by M Dressler
The fog whipped my face and I thought, still frightened, of how much time I needed. The man I’d left bleeding on the signal house floor had been expected to work all night, so no one would find him until morning—I hoped. If I saw and faced Quint, and then got my ticket, there would be nothing more to do. I’d be gone to San Francisco before a wagon could come from the Point to tell the constable. I kept my head down and my feet steady. The way was long and rough. I tried to gauge how far along the winding track I’d come. How long would it be until I reached Benito? How much more of night did I have left, how many more hurrying footsteps?
I thought I was imagining the sound, at first. The clicking, rolling echo. A motoring sound behind me, coming closer, closer. Then I turned and saw the bobbing lights of an automobile.
As though I’d had some special power, as though I’d been able to conjure him out of the fog and night with my will alone, I saw Quint. His face stretched white above a dark slicker and his long driving gloves.
I felt stupid for an instant. I could see the flickering shape of him, jerking and setting the brake, standing up in the brass of the car, in the moonlight, pushing aside the wind screen; but I thought it was a ghost.
Then I heard his voice call out, amazed. “Emma? What on earth?”
I heard myself say, queerly, “Hello there, Quint. I’m going to town.”
“This time of night? What on earth?”
“I had to leave the Point.”
“Now?”
Why was he being so stupid himself? “Yes. Right now.”
He climbed down to the road.
I stepped back as he came toward me.
“Mr. Folde,” I said, shaking suddenly. “He behaved—badly.”
Quint pulled off his gloves. “Good God. Are you sure? Are you all right?”
“I hit him. With a wrench.”
“Good God!”
“I left him in the signal house. I can’t go back.” I calmed myself. “I’ve left.”
“Well—of—of course you have!”
We didn’t move any closer to each other. We stood in the road, some heavy thing between us.
“I need to get to the village, Quint.”
“You’re coming with me.” He took my case and my arm, quickly, looking around to see if anyone was coming out of the shadows toward us. “I’m not going to leave you. Not like this …”
And now, as he hoisted me up, I couldn’t believe how safe I felt. How high the automobile put me. It was like riding in one of the chariots in the glass windows of St. Clements Church. Quint climbed in and sat high beside me and loosed the brake, and the car leapt forward. I closed my eyes and then opened them again. I couldn’t believe where I was. I was so suddenly and strangely free. Floating. How well-sprung the Lambrys’ car was.
“Are you cold, Emma? Take the blanket.”
“Thank you.”
After some silence, he said, “You’re sure about what Folde—tried.”
“Yes.”
“You should have come away with me when I asked you to.”
“I couldn’t. You know why.”
“But Folde? Laying his hands on you? How dare he. It’s disgusting.” His gloves made a stretching, tearing sound against the wheel. “And I always thought you’d be safe there.”
“I thought so, too.”
“It’s going to be a scandal.”
“It’s not my fault.”
We said nothing for a while, him staring moodily into the dark between his headlights, managing the bucking gears shooting us forward down the empty, rough road.
“Quint, where were you coming from, just now?”
“One of my sisters. She needed a ride to Fort Kane. Eudora’s engaged to someone there.”
The trees rolled in dark planks beside us.
“I’m so sorry this happened to you,” he said after a moment.
“It’s done now. Only I won’t go back.”
“I’m sorry for something else, too. I can’t explain it—No, I won’t go on like this. I have to tell you.”
“I know, Quint. I heard. You’re going away east.”
“But you couldn’t have heard it all.” He twisted toward me and away again. “I wasn’t set on going in the morning. I wasn’t at all absolutely decided. I promise. I was still … wandering around tonight, do you see? Driving around. Thinking. And trying not to think. Of you.”
I kept my cold hands under the blanket. But they tightened. Warmer.
“Right now,” I said, “what you need to do is take me to the Main Street Hotel.”
“Yes, good.” He nodded. “That’s an excellent plan. It’s perfectly safe for me to leave you there. And I can give you some money. What my father gave me to travel on. I can give some of it to you. Right now.”
“No, I have money of my own.” I let that sink in, for a minute. I didn’t say, I’ll bet this wasn’t what your mother had in mind when she said I’d put my salary to good use. But I knew now exactly what I was going to do. I was going to use my savings to show Quint I wasn’t a girl to be called up to the big house anymore. That I could pay my way in the world just as well as anyone else could. Paying my own way at the Main Street Hotel would let everyone in the village know I was a good, proper, modern girl—if Folde dared to try and say I wasn’t. If he wasn’t already … And then all at once it hit me, in the next, breathing moment, that he couldn’t accuse me of anything—because either he wasn’t going to remember anything, because I’d hit him square on the head, or else he was going to wake—he was still breathing when I left him—and realize it would sacrifice his pride too much, after losing the lightkeeper’s job to Mr. McHenry, to say he was beaten by his own housekeeper. He was going to have to say, if he was going to say anything at all, that he’d hurt himself while repairing the compressor. I was so struck by this, my head, giddy, began to spin.
“But I want to help,” Quint said.
“No, thank you. I’m not going to let anyone say you bought me a room in the middle of the night. That won’t look good. Just put me down outside of town, and I’ll walk the rest of the way. I’ll say I’m going to visit family in San Francisco. I’ll say someone there is sick and needs me.”
“But do you have family there? Really?”
“No. But only you and I need to know that.”
“And will you go to San Francisco alone?” He looked at me, wonderingly. “You have that much money?”
“Maybe. There’s work there. I haven’t decided everything.”
We’d reached the edge of town and he stopped to let the motor die and the lights of the car dim. We sat for a little while, under the pines, listening to the wind far off in the cove.
“I feel terrible it has to be like this, Emma,” he said quietly, but with what seemed like a new calm in his voice. “I mean, that you’d think for a minute you’d have to go on by yourself.”
“It’s all right.”
“I wish I could tuck you in your room, be sure you’re safe.” His hand squeezed my thigh. “I want you to know I hate the thought of leaving you.”
“I’ll be fine till morning.”
“You could go to the constable. Call Folde out on charges.”
“No. I don’t want anyone but you to know what happened. And you’ll never tell. Will you?”
“Not a soul.”
“And then tomorrow. Well. We’ll each have things to decide, won’t we?”
“Tomorrow. Yes. I’ll come and see you. It will all be clearer then. Can I have a kiss, for now—until tomorrow?”
I couldn’t explain. I didn’t want a kiss. Not with the memory of Folde’s hot breath on my neck.
“Let’s wait till tomorrow,” I said. “When everything’s been decided.” When we would be together, if we wanted to be, if it was meant to be, not in the dark, but in the open sun.
24
Alone, in the dark, Pratt moves along the white foundations of the forgotten lightkeepers’ houses. The signal building stands deserted i
n front of him, leaning like a dead weight against the neck of the lighthouse. Its door was sealed and bolted with boards across it long ago, but the weather’s warped the barricade and it’s clear where hunters thinner than Pratt have been able to squeeze through. He cuts himself, forcing himself in. Blood rises on his wrist again. The same as when we met.
The oil pans left in place when the compressors were lifted and carted away are filled now with dirt and ash. They look like the open lids of coffins. He walks with a soft, padding sound around them, past the floor where I struck Folde, to the place where the long, grease-coated chain once hung, its black hole, the one Quint and I and Mr. McHenry once stared into, now filled with lime. Pratt looks up. Will he try the rusted spiral staircase? Be careful, be careful, I warn him. Remember Manoel. Remember the writing on the wall. We all fall.
“I hear you,” Pratt whispers, “and thank you. Tell me more. I’m so very interested in this place. Were you, by any chance, aboard a ship when it went down not far from here?”
I won’t answer that. I want him to believe again it’s Alice and her carved words he’s been seeing everywhere. Alice with her hidden Lambry ways, leading him on.
He tests the first metal step. Then gambles. He runs his weight up, holding onto the ringing, fishtailing scaffold. With his flashlight he bangs through the overhead hatch. And now he stands where Quint and I once stood below the Fresnel and marveled. But the center is long gone, the great, high oyster of the lens. The door to the metal walkway hangs open, but the walk goes around nothing, and for no reason, in the dark.
He clutches the metal frame and climbs outside the housing and onto the ledge under the blister of the moon, and his eyes crinkle at its shine, breaking on the restless sea. He travels the rusty railing, rubbing it back and forth with the palm of his hand, listening to the surf far below. I understand why he grips the rail so tightly. It’s good to feel there’s something between you and the bottom.
He feels something under his right hand and holds his light in his left and shines it onto the metal where he’s just rubbed the flake away.
“Emma Rose?”
What?
He says it again:
“Emma Rose. Emma Rose. Emma. Rose.”
My name. No. It can’t be.
But it is. Etched in jagged writing, before it was painted over. How had it gotten there? Had I forgotten? Had Quint and I done it, after he stood me on my feet and we’d kissed and made up after my fall? Had I done it after I’d bashed in Mr. Folde’s skull and shoved him, bloody, away from me and struggled up, climbing away from him, needing to find some clean, fresh, free air? But—how could anyone forget such a thing?
“Poor girl.” He touches his chest, softly. “I can feel your pain. I can. I’m so sorry. But I’m so happy you left this here. So I could find you, dear Emma Rose. Tell me. Tell me what happened to you. Did someone call you by a dirty name? And leave you? Is it lonely, in the dark? Can you bear it, the loneliness? Isn’t it terrible? Don’t you want to rest?”
A hiss that isn’t mine—it can’t be—fills the night.
“Show yourself.” He spins around on the narrow walkway. “Let’s say our names out loud, together.”
He doesn’t, can’t see. The white funnel of mist behind his head. Forming into a hand. A long arm. Reaching out from the curling, mirrored night, behind his back, snaking around the iron rail. With one burst of anger the metal with my name on it might be broken and Pratt would fall, as I had. That’s all it would take. One tug. Just one. From her.
Because of course it’s her that’s doing all these things. Yes, the woman with no face, I tell myself, certainly. Who must have pulled down the water tower while Manoel was still standing on it—yes, it had to be her then, too. Now sneaking up on Philip Pratt with the twist of her cold hand, and he doesn’t know it yet—oh, he’s a card she’s ready to play, if I let her, if I let her loose her rage wherever she wants to, but I can’t, even with the best will in the world, stop it, stop it, how do I stop—
Sometimes it takes a little while before the pieces come together. Until you see the ghost of the thing you were blind to before.
One minute there is Pratt, smiling softly to himself, leaning against the railing. The next his arms are wheeling and he’s reaching out for nothing as I did, falling, scratching and scrambling to find some hold on the edge of life and finding it with one hand only, one hand clinging to the rim of the ruined platform, his feet dangling over the waves.
It’s she who’s at fault in all of this, I know that now! It’s she who doesn’t yet know how to control her rage, as a ghost should be able to, has to, no matter what terrible things may have happened to her in her life. And it must be she who’s angry with me, too, angry enough to give me away by scratching my name into a rail. So that Pratt could find it there.
I study Pratt dangling from the side of the lighthouse. His body hangs by a thread over the rocks and spray. I see now exactly what she was trying to do. She was trying to trick him into mistaking one ghost for another. Just as my plan had been. But then Pratt said, Did someone call you by a dirty name? And leave you? Is it lonely in the dark? and it set her anger off, a storm, and she’d torn the railing away and Pratt’s arms had windmilled, and now he is …
I see Pratt’s fingernails, white as wax, the blood forced out of them like pressed flowers, holding on. I see him managing to bear his own weight with one arm as he reaches up to the walkway with his loose hand. With two hands now on the rusted ledge, he begins inching his fingers around the walkway, bit by bit, so that his feet are no longer kicking out over the foam and spray but swinging over the soft roof of the rotten signal house, its red shingles green and spongy with moss. I see him strain over his shoulder, trying to catch a glimpse of the distant lane, and Ellen, for help. Where? Where is the one we are looking for? But it’s a long wait, isn’t it, Mr. Pratt? Wondering if someone you care about will come back to you. It could be a long, long night.
But I am not what you think I am. I’m no torturer, no murderer. She is. That other one, whom I can’t see, for some reason. She must have done this and then flown away. I can help you. I will. I’m not her.
Pratt shakes his head and takes a breath. He doesn’t want any help. He lets go.
It’s a strange sound a body makes as it falls through soft shingle. A dull crashing, like a wave pounding on wet sand.
I fly through the hole in the signal house roof to see what Pratt has done to himself.
He lies in a heap with a cushion of moss underneath him. But his right leg and arm are pinned, trapped under a sodden roof beam that has come down with his fall. His eyes are closed. His eyelids flutter.
I wait until his breathing steadies and his eyes have opened. Then I do what I must: I let him see me. Because I need to be seen, and not be mistaken, myself, in who I am. And I won’t let her outdo me, do me harm in the way she seems to want to.
I let him see my skirt floating. The flesh melting away from my bones, the water dissolving me. My skin floating away in tattered sheets. My fingerbones reaching out, glued together only by slim, blue-gray strands. Do you see me now? Do you?
This is who I am. This is what happened to me. Me.
He struggles. He’s trying to get free of the beam, his mouth opening in soundless surprise as the water pouring in from the hole in the roof begins to fill up the signal house. As his eyes grow wider, I let him watch me float above him.
Look at me. Look at me now.
He sees me, and yet he doesn’t. Because he’s drowning. This is what happens when you drown. Nothing matters to you but air. Please. Air. Air. He sees, wide-eyed, as I write on the cracked plaster of the wall fast sinking under the rising flood. But all he can hold onto, in his lungs and in his mind, is how to wrench free of the weight that’s pinning him down, how to reach that hole in the roof, in the sky, opened by his fall. The same way, before I died, I looked up and saw a patch of stars. I finish my little sketch for him, the last thing, he thinks, he’ll
see before he dies.
I glide away like a mermaid, my long skirt a tail, up through the hole. I pick up Pratt’s flashlight where it still lies on the roof, so that Ellen can spot it waving and come. She’s already driving down the lane, slowly, her lights bobbing over the rough ground.
25
Constable Knightley is upset.
“The tourists are starting to leave!” He pounds his desk with his fist. “I’m holding you personally responsible for this, Pratt. The handyman, then the hotel, Ms. DeWight’s house, the Point—”
“The intensity. I know.” Pratt massages the bandage on his hand.
“What’s next? This office? Right here, under my own nose?”
“Listen to me and stay calm,” Pratt says smoothly, trying to win him over. “This is progress. We have a key now. We have a name—or part of a name. We haven’t found any record yet of an Emma Rose, but we have the name and the story Mrs. Fanoli told. My gut and my experience tells me they’re connected. And we have the writing. The image the manifestation left me. What happened to me after I fell, the drowning, the white body, that was all pure hallucination—but the writing on the wall wasn’t. Here it is.” Pratt hands the constable his device, so he can see the picture Ellen took with it. “It’s clearly a sketch of the Lambry obelisk. And the words: ‘Look to the coffins.’”
“Jesus.” Knightley stares at my fresh artwork. “But why would a ghost try to kill you, then try to communicate with you?”
“Because it’s torn, I’d say. And unaware of how torn it is. Or it might be because it’s exacting a price from me. That’s not unusual. Sometimes you’re made to suffer a bit before you’re given a glimpse of what’s struggling to be shared, to be discovered. The same thing happened to Ellen, at her house. She experienced a hallucination. Then her house was torn to shreds. And something was revealed.”
