by Matt Stanley
“So you did.”
“I did not. I never asked you to go out looking for a shadow or whatever lunacy you wrote about. It’s pure fancy and lies.”
“Please. It is my property.” I held out my hand.
“Then you shouldn’t leave it lying carelessly around, should you?”
I stood. “I must insist.”
“Are you going to kill me, too, Meakes? The last one. You have killed all the rest, Bartholomew included… Or so I surmise from your account. This is evidence, Meakes. I will have nothing to answer for when the Commission sees this.”
I snatched at the book in his hand. He swung the hatchet at my head and it glanced off my shoulder. I threw myself bodily upon him, grappling for the book, but he was strong: fired with the divine electricity of his lightning bolt.
I caught another blow, this time on the ear. Another must have hit my temple because all went black for a few moments and I awoke to find him gone. My precious journal lay on the floor.
His footsteps were banging down the stairs to the commissioner’s room. I heard the rattle of the lock and the hasp.
“I don’t need the book, Meakes!” he shouted. “I know what’s in it and I know where it is. When they come, I’ll tell them and they’ll take it from you. Or you’ll destroy it first – and I don’t think you’ll do that.”
I said nothing.
“I’m not coming out, Meakes! You’ll have to smash this door before you reach me… And I have all the tools in here. The cutter will come out soon – you know it’s true. The sea will calm. They can see we’ve lost the lantern. We’re dark. They’ll come and they’ll find just you and me and we’ll tell our stories and see who they believe: you the madman, or me the drunkard. But I never killed a man, Meakes. They’re not investigating me. I’ll tell them about the bark and the sailors. There’ll be a record of the missing vessel and crew manifests. I only have to wait, Meakes. I don’t need food. I have enough in here. The Commission will be here before I suffer thirst or starvation. I’ll not be your final victim, Meakes. But I hope I’ll be there when they sentence you to hang.”
I said nothing. I sat and thought.
I thought of Nero, of Herostratus, of Titus in Jerusalem and the ire of the Lord who will come with fire, and with his chariots like a whirlwind, to render his anger with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire, and who rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from out of heaven.
I thought I smelled smoke.
Perhaps the previous night’s lightning bolt had grown and kindled in the coal depots or among the stacks of candles. Perhaps the great lantern-sweeping billow had burst in the windows and fed the nascent embers with the air they sought for life. Perhaps the great quantity of oil spilled by the ruptured cistern was providing a path whereon the infant conflagration might creep slowly up the great flue the house had become.
I went below to investigate and, lo, a small fire had started in the oil store. Coals had been scattered and a heap of splintered manhole-hatch wood piled on that spot as if to encourage flames. The addition of balled newspaper and broken candles only served to give boldness to the growing blaze.
I watched the animal grow valiant, seeking greater territory. Evidently, somebody had taken a canister of oil and dribbled it from the store up the steps to the provision store and among the baskets there; up the steps to the kitchen and around the open draws and cupboards; up the stairs to the keepers’ room with its beds and furniture; further to the principal’s room and up and up so that the fire had a shining path to follow. Somebody, too, had opened all the manhole hatches.
“Meakes? What are you doing out there?”
I said nothing.
“There is oil coming under my door. Meakes!”
I said nothing.
“Can I smell smoke? What are you doing, lad?”
“I don’t know if I can extinguish it alone, Mister Adamson.”
“Damn you, Meakes! You will not force me out on this pretence.”
“It must have been the lightning. A spark, perhaps.”
“Don’t do this, lad!”
“I believe it is spreading.”
“Put it out! Do it now while you have the chance. Smother it with a blanket. Pour water on it. Meakes – can you hear me?”
I sat in the stairwell outside his room and heard him moving. I heard him opening a window as if to look below for signs of smoke. I saw the shadows of his feet at the bottom of the door.
“Meakes? Are you outside? You have to put that fire out. Don’t you know how fire spreads in a lighthouse? It’s one massive flue, man! And with the lantern gone… Meakes? Damn you, Meakes! Meakes? We’re in this situation together, me and you. We’ve survived this terrible storm and the many… the many accidents of recent days. We must work together. Meakes?”
The smell of smoke was becoming stronger and was rising past me, curious and questing, on its way to the shattered lantern. The fire was growing as when, on some mountain, through the lofty grove, the crackling flames ascend, and blaze above, the fires expanding, as the winds arise, to shoot their long beams, and kindle half the skies.
The light at the bottom of the bedroom door went dark as Mr Adamson blocked it with a watch-cloak or some other clothing.
I recalled that a sacrifice should properly be attended by an aromatic offering of spice to please the gods. Alexander as a child had been rebuked by his tutor Leonidas for throwing two handfuls of expensive perfume upon the sacrificial fire. But when the youth had conquered Gaza, he sent the tutor eighteen tons of frankincense and myrrh along with a note advising less parsimony with his supplications.
It was difficult to descend with the quantity of smoke and heat now rising. I had to cover my mouth and nose with an arm as I sought the provision store for something that could serve as incense. Time was short, and so I was obliged to grab a can of pepper to cast upon flames that even then were emerging from the oil store and seeking the wooden stairs.
Indeed, I could barely descend past the oil store for the intense heat emerging. I smelled my hair scorching and felt my skin burning beneath my clothes, which shrank and blackened at the fire’s touch.
I made for the stone staircase and the water store. This would be my sanctuary. Down here, there are no windows and nothing to burn. All is stone, metal and water. I watched the conflagration walking up the wooden steps from the oil store, sniffing out the flow of air and fuel it needed to rise yet higher. I watched it enter the provision store and heard it consuming bags and baskets, puckered apples, crackling grain and popping bottles. The pyre roared on, finding wind, and now it leapt vaulting up the next stairwell, sucked and beckoned by the flow of air effected by the colossal chimney of the lighthouse.
I descended a few more steps to escape the heat and listened to the hollow-moaning holocaust. Next the kitchen fell victim, plates tumbling and wainscot cracking – an inferno, that place where we had sat so many times: a raging den of flames and smoke sent senseless by the ever-luring sky.
“Meakes! Meakes!” I heard faintly over the bellows of ascending hell.
I started to feel faint and leaned against the lightning-scorched brass rail. The combustion was using up my air, inhaling from the very bottom of its stone lung to feed the fury. I had no choice but to descend into the water store and approach the main door through ankle-deep water.
On opening the first metal door to the vestibule, cool air rushed past me and growled into the fire. It was ravenous. It would burn every breath of air fed to it.
Boisterous waves were still banging at the main door, but what choice did I have? I slid the side bolts. I slid the floor bolts and peered through the crack to grey mountain peaks towering. Restraining the door with a trembling shoulder, I selected the boltholes closest to the brass sill and secured the door with a gap of just two inches.
“Meakes! Meakes!” Fainter now amid the uproar.
Wind blasted past me through the vestibule and up the tower, flames wailing and
whooping with the levitation they were offered. A wave crashed against the door and water jetted through the aperture with a force that shook the door and rattled bolts. How long before some immense billow smashed the oak to splinters?
I was in a precarious position: caught between the warring elements of flame and sea. Both would starve me of respiration. Both would consume me in their fatal embrace. The heat was rising and threatening to descend. The flood was high and trying to break in.
The tower was a Cuthite fire beacon, a second Tower of Babel. Soon, sacrificial ecstasy would burst from the ruined lantern crown and shoot into the heavens. Ripsaw would become the London Fire Monument made real.
I could see only one course of action: the massed water tanks.
I took off my boots, put my journal inside one of them and laid them on the cover to one tank. My feet were cold upon the chill and briny stone. I then lifted the cover of the emptiest tank and climbed into the black water before closing the hinged lid over me.
There was no room to stand. I sat and hugged my knees, the water level halfway up my chest. My clothes immediately soaked heavy and frigid. All was darkness.
The bombarding sea was magnified within this metal box, reverberating like thunder immediately overhead. The burning column howled and groaned. The main door rattled in its boltholes. And I, a midnight embryo, shivered waiting for the hell to pass.
How long I waited, I could not say. I felt the iron warming. I smelled the smoke. The water vibrated with striking waves and seismic fire. If only one could re-enter the womb and return to purity and innocence, wiping clean all that contaminates and poisons. From that first screaming entry into the world, we are cast upon the flood and at the mercy of the sky. Darkness pursues us with beguiling whispers and false promises. Light offers sanctuary and salvation. We live amid penumbrae. Burn this house; don’t burn this house. Kill this man; do not kill this man. Revenge oneself for horrors committed; forgive others for their sins. Bludgeon, dismember and inculpate – or walk away to fairer horizons and a life of happy routine.
Choices. Choices.
Mr Fowler said we all have choices, but I wonder. The higher mind is a crystal lens that gathers rays and concentrates them in a beam of saving light to pierce darkness and warn sojourners of peril. That light is knowledge. That light is art and science. That light is Socrates’ daemon and St Augustine’s soul. It is a beacon to all men through history. And yet where does the great and pure refracting lens stand but on a tower? And where is the base of that tower but in the foundations of the earth or amid the sea bottom’s wretched jellies? That darkness, that cloaca, is man the animal. Man the hunter. Man driven by black and lascivious urges, man malignant and envenomed with the feral passions in his blood. To conquer. To possess. To annihilate for personal gain. And which of this pair will triumph in the end: animal or anima? Lust or love? Piety or pride?
Without light there is no darkness. But inside these frail columns of flesh, inside these veins, inside this skull, there is only night. Illumination is without, beyond. Illumination burns bright and needs fuel to live. It is delicate and requires nurturing. But darkness needs nothing to exist. It is the essence and the origin of everything.
In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Before the light? Numberless eons of nothingness to which we all return.
THIRTY
I don’t know how long I was inside the water tank. When I emerged, my limbs were stiff and I was shaking. The storeroom was awash, the main door ripped free of its fastenings by mocking billows and carried to my feet. The lighthouse was hot and reeked of incendiary destruction. I went to the stone staircase and put on my boots to ascend.
The oil store was a charred and smoking hell, all coal burned up and the oil cisterns soot-blackened. The ruptured one had been consumed entirely, but the others remained covered and seemed still to contain some oil. It was necessary to cover my face against the harsh and acrid smell.
The staircase to the provision store had burned entirely and I was faced with an impossible leap to reach the next chamber. I dragged an iron coal depot – still hot – from the oil store to use as a step and managed to jump high enough to grasp the edge and hoist myself, soiling my legs and arms black in the process.
The smell there was worse: a compost of burned hessian, soap, vinegar, wicker basket, sundry grains, salt beef and ship’s biscuit. The place was a chaos of carbonised detritus and ashes, all reduced to shrivelled debris.
Again, I had to drag a japanned locker – now stripped of its lacquer to the bare metal – to hoist myself up the stairless gap to the kitchen.
Waste. Destruction. Ripsaw had become an empty crucible, its interior scarred and blasted by purifying incandescence. All that remained was heat-scoured walls and the vestiges of familiar things transformed by fury into shadows. No doors or partitions were left. No wax-cloth covering. No furniture. No staircases. Gehenna’s fire had whirled voracious through the house and razed everything that fed it. The keepers’ room: a shell of embers. The principal’s room: dilapidated heaps of smoking cinders, the leech jar empty and desiccated corpses spread about its base.
The commissioner’s room’s double-locked door was gone – reduced to ashes by the up-rushing firestorm. I went inside. The heat had been intense in here, fuelled by book and chart. The sheets were gone, the bed a mere charcoal sketch of beams.
No bones. No body.
The library. The poor, blameless library, once so like home, was now a nightmarish Hades. But not all the books had burned. Those stacked closest together had lost their spines to flame, but remained intact: Crusoe soot-smeared but still determined; Achilles and Hector – no strangers to the fires of sacrifice – still brandishing their arms; Macbeth, waist-deep in blood, waded on; Hamlet coached his players undistracted. But Dickens had succumbed, and Scott. Arthur Gordon Pym, too, was lost. They would live on in other books on other shelves.
But no bones. No body.
Up into the light-room store, whose walls showed marks of spirituous explosion and whose accumulated rubble smoked still. Here, so close to the nourishing air of the light-room, the inferno had burned its hottest and most crazed. The vice lay on the ground amid the fragments of the table that had held it.
But no body.
The light-room was still hot, its metal column, cogwheels and mesh ceiling super-heated. Raven flags and tatters of paper and cloth dangled where they’d been left by the tower’s hellish expirations. The sky showed as a circle of pale grey. There was a smell of roasted meat. Not beef or pork or anything I recognised.
The spiral metal staircase to the lantern had buckled and it creaked as I ascended to the open air. No glass remained, and only jagged spikes of astragal. The cupola was entirely vanished. This was now the uppermost platform of the lighthouse, exposed fully to the open sea and sky. The lens – the great one-ton lens – lay on its side, charred black on its lower half and missing sections that had fallen and smashed.
Inside and foetus-curled were the remains of Mr Adamson: hairless, naked, black. What impulse had compelled him to seek protection in the lens – the same chamber that had scorched him with heaven’s fire? Did he believe in the sanctity and sanctuary of the light? Did he, in his final asphyxiation, see something reflected, something refracted, of a life to come? Of a place to rest? Of a home?
Ripsaw Reef had been his hell. He had lived the full length of his life, travelling the seas and land, traversing friendships, learning, perhaps loving, to finish here – roasted ’midst a lunatic inferno inside a crown-glass coffin. Piteous. Absurd. A man sketched in charcoal on a cave wall.
And so I sit amid the rushing clouds and write and look occasionally at the approaching cutter. If I wished, I could call on Boreas or Zephyrus and draw a squall. I could summon cataracts and hurricanes to blow the world back whence it came. That is within my power. For if the winds rage, does not the sea wax mad? I
am the sea. And if calm is upon the flood, is it not a field of tranquillity and a mirror to the vault of heaven?
I am the sea. I am the sea.