How We Became Wicked

by Alexander Yates

  • • •

  “You need to remember that your grandpa is faster than he looks,” Natalie’s mother said as they gazed out the bunkhouse window, waiting for the morning fog to burn away. “And he’s stronger, too. I want you to keep your distance. You should be just close enough that he follows you, and no closer.”

  “Okay.” Natalie nodded.

  “It’s important to keep him talking,” her mother went on. “Remember that your grandpa doesn’t want to hurt anybody. At least not until the idea strikes him. So it’s important to change the subject as often as you can. If he gets it into his mind to pick up a stone, you should pick one up too. Make a bet about who can throw it farther. Make it a game. He loves games.”

  “Got it.” Natalie fidgeted, glancing from the shoreline up to the spinning lamp atop the lighthouse tower. She was eager to have this over and done with.

  “Try to stick to the paths wherever you can,” her mother said. “And definitely stay away from any kelp or seaweed.”

  “I’m not going to fall, Mom,” Natalie said. Her hands were clammy, and her feet felt hot in her boots.

  “I know you’re not, honey,” her mother said, squeezing the nape of her neck. “It’s for your grandpa. Please don’t forget that he’s very, very old. If he slips and falls, he could really hurt himself. I want everyone to be safe. Even him.”

  “Everyone will be,” Natalie said, willing the words to be true.

  “That’s my girl,” her mother said, giving her neck one last squeeze.

  • • •

  A short time later they decided that the fog had cleared enough for them to begin. Natalie headed for the lighthouse tower. She unlocked the dead bolt on the big iron door, swung it wide, and immediately backed off. Some minutes passed, and then her grandfather appeared in the arched stone doorframe, blinking in the morning sunshine. He seemed happy, but not surprised, to find himself outside again for the first time in ages.

  “I think this is outstanding,” he said. He sucked in a long breath and then let it out with a full-body shiver of satisfaction. He stretched, elbows and knees popping. “I mean, for my money, this is a whole lot better than being cooped up inside.”

  “Totally,” Natalie said, taking a cautious step back and then another. “I can see how that’d be true.”

  Then, rather slowly, her grandfather began to approach. “Can I eat breakfast outside today?” he asked.

  “Don’t see why not,” Natalie said, still backing away. She took a long breath, hoping to steady herself. “How about we go down by the western shore?” Natalie asked. “That way we can watch the puffins.”

  “I think that sounds great,” her grandpa said, still grinning with contentment. Natalie continued to walk backward, keeping her distance as she led him away from the shining lighthouse. She stuck to the main path, giving herself room to run in case things went bad. Though it appeared that they wouldn’t—if this was a chase, it was the slowest chase in history. Her grandpa ambled with his hands on his hips, gazing out across the landscape of boulders and stones. There was a small cemetery near the southern shore, and when he caught sight of it, he stopped walking.

  “That’s were my wife is,” he said.

  “Yes, it is,” Natalie said, stopping as well. Her grandma had died shortly after the family relocated to the island, and Natalie had never had the chance to meet her.

  “I’d like to go visit my wife,” her grandpa said. Then, lest this sweet sentiment be allowed to stand on its own, he added: “So that I can dig her up.”

  “Maybe in a bit?” Natalie said. She caught sight of her mother in the distance, slipping out of the bunkhouse and making for the open tower. Her mom was carrying the big fireman’s ax that they kept in the common room. Natalie forced herself to look away. Everything was riding on her ability to keep her grandfather’s attention. Everything depended upon her. Natalie had thought she was ready for this.

  She didn’t feel ready.

  “How about we . . . ? Let’s go and . . .” Her voice fell to pieces before she could finish the sentence. Again Natalie forced down a long breath. She crossed her arms over her chest so that they’d have something to do other than shake.

  “I bet she’s just a bunch of dumb white bones by now,” he said, still gazing lovingly toward the cemetery. “I wonder how many we can find.”

  “Maybe the puffins first?” Natalie asked, backing another step down the trail. “We can dig up Grandma after that.”

  Her grandfather scrunched up his nose. He seemed unconvinced.

  “I bet the puffins will try and fly away from us,” Natalie offered.

  That was the clincher. The old man beamed. “I won’t let them,” he said. “I’ve got an idea—I’ll break their little wings.”

  And so together they continued, Natalie walking backward to the nesting grounds with her grandfather sauntering after. Soon the air grew heavy with the stink of fish and droppings. The nesting puffins grumbled as Natalie approached.

  You keep that crazy man away from us, one of the birds scolded.

  Natalie couldn’t turn it off, even when she wanted to.

  “I used to eat their eggs,” her grandfather said, reminiscing now. “Before we got the chickens. Your mother would steal their eggs, and I would eat them.”

  “For real?” Natalie asked, pulling the biggest surprised face she could. “Are puffin eggs any good?”

  Over at the lighthouse she could see that her mother had made it all the way up to the lamp room. She lifted the fireman’s ax over her head and brought it down onto the ornate spinning lens. The lighthouse beam switched off all at once, but in the bright morning light you couldn’t tell unless you were looking right at it. Astrid watched out of the corner of her eye as her mom’s shape disappeared back down the stairs.

  “I was hungry,” her grandpa said with a shrug. “I ate them up.”

  As if in answer to this, the birds decided that they’d finally had enough. They burst from their nests, flying with quick little wingbeats, a cackling cloud of black and white and orange. Natalie’s grandfather beamed up at the puffins as they flew.

  “I see you up there!” he called to the birds. “Don’t think I don’t see you!”

  The flock wheeled over their heads in a kind of synchronized panic. He turned to watch them, and in doing so he caught sight of the extinguished lamp at the top of the lighthouse. All at once his childlike enthusiasm vanished.

  “I thought I left that on,” he said, suddenly annoyed.

  “No . . . I’m pretty sure you didn’t.” Natalie was hoping to stall him. For some reason her mother still hadn’t emerged from the lighthouse.

  Her grandpa shot Natalie a look over his shoulder. “I will yank out your lying tongue,” he said. “Remind me to do that later, please.” Then he headed for the lighthouse. The old guy was moving a lot faster now than he had been before.

  For a moment Natalie didn’t know what to do. It would have been simple enough to run up behind her grandfather and push him down onto the jagged rocks. That’d stop him, no doubt. But it could also be enough to break his hip. Natalie didn’t want to do that until there were no other choices left. So instead she raced toward the lighthouse, giving her grandpa a wide berth as she passed him by. When she got there she found her mother in a heap at the foot of the spiral staircase in the engine room. Her face was bright pink, slick with sweat. For an awful second Natalie thought she might be about to have her baby. But then she saw her mom’s ankle—inclined and twisted on one of the wooden steps. She must have fallen on her way back down.

  “What are you doing here?” her mom said, wincing with pain.

  “He saw that the light is out,” Natalie said, rushing to her. “He’s coming.”

  She propped her mother up, and together they hobbled three-legged to the door. Her grandpa had already made it back to the center of the island. He was sort of speed-walking now, knock-kneed and jaunty. He looked so terrifyingly happy to see them. He threw both
arms up and flapped them about in the air, like a castaway calling for rescue.

  “Don’t start without me!” he called, his voice carrying across their empty island home. “I’m almost there!”

  Her mother’s grip suddenly tightened on Natalie’s shoulder. “We can’t leave him the ax,” she said. Natalie glanced back and saw that the fireman’s ax was still lying across the spiral steps, where her mother had fallen. Natalie left her braced against the doorframe and rushed back to grab it. But by the time she returned to the tower door, her grandfather was only fifty yards away.

  “I can’t make it to the bunkhouse,” her mother said.

  More than anything, she seemed surprised that their plan had gone so very, very poorly. Natalie was surprised too. She felt her mother’s hand return to her shoulder, but this time instead of grabbing for support, she was pushing. “You can still get there,” she said.

  “No way,” Natalie said, pulling them both back into the lighthouse. “Not a chance, Mom.”

  Natalie shut the big iron door and quickly used her mother’s keys to lock it from the inside. The engine room went dark as soon as the door closed, and for a moment there was nothing but silence. Then they heard the low gong of knuckles on the metal door.

  Knock-knock.

  “Guys, it’s me,” her wicked grandfather called. “Can I come in?”

  CHAPTER 11

  Knock-Knock

  NATALIE’S GRANDFATHER REMAINED JUST OUTSIDE the lighthouse. “Can I come in?” he called, knocking gently on the locked iron door. He sounded so sweet and innocent. Like a child who knows that it’s important to be on his very best behavior. “I’d really like to come inside with you.”

  Natalie and her mother said nothing.

  They remained absolutely still.

  “Can you even hear me in there?” Her grandpa’s breath puffed across the hinges, and his voice echoed about the enclosed space of the engine room. “If you can hear what I’m saying, clap twice.”

  He clapped to demonstrate.

  Natalie shut her eyes. It seemed as though the room were shrinking all around her. A strange thrum ran through her chest, sort of like a hiccup. Natalie’s breath was catching the way it did when she was about to cry. Or scream. In the darkness, her mother’s hand found hers. It squeezed tight.

  “I’m waiting,” her grandfather called, ever hopeful.

  “Mom,” Natalie said. The word just came out of her all on its own. She couldn’t tell if she’d yelled it or whispered it. She wasn’t even sure that any sound had come out of her at all. “I’m scared,” she said.

  “I am too,” her mother whispered back. “Let’s just take our time. It’ll pass.”

  Natalie opened her eyes again, blinking in the muggy darkness. She could just make out a concrete platform, upon which sat a pair of antique generators that dominated the engine room. Beside that was an ancient air compressor for the foghorn. But there was nothing else—no desk, no furniture, not even a chair. No place to sit.

  Natalie caught herself—no place for her mother to sit or lie down. That was a nice, solvable problem.

  “Can you make it upstairs?” Natalie whispered.

  Her mother didn’t answer for a moment. Her whole body was wedged against the doorframe, bad leg jutting out to one side. She was sweating—even in the darkness, Natalie could see it. Her mom shifted her weight, and her eyes bulged. The light in them seemed almost to swell, filling the room with the faintest purple glow. Somehow, she managed to keep from hollering in agony.

  Once her mother had regained her composure, she simply shook her head.

  “I know that you two are in there,” her grandfather singsonged from outside the iron door, still rapping away. “I know that you can hear me!”

  As carefully as she could, Natalie threaded her mom’s arm over her shoulder. Then they hop-hobbled to the center of the circular room, where she helped her down onto the edge of the machine platform. Between leaning on Natalie and holding up her own bulging belly, her mom accidentally shifted to her bad leg. And now there was no stopping it—she shouted out in pain. Her face shut tight, squeezing tears from her eyes like water from wrung cloth. Outside, Natalie’s grandfather hooted with delight.

  “Wait for me!” he hollered, still tap-tap-tapping on the door. “Don’t kill her without me, please.”

  • • •

  The tapping went on for hours.

  At one point it stopped briefly. Natalie strained her ears and heard the icy crumble of gravel outside. There was a faint scratching on the storm walls, and a dark shape passed across the open food slot. Her grandfather was circling the lighthouse, looking for another way inside. You’d think that if there were another door he’d have found it years ago. But those sorts of calculations didn’t interest the wicked. Natalie’s grandfather took his time, testing the concrete blocks for give. When he found no secret passageways, he returned to the iron door and recommenced his knocking.

  The light pouring into the engine room sharpened as the day got away from them. Natalie and her mother had kicked off this ill-fated scheme in the mid-morning, so it must have been late afternoon by now. Eventually Natalie decided it was worth the risk to try to head upstairs, to see if she could find something that would make her mom more comfortable. She took the spiral staircase slowly, but the stairs still creaked with every step.

  The second floor was slightly smaller than the first. It was also darker, owing to the fact that the windows up here were entirely covered. It was the kitchen—what was left of it, at least. Natalie’s parents must have hauled away anything that a wicked person might have used to hurt himself or someone else. A gap in the countertop was the only clue as to where the electric stove used to be. The cabinets had been stripped of their doors and emptied of plates and cutlery. The only thing inside the refrigerator was a plastic mug holding a bouquet of disposable forks.

  At this moment an unsettling thought struck Natalie. There was nothing to eat in the lighthouse. More than that, there was nothing to drink. Everything that sustained her grandpa came through the slot on the ground floor. Every mouthful of food. Every sip of water. Even as Natalie realized this, she suddenly became aware of a dry ache in the corners of her mouth. Neither she nor her mother had had anything to drink since the tea they’d shared that morning, waiting for the fog to burn off. Their plan had gone poorly, but it was only now that she understood just how poorly.

  They had to figure out a way out of this tower.

  A little shaky now, Natalie continued up to her grandfather’s bedroom on the fourth floor. There a shaft of summer light nearly blinded her. The bedroom windows hadn’t been bricked over—it was too high to jump—and it made a huge difference. Sunlight shimmered through the thick, warped glass, illuminating dust motes in the air. Natalie stood there for a moment, her eyes readjusting. A full-size bed sat in the middle of the round room, covered in a nest of quilts. There was a large couch oozing stuffing, as well as a shelf stacked with adventure books and picture encyclopedias, all salvaged from the mainland. Natalie could remember passing many of these books through the food slot, into her grandpa’s happy hands. One of them—a giant wildlife encyclopedia—lay open in the middle of the bed. Her grandfather had torn some of the pages out and had stuck them to the walls of his bedroom. Color photographs of a rooster, a bear, and even a puffin all gazed down at the bed. They looked very nearly alive.

  It was a strange sensation, to be standing in her grandfather’s private space. It felt almost like she were peeking into his head. Natalie often wondered about the person that her grandpa used to be, before the wickedness forever changed him. But her mother was useless on the subject. “What matters is who he is now,” she’d always say. “If I hadn’t let go of who your grandpa used to be, I wouldn’t be able to care for the person he has become. If I hadn’t let go, I might have started hating him. And I don’t want to hate him. He’s my dad.” So then, based on this bedroom, what kind of person was her grandfather now? It ce
rtainly didn’t seem like a dangerous man lived here. No, this was more like the room of a boy. A kid who loved animals, who treated his possessions with care, and who hated making his bed.

  Natalie was so lost in her thoughts that it took some moments to realize that the knocking on the lighthouse door had stopped. She inched toward the window and peered down at the rocks below, hoping to see that her grandfather had wandered off. Even if he’d gone only as far as the graveyard, that would still give Natalie and her mom enough time to slip out of the tower and back to safety.

  She couldn’t find him anywhere. Natalie looked to the bunkhouse and saw that the door had been flung wide on its hinges. Some of her mother’s clothes lay splayed across the rocks in the front yard. As she watched, her grandfather emerged from the bunkhouse doorway. He held their crank-powered shortwave radio in his hands, lifting it up into the sunlight with a look of rapt curiosity. Then he dropped it. Natalie winced as the radio crashed upon the stony earth. So much for listening to The First Voice. So much for talking to the outside world—you know, if the outside world ever became safe and sane enough to talk to.

  Natalie became overwhelmed by all the other damage her grandfather might do. But that wasn’t a problem she could solve right now. Natalie forced the thoughts out of her head, pulling some broad cushions off of the couch. She carried them down the spiral staircase. Down in the engine room her mother was still breathing heavily from the pain. Her ankle had nearly doubled in size.

  “I think your grandpa left,” her mom whispered.

  “I saw,” Natalie said. She arranged the couch cushions end-to-end on the floor, forming a makeshift mattress. Then she helped her mother roll onto them.

  “Thanks.” Her mom lay back, exhausted.

  “Do you think it’s broken?” Natalie asked.

  “It’s bad, but it’s just a sprain,” her mother said. “Just a sprain,” she repeated, as though willing the words to be true. But she must have known they weren’t. Natalie knew it, and she couldn’t even feel the pain. Again there was a tug at the back of her tongue. She swallowed spit.