by Matt Stanley
It is difficult to remain at peace here in the tower turret, for the firmament is allied with the flood as they conspire to erase the house from existence. The banshee ventilator’s din is quite demented and the wind moans interminably round the granite courses.
I have nothing to read except columns of weather notations and the ship-sighting log with its list of nameless colliers, schooners, skiffs, cutters, lighters, barks, merchantmen and sloops. There is nothing to see but clouds, spray and savage water. I sleep. I wake. I watch Principal Bartholomew’s storm tube turn opaque and crystalline.
Twilight. I light the lamp and set the mechanism going. I feed the light-room stove with coal and move my chair closer to its warmth. And I wait for the inevitable. I know he’s coming. I have felt his presence.
It seems the tempest has felt his presence, too. The billows now are constant thunder. The tower shakes almost without pause. I remember my first days at Ripsaw when the gentle whump of waves alarmed me so. How they must have laughed at my naïvety.
“You have always been naïve,” said the boy, just behind me.
I didn’t turn. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“I am always with you. You know that.”
“What message has Mister Adamson given you?”
“I don’t speak to Mister Adamson. Only to you.”
“As you like. You have been busy in the lighthouse. How many have you killed now? The commissioner. Spencer. Two mariners… Or is it three? One of them has vanished.”
“James, James – you know where he is, the one you call Sunken Cheeks.”
“I do not.”
“Mister Fowler told you not to lie. Lies are weeds that grow and grow and suffocate the truth. He would be disappointed with you, James. Look what you have become: a prisoner again. Distracted. Your cerebrum is quite overheated.”
“Do not sully his name with your tainted mouth. Be gone, you starveling. You loathsome toad.”
“Poor Mister Fowler – bludgeoned by his favourite, by his own nephew. Not only clubbed but chopped. The blood! Oh, the blood! And that sharp cupric smell impossible to wash away. You supped full with horrors that night, James. What man could do such a thing?”
“Go, you morbid harbinger!”
“Harbinger, I? You are the death-wreaker, James. You are the fatal shadow. What other fellow would kill his very own—?”
“Leave me, fiend!”
“—Would kill his very own par—”
I spun in my chair and leaped at the pallid spirit, taking his cold throat in my hands. I squeezed and forced my thumbs tight against a gristly tube. Tight and tighter still to stanch the seeping poison of his words.
The foul youth fell. I kneeled on his chest and leaned into my work, but still he spoke calmly and with clarity.
“Convict, murderer, madman…”
“Die! Why won’t you die?”
“… Patricide. Matricide. Avunculicide…”
“Lord, deliver me from this infernal imp!”
“… Incendiary. Dismemberer. Decapitator…”
I grasped a handful of hair and beat the child’s skull against the stone floor, shaking his fragile form as a dog shakes a rat to snap its spine.
“No more words! No. More. Words!”
Exhaustion overtook me. I realised I was alone in the light-room. The boy was gone. No trace or stain remained. I was on my knees and dripping perspiration. My panting briefly challenged the wind for fury, but the elements would have their say.
A colossal billow crashed booming against the tower. I felt it shake beneath my knees. The mechanism stuttered in its steady hum. The barometer toppled from the wall and smashed against the floor.
A pause. A breath.
And then another strike, but from another angle. The already shaking lighthouse was confounded in its swaying. It lurched. Warping metal groaned. The supporting column shuddered and the great lens heaved sideways, jarring free of its mechanism. Prisms fell and splintered. Shattered shards rained tinkling on the light-room.
I rushed up the stairs into the lantern and gazed in horror upon the afflicted deity. The lamp was still alight, but the lens was tilted, static. Its beams were frozen, misaligned. The ventilator wheezed and swallowed seaspray. The waves had reached the very cowl.
The lens and frame weigh in excess of one ton. Not even three strong men could lever it back into its clockwork saddle. Nor are there spare prisms in the store for this eventuality.
“Meakes! Meakes!” The voice of Mr Adamson below.
“I’m in the lantern.”
He came up the stairs. “My God, what a strike! We have lost windows in the storerooms and the kitchen.” He saw the lens. “Christ save us!”
I saw that he was holding the hatchet he had used to injure Principal Bartholomew.
“What can we do?” I said.
“It’s broken, lad. We can’t do anything. The waves are breaking clean over the lighthouse. We must get you down below. Come. Come!”
“But the light!”
“Damn the light! Do you want to die!”
“I cannot abandon my watch.”
We stood in that dramatic tableau for a moment – he gripping his hatchet for defence or attack, I unbalanced by the leaning lens askew. Nature decided for us.
The lantern’s weather side exploded in vitreous hail as a great beam smashed through the astragals to lie half in, half out of the hole it had made. Seawater and sand rushed in up to our knees – sand vomited from twenty fathoms deep. The cheated wind burst in with spitting spray. I heard a fog bell ripped from its iron mooring, pealing as it fell.
The lamp was out, the lighthouse blind.
“Down! Down!” screamed Mr Adamson over the wind.
“We must fix the lantern!”
“Fix it? We cannot fix that! Down! Down!”
He did not wait for me. I followed him down the steps, through the light-room manhole, through the store manhole to the stairwell outside the library.
Bulbous Gut was waiting with a coil of rope over his forearm.
“You understand, lad,” said Mr Adamson. “I cannot have you free about the house.”
I submitted to be lashed with sturdy seaman’s knots at thigh and arm and ankle to one of the wooden chairs. All four shutters were closed against the storm. The sole illumination was from Mr Adamson’s lamp.
“Might you leave the lamp or light a candle?” I said.
“Afraid of the dark, Meakes?”
I did not respond to that. He used his lamp to light two candles, which he placed on the marble-top table in their brass holders.
“Am I expected to sleep upright in a chair?” I said.
“It’s uncomfortable, I’m sure,” he said. “But so is being murdered and I’ve no wish to be your next.”
“What will you do about the lantern?”
A shrug. “Nothing, lad. What can I do? We don’t have panes enough to fix it. As for the lens, it is ruined. That’s nothing you or I anybody at the shore station can repair. Men will need to come from Birmingham or London.”
“The light is out.”
“Yes, lad. The light is out. The light is out. There’s nothing you or I could do about it. It’s not our fault. The lantern’s built for wind and birds – not for ship’s timbers borne on mountainous waves. This must be the worst storm since 1703 and poor old Bartholomew is missing it. Or perhaps he lies in bed on shore listening to its wailing and wishing he was out at Ripsaw with his instruments. I don’t know.” His smile flickered in the candlelight.
“The light has shone from Ripsaw every night for twenty-seven years.”
“Well, it shines no more.”
“There may be vessels in the straight.”
“Only a maniac would be out sailing in this. Besides, how can you fret yourself over drowning sailors when you’ve accounted for more of them than the sea in recent days?”
“That comment is unjust.”
He took a step towards me. “Is it? I
s it, Meakes? What’s your story, Poet? Why did you come to Ripsaw? Was it only to take lives? Or are you a fugitive from crimes committed on land? I wonder. I was joking before about your chopped-up Mister Fowler, but now I’m thinking…”
Bulbous Gut stood watching all the while. He didn’t seem to understand anything other than the tone. He was watching a play in a foreign or a dead language: the characters gesturing this way and that, their voices placatory or threatening, cozening or seductive. One is compelled to guess the action and each uncomprehending viewer sees his own play, constructing it from the clues at hand, the inferences, the music of the words if not their real meanings. His experience is as much imagination as the play itself. A new interpretation. A new production. Had Bulbous Gut perceived the dramatis personae in our unfolding drama? Did he know about the lurking boy? Could he untangle the concatenating syllables of Principal Bartholomew, a character who’d left the stage long before he’d entered the main door on his cork-baited hook? Who was Spencer to him? The Sphinx? The Ghost of Banquo? Hamlet’s armoured father stalking the battlements of Elsinore? Had he perceived earlier scenes with the commissioner? How difficult to understand the drama having missed the opening acts! If he left this place alive, what story would he tell his wife, his children, his drinking mates in portside bars? Would this be his Macbeth, his Lear, his Titus? And would they believe a word he said, sailors being so notorious for their yarning? Get away! they’d tell him. A great column in the middle of the sea? A prismatic deity beaming from its tower top? A bawdy king who caught barrels from the sea and ate ship’s biscuit and drank brandy from an iron goblet? A tempest preternatural dredging sand from twenty fathoms deep? Get away! Get away! Murder most foul in the asphyxiating privy chamber! Another fellow sacrificed to clouds upon a balcony between sea and sky? Get away! Put down your flagon!
“Meakes? Meakes? You’re quite hopeless, aren’t you? I knew it from when I first laid eyes on you.”
“Perhaps you will allow me some peace and quiet now,” I said.
“In this?” he said, jerking a thumb at the ululating elements without.
“I have slept amid worse.”
And it was true. I had slept through the keening wail of Mayhew as he sought to eat a finger. I dozed as Cuthbert vomited his stomach dry with cries of strychnine poisoning. I was in the very next bed alongside sorry Tibbotson as they wrestled him into the straight-waistcoat for destroying Cuthbert’s favourite flowers. What a night that was – the whole house a veritable Bedlam! I have slept also with my sleeves soaked stiff and images of horror imprinted on my inner folio. Aye, this tempest could not rival the vast and boundless deep, this seat of desolation, the lightless cavern of my memory.
They were gone. The door was closed. Twin candles flickered. Outside, unseen, the world was returning to the chaos whence it came. Booming. Howling. Screeching. Despite the shutter, despite the window, a draught had infiltrated. Flames fluttered. One guttered and smoked. The room darkened. Shadows quivered in penumbrae.
A cataclysmic gust of wind and spray assailed the shaft. I heard metal squeal and rent in the lantern. The second candle winked out and I was in Tartarus. Stygian gloom – a Cimmerian grasping blind in raven darkness. Sightless night.
The only light was a slender line beneath the door, and this a gossamer of pale gold so fine that the weight of shade might break it. In the library, I saw nothing, though four dozen worlds inhabited that space. Simeon praying filthy on his column; kings Richard and the Henrys; Crusoe on the shore; Gulliver in Lilliput; Achilles in his tent. All watching. The sedimentary and volcanic rocks; the early kings of Rome; the suicides of London; Arthur Pym trapped in the hold. All of us together in the blackness. Aye, and Macbeth’s woman, who walked in sleep while washing, washing, washing gore. It stays under the nails, blood, and in the creases of the fingers. The smell of it dwells in the nose and in the senses so that a naked nail or rain-beaded rail whispers scents of sticky death long after terror has elapsed.
I sat in darkness.
Agamemnon coughed.
Leonidas tapped a finger.
Friday’s gaze was quizzical.
Iago felt blindly for his purse.
A single drop of water landed on my crown where the hairline meets the forehead. I looked up sightlessly and another hit my nose tip.
Had the double wave strike cracked the tower? Was water working its way between the courses down from the fractured lantern?
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Memories of the saline douche. That maddening clepsydra. I could not tolerate another drop. I pushed against the floor and tried to scrape my chair away from torment. I overbalanced. I toppled. I hit my temple against cold stone.
And still the water dripped as if following me. I tasted blood.
And still it dripped, bespattering my face, wetting my eyes, matting my hair. Spraying hot and red.
No more.
I struggled with my bindings. I twisted and contorted like a man writhing in extremities of torture. There was weakness in this chair, in its jointed angles, in its fragile legs. If I could force the whole weight of my body against its frailest points and crack its interstices asunder. If I could splay and split with mortal mass…
A creak. A crack. A cough of splinters. A snap.
Cassandra, in support, threw incense on her sacrificial fire. Lucifer sent Belial – Belial who reigns in luxurious cities where the noise of riot ascends above their loftiest towers, and injury, and outrage, and when night darkens the streets – to guard the door.
Rachitic timbers yielded one by one to breach. Ropes fell loose.
I was free. Free and glisteningly delivered from night’s foul womb.
TWENTY-SEVEN
By rekindled candlelight, I found the hatchet left sitting on the kitchen counter in full confidence that I would not escape my bounds.
I hefted it for weight and balance and saw my dull reflection in its cheek: dark, distorted. This same hatchet had cloven Principal Bartholomew’s brow and frayed the jib rope that failed him that day he fell into the sea. Blood will have blood, they say.
I ascended the stairway to the keepers’ bedroom, my footsteps’ quiet creaking quite masked by waves and moaning wind. The room was disarrayed and empty, the rank sweat of enseamed sheets left wrinkled as the sea where Blond Beard and the Ape so recently slept. Their bestial aroma lingered.
Up again to the principal’s room, now unhasped and standing ajar. Not a flicker of light showed within. I extinguished my candle with licked fingertips and entered on a filament of smoke.
The lee-side shutter was undone and water dripped a silver-beaded curtain at the window. Evidently, the bloated brute dare not sleep in total darkness. I cast my gaze about the room: Principal Bartholomew’s books and charts; his watch-cloak waiting on a hook; draws and doors half-open as if ransacked. The leeches in their jar had climbed and congregated in a mucous mass about the rim. Escape! Escape! they seemed to say, insensate with barometric fluctuation.
Bulbous Gut was sleeping prostrate, snoring lightly, his mouth open. Accustomed to the rolling ocean, he was not incommoded by the restless weather. If the lighthouse shook, it swayed him as his hammock swung him in the foc’stle. Did he dream? Did he hope? But each man’s thoughts are granite-walled and dovetailed tight. The masonry might crumble or the lens be smashed, but still the essence remains obscure.
The hatchet handle was balanced in my hand. The head glinted dully. Poll or bit? Bit or poll? I spun the handle in my palm. Better the poll – a crushing blow. Quick. No blood. What are you doing, James? What are you doing in my room? Peace, nuncle – be not afeard. But, James… What are you doing with that hammer? Go back to your room; we will speak tomorrow. I am sorry, nuncle, but I must. I must. I must.
Bulbous Gut was staring madly. He took a breath to yell.
I hammered the flat hatchet poll into his forehead before he raised his arms. A single, fatal swoop. A muffled crunch. His body jerked s
pasmodically. Bloody night descended on his eyes but his skin remained immaculate. I closed the eyelids tenderly.
What would this look like? A fall? The somnolent mariner awakes in need of the privy. Groggily, he stumbles for the stairwell, grasping blindly ’midst the thunder of the surf. A trip. A tumble. His forehead strikes the floor as a blacksmith’s hammer hits the pliant tongue of glowing metal twixt his sturdy tongues, purifying it with bursts of showering sparks and turning something humble into a work of art.
I threw back the sheets, took his furry hand in mine and dragged him from the bed on to the floor. The wax-cloth rug ruched as I pulled him to the doorway and positioned him headfirst atop the staircase to the keepers’ room. A pause. I waited and listened to the weather’s paroxysms for a fortuitous eruption. A gust, a billow, and a firm shove with my foot sent him juddering down the wooden steps to land squarely on his face, limbs a-tangle, one arm outstretched as if belatedly to break his fall. Efficient. Ordered. No need to clean the walls or burn a mattress. Merely pull the wax-cloth taut, return the hatchet to the kitchen and let the story tell itself.
I ascended to the library with my candle. The shattered chair lay in pieces on the carpet, the rope a Medusa’s head of serpents. A problem, then. I took another chair and sat and thought. What would clever Ulysses have done, arch-trickster and beguiler of the gods? He who clung to the underside of sheep, having blinded cyclopean Polyphemus in the cave.
Of course: the stove.
I blew on embers and fed small fragments to the nascent flames. The fire grew and consumed the legs, crackling and seething as the storm sucked air up through the flue. The seat back with a carved likeness of Ripsaw’s tower succumbed to orange tongues, but the leather would not burn and merely shrivelled.
Next, the question of my restraints. I could not lash myself convincingly to another chair using the same rope, but I could utilise the power of illusion and distraction.
I took another chair and tied myself securely thigh and ankle. Thereafter, all I could do was loop the rest around my arms and torso the best I could and throw myself over on my side. When Mr Adamson entered, he would find me asleep on the floor, still apparently tied up and evidently having attempted (unsuccessfully) to escape. Perhaps the rope about my arms was loose, but I had clearly given in to exhaustion and despair.