? Will they be oppressed by the stationary nature of the house, whose colossal mainmast takes it nowhere? Or will they be accustomed to the restrictions of life on board a vessel? Many keepers came to the service from the sea. Some will return to it.

  * * *

  On my watch, I lighted the lamp and set the mechanism moving. I noted barometric pressure and temperature in the logs. I stood in the lantern and watched the rain against the panes. Occasionally, an enormous billow would break against the column and spray the glass with spindrift. The beam picked out hectic precipitate.

  I have been thinking much about divination and how the truth surrounds us with Delphic detail. The signs are everywhere, but reading them eludes us. Patterns exist but we see only every third or fourth increment. What appears mystery in inchoate form is revelation in totality.

  I descended to the light-room and took up the watch log. I flicked to the entry I had seen from Keeper Spencer about his curious glimpse of a boy-like shadow on the balcony. I was about to read the entry again when I noticed that my thumb was placed over a word: cowl. Spencer had heard a rattling and gone out to see if there was a problem.

  I ran my thumb over the page edges and opened the book randomly. It was an entry from Principal Bartholomew about some transformation in the weather. The word under my thumb: slowly. And again, towards the front of the logbook before either misters Spencer or Adamson were resident. An entry about a notable storm. The word under my thumb: howling.

  I felt the mystery focusing itself as Ripsaw’s lens gathers multiple rays of light into a beam. Signs. Patterns. The boy’s hidden messages: Lord, deliver me from this… windowless pit / dark knowledge / marrowless inertia / lowly hell / howling sea. Every phrase contained the same lexical trinity, the same concealed clue.

  Owl.

  Ovid’s dire omen of mortality. Lucan’s sinister bubo. For Pliny, a perverse fowl both inauspicious and funereal. Ominous and fearful. Presager of death. I had encountered that tawny owl in the lantern and seen in it some memory of a face I’d known – a message coming to me through the fog and filthy air. But a message from whom? Saying what?

  I went up to the lantern, where wind and rain expectorated at the glass. Only seabirds were circling the house, their angled wings brief lightning bolts in the beam. What message did the night bird have for me?

  “You know,” said the boy.

  I turned but could not see him. “Where are you?”

  “You saw the eyes. You recognised the kindly face.”

  “Are you inside the lens? Get away from there. You shouldn’t be in the lantern!”

  “You know who. His eyes were sad. He was disappointed with you, James. Such betrayal.”

  “Will you stop plaguing me, boy! A lighthouse is no place for you.”

  “It is no place for you.”

  “When I find you, boy, there will be—”

  “These mariners are a pestilence upon the house. They must go.”

  “The cutter will come out to collect them.”

  “No, James. They will die here.”

  “They are our guests. This is their sanctuary.”

  “There are contaminants. This is their shambles.”

  “No.”

  “I can kill them for you.”

  “No.”

  “It will appear nothing but a series of accidents.”

  “No.”

  “Do you know who the owl is? Think about it. You know.”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you do, James. Yes, you do.”

  “Be gone, fiend! Away, malignant incubus!”

  I charged towards the lens and entered, but he had slipped away. There was only the lamp patiently burning, the mechanism turning slowly, the ventilator growling low amid the crazed elements.

  * * *

  The situation is intolerable. I came to breakfast this morning and discovered a bacchanal in the kitchen. The four mariners had risen and were enjoying breakfast with Mr Adamson – all red-faced with cheer and well fed with toast and oats and eggs. The stove was stocked, the windows closed and a pungent, gamey reek was rising from the gathered stags.

  “Ho! Look who has joined us,” crowed Mr Adamson, who had neglected once again to do his watch. “This is Keeper Meakes, formerly Apprentice Meakes. He is a poet!”

  The others cheered and rose to pat my back, thought it seemed clear that they had understood his gusto more than the sense of his words. They muttered briefly to one another for a composite translation. Evidently, I was a poet.

  “You are drunk,” I said, noting a barrel of something that smelled like brandy by Mr Adamson’s feet. All four iron goblets were on the table.

  “I find my Danish is more fluent with a glass or two, lad… If Danish is what they talk. Che
ers, boys!”

  They raised their glasses raucously.

  One of them, a sunken-cheeked thing and very young, noted that I was not drinking and indicated that they should seek a cup or glass for me. Blond Beard offered his own goblet with a hand across his heart in what I interpreted as a grave expression of gratitude. Bulbous Gut stood in salute. The Ape – evidently too inebriated to stand – offered a gaze somewhere between befuddled and profound.

  All were attired in a tatterdemalion motley of surplus and borrowed clothing. The principle’s trousers folded triply at the hems, Spencer’s woollen jersey, sundry lendings from Mr Adamson’s wardrobe, and, I noted, items from my personal chest.

  “Mister Adamson – I need to speak with you.”

  “Speak your mind, lad. We’re all friends here. And they barely understand a word.”

  “Outside. In the stairwell, if you don’t mind.”

  “I have to tell you that I’m drunk, Meakes. It’s easier to speak while seated.”

  I looked around the sordid kitchen with its dirty plates, scattered breadcrumbs, cloven eggshells and sticky stains. The windows were opaque and dripping with condensation. It smelled like a low harbour-side bar. Wordlessly, I went to the stairwell to await him.

  I heard the mood shrivel inside. Whispers and mutters. Interrogative tones. “Don’t worry, mates,” said Mr Adamson. “He’s our ship’s boy. I’ll talk to him.”

  “What’s this all about, Mother?” he said when he emerged.

  “This is unacceptable.”

  “What’s unacceptable, lad? I find it very agreeable.”

  “We cannot feed four extra men like this. It’s not a banquet.”

  “Do you suggest we starve them?”

  “And lighthouse regulations forbid drinking of wine or spirits except during visits from dignitaries or at Christmas.”

  “I won’t tell if you don’t. And what difference does it make if we drink. You’re the one minding the lamp and you’re as sober as an apostle.”

  “Don’t you see? They are polluting the house. We cannot have the windows closed like that in the kitchen. The moisture will rise. The miasma of unwashed flesh will rise and soil the instruments.”

  “The miasma of unwashed flesh? Lord!”

  “They cannot stay.”

  “And what do you recommend? Toss them back into the waves? Throw them off the balcony, perhaps? Lock them in irons in the water store? We’re all trapped here for as long as the weather lasts. Nothing will change that. These men aren’t keepers – they can drink if they want.”

  “But you are a keeper.”

  “Am I? The Commission intends to dismiss me as soon as they can bring a replacement. I will not be paid for this current duty. I am a lighthouse-man only in the most literal sense of living in a lighthouse, but I am not employed as such and am not considered one.”

  He was grinning. That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.

  “We need to establish some rules,” I said. “Some limits.”

  “There is a book of them in the library, Meakes. We don’t need more.”

  “I mean rules for the mariners. They should not enter the light-room or the lantern. There is no reason for them to venture there. Nor have they any reason to be in the library if they cannot speak English. Besides, it is my room.”

  “Your room, is it?”

  “It is my room, yes. Will you communicate these things to them? You are, after all, the acting principle.”

  “Flattery, Meakes?”

  “I meant only—”

  “I know what you meant. You think you are sly, Meakes, but I see you.” He tapped the corner of his eye. “You are not in your Bedlam now. I am not your Mister Fowler.”

  “You assuredly are not. He was a gentleman.”

  “He was chopped up like cat meat and packed in a seaman’s chest.”

  I could barely breathe.

  “I cannot speak to you when you are intoxicated,” I said.

  “Then save your breath, Poet, because I plan to drink for the duration of this weather.”

  I went up to the library and lay on my bed. The boy stood silhouetted against the window and spoke to the sea. “Come, thick night, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, that my keen knife see not the wound it makes, nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, to cry ‘Hold, hold!’”

  I closed my eyes but the darkness was red. I pressed my hands over my ears but the screams would not stop.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The weather continues bad. Principal Bartholomew’s storm glass in the light-room has been stirring, the pale matter in its base slowly creeping feather-like up the tube. The lantern glass streams and shivers with wind and rain. Billows batter and protest about the tower, speckling and spitting at the higher windows.

  I have closed all storm shutters below the kitchen. Now those chambers languish in perpetual shade. One must enter the dungeon with a lantern, facing a nether world of jerking shadows, cryptic glints and proximate thunder. The superstitious mariners have conceived a mortal fear of these catacombs and refuse to descend even for food and drink.

  Indeed, their trepidation in the house has magnified as the strumpet wind and enchafed flood have grown in boldness. Accustomed to a vessel that flies before the wind and turns its keel to better accommodate the waves, they sit stunned and stationary inside a tower that shows flat granite cheeks to every blast. We are living now amid a yesty battlefield in which cannons assail our keep at every moment, rattling our crockery and setting every beam a-creak.

  Naturally, they have been numbing their dismay with drink, Mr Adamson their liege. He has returned to the role of dissipated king, his watch-cloak about his shoulders, his iron goblet in hand, his loud pronouncements welcomed with wine-fuddled and uncomprehending glee. They are his jesters and his courtiers, his sycophants and counsellors.

  I encounter them in stairwells as they move aimlessly between their bedrooms and the kitchen. They traipse about the house like tourists who have long since lost interest in their destination, having seen and done everything that this London or Paris has to offer. One museum is much like another. The Seine is as wet and as dirty as the Thames.

  Young Sunken Cheeks has attempted to engage me in social intercourse with his limited English. Perhaps he sees me as his coeval, I having arrived here as an apprentice keeper. Perhaps he detects some sensitivity or sensibility in me that is lacking in his throaty and boisterous shipmates. There is some yearning in his eyes, some vulnerability that disturbs me. He could have been one of Mr Fowler’s men. I wonder what his infirmity may be and why he seeks me to express it.

  Yesterday morning I caught him in the library with a book and flung him from the place. He stuttered something about wanting to find a word in the dictionary, but I will not have him in the place. That was always the rule at Mr Fowler’s house. For every man his own protected space, inviolable and private. Flouting of this rule caused conflict, and conflict is a canker that grows hidden until it bursts as violence.

  The others seem to know – or have been told – that avoiding me is preferable. Blond Beard is evidently uncomfortable and nods to me in silent greeting if we pass. Bulbous Gut began by trying to shake my hand or embrace me at every opportunity, but my horror at these advances was clear. Now he merely scowls. The Ape, meanwhile, has barely left the kitchen and spends most of every day sleeping or insensible with drink. He smells like a bloated corpse in some Levantine alley.

  I am weary. I alone continue the nightly watches and enjoy the relative solitude of the upper levels. With the trapdoors closed, the ventilator breathing and the wind roaring, I can occasionally forget that the others exist. I am among the tower’s battlements where I can repel all invaders.

  But I am grievously tired. I try my best to stay awake at night, remaining on the chair so I will fall if sleep attempts to take me. Or I go out to the balcony, where the wind casts pins of rain or grape-shot hail into my face to wake me. During the day, I se
ek repose in the library, but the Dionysia continues raucous as long as salvaged barrels remain undrunk. After cleaning and emptying the ash bucket and maintaining the stores in good order, I can barely keep my eyes open. My head is heavy. I walk as if in a dream.

  The owl has not reappeared. I spend hours in the lantern circumambulating the lens, but only seabirds gyre about the glass. What the feathered prophet might tell me, what message it may bring from beyond, I cannot say or guess. I recall only its large, black eyes and its bearded, astragal-framed face. It came out of the fog, out of the darkness, to this light. To me. To condemn? To forgive?

  There is some connection, some strange affinity, between owl and boy. One is the harbinger of the other. I have not seen the boy since he appeared in the library. I imagine him in the tower’s windowless stygian depths, scuttling rat-like, muttering dark incantations.

  * * *

  Outrage! Sacrilege! Blasphemy! I am fresh returned from the water store, where I was obliged to use the privy. It was there I noticed a stack of pages skewered on a wire hook for the benefit of wiping. Dictionary pages. Shakespeare. Some barbarian had selected the fattest volumes for their desecration and torn out pages thoughtlessly.

  I went first to the library to verify the crimes. There, I saw the riven paper and the ragged spines. The books had been replaced in the wrong locations. There was a smell of humid dog. Bulbous Gut. He had posseted and curded the purity of this place, like eager droppings into milk. Mr Adamson would have to answer for this.

  “What do you want me to do?” he said, bibulous and languid in a kitchen chair. The other swine were snuffling in their beds.