The Lighthouse

by Amy Cross

  Stumbling to my feet, I reach up and try to touch the hatch, but I can barely get my fingertips to brush the wood. I have no idea whether Matthew is close enough to hear me, but I know I have to try so I take a firm grip on the hammer's handle and then start banging as hard as I can manage against the edge of the hole I made yesterday. At first there's no real effect, and I feel as if the whole task is hopeless, but I keep going until finally one of the wooden panels starts to come loose. This only makes me redouble my efforts, so I hit harder than ever and after a few minutes ones of the boards comes away, dropping past me and splashing into the foul water.

  It's working. It's actually working.

  I keep going, filled with desperation but also with a growing sense of hope that I might actually get out of here. It takes much longer to get the next board loose, but finally it too comes crashing down. The hole isn't big enough for me to climb through yet, but I'm definitely making progress as I continue to hack at the wood. More and more splinters start raining down on me, until finally a larger chunk comes loose and I realize I could maybe get through. Holding the hammer between my teeth, I reach up and grab the sides of the hole with my fingertips and then I take a moment to steady myself before trying to jump. It takes a couple of tries, but I finally manage to get my right arm through far enough to hold on, and then I start wriggling up, dragging myself through the hole until I reach the generator room's wet concrete floor.

  I take the hammer from my mouth and get to my feet, and -

  Suddenly something hits me hard from behind and I fall forward, dropping to the floor as I feel a sharp, radiating pain in the back of my neck. Before I can react, I feel the hammer getting pulled from my hand, and a second later its head is slammed hard against the side of my knee. I cry out as I try to crawl away, but the pain is too much and I slump down against the concrete.

  “Impressive,” a familiar voice says from behind me. “I've gotta admit, I had my doubts, but you actually managed to crawl out. Clever girl.”

  As the pain continues to throb, I look up and see Matthew standing over me with the hammer in his right hand.

  “You really stuck your nose in, don't you?” he continues. “No-one else has ever been so bloody interested in the hatch, but you wouldn't take no for an answer. You just had to start poking about. You know, if you'd minded your own business, I'd have let you live for a few more days, maybe even a week. After all, I don't like hurrying, not when I'm all alone in this bloody place half the time.”

  Gasping with pain, I try to sit up. Turning to look outside, I see that the lamp at the top of the lighthouse is working again, and the beam is slowly rotating as if nothing was ever wrong.

  “Colin!” I scream, with tears in my eyes. “Help me!”

  “No need to shout,” Matthew tells me, “he's right here.” He steps outside and looks toward the rocks. “Colin, mate! Get over here!”

  After a moment, Colin appears from around the side of the building. He stumbles slightly, and when he looks at me he almost seems to not recognize me.

  “His memory's even worse now,” Matthew continues, looking down at me. “I think it's time to put him out of his misery.”

  “Help,” I whisper, trying to reach out to Colin. “You've got to stop this...”

  “Stop what?” he asks, frowning at me. “Who are you?”

  “Come on, mate,” Matthew says, slipping the key into the padlock and then pulling the remains of the hatch door open. “There's something in here that you need to see. Maybe I should've shown you sooner.”

  Colin stares at me for a moment, before stepping past and going to join Matthew at the edge of the hatch.

  “With most people, their souls just disappear when they die,” Matthew continues, glancing at me with a smile, “but occasionally they don't realize what's happened, or they refuse to accept it, so they kinda linger. Poor old Colin's clearly denser than your average bear, so he's been hanging around for ages, slowly fading away.” He nudges Colin's arm and then points down into the water beneath the hatch. “Recognize that fella down there, do you?” he asks. “The one right in the corner?”

  “What's happening?” Colin asks, taking a step back. “Who are all those people?”

  “One of them's you, you daft sod,” Matthew replies, his grin wider than ever. “Now do you understand why you're bloody memory's been so bad lately? You died, mate. You were one of the first, and since then you've been literally fading away to nothing. I reckon it's time for you to accept the truth.”

  “No,” he stammers, turning to me. “This can't be true.”

  I try to get up, but the pain in my knee and ankle is too intense and I wince, letting out a gasp. I look down at my damaged leg for a moment, and when I look back up I find that there's no sign of Colin at all. Turning, I try to spot him outside, but he seems to have vanished into thin air.

  “Silly old thing,” Matthew says after a moment, letting the hatch door swing shut. “I'm sure he must've had his suspicions, but once he was forced to see his own corpse, he had to accept the truth. Now he's finally gone, off on the road to... Well, I don't know where they end up, really. I guess that's none of my business. I'm more interested in what's happening right here on this island.”

  He comes closer and crouches in front of me.

  “Now what are we gonna do about you, eh?” he asks.

  Before I can reply, he holds the hammer up and then bumps the head against my nose, forcing me to try turning away.

  “You've joined my little party,” he continues, reaching around and bumping the hammer against my forehead, a little harder this time; a moment later, he hits my chin harder still. “You need to be gone by the time your replacement shows up. That's just how it goes, I'm afraid, but we can have some fun 'til then.” He hits my forehead, hard enough to hurt this time. “It's wonderful out here. Every few months, I let the mainland know that their latest recruit has effed off, and they send a replacement. The best part is, no-one really asks any questions. People who come to live at the lighthouse tend to be, well...” He smiles. “They tend to be the kind of people no-one comes looking for.”

  “You can't do this,” I whisper, tasting blood at the back of my mouth. “Please...”

  “I know they'll catch up with me eventually,” he continues, hitting the side of my cheek, harder than before and with enough force to jolt my head. “I'm not under any illusions, Penny. I just figure I might as well enjoy myself while I can. It's been a few years now since the first one I killed. There've been a few who came and I let them live, I just made them feel uncomfortable until they quit. Not everyone can disappear without the alarm being raised, and I don't want my little experiment to end prematurely.”

  “Please,” I stammer, “just -”

  Suddenly he bumps the hammer harder against the side of my forehead, knocking me back. Every time he hits me, he uses a little more force.

  “I lied to you when you arrived,” he continues, “I'm not some lost dimwit, mired in debt and with no future. Well, the debt part's true, but I had to fund my post-grad research project somehow. It took me a while to work out where I could carry out my study without too much interference, but when I heard about the supposed Essie Davis ghost hanging around this place, I realized a remote lighthouse would be perfect. I'm studying for my doctorate in philosophy. What better subject than the manifestation of ghosts, eh?” He hits the top of my head, but I barely have enough strength to draw away. “You're Subject K,” he adds. “Subject K has to die in a humiliating manner. I'm testing, see? I kill each person in a different way, so I can study why some of them come back as ghosts and some don't. I'm gonna be the first person to conduct a proper scientific study of a real-life haunting.” He taps the hammer against my cheek. “So you see, I'm not a loser like you.”

  “Please...”

  Before I can finish, he slams the hammer against my mouth, hard enough to dislodge a couple of teeth. I cry out and pull back, putting my hands in front of my face as I feel on
e of my front teeth hanging loose and blood filling my mouth. Tears are flowing down my cheeks, but I can't even begin to stop them now.

  “I need to know what makes some people come back and some people not,” he continues, grabbing the back of my shirt and starting to rip it open. “Nasty,” he adds, prodding the wound next to my shoulder-blades. “I reckon that'd get infected if it was left too long. Fortunately, you'll be out of your misery well before it becomes an issue.”

  I try to pull away, but he simply rips the rest of my shirt away and tosses it to the ground.

  “So you're the humiliation subject,” he adds, getting to his feet and stepping out into the clearing before turning back to me. “You know where I'll be. If you find the strength, try dragging yourself to the lighthouse. There's no way off the island, not unless you can get to the radio. I'm sort of expecting you to just die right here, but that's a necessary risk. What I really want is for you to show a little fight. I don't know whether this'll make you feel any better, Penny, but based on my preliminary results to date, I reckon you're just the type who'll come back as a ghost when she's done. You need to fight back first, though, so...” He holds his arms out, with the hammer in his right hand. “Come to the lighthouse if you can. Be useful and contribute to the study, yeah? Good girl.”

  I watch as he turns and starts walking away from the generator hut. He glances back at me a couple of times with that same leery grin, but finally he disappears into the forest, no doubt heading back to the lighthouse, leaving me crumpled and bleeding on the concrete floor.

  Slowly, with pain cascading through my body, I roll onto my back and look up at the gray sky. Rain is still falling, but much more lightly than before, and I can hear wind rustling through the nearby trees. I try to take a deep breath, but there's a sharp pain in the left side of my chest, as if one of my lungs is damaged, and the pain only increases as I force myself to sit up and lean against the doorway. I know I have to get up and do something, I have to get out of here, but even the slightest movement brings sparks of agony rippling through my body, and I swear I can feel broken bones pushing against one another, keeping me from moving properly.

  Finally my head droops and I feel my mind being drawn down into darkness. For a moment, I feel a flash of fear at the thought that maybe I'm about to die, but that fear is quickly washed away by a flood of memories. I'm back at the house in Exeter, and Mel's with me, and we're still students and we're talking about the future. I tell myself to focus, to remember that I'm on the island, but it's hopeless. Memories swarm all around me and bring me a moment of relief, before fading to darkness and silence.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  At first I don't even realize I'm awake. I'm still sitting in the doorway, but the pain in my body has been replaced by a sense of stiffness and it's not until I open my eyes that I feel a cool breeze blowing against my face. It takes a moment longer before I understand why I can barely see anything.

  Night has fallen again. I think I've been dreaming, too; about being a little girl again, about my parents finding me screaming in the back garden, and about the doctors diagnosing me as manic because I insisted a ghostly woman had screamed at me. I was ten years old when they put me on those pills, and now...

  It was real.

  The woman was never a hallucination. I really saw her.

  Suddenly I realize that I'm in danger of losing consciousness again, so I bite my bottom lip hard, until blood bursts out and I feel a sharp pain. Turning my head, I look into the generator room and see the hatch, and then I turn and look outside, where a patch of moonlight has fallen across the clearing and the distant trees. I must have passed out for hours and spent the entire day here, and when I look down at my torn shirt I see dried blood all over the fabric, and on my skin too. My head feels incredibly heavy every time I look around, but the most startling realization is the lack of pain from the knife wound. Fearful of disturbing my body too much, I start moving my hands first, clenching and un-clenching my fists to make sure that they work, and then I try to sit up a little straighter.

  My chest hurts a little now, but still not as much as before. The worst sensation is my shirt, stuck to my chest with the fabric having dried into the wound from Matthew's knife.

  In the distance, the lamp of the lighthouse is turning, as if everything is normal, but...

  I'm not crazy.

  I was never sick in the first place. I swear, I'd cry right now if I wasn't in so much pain.

  I spend several minutes just testing different parts of my body one at a time, checking to see if they work and if the pain is too much, before finally I take a deep breath and start getting to my feet. At first there's no real discomfort, until I try to put some weight on my right ankle and I feel shattered bones ripping through the flesh like a nest of razors. I fall forward, just about managing to support myself against the other side of the doorway as the pain ripples up through my body. My chest is starting to hurt again, too, and I have to force myself to take several deep breaths. Again, though, I feel razor edges inside, in my lungs this time, as if broken ribs are poking through.

  “So you're the humiliation subject,” I hear Matthew's voice whispering in my head, goading me. “You know where I'll be.”

  A flash of anger strikes me at the thought of that asshole sitting in the lighthouse, thinking he's got everything under control.

  “You're Subject K,” his voice continues. “Subject K has to die in a humiliating manner. I figure maybe that's something that'll bring your ghost back.”

  “I'm not an experiment,” I whisper, barely able to get any words out at all.

  “Come to the lighthouse if you can,” I remember him telling me. “Be useful and contribute to the study, yeah? Good girl.”

  The thought of going anywhere near Matthew or the lighthouse is horrifying, but at the same time I know there's no other way off the island. If I wait here, he'll come and finish me off. If I try to hide, I'll either die or, again, he'll come and kill me. My only option is to get to the lighthouse and somehow use the radio to get help, but there's no way he'd let me do that. He wants me to go there, and I've got no doubt he's waiting with something all planned out. If I try to save myself, or to warn others, I'll be walking right into his trap. Still, the anger in my chest is enough to force me onward. I'm not going to just sit here and wait to die.

  Turning, I look up at the lamp at the top of the lighthouse and see that it's slowly rotating as usual.

  It takes a moment, but I finally realize what I have to do. I limp back into the generator room and find the connectors that I had to tighten a few days ago. Taking care not to touch anything that could possibly deliver a shock, I start unwrapping the tape that Colin put in place and then – with trembling hands – I unplug each connector, one by one. When I'm done, I glance over my shoulder and see that the lighthouse's lamp is still shining bright, so I shuffle to another set of wires and try to find a way to pull them out. Spotting a couple of cables running into a control box, I give them a tug but find that they're held too tight, and I don't have the strength to force them out. Instead, I crouch down and start examining what appears to be some kind of hub for various wires. I flick a few switches but the lighthouse doesn't seem affected, so finally I open one of the main boxes and see a set of wires attached to a circuit board. I reach inside, trying to decide which wires to pull out, when suddenly I spot a large set of pipes nearby with a heavy metal lever. I vaguely remember Colin using that to switch the lighthouse to the back-up generator, so I take hold of the lever and give it a tug, switching the power supply away from the back-up and over to the main system.

  When I turn to look out the door, I'm just in time to see the lighthouse fall dark again.

  Getting to my feet, barely able to move at all without a kind of grinding pain in my chest, I limp to the doorway and pause for a moment. I've no idea whether Matthew expected me to do this or not, but I'm hoping that at the very least I've caught his attention. It's not hard to imagine hi
m starting to panic in there, and it was certainly noticeable yesterday that when the power went off he seemed almost scared, as if maybe he thinks the island's ghosts are more likely to go after him if there's no light at all. In fact, thinking back over the past week, I don't think I've ever seen Matthew stray from the lighthouse at night, which makes me more certain than ever that he's scared of what might happen in the dark. He knows the ghosts are real, but that doesn't mean he wants to go anywhere near them.

  He'll come to fix the light, he has to.

  And when he does -

  Suddenly I hear a creaking sound nearby, coming from inside the room. I pause for a moment, telling myself that it's nothing, but a moment later the creak continues until finally I hear the hatch door bumping open. I don't turn and look, not yet, I don't dare, but I can hear the sound of something moving down there in the foul water, and finally I hear a series of faint clicks and scratching sounds coming closer, as if something is rising up from the chamber below.

  Maybe Matthew was right to be scared of the dark.

  Slowly, I force myself to turn and look at the hatch, and I immediately see a pair of arms reaching up, clutching at the concrete floor. A moment later, a rotten head starts to rise up from the darkness as the first of the bodies claws its way out, followed by two more that have already begun to climb up. I step back, out into the clearing, as the first of the figures stumbles forward and then rises to its feet, dripping water from its naked, decomposing bones and from its pale yellow flesh. As it shuffles toward the doorway, it stares straight ahead with rotten, empty eye-sockets and a skeletal face that has lost most of its skin. There's a faint hissing, gurgling sound coming from its throat, as if it's trying but failing to speak.

  My heart is pounding in my chest as I watch the figure limping past me. It doesn't even seem to have noticed that I'm here, as if its only concern is getting to the lighthouse now that the lamp is off. Seconds later, I hear more movement nearby and I turn to see that two more figures have climbed up from the hatch, one little more than a set of bones held together by patches of skin but the other looking much more intact, with most of its flesh still in place and just a few rotten wounds on the chest and neck.