by Karen Heard
****
It has been forty-two nights since I was left to keep the lighthouse, and I have only one bulb left. It was my fault. I had forgotten to wipe the lantern during the day and so went up there in the dark to quickly clean the glass pane.
There was a faint mizzle in the air, making everything slimy. I turned my face away from the intense glare as I placed the damp cloth to the glass. As I looked out to sea, I saw a dark hand coming from the distant swell, growing larger and larger as it reached towards me. I pressed myself against the wall as the hand came near. Everything went suddenly black, and I feared the shadowed hand was gripped around my eyes. I remained still for a long, long moment.
But it was not the hand that pinned me to the wall – only fear.
Coming to my senses and finding myself unharmed, the terror loosened its hold. I felt my way back through the thick darkness to the glass pane and touched its clammy surface, sure now that the bulb was dead and that any approaching boat would quickly meet the same fate if the light did not return soon.
In the darkness, I imagined I could hear the disapproving whispers of the shipwrecked sailors. I could feel the fog, like a thick wet shiver, growing more substantial around me as the seamen came closer, hissing in my ear with their salty breath. Make haste.
I floundered in the dark, my hands groping along the soggy walls for the way back to the staircase. Then, a low, mournful wail broke out from the lighthouse, so deep and melancholy it made me jump with an unknown guilt. I felt the lighthouse was calling out to Father of my negligent care.
My mind fumbled to place the sound, but then, as the lighthouse cried out again, I remembered. I should have expected it: the dampness in the air must have pushed the automated foghorn into action. It howled again around my head, like a terrible reprimand vibrating through my soul.
I swept down the stairs, blowing out candles with my skirts in my rush to reach the bulb cupboard, thinking only of any lost sailors alone in the dark mist.
The foghorn keened once more: another thirty seconds in the gloom without light.
I lifted out the penultimate bulb. The smooth orb jumped around in my hands, wanting to be back in its box. I let the bulb rest in the crook of my arm like a baby, careful not to disturb it, as I stumbled back up the staircases in the dim light.
The foghorn yelled at me again to hurry.
The remaining candlelight inside was of little use, but I found the power switch for the lamp on the top of the staircase.
The horn’s persistent bawl reminded me that it had now been two minutes since the bulb had failed.
I pushed the switch to turn off the power to the light filament, but the motor started up immediately. The lighthouse shone once more. There had been nothing wrong with the bulb at all.
For long moments, I stared at the switch accusingly – flicking the power on and off, ignoring the objections of the foghorn. It worked fine. It must have been turned off just now somehow, though I could not see how the button could have been knocked off by even the strongest wind. Some guilty hand must have been at work here unless the lighthouse had acted of its own accord.
Whatever the cause, the light now burned a hole through the fog that rolled silently in across the sea in a white floury haze.
I gave the misty lamp a quick wipe with my palm, but the giant hand came at me again out of the gathering murk. I threw my back against the wall again, narrowly avoiding the power switch. As I moved away from the light, the hand vanished, and I realised it had been my hand whose shadow had been cast across the sea when I had pressed it against the light. But then, if the daemon-hand had been my own shadow, why had everything gone dark as I moved away from the light? I looked again at the switch to my side. I had barely missed knocking into it just now. And when I first saw the hand, what had I done then …? I had backed into the wall. Was it possible that I could … and not even realise? I regarded the switch for some time … wondering.
I pressed my back tentatively against the switch, and I heard the motor stop again as the lamp snapped off.
I must have turned the switch off.
The bulb fell from my grip, smashing in the darkness. I fumbled for the switch again, quickly turning the beacon back on. Wondering …
I must have turned the switch off. It had to be so. There was only me up there. There was only me this time.
But last time …
Last time there were two of us, one who had crashed into the wall on the way down the stairs hard enough to bruise her shoulder … and another, who had stayed to watch his wife desert him in a strange boat, with the switch within arm’s reach.
Father must have turned the light back on either way. But off? There was no way I could know which one of us was to blame, but Father must know who it was.
The idea was too big for my head. I looked instead into the obscuring fog.
I thought I saw something in the haze: a shadow rearing up from within the mist. It grew larger.
Forming out of nothing, I saw the ghostly shape of a vessel emerging from the fog. I squinted into the darkness but could not see what sort it was, nor even judge its size.
The light twitched and spluttered as the spectre came closer, and instinctively I made a step towards the stairs to break out the last bulb.
The boat came nearer, and I saw a figure fighting to keep hold of two splintering oars. The figure stared up at me frantically as it navigated through the eerie gleam of the malevolent rocks lurking just beneath the water’s skin.
The lamp blinked off and then on again.
As the boat came closer, I made out Father’s face, full of fear, as he looked up at the lighthouse. Everything around him had turned a bright white, as the fog painted out everything else in the world but us two: the boat and the lighthouse. There was no water … no rocks … no rift … there was nothing in front of us or behind – the oblivion of fog swallowed everything.
I remembered Mother telling me, on nights like this, that from the outside, it would look like our tower was wrapped inside a pure white cloud, as if we were not part of this world at all. She looked sad when she said this, though I never understood why.
The bulb blinked again. I looked at the switch at the top of the stairway, wondering …
****
It has been forty-three days since Father left me here to watch the lighthouse, with only my memories to keep me company. I look out now as his boat creeps closer. I imagine that the light is a stream of golden hair, flowing over to him so that he can reach me. Maybe he brings news of my mother, happily settled somewhere on shore. Perhaps he has answers to the troubles that have washed up in my mind whilst he has been away, but what answer could he bring that I could bear to hear? Possibly, he comes to save me from the drowning lighthouse. Forty-three nights – but now I fear he comes too soon.
When he comes, I will have to ask him which one of us turned off the light on Mother.
The light coaxes him on, the bulb guttering badly now, so that Father’s boat comes closer to me in flashes of dark and light, good and bad, him or me.
I take a step backwards, thinking of the last bulb. Father puts his hand up towards the light, towards me, though, again, the meaning is lost in the inscrutable gloom. I am not sure if he can even make me out, or if he sees only the lighthouse’s bright white eye. Maybe they are the same thing: the lighthouse and myself. I take another step backwards, towards the door, towards the wall, towards the bulb, towards the switch.
****
I hear nothing now but the pounding of my own heart as we close our eyes against the darkness.
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