The Lamplighter

by Anthony O'Neill

  “No one could have survived,” Lessels said, as though still to deny the possibility. “They found the keeper’s cap washed ashore…and the boat, it was all in flinders. No one could have survived it. We said our prayers for her, and we observed a silence for her soul…for we did not set out to hate her.”

  “But not all of you believed she was dead,” Groves stated authoritatively. “There was Abraham Lindsay…”

  “Aye. Lindsay said he knew her best—that she had a power in her from the start, and now the power of the Beast. He reckoned she would not die so easily, and he reminded us no body had been found.”

  “You chose not to agree with him?”

  “Aye…”

  “Because you could not live with the idea that she was still alive?”

  She looked caught out.

  “Because of what you had done to her? On top of everything else?”

  Guilty silence.

  “And what,” Fleming interjected, “is this thing that you are meant to have done to her, madam? It is a serious allegation that is being made against you, and it is best that we hear it now, for your own welfare.”

  Her face reddened and she tried to build the courage to confess.

  The boat is overturned. She clings to the wood. There is no sign of the keeper, and the lighthouse is a distant obelisk. She rises and plunges. She is half submerged in the freezing water and for seconds the shock is so great she might well be dead.

  Before tonight she has known the sea as only a distant abstraction. Something she has read about in books, glimpsed from a great distance, and heard thundering against the lighthouse walls.

  You will not die, lassie.

  Another massive wave bears down on her. She closes her eyes as the water smacks her like a punishing fist. She loses her grip. The boat is torn away. She is swallowed completely by the sea.

  Her mouth is full of brine, her wounds are stung by salt, her whole body is immersed in bubbles and blackness. But beneath the surface there is remarkable solitude. The lighthouse beam briefly carves through a rolling wave and lights up the ghostly figure of the insensible Billy Connor, drifting into the deep as though hauled by a rope.

  You will not die, lassie.

  She does not know where the energy comes from, but suddenly she must do something. She begins to move her limbs, to kick and thrash, at first protestingly, but soon as a means of propelling her way to the surface.

  You will not die…

  She bursts into the air coughing and gulping. She is swept by a wave into the faintly brightening sky and spots the glimmer of shore lights. She has never swum before and has no idea from where the explicit memories flood.

  She strokes through the water like Robinson Crusoe.

  McKnight breathed a sigh of relief. “The girl is saved, Evelyn?”

  “The girl is alive,” Evelyn confirmed, and seemed to marvel.

  “The keeper’s family, they find her?”

  “The keeper…” She nodded and frowned, concerned about the brave man’s fate.

  “And they—the keeper’s family—they take her away somewhere, do they not?”

  She nodded.

  “It is no longer safe in these parts, they know that. But they have family…in Ireland.”

  She nodded again.

  “And the girl is well cared for there. She recovers and grows.”

  Evelyn seemed close to tears.

  “Everything is well,” McKnight said. “Except that she can never really forget, can she? As much as she might try to put it all behind her, there is a force inside the girl that will not allow her to forget.”

  The whole of Evelyn’s lower face now started to quiver.

  “Because something terrible happened to her in that lighthouse. Beyond the realm of words. Something happened to the little girl, did it not?”

  She stared into the fluttering flame and again her pupils contracted.

  Canavan now put aside the candle. “Evelyn…” he whispered, unable to stand it any longer, and stepped forward protectively. “Evelyn,” he said again, to assure her of his presence.

  But McKnight, close to revelation, would not be hindered. “What happened?” he asked, stalling the Irishman. “What did they do to her? Tell me what you see, Evelyn—tear it loose and set it free!”

  Evelyn struggled to force the words out, needing the release but resisting the complete exorcism.

  “They…”

  “They what, Evelyn, what?”

  “They—” Her face was suddenly sucked of blood.

  “Tell us, Evelyn, tell us now!”

  The memory coalesced and seared her mind. “They—”

  But no words were adequate. McKnight and Canavan watched in terrible silence as she methodically turned out her wrists in explanation.

  “Dear God,” Canavan breathed, staring at the stigmata.

  “What did you do to her?” Groves demanded.

  “It was not just me,” Lessels insisted. “It was all of us.”

  “What did you do?”

  “The priest was gone, but it was his idea, I tell ye. A last resort. He said we must brand the suffering of the Redeemer on her mind, and so onto the Evil One. The Papists, they have always been fond of the cross….”

  “What, woman?”

  “It was a last attempt to save her, you understand. To save them both. We would not have done it otherwise.” She put her hand over her mouth. “And we knew…we would need to share it. If we were to be damned, we would be damned together.”

  “What did you do?”

  Lessels sobbed. “The keeper held her down…it was the priest’s idea…”

  “Tell us, woman!”

  “There were the four men…and I had the spear…and the keeper had the whip…oh dear God have pity on me…”

  “It’s too late for that now, woman!” Groves said hysterically. “Say it!”

  “One of the men held her to the boards, and the others took turns with the hammer, and…and…”

  “What? What?”

  Hettie Lessels looked up with eyes both beseeching and angry, for she had not expected to be driven so far. But she shook off the urge to bite down her words, even at this late stage, and, bursting into tears, she made the terrible admission.

  “They crucified her, didn’t they, Evelyn!”

  McKnight was leaning forward, still managing to restrain Canavan.

  “They crucified her!” The Professor was breathing the words with indignation. “The little girl, they crucified her in that lighthouse!”

  Evelyn started to shake violently.

  “They were trying to kill the devil inside her! So they crucified the little girl! They crucified you! Admit it, Evelyn! Admit it!”

  “For God’s sake!” Canavan said, and surged forward.

  But McKnight was surprisingly strong. “No,” he said, staring at Evelyn. “You must acknowledge his presence, Evelyn, and you must set him free! You must do it, Evelyn!”

  She started to convulse.

  “There is no shame, Evelyn! You must not deny him! It’s imperative that you set him free!”

  “No,” she said.

  “You must!”

  “I can’t…” she said defiantly, and tears stained with blood dribbled from her eyes.

  “Evelyn!” said Canavan, no longer able to bear it, and pushing aside McKnight he swooped in to embrace her with genuine sympathy as the candle flame fluttered and died.

  Chapter XXII

  PRINGLE HAD DEFINED himself through his comprehensive obedience to his immediate superiors. Scrupulously avoiding questions as to the Wax Man’s unorthodox methods, he had been content to learn and observe while assiduously warding off the contagion of the man’s weaknesses. Assigned to Inspector Groves, he initially had been relieved, figuring that the man’s notoriously pedantic procedures might better suit his own sensibilities and allow him to pass a month or two untouched by the merest breath of scandal. But now, nearly two weeks after the murder of P
rofessor Smeaton in Belgrave Crescent, he was beginning to suspect that the mounting pressure had squeezed Groves’s imagination in unnatural directions.

  It was an extraordinary case by any measure. Four men killed, an unlawful exhumation, the city on edge, an accelerating sense of mystery, the enigma of Groves’s methods (the notion, frequently promulgated by the Inspector himself, that there were complications beyond any understanding save his own)—all this meant that, for a while at least, Pringle had felt on the periphery of a greatness unlike anything he had experienced with the Wax Man. The gruesome death of the Lord Provost had now magnified the importance of the case to previously unimaginable dimensions and left them with another two potential victims—Abraham Lindsay and Hettie Lessels—but still no one whom the law would accept as a murderer, or even a firm suspect. Groves had been summoned to several meetings with the Sheriff, the Procurator Fiscal, and the Lord Advocate, resolving little. The introduction of the devil, the very invocation of the name, was regarded as outlandish to the most proper and studied men, and his indictment as manifestly ridiculous. In lieu of a more satisfying resolution, they committed themselves to more official examinations with a view to prosecution. The revelations about the activities of the Mirror Society, gleaned through Lessels’s preliminary statement, were themselves subject to further scrutiny, in particular the testimony relating to the crucifixion of the young Evelyn Todd. But the eminent gentlemen were uneasy even here, averse to posthumously soiling the name of the Right Honorable Henry Bolan, to whom many were deeply indebted. And while the victim of this alleged outrage loomed large over these discussions, with her criminal record duly noted, they were unsure if they should regard her with pity or contempt—certainly they could not conceive of her as a monstrous murderer—and here they sought some clue from Inspector Groves, who was becoming increasingly inscrutable.

  “I have seen things,” he said, “which make nothing unquestionable.”

  And indeed he had worn a deathly pallor ever since witnessing the ruthless slaughter of Henry Bolan, so that none of the men felt inclined to question him further or make an issue of his failure properly to identify the killer.

  The Inspector’s eyes were still glazed, and he bore about him the aspect of a fanatic when he confided his suspicions to Pringle sometime later. “She will not allow it,” he whispered confidently. “She will have Abraham Lindsay done away with tonight. Before it is too late.”

  It was a prediction later given weight, as it happened, by the orphanage governor himself. “It was my final exhortation,” the old man wheezed, his eyes shining with sickly satisfaction. “I told them to run. But our Lord Provost was too bound to his burgh. He wanted to strike down the girl and do away with her once and for all. But there is no point to that.” He did not even deign to look up at the Sheriff, Groves, and Pringle, not expecting them to understand. “If you kill her, I told him, he will flood out of her in her final moments and he will brand himself on your very soul.”

  Fleming was still exasperated. “Stop this gibberish, man. This sort of talk will stand in no court.”

  But Lindsay was staring into more distant realms. “No,” he said. “It is as it should be. I will not run from him. I will not hide.”

  He did not explain how he expected to be punished, or indeed where, but later in the day, in full view of the watching Groves, he emerged from his crumbling residence and hobbled to the cabstand near Queen Mary’s Bath. Here he dispatched one vehicle with a message and secured another to take him to his final destination. He was dressed in a thick greatcoat, black frock coat, and silken top hat, armored against the cold but not against damnation.

  Groves elected to follow the first cab, which as he expected wound through the labyrinth of streets to Candlemaker Row, where Pringle was posted. They intercepted the messenger on his way up the stairs, and here read Lindsay’s spidery note.

  Awaiting dissolution in the house of the Great Deceiver.

  Abraham Lindsay

  “What does it mean, sir?” Pringle asked.

  “It means we have one last chance,” Groves breathed. “Before the Wax Man takes control and draws a blanket over his bairn.”

  “His bairn, sir?”

  But Groves did not respond. He instructed the messenger to deliver the letter without a further word and withdrew to the shadows at the bottom of the stairs.

  Aeneas and Psyche had been there, so too Ulysses and the mighty Hercules. Saint Paul and Saint Anthony had visited, at least in their imaginations, and Christ Himself was said to have been harrowed there between His death and resurrection. For McKnight and Canavan, then, preparing for this most mythological of odysseys, a trail of legendary precedents lent gravity to their every word and gesture. But beyond what they had heard and smelled through its gates in Shand’s Wynd, and the sight of the medieval Beast itself—signs that were hardly encouraging—they could not be certain what they should expect to find there.

  “All aspects of hell,” the Professor observed, “have been in a state of continual evolution.”

  It was a place whose boundaries had been repeatedly expanded and contracted, its topography raised and flattened, its population variously rampant, magnified, rounded up, imprisoned, and finally dispatched on a sort of demonic diaspora. From the classical Hades of the Greeks to Ezekiel’s fire pits, Isaiah’s abyss, John’s Apocalypse, Saint Thomas Aquinas’s elaborate prison, Dante’s carefully segmented levels, Bosch’s chaos, Milton’s majesties, and ultimately the cerebral hells of psychology, it had been at all times subject to mutating theology, pervasive dogma, the feverish torment of poets, the boundaries of language, and all the prevailing perceptions of evil, shame, and discomfort. Likewise the face of Satan. First assuming his satyric features when the Church demonized the cult of Pan, he later acquired elements of the Dragon of Revelation, Job’s Leviathan, the Greek harpy, and every cunning and repulsive characteristic that could be imagined from flared eyebrows to dripping orifices, until—with the coming of the Enlightenment—he evolved into the immaterial form of abstract concepts and insuperable instincts.

  “And now I fear we have no option but to meet him personally,” McKnight said. “Or at least the monstrous form that indoctrination has stitched for him.”

  Mere hypnotism had proved inadequate. The purging of hidden memories had revealed that they were dealing not just with a tormented unconscious but the very devil himself. This was no metaphor, but an ageless entity in his own right, the Prince of Darkness born as the Bearer of Light. In establishing this at last, and forcing Evelyn to acknowledge his tenancy, they had successfully levered open the gates of hell, but releasing the ruthlessly persecuted prisoner inside would require more than just spells.

  “Sooner or later,” McKnight noted, with incongruous enthusiasm, “all true heroes must go to Hades.”

  For Canavan, too, an undeniable sense of determination intoxicated him beyond the realm of doubts. This was an exertion of will he found impossible to view as anything less than independent. And it occurred to him with satisfaction that Evelyn herself had never, in their presence, given any direct indication that they were less than real. So if their God accepted their existence, then who were they to argue?

  Arriving with McKnight at Clancy’s Maritime and Hunting Goods Emporium in Leith, there to stock up on weapons and provisions for the coming expedition, the Irishman was again given cause to question the nature of a reality that could be so effortlessly simulated down to such annoying obstacles as the Professor’s temporary loss of his wallet (he had slipped it into an irregular breast pocket after cashing in some more of his books) and an emporium proprietor unwilling to open his downstairs store on a Sunday without a substantial bribe.

  “If I’m to go to hell,” said the flustered Mr. Clancy, “then you will need to make damnation worth it.”

  “I shall put in a good word for you,” McKnight assured him ironically, “and secure a suite with a commanding view.”

  The two visitors then roam
ed across the unlit shop floor—Clancy was nervously sweeping the doorstep outside—trying to ascertain just what items were required for the unknown depths.

  “Evelyn has certainly been exposed to the Bible, and the dogma of various churches,” McKnight observed. “But is she familiar with Alberic? Dante?”

  “I don’t know,” Canavan replied. “Are we…?”

  “We know only this much for certain,” McKnight predicted grimly, surveying a rack of alpenstocks and cord ladders. “Whatever has been driven into her unconscious, with all the powers of her maligned imagination, has had twenty years to fester, coagulate, and build impenetrable barriers to reason. We can most certainly expect to find tempests there, and tangled woods, and baking gridirons, and clanking chains. These are present in the most serene of minds, so we should have no reason to be surprised, and even less to go unprepared.”

  It was into the dungeons of this underworld that an unsuspecting Leerie had been ruthlessly flattened by the Mirror Society, while in the realms of reality he had found his movements inhibited by a form conducive only to nightmares.

  “An agreeable tenant, too, I’ve no doubt,” McKnight said, “given the proper circumstances.”

  “He is, and always will be, the Prince of Darkness,” Canavan reminded him.

  “We all have demons in our minds,” the Professor argued, selecting a coil of stout rope. “It’s just a matter of how we integrate them. Some, of course, are allowed to become undisciplined and inflict damage on their hosts. But it’s difficult to imagine Lucifer himself, with all his age and wisdom, would be such an ingrate. Look no farther than the tribesman he previously inhabited. A man of enormous tranquillity, from Evelyn’s own account.”

  “It’s as if you admire him.”

  “If God truly created man in his own image,” McKnight said, “then it’s equally true that man created the devil in his own.”

  “No man is born evil.”

  “Nor, you’ll recall, was Lucifer.”

  Canavan snorted.