by Matt Stanley
First impressions are powerful. He wouldn’t notice the missing chair. He wouldn’t imagine that I had been at liberty about the house and returned to knot myself anew. He would see only an unfortunate young man tied to a chair and lying helpless on the floor.
And so I waited, my neck cricked at an awkward angle and my shoulder sore against the stone. The structure shook and trembled but would not yield. Wave and wind and rain and spray assailed it, but it is adamantine – a temple pharos. No elements can crush it.
* * *
Four rectangles of light around the shutters showed that day had ventured to appear. The door was open and Mr Adamson was standing silhouetted in its aperture, wordless, watching me. He looked around the library: at the wrinkled carpet, at the toppled chair, at two depleted candles on the marble tabletop. I fancied I could see his mind working.
So many accidents at Ripsaw. Poor asphyxiated Spencer and those others washed off the rock. The missing commissioner and vanished Sunken Cheeks. Woeful Principal Bartholomew whose end had followed a series of misfortunes. Blond Beard and his fatal desire to take the air. The Ape a victim of mephitic air. And now uncomprehending Bulbous Gut another casualty of gravity. The evidence seemed clear enough.
“Meakes. Are you awake, Meakes? Are you alive?”
“I am.”
“The other sailor is dead, Meakes. The last one.”
“What has happened?”
He approached and stood over me, still a shadow ’gainst the dim light of the stairwell. I felt that he was studying the ropes and gauging possibilities. The hatchet was in his hand.
“What do you think happened, Meakes?”
“I’m sure I have no idea. I have been here all night.”
“He appears to have fallen down the stairs.”
I said nothing.
“That is, his death looks very like an accident.” His eyes upon me were unwavering.
“Then you and I have nothing to regret or fear.”
“What manner of demon are you, Meakes? What brought you here? Did you come with evil intentions, or did they grow and fester once you arrived at Ripsaw?”
I said nothing.
The hatchet rose. “Tell me, Meakes – what if you were the next seeming accident at Ripsaw? The lantern has been irreparably damaged and you were in it at the time. It would be no shock to learn that you had tumbled to the sea. Just another one of so many fatalities. Your body lost to the waves. Who would know? Who would mourn you? The world is better without you. Without men like you.”
“It would look bad for you: the sole survivor.”
“It looks bad for me already, Meakes – thanks to your machinations and your conspiracies. The Commission will hang me for Bartholomew if they can. And for their commissioner, too, if one stone gets two birds.”
“They don’t know about the sailors. Nobody has seen. They can’t prove anything about the commissioner.”
He looked down at me. “Are you my punishment, Meakes? Have you been sent to castigate me for accumulated sins? Have I lived so badly that I deserve incarceration in this house of wailing winds and madness?”
“Mister Fowler says we are each our own deity. We reward and punish at our will.”
“Mister Fowler. Mister Fowler. You killed him, didn’t you?”
I said nothing.
Lightning flashed. A pause. Thunder ripped the sky and shook the house.
He went to the window in the stairwell.
“Have you lighted the lamp, Meakes?”
“How could I?”
“It looks like the lamp is lighted. I can see its glow in the rain and spray.”
“Perhaps the lantern is burning. The lightning…”
He went quickly up the stairs. I heard him enter the storeroom through the manhole and then into the light-room. Then silence.
I shrugged off the ropes around my arms and worked quickly at the bonds about my legs. Up the stairs, up through the manhole, up through the darkened store.
Illumination shone from above.
The light-room was flooded with celestial light. I looked up at the lantern and saw a cold blaze emanating from the astragals, from the lens frame and the parapet – a pale blue electric phosphorescence that dripped pearlescent with the water that had entered. Flamed amazement.
Mr Adamson was inside the tilted lens. He had neither heard nor imagined my approach. The wind and rain had momentarily paused – the storm’s calm eye? – but the sea still thundered spray in through the fractured panes.
“The corposant,” I said, appearing at his side. “Saint Elmo’s light.”
He raised the hatchet, shocked, but saw my reverent wonder.
“Have you seen it before?” I said.
“At sea. Off the mastheads and the yard arms.”
We stood together at the centre of a glowing dream. All around us, in the lantern and the lens, holy vapour hissed and sizzled with chill fire. Our faces were pallid with it and our eyes galactic gems. Out beyond, the dark and cloud-raked firmament flashed stuttering white.
“The boy is gone,” I said. “We have nothing more to fear.”
“Is that right, Meakes?” said Mr Adamson somewhat wearily.
“Indeed. No more lives will be taken. You need not restrain me further.”
He gazed at me, an insubstantial spirit in the pallid light.
“I believe we must work together,” I said, “if we are to survive this tempest and reach safety. We must be allies.”
“You think that returning to shore means safety?”
“You have said it yourself: we are prisoners here. There is nowhere to go except the abyss.”
“Some might say you’re already there, Meakes.”
“Do we have an accord?” I held out my hand.
He looked at it as one might look into a freshly disinterred coffin.
“Very well, Meakes. I suppose you talk sense.” He shook my hand.
He was lying.
The heavens flared white and thunder followed instantly – a basso cannonade that shook the house. A fanged pane dropped from its astragal and shattered on the parapet: a spray of glowing sapphires.
“We should descend,” said Mr Adamson. “I don’t want to be up here in the lightning. I expect we’ve lost the conductor in the wind.”
His words were prophetic.
A colossal violet flash. Blinding. Deafening. A smell of burning phlogiston.
I could not see, hear, think.
A heavy weight against my leg. Burned flesh. Burned wood.
Mr Adamson was at my feet. Dead? Stunned?
An annular section of the lens dropped and smashed. It’s gun-metal frame had isolated me from the lightning strike, but some part of Mr Adamson must have been touching metal. Perhaps the hatchet in his hand had grazed the frame.
The sky twitched epileptically electric. We had to descend.
I dragged him unceremoniously down the metal stairs into the light-room. I closed the windows and stocked the stove. He would have to stay here until he regained consciousness or died. Meanwhile, I had to check the lighthouse was not burning.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The manhole hatch to the light-room store had been blasted to charred pieces and was smoking still. A scorched and ragged line continued down the wooden stairs, while on the wall a curious fern-like burn pattern had spread.
I followed the trail down past the library and the bedrooms, noting that the inert corpse of Bulbous Gut was marked with a red and ragged slash where the lightning had crossed his back. The skin was melted and cauterised, the shirt left carbonised.
The thread of destruction continued past the kitchen, where many of the cupboard doors stood open, their cutlery, crockery and glassware spewed and lying broken on the floor. A skein of acrid smoke hung head-height in the provision store, though nothing seemed disturbed.
The oil store was quite a mess, however. The cistern nearest to the door had convulsed and ruptured, its riveted seams burst open and the body
of Sunken Cheeks half-vomited from within. His head, shoulder and left arm were visible in the lamplight, slick and viscous with the oil. The floor shone stickily with all that had spilled and the air was heavy with its scent.
I continued down to the water store and saw that the brass handrail had been transformed by the sky’s ferocity from the gleaming yellow of Principal Bartholomew’s tenure to a sombre iridescence. Evidently, the bolt had travelled right along it into the cellar of the house and shattered the final granite step.
The lowermost chamber was two-inches deep in brine – a mirror in the lamplight, quivering mercurial at the tempest’s ceaseless onslaught. The noise was apocalyptic. Here was Vulcan’s forge with gasping bellows and the constant thunder of massed tilt-hammers. Here was purgatory amid the wail of countless souls held to the purifying flame. Here was ten years of warfare on the Trojan plain, the peopled din of sword and spear ’gainst man-covering shield. Here was madness reigning, raging, railing in the darkness edging abyssopelagic depths. Here, on the bare outside of this world, amid black tartareous cold where the firmament spouts cataracts of fire and this house, is the prey and sport of racking whirlwinds. Here, where length and breadth, and height and time and sense are lost illimitable without dimension. Here, unrespited, unpitied, unreprieved we crouch and cower beyond grace.
This is Hell. This, the imprisoning tower of the inward self with walls seven-feet-thick, impenetrable but corrupt and blackened at their core. On this abhorrent rock we stand, victims all, to face the vagaries and whips of fleeting spans – powerless ’gainst tide and season. Toys of fortune. Afflicted, benighted, betrayed. We may close the shutters and bar the doors and build our edifices higher than the flood. We may tantalise the sky with Babel ambition. We may combine our lights and refract beams that challenge heaven. But our mortal feet remain barnacled in darkness and it will seep; it will enter; it will undermine and poison all our play-divinity.
* * *
I write now at the marble-top table in the library. The stove is hot, the shutters closed against the storm. I have laboriously dragged and lowered Mr Adamson here from the draughty, ruined light-room and swaddled him in blankets on the bed.
Bulbous Gut remains dead and firebolt-scarred in the interstitial stairwell. Sunken Cheeks remains unholily baptised in the oil cistern. The lighthouse is dark and I move about it with a lamp, monk-like in these rectilinear catacombs.
Poor Mr Adamson remains unconscious and gravely injured, a livid band all along his left arm and down his back. From this scarlet root extend many of the same fern-like patterns I have witnessed on the lighthouse walls. He is as helpless as a child, yet I have tied him firmly to the bed at wrist and ankle for his own security.
I believe the storm may be abating. The wind has lessened and the rain has stopped, but we are still being battered by the sea. The greatest waves come after the wind has ceased and I wait with trepidation for crests yet higher than the ones that took our fog bells and our lantern glass.
Ripsaw is half-destroyed and lightless – invisible to mariners and to the shore. We are now just a dark column, a slender pencil mark amid a sheet of charcoal swirls and shading. They know nothing of these dramas in the station. They can only imagine what is happening, what has happened, here, and trust to gossip or imagination the events unfolding on the reef.
No doubt they’ve heard rumours from the Commission and from Mr Jackson. No doubt, they saw the pale, brine-soaked corpse of Principal Bartholomew arrive unmoving on his litter. They’ve watched the elements grow mad and the lighthouse disappear in their ecstasies. If, sometimes, the house materialises through the spray, they must gaze through their telescopes and study us as villagers once gazed up at the castle on the hill and wondered at the intrigues and the mysteries within.
Could any of them, I wonder, picture the scenes we are living now? The Cyclops lantern blinded. The tower lightning-blasted. The lower chamber flooded. Bodies on stair and in cistern. One keeper insensible and the other enshuttered in perpetual night ’gainst assailing seas.
I am so grievously tired. The storm torments with thump and shake and lashing spindrift. We are inhabiting a place of ghosted absences and timeless expectation. The sea must calm, the wind must stop, and then will come the cutter with its fateful emissaries to take us to that other world. The world of men and streets and gaols.
But before I sleep, I must clean the house and put it in order. A new manhole hatch is required for the light-room. Bulbous Gut, lying further up the house, will have to go off the balcony. Hoisting him up four flights of steps is going to be a tiresome and disagreeable experience without the aid of Mr Adamson, but the mariner must not be here when the Commission arrives. No trace of he or any of his shipmates must remain – not clothes or shoes or evidence of other guests at Ripsaw. They and their vessel must be so erased that only the sea’s smooth surface may smile at their passing.
Sunken Cheeks may be toppled down the stone staircase to the water store without much labour and cast out of the main door once the night has fallen. It’s true that I may risk a tumbling billow entering the house, but we must dispose of our rubbish and keep the tower clean. The Commission may be pacified provided that their twenty-one flat plates are stacked just-so and that eleven knives sit snugly in the proper draw, not ten. Lord, deliver us from a library book not properly catalogued, or three minims of oil unaccounted for in its apportioned column.
* * *
Night. My duties now accomplished, I keep vigil over Mr Adamson in the library. The wind has stilled yet further but the waves have risen and great walls of ocean heave against the tower. I have watched them from the lantern: rolling swollen and heavy – fatigued with their own density – and folding about the tower in futile embrace. Like burly boxers in the final throes, they look for anything to hold that will support them.
I cannot sleep for their incessant explosions, expecting that some envious surge will be the one to crash through a shuttered window, burst in the main door or sweep the column, disintegrating, from its rock. Not a single clock has worked since the lightning strike and so we have little concept of the time. I was dozing at some tender hour when a thunderous impact was accompanied by screaming metal and an awful impact on the reef.
The lantern.
Water was dripping down the stairs as I went up to the light-room. I paused before opening the newly constructed manhole. Would a torrent of freezing brine descend to encompass me?
I pushed. Water dribbled but did not gush. I tentatively raised my head above the floor to see that almost the entire lantern and cupola had been wrenched off by some barbaric wave whose crest had vaulted two hundred feet or more. The lens lay on its side amid emerald and prismatic rubble. The majority of panes and astragals were gone, leaving only jagged metal angles. The lighthouse had lost its crown and become a common chimney. I saw clouds racing through the steel mesh ceiling as water dripped apologetically into the light-room. A strand of seaweed glistened on the table where I had passed so many hours on watch.
What luck that I was in the library when that billow struck! Imagine – the great green sea appearing at the pane, its speckled mane wind-whipped, its concave maw a wall ten times thicker than the thickest course of Ripsaw. Imagine the very instant when it broke against the glass and all went dark before immense pressures blasted every pane to dust and permitted ingress to the beast. In one moment, the one-ton lens was lifted like a pine cone in a river and jerked from its base, before the wave continued out the other side, taking glass and copper with it. Nature had erased the art and science and the will of man.
Further down the house, I found the surge had smashed in shutters and windows, leaving puddles in the lower stores and in the kitchen. They would need to be repaired, but I lacked energy. It would be futile to attempt any work until the waves subsided further.
And so now I wait. Wait for sleep. Wait for light. Wait for Mr Adamson to return from whatever bourn he sojourns in. Wait for the weather to change and for th
e inevitable cutter. Wait for the inescapable.
Mr Adamson looks as Principal Bartholomew did at the end. Pale. Immobile. His skin is painted with an exquisite filigree of burns and angry venal labyrinths. I envy him. I envy him because he has been touched by God, whose arrow shall go forth as the lightning with whirlwinds of the south, his eyes as lamps of fire, and his arms and his feet like in colour to polished brass, and the voice of his words like the voice of a multitude. Mr Adamson has felt the holy fire of Judgement – a power vast and limitless that leaves mortal man destroyed or purer for its searing Truth. It punishes sin, or eradicates it.
TWENTY-NINE
I awoke cold and damp. The stove had cooled and the atmosphere had entered the lighthouse through the many broken windows. My body was stiff from having slept in a chair.
Mr Adamson was awake and free. Not only free, but reading. He was reading this very volume, my personal journal, that I had left on the marble tabletop after writing.
“You are awake, Mister Adamson.”
His hand moved to the hatchet on the sheets beside him. “Aye. I can’t hear anything in my left ear. My other arm is almost numb.”
“You are untied.”
“You’d make a hopeless sailor, Poet. A child could wriggle free of your knots.”
“You are reading my journal. My private journal.”
“Indeed I am. And what a work of fiction you’ve written. What a mind you have, Meakes! What lies and fancies! All that stuff about the boy – conversations with him, no less! I think the Commission would be very pleased to take this volume into evidence, don’t you?”
“Give me the book.”
“These pages are full of calumny and defamation. You say I locked you out on the balcony. Two times, in fact!”