by Matt Stanley
“The library is a prohibited area.”
“Poet, Poet,” he sighed. “Think of it: these men are gaoled here and limited to just four rooms, mine included. Imagine their sense of confinement and frustration. They aren’t keepers. They didn’t volunteer for this. They have no purpose here.”
“The books do not belong to them.”
“Nor to you, lad. Ripsaw is not your lighthouse. You’re just another working part of it: another cog, another valve, another door or window. When one part breaks, there’s always a replacement. Even Bartholomew – even he can be replaced. You and me, we’re jars of jam or bottles of vinegar. If one falls from the shelf and shatters, there are five more. Ten more. Accept it. Admit it to yourself. Or are you one of those always complaining that life’s not fair? The whole world must change because you are at its centre? Is that it?”
“You implied something earlier – something I would like you to retract.”
“Did I? What did I imply?”
“That I was involved in some way with the death of the commissioner.”
“You said he fell in the fog.”
“New information has come to light. There is a boy here in the lighthouse. He told me that he pushed the commissioner from the balcony.”
He looked at me. Intoxication drained from him. Sobriety paled him.
“A boy,” he said. “In the lighthouse.”
“Yes. It was also he who disposed of the commissioner’s notes. He burned them and threw the ashes in the sea.”
He continued to stare.
“This boy,” he said. “Where does he sleep?”
“In the lower chambers, but I have not seen him recently.”
“And how long has he been at Ripsaw?”
“He says as long as I have. He says he came on the same boat. I admit… I admit I am very dubious about that part.”
He had not blinked for some time. Evidently the news had shaken him.
“Can you explain to me, Meakes, why I have never seen this boy?”
“I asked him the same question. He says he eludes us, that he is like a mouse.”
“And you have spoken to this boy.”
“Indeed.”
“What is his name?”
“I don’t know. But he knows my name. He knows your name.”
“Perhaps his name is Jimmy?”
“No. I don’t know. I have not asked him.”
“Do you know where he is now, this boy? Can I meet him?”
“Not unless you can find him. I have not seen him.”
He slowly rubbed his chin with thumb and forefinger, fixing me all the while with unwavering attention.
“Mister Meakes… Do you think this boy is a danger?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You’re telling me he killed the commissioner. Might not he threaten you or me?”
“I don’t know… I don’t know. Sometimes he says things.”
“Meakes. I want you to think carefully. Have you ever seen this boy before? Before you came to the lighthouse, I mean?”
“I don’t believe so.”
“But he knows you. He knows your name.”
“Perhaps he overheard it. If he is here all the time…”
“Do you think I might speak to him? Shall we look for him now?”
“It will be difficult. He hides.”
“He cannot hide in a lighthouse with six other men in it. Shall we look now? We can start in the lantern and work our way down.”
“He passes on the stairs. He told me… But no. I see from your face that you do not believe me.”
“I don’t know what to believe, Meakes. I’m sure that you believe it.”
“I have spoken to him. I have heard him and seen him.”
“Very well. Then we’ll keep a look-out for him.”
“You don’t believe me. You are merely humouring me.”
“Meakes – you’re tired. You should sleep.”
“I am grievously tired. It is true.”
“I’ll talk to the mariners. I’ll make them understand that they mustn’t take any more pages for the privy.”
“Thank you. Thank you. I must sleep.”
I went to the library and slept like the dead, woken only briefly by some hollow hammering. I revived fully only half an hour before twilight – just in time to prepare. It seems my body has become accustomed to the rising and the falling of the sun.
I prepared sandwiches to sustain me for my watch and on ascending to the lamp I noticed that the hasp and padlock had been removed from the outside of the principal’s door. Mr Adamson has affixed it to his own and was adjusting it as I passed. Evidently, he does believe in the boy’s existence, for he has positioned it on the inside of the door.
* * *
It occurred to me while in the light-room that I am once again living in a house of eccentrics. There is Mr Adamson, who fluctuates between sobriety and drunkenness, between bawdy and boorish. Sometimes the dissipated king, sometimes the melancholic misanthrope. A Richard. A Lear. He is a man of controlling appetites and limited control.
As for the mariners, they mask their fears and frustrations in gross inebriation. Many conceal themselves thus. It was Mr Fowler who told me that most men live within a drama they construct for themselves. We are all characters, he said, in the tragedies or comedies of our own making – living a role, mistaking reality for stage because reality is frightening and disordered. The problems come when we must play our parts in other people’s dramas, whose plots don’t coincide, whose acts have different rhythms, whose heroes are often villains. What then is the denouement? Something must be forced. Something must be broken.
But we lack a Mr Fowler here to provide a guiding wisdom, a voice of tranquillity. He gave each player his own scene, his own stage, where he could feel safe. Not to perpetuate illusions and augment the world of fancy, but as a calming influence to effect an understanding of the real world. He encouraged his gentlemen to turn from the jerking silhouettes of their cave walls and gaze upon the sun. Perhaps Principal Bartholomew was our Mr Fowler, but he has gone. I am alone amid the gibbering and insensate dramatis personae.
The lantern soothes me. What, at first, were irritants have now become my lullabies: the whirring mechanism, the ringing of the bell, the ventilator’s breath – even the wind and pluvial percussion. The lens circles slowly with its dancing prisms and refractions, transforming light from elemental flame to holy beam. In such a way does learning change man’s lowly animal impulses into the purity of knowledge…
I may have slept for a brief moment, but was awoken by sounds that shocked me: base, guttural grunting. A cry of surprise or pain. A chair overturned.
I lifted the trapdoor between light-room and the store below. Another yelp. Another grunt. I was caught in indecision – descend and leave the lamp, or sequester myself in the safety of the castle keep?
If I could hear the voices, they had to be close. In the library. I took my lamp and went down to the light-room store, darting glances among the supplies for any sign of the boy’s sharp eyes. Still, the commotion continued below: furniture scraping, the occasional gasp.
I lifted the next trapdoor and looked down into the darkened stairwell. The library door was ajar and light shone in the gap.
I approached the door and held up my lamp. I pushed the door with my foot and said boldly, “Now I have caught y—!”
The scene shocked me into silence.
The Ape and Sunken Cheeks. Both naked. The former’s body was an ursine horror of glistening pelt. The latter’s frail form was pale and doubled over the marble-top table. Both sweating. Both red-faced. Fingers intertwined in voluptuous collusion. Eyes wet with vulgar passion. The smell in the room… The smell of it… The viscous haze…
* * *
“Meakes! Meakes!”
A sharp slap on my cheek. Another.
I opened my eyes to see Mr Adamson above me, brandy on his breath. I was on the floor. I looked around. The others had gone.<
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“You gave us a scare, Meakes.”
“What…?” My voice was hoarse.
“Forget the lamp tonight, lad. It can illuminate itself without you. You need to sleep. Can you get into bed unaided?”
“I saw…”
“I know what you saw. Sailors will be sailors. Sleep. You need to sleep.”
“What happened? Why am I…?”
“You were screaming and shouting, lad. Enough to wake the entire house. The others tried to placate you but, well, you had some sort of fit and finished on the floor.”
“I was screaming?”
“You haven’t slept for days. Let me help you.”
“What was I shouting?”
He was avoiding my gaze.
“What was I shouting?”
“Meakes…”
“Tell me.”
“You were saying, ‘Stop! Stop! Mister Fowler! Stop!’”
“I… I don’t believe you. You are lying.”
“Perhaps I misheard. Sleep, Meakes. Sleep. I will leave you.”
He closed the door behind him. I heard his footsteps on the stairs. I heard the key turn in his lock. I heard the hasp fasten and padlock rattle.
He had lied to me. Assuredly so. I have no recollection of any screaming.
But that smell. That smell lingered in the library. Hot flesh and domination. Another body close and panting humid at one’s neck. I was so tired. So tired. Despite my agitation, I was soon swallowed into sleep. But not before I thought I heard a voice – within or without, I could not say.
’Tis now the very witching time of night, when churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out contagion to this world: now could I drink hot blood, and do such bitter business as the day would quake to look on.
TWENTY-FOUR
I slept fitfully. The elements were angry and billows beat against the tower. The wind itself was thunder. Spray hissed and whispered at the windows. I dreamed I was in a forest in a storm, the branches swaying, the leaves tremulously gossiping. I dreamed I was wrapped in a sheet and lashed to a trunk as a cold inundation rose slowly up my legs.
It was daylight when I woke. My first thought: I must extinguish the lamp to conserve the oil. But such thoughts were overtaken by the cries coming from below. I cast aside the bedding and descended.
Down, past the empty bedrooms. Down, past the empty kitchen. Down, down to the water store where all were congregated in a chiaroscuro scene of lamp and shadow: an atramentous composition of crouching figures round a prone figure on the puddled, stone-flagged floor. Briny hell lashed frantically without the walls.
“What is happening?” I said.
“See for yourself!” said Mr Adamson, holding his lamp to the face of the lying man.
It was the Ape, his countenance cherry-red, his lips purplish and frothing slightly at their corners. His hands and fingernails also seemed deeply purple. He looked like a fallen demon or satyr with his shaggy legs exposed and his trousers round his ankles. I could see no blood.
“Is he…?”
“Yes, lad. He’s quite dead.”
The other sailors stood witness with ominous and superstitious muttering. A death was bad among mariners, but a dead body onboard any vessel was bad luck. It invited storms, and lo! here was a storm greater than the one that had wrecked their ship. They flinched and cowered at each tremendous wave.
“What happened?” I said.
“Look.” He stood and went to the stove with his lamp. I saw coke glistening on the floor before it.
“Carbonic oxide,” I said. “Was the trapdoor closed?”
A nod. “He must have taken coke from the storeroom thinking it would burn as well as coal. It’s easier to carry down the stairs than coal.”
“He was probably drunk.”
“What has that to do with it?”
“I mean, perhaps he wasn’t thinking clearly. What shall we do?”
“What can we do? Signalling shore is a waste of time in this weather. They won’t be coming out for a week or more.”
“Then do we bind him to the balcony rail as you did with Mister Spencer? There are more men now. It will be easier.”
He held up his lamp the better to see me. “You don’t seem very concerned that a man has died here, Meakes.”
“It is shocking, I agree. But I am thinking of solutions.”
“His shipmates want to consign him to the sea. At least, that’s what I understand. They don’t want a corpse in the house. If they were aboard their ship, they would bury him at sea.”
I looked at the interior door. More water had seeped beneath it from the vestibule. Waves were convulsing and exploding at the main door. We wouldn’t be able to open it unless the wind changed. And even then…
“What are you thinking?” I said.
“The balcony. He is too large to fit through a window.”
I looked at the hirsute bulk of the Ape.
“They would carry him,” said Mr Adamson.
“But what about the Commission? If there is no body as evidence of accidental death, suspicion falls on us.”
His expression was briefly incredulous. “Meakes. The Commission doesn’t know that we have taken any mariners in. It was impossible to see anything on the day of the wreck. Nor have we recorded it in any log. That is, I haven’t. I suspect you haven’t either.”
His logic seemed sound. “Then I suppose they need to get hold of him.”
Thus, with much grunting and gasping that evoked for me unpleasant memories of the previous evening, Blond Beard and Bulbous Gut manhandled and hoisted their crewmate up almost the entire lighthouse length to the light-room. I noticed that Sunken Cheeks was not with us and must have been hiding shame-faced in his room.
Once above, it seemed the mariners expected some kind of service to be read, as happens on a ship when a fellow tar is sent to the abyss. I fetched the Book of Common Prayer and we went out of the lee-side door into the fretful elements, rain and gusts flailing at us, my words scattered to the wind like chaff. Perhaps it was just as well, given my improvisations.
In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our brother… Ape, and we commit his body to the deep: reef to eddy, crest to trough, spindrift to spume. The Lord bless him and keep him. Amen.
They muttered their amens, these godless men, and carried him shoulders-and-feet to the railing, where they briefly rested him along its ferrous rod. Mr Adamson and I approached – both drawn, I suspect, for no other reason than the novelty of watching of a body fall from the house into the boiling sea.
A slight push and he was free, turning slowly in the air, falling, falling smaller, accelerating. A yawning trough opened to receive him and he struck the water with a stellate splash. The wave closed over him – a three-ton liquid sarcophagus – and he was swallowed whole.
“For God’s sake, let’s go inside now,” said Mr Adamson.
Blond Beard and Bulbous Gut went sombre to their rooms but I caught Mr Adamson’s arm before descending.
“What is it, Meakes? I’m much the worse for drink. I want to sleep.”
“Do you think it was an accident? With the coke and the asphyxiation?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“The dead man – he was one of those engaged in… In those acts last night. Perhaps the young one was unwilling. Perhaps he sought his vengeance in the night?”
“By using coke to provoke carbonic oxide? Who would think of such a method? They share a room, Meakes. He could have bludgeoned his bully while the big man slept.”
“But it would have looked like murder, and he the obvious suspect.”
He sighed and passed his hand over his eyes. “There’s an easy enough solution. Let’s ask the lad. He’s the only one of them who understands much English. Come on.”
We descended to the principal’s room. The boy was not there. Nor was he with the others in the keepers’ room. Mr Adamson spoke t
o the remaining two in some juvenile incarnation of English he had apparently developed with them.
“No. They have no idea where he is. They have not seen him since last night. After the… The incident you interrupted.”
“Then we must search the house,” I said. ”He may be injured and hiding scared.”
And so began another charade of the kind we had experienced with Principle Bartholomew and the commissioner’s notes. No sign of the boy in the light-room store (where potential weapons could be found). No sign of him in Mr Adamson’s room, nor in the kitchen. He was not in the provision store, nor in the coal and oil store. We had already congregated in the water store that very morning and there we stood again like explorers in the tunnel vent of some smoking volcano that belched and rumbled under the earth, our meagre lamps probing at the shadows.
Mr Adamson and I looked at each other. He said nothing.
Blond Beard and Bulbous Gut began to jabber incomprehensibly.
“He is not in the house,” I said.
Mr Adamson held his lamp up to my face.
“Do you know who else isn’t here, Meakes? Your phantom boy. Your Jimmy. Or is he clinging to the rock outside?”
That’s when I finally understood it: the boy and he were in collusion. It was a game of theirs to torment me and make me doubt myself. Mr Adamson was hiding him, sending him to taunt me, instructing him what things to say. When the boy told me he had killed the commissioner, he meant to say that Mr Adamson had done it. Mr Adamson had burned the notes after reading them.
His lamp remained at my face. Could he see that I had perceived his duplicity? Could he see that now that I knew his secret?
“Where is he, Meakes?”
“You tell me, Mister Adamson.”
“I’m talking about the ship’s boy.”
“What are you suggesting? I was asleep from the moment you left me last night to the moment you awoke me this morning. Since then, I have been with you. I might ask you where you were during the night and after dawn? Evidently, you extinguished the lamp this morning.”
Blond Beard and Bulbous Gut watched us. They could sense our disagreement. Mr Adamson continued to affect his look of incredulity as if I were the unreasonable one.
“Another possibility,” I said. “After planning and executing the death of his shipmate, the young man took his own life from the balcony. Have you thought of that?”