by Matt Stanley
“That would certainly be very convenient, Meakes. No way to prove or disprove it. No body to be found. Or will you tell me next that our mysterious Jimmy is the culprit?”
“You should know.”
He actually laughed. That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
“What does that mean, lad?”
“I will not say it.”
“No, say it. Let’s hear it.”
“Very well. I know the boy is in your employ. He is your fatal agent.”
His smile fell. He studied my face with his lamp.
I saw from his face – a play of shadowed hollows – that I had cut to the heart of his deception. He was caught in fear.
“Then where is he, lad? Where is my fatal agent?”
“I don’t know your stratagems. You are an arch beguiler.”
He studied me for a moment longer then lowered his lamp.
“There’s nothing more to be done here. Let’s go up and prepare breakfast. I’m sure we’re all hungry.”
* * *
I have spent the day predominantly alone. I cleaned the lamp while they were eating breakfast and ate my own while they were gathered in the keepers’ bedroom. Their carousing has diminished somewhat, in part because they are trying to conserve the remaining alcohol, in part due to the unfortunate events with their shipmates, and in part the dismay they feel about the weather.
It is true that the air and sea are warring. The wind waxes mad and moans about the tower. Liquid peaks lash the shaft and crash sissing ’bout the rock. The house quivers with each clapping cannon shot. It is not difficult to imagine that such an ambience might provoke anxiety. Is it better to look out of the window and watch ranks of massy waves break foaming up the column without cease? Or is it better to close the shutters tight and sit in lamplit darkness listening to the battle roar? Imagination, always, creates the greatest timor.
The worst is: there’s no escape. The wind’s assault is tireless. The rushing crests are numberless. The spirit and the senses cry No more! and still the cannonade continues day and night, day and night. The elements will not submit before the lighthouse crumbles. Will solid granite withstand the fury of all Neptune’s realm? Will the winds of Jupiter renounce their right to blow where man-made impediments block their way?
The wise man knows that nothing will survive the patience of the elements. No, not even the great pyramids of Egypt, wind-whittled and sand-scoured by the centuries until they too are desert once again. We measure our time in mere seconds against dumb nature’s doggedness.
The lighthouse-man does not live in fear. He trusts that the house has already withstood screaming tempests and survived. He accepts that there is nothing to be done when heavens and flood combine. He smiles at the atmosphere’s tantrums and waits patiently for them to subside. Where there is madness without, sanity reigns within.
I was refilling the lamp and thinking such thoughts when a shadow flickered through the lens. The owl? Come to complete its oracular message to me? No. It was the gaunt malediction of the boy, his waxy skin now yellowish, his teeth all blackened.
“Don’t speak to me,” I told it. “Aroint thee, knave!”
I noted that his fingernails were coked half-moons. His trousers were oil stained.
I cried out, “You! You are the murderer! You have killed again!”
He said nothing. He merely pointed to the balcony door.
I turned to look but there was nothing. Only the closed metal door reverberating madly with the fisty wind.
“What do you—?”
He was gone. I went to where he had been standing and my boots crunched on glistening coke dust. Close to the triangular panes, I noted that no birds were flying round the lantern. They knew that worse was coming in a sky of blue-black slate and speeding scud.
Dusk was approaching when Blond Beard appeared at the light-room’s wooden manhole.
“You cannot enter here. This place is forbidden to you.”
He said something I didn’t understand, but I perceived from his gestures that he wished to placate me and explain some point. He ascended another step.
“I said you must not enter.”
He was garbling away now in his language and pointing out to sea. I looked. There was indeed a ship between Ripsaw and shore, but it was close-reefed, distant, and in no danger from the reef. I couldn’t understand a word of what he wanted to communicate.
He formed a large rectangular shape with his hands and pointed down into the reef’s hectic pandemonium. And there I saw a seaman’s chest amid the surging swell. It was only intermittently visible in the tumbling convulsions, bobbing and sinking and rolling amid the sawtooth outcrops. Miraculously, it had not splintered and burst its seams to cast its contents on the flood.
“What?” I said. “What are you trying to tell me? It’s your chest?”
Was he mocking me? Had Mr Adamson sent him to taunt me?
“Did Mister Adamson send you? Go. Leave the lantern. Go!”
He flinched at my raised voice and raised conciliatory palms, but I pointed insistently to the manhole.
There were three of them against me now. With the boy, four. And I, alone, in the castle keep, maintaining the light.
I fastened the hand-bell to the manhole hatch and set about lighting the lamp.
TWENTY-FIVE
Dark night. Unhallowed night. A moonless night made darker by the mourning cloud and the elements crowding at the lighthouse. There was no peace for me in the bell and the mechanism, for the ventilator shrieked and wailed, gasped and gulped and wheezed amid the wind-wrought tortures. Rain hammered. Spray ricocheted. The panes shivered my reflection in the sea’s pulsing blows.
Below me lurked conspirators and traitors who would inculpate me as scapegoat, impugn my name and put wild ideas into my head by their venomous influence. Only here in my prismatic eyrie could I maintain myself immaculate and pure beyond their mortal plans.
Pitchy night. Tyrannous night.
Tonight the light-room doors are boisterous, their metal banging hollowly as if a man was trapped outside and beating for his life. The wind whistles outraged through the parapet and drums against the astragals. It spirals up the tower with insinuating eddies and rages at the railing. Seeling night. Howling night. Whittawer hyabyssal. Bursiculate zerumbet. Onychomancer hellebore. It’s possible to hear words in all of nature’s utterances, but interpreting them is not the work of common men. Only an alchemist or mage or madman can discern the clues and patterns.
There was a fellow at Mr Fowler’s house with a mania for reading. He would read everything quite indiscriminately, from encylopaedias to newspapers, train timetables to advertising bills. Poor man, he believed that there was a hidden truth in the infinity of printed words and that, by reading them, he would find patterns invisible to the vulgar masses. Poetry and drama – being of a more ethereal origin – would provide the keys to more mundane works such as shopping lists or apothecary’s catalogues. Words were his currency and his passion. He made lists of them, finding shapes and meanings in their columns. But it was an endeavour without end and doomed to the abyss, as when two mirrors face each other and lose themselves in vanishing reflection. His treatment, this fellow, was a daily regimen to fill his time with mundane and repetitive tasks. No reading. No writing. Nothing to overheat the cerebrum or provoke irritation. No feats of imagination or creation. I can’t recall what happened to that fellow. He went away, I believe, after some trouble. Men came looking for him.
Words themselves are great dissimulators, shifting shape and significance through time. In essence, they are merely accretions of vowel and consonant, syllable and stress, suffix and prefix. Their roots are deep or barely grown. Say any word a half a dozen times and it turns meaningless: an absurd assemblage of sounds. Take language. Language from lingua, the tongue. Lenga. Lengua. Langue. And tongue – tunge, tunke, tonke, tonge, tungge, tongge. Just sounds. Just wet flesh writhing in darkness.
The vo
ices of animals are meaningless to us, but how do we sound to them with our clicking consonants, our lowing vowels, our stammering grammar? Indeed, these shipwrecked mariners are wordless beasts to me. We live in worlds as different as worm and eagle.
The balcony doors reverberate with formless sound. Vibrate. Berate. Vertebrate. I can make no sense of their cacophony. Lamentings heard in the air; strange screams of death and prophesying with accents terrible of dire combustion and confused events. Do the dead speak in the same tongue as the living? Is the commissioner’s spirit out there mingled with the wind? Is Spencer’s? Is Principal Bartholomew’s, crying fathom-deep to questing crests? And the rest? And the rest?
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash clean this blood from my hand? Or, this my hand rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine?
* * *
Banging wood and ringing bell awoke me. I started from my slumped position in the chair. It was light outside but the mechanism was still revolving, the lamp still burning. The wind seemed even more tormented.
“Meakes!”
“Mister Adamson.”
His head appeared in the manhole. “Is the other mariner with you? Is he in the lantern?”
“Which one?”
“The blond one. He’s missing.”
“Missing? Are you sure?”
“Of course we’re sure! Don’t you think we’ve looked? Up here is the only place we haven’t searched.”
“He visited last night. Around dusk. I told him the light-room is prohibited and sent him below.”
“Why did he visit, Meakes?”
“I have no idea. He was talking and pointing to a distant ship but I could make no sense of his language. I thought perhaps you sent him up here.”
“Why would I send him?”
“I don’t know. I could see no other reason.”
He ascended fully, followed by Bulbous Gut. They looked around the light-room and saw at a glance that no one else was present. They went clanging up the staircase to the lantern and I watched them from below, foreshortened figures through the mesh. Of course, Blond Beard was not above. They descended.
“Where is he, Meakes?”
“Why are you asking me?”
They stood facing me where I sat, sceptical inquisitors. Mister Adamson looked to the balcony doors and beckoned the other with a jerk of his head. They unbolted the lee-side door and had to push it open ’gainst the wind. The churning storm burst in with a gust of spray.
“The lens!” I said.
But they went heedless to the howling. I heard their voices torn to rags.
“Meeee! Eeeee! Meakes!”
I went to the door and looked out. Mr Adamson and Bulbous Gut were crouching at the railing where Blond Beard slumped, apparently dead.
His wet hair lashed about his face. His shirt had been torn or taken off. His lips were blue, his eyes closed. He clung stiffly to the gunmetal rods.
“Is he dead?” I shouted.
Mr Adamson waved a furious gesture: there was no point trying to converse amid the elements.
I watched as they prised him loose from the bars and dragged him into the light-room. Mr Adamson slammed shut the door and bolted it. All three were red-faced and sharp with ozone.
“Is he dead?” I said.
“If he isn’t, it’ll be a miracle. Has he been outside all night?”
“I am sure I don’t know.”
“Meakes – you have been here since dusk. Dusk, when you were the last one to speak to this man. The last one to see him alive.”
“I must object to your sugg—”
“Meakes! For the love of Christ, can you tell the truth just once? This man couldn’t possibly have gone out on the balcony without you knowing. He must have been hammering and shouting for hours.”
“The storm is quite ferocious, as you can hear.”
He glared at me.
“Perhaps you need to ask the boy,” I said.
“The boy? The boy? There is no boy, Meakes! There is no boy.”
Of course, he would say that.
“Meakes… I’m going to take this man down and try to warm him. He’s frozen to the bone. Stay here. Are you listening? Don’t move from this place. Do your cleaning. I’ll return directly.”
“Very well.”
His eyes fell on the watch log. “I’ll take that also and make a note of these events.”
“The watch log should not leave the light-room.”
“There’re many things that shouldn’t happen but do. Stay here. I’ll return directly.”
They manhandled Blond Beard down the stairwell, glancing at me all the while. Evidently, Mr Adamson had already been filling Bulbous Gut with his conspiracies.
I sought tranquillity and order. I extinguished the lamp and fetched fresh cleaning materials from the light-room store. Chamois rag. Linen cloth. Spirit of wine. The stiff-bristle broom. I was the hierophant of this crystal temple, making my ritual supplication to the light.
The view from the lantern panes was opaque with salt spray and quivering rills. The sea was a mountain range new-formed: crest edged, dark scalloped. Heaving. The waves were breaking ever higher up the column and I could feel the wind’s pressure on the glass, pushing enviously to get through. The cowl groaned and whined, howled and guttered. Ripsaw’s tower is a slender finger raised against the chaos of creation. The finger of St John the Baptist indicating heaven’s will.
I wonder how Mr Adamson engineered the egress of Blond Beard on to the balcony. Perhaps I was sleeping and they moved him silently. But how to avoid ringing the hand-bell? How to open the balcony without the gusts awaking me? Sinister activities are afoot at Ripsaw – things I can neither understand nor explain.
I was polishing the lens when I heard the clang and clatter of tools in the light-room store.
“Mister Adamson? Are you below?”
No answer.
“Mister Adamson?”
A hammer echoed sonorously against the manhole hatch. There was a rattle like a padlock in a hasp.
“Mister Adamson?”
I went down to the light-room store. It was empty but there was a smell of men. Some tools had been left disordered on the workbench top. Pliers. The lead ladle. An iron set square. A scattering of nails. I went to replace them in their proper places and saw that the rest of the tools – the saws, the hammers – were missing. Some mischief was apparently in progress.
I went to the manhole hatch… a found it resistant to my pull. I pulled again and a hasp rattled.
“Mr Adamson?”
“It’s for your own good, Meakes,” came his voice from directly below the deal cover.
“What are you doing? Have you locked me here?”
“You can’t be trusted, Meakes. The Commissioner… And now the sailors. You’re a danger to this house.”
“You have locked me here?”
“I’ve taken the tools so you can’t break through the hatch.”
“So… So, I am imprisoned here?”
“You can’t be trusted Meakes. You… Well, you’ve clearly lost your mind.”
“You have been planning this—”
“The boy, Meakes. The boy doesn’t exist. And the watch log…”
“What about the watch log?”
“It is full of nonsense, Meakes. You have filled it with derangement and fancy. That entry from Spencer–the one about seeing a shadow – it’s not real!”
“I read it myself. You cannot trick me.”
“You wrote it, Meakes! The writing is the same as in that bottle message.”
He would not catch me out with that. “Then it’s obvious: Spencer wrote both.”
“Can you hear yourself, Meakes? What are you saying? That Spencer wrote a bottle message to a man he’d never known? A man who would replace him once he’d suffocated accidentally on the privy? Is that what you’re saying?”
“You will not contaminate my mind with tricks, Mister Adamson.”
I heard hi
m sigh. “I will bring you food, Meakes. And oil for the lamp if you want it. But you’ll remain aloft until the next boat comes out.”
At this, a colossal gust buffeted the tower and wailed through the railing. The sea and sky knew that no boat was coming for two weeks or more.
“Then I am your prisoner,” I said.
“It’s for our protection, lad. And possibly for yours.”
I heard him receding down the wooden steps.
So. A prisoner in the tower, confined to these three chambers: store, light-room and lantern. He had taken the tools I might use to dismantle the wooden trapdoor. That was forethought. How long had he been planning this? Since my arrival at the house? I had walked blindly into every one of his traps. Now he would accuse me of the commissioner’s disappearance, of Principal Bartholomew’s fall into the waves, of the unfortunate sailors. He had me doubly incarcerated in this fortress at the edge of the world.
I went up to the lantern, where the weather raged dark, wasteful, wild. The immeasurable abyss hurled and twisted and threw jealous billows high against the house. Spume flecked, foam strewn, spindrift chidden. The sea lashed in torment.
But I do not feel like a prisoner. Rather, I see myself Ulysses, Diomedes or Pyrrhus expectant in the wooden horse: he whose sable arms, black as his purpose, did the night resemble, his dread and black complexion smeared with heraldry more dismal. Head to foot now is he total gules, tricked with blood of fathers, mothers, uncles…
TWENTY-SIX
True to his word, Mr Adamson has brought me food and drink. I hear the padlock scratching, the hasp clang and a wooden tray appears at the gap. He is careful not to show his fingers or any trace of skin as he places the food on the floor. He has been quite clear with me:
“Listen carefully, Meakes. Any attempt to attack or escape and there’ll be no more food. Do we agree? You’ll have to live on rainwater and any birds you catch.”
Naturally, I agree. It is necessary to appear calm and compliant. Perhaps, in time, he will accept my innocence and seek instead the boy for punishment. He – that poisonous imp, that moribund homunculus – must answer for the crimes levelled against me. In time, I will be exonerated fully.