Ashes

by Scott Nicholson

  Poe waved one florid hand to the three windows facing the seaside. “There’s your view,” he said, then sat in the chair by the logbook.

  The flat, gray water stretched for miles, the horizon farther than I had ever seen it. The ocean seemed to curve, and distant full-sheeted masts protruded from the water like tiny clusters of white flowers. The shoreline stretched in either direction, the north sweeping more gently, the south broken by crags and cays. The natural breakwater of which ships’ captains were afraid was black and sharp, gleaming like wet teeth. I took in the view for some minutes, not remarking.

  “ One gets bored with it after a while,” Poe said. He uncorked one of the bottles and poured some of the liquor into a glass. He drank without offering me any.

  “ Are you not a lover of the sea?” I said. “I would have thought someone taking a post such as this-”

  “- must be as mad as a hatter,” he said, looking glumly into his glass. “Four months here, and I’ve barely even started.”

  “ I don’t understand,” I said.

  He gestured toward the papers on the table. “My work.”

  “ You keep a record of the currents, tides, and ships?”

  “ Not that work. I meant my writing.”

  “ You are a writer, then?”

  “ Yes. I used to be a newspaper reporter. But I’m driven to write of false things. I thought with a change of scenery, and blessed isolation…”

  “ You have plenty of both here, I imagine. I know something of isolation myself.”

  He gave a grim smile, as if his loneliness were the deepest in all the world and weighed most heavily on his shoulders. He drank more liquor, in gulps instead of sips, and refilled his glass. My legs were trembling from the long climb, but the only place to sit was his bed. I had never been in a man’s bed.

  “ Isolation is the devil’s tool,” Poe said. “I want to concentrate on my work, but one hears things in this damnable cylinder. The rush of high tide sounds like voices in the chamber below, like the soft cries of those who have been pulled under the water. Think of all those ships lying on the ocean floor yonder, and the white bones of those who went down with them. Where do you suppose they go?”

  For the first time, I had an inkling of the man’s instability. His brooding good looks became sharper and fiercer, his eyes flashing with a morose anger. Beyond the windows, the clouds had gathered and grown darker as if to match Poe’s mood. A squall was pushing in from the sea, and the cutters spread across the sea had taken down their sails as the wind increased.

  “ A storm is blowing in,” I said. “Shouldn’t you light the lamps?”

  He said nothing, just wiped at his chin.

  “ The current shifts here with these spring storms,” I said. “Surely you were told that by your employer.”

  “ Damned De Grat. He should have known I could never tolerate this place-or my own company-for an entire year.”

  Wanting to pull him from his mood, not yet ready to trouble him to lead me back down the stairs, I asked what he was writing.

  “ It’s about a shipwreck.”

  “ Shipwreck?”

  “ A ghost ship. With a morbid crew.”

  I laughed. “One hears plenty of those tales. I found a paper in a corked bottle once, washed up on the beach.”

  His eyebrows arched. “What did it say?”

  “ The water had gotten to it.”

  “ It always does,” he said, with the air of one who had floated many futile messages.

  “ Can I hear the story?”

  “ It’s no good,” he said. He tapped the rumpled pages beneath the logbook. “This may be the last thing I ever write.”

  “ Have you been published?” I asked.

  A smile slithered across his moist lips. “Some poems.”

  “ Please, read me one.”

  “ It’s not fit for ladies,” he said, and I wondered how much of his gallantry was due to drunkenness. He closed the logbook and passed it to me. I opened it to the first page. I’d had some schooling in the village, but could read little. He had started entries on January first. His handwriting was florid and bold, the words scrawled with an intensity that matched his features.

  He took it from me. “’January two,’” he read. “‘I have passed this day in a species of ecstasy that I find impossible to describe. My passion for solitude could scarcely have been more thoroughly gratified. I do not say satisfied; for I believe I should never be satiated with such delight as I have experienced today. The wind lulled about daybreak, and by the afternoon the sea had gone down materially. Nothing to be seen, with the telescope even, but ocean and sky, with an occasional gull.’”

  “ That’s lovely,” I say. I know nothing of poetry.

  “‘ January three,’” he continued. “ A dead calm all day. Towards evening the sea looked very much like glass. A few seaweeds came in sight; but besides them absolutely nothing all day, not even the slightest speck of cloud.’”

  “ Much like this morning, only now the wind is picking up and there’s a swell rising.”

  He closed the book and stared out at the sea for a moment. “What do you know of murder?” he asked, appraising me, his eyes gleaming.

  “ Very little,” I said. “I can’t imagine such a horrid thing.”

  “ I can,” he said. “Far too easily. The mind of man is a foul, corrupt thing. And when a man is alone with his thoughts…”

  He drained his glass again, refilled it, spilling a few drops on the table. “But forgive me,” he said, louder. “I forget my manners. You are a guest and I have made you stand.”

  He rose unsteadily from the chair and sat on the bunk, indicating with his glass that I was to take the chair. I hesitated, afraid to linger but also wary of his wrath. I sensed he could be set off with but the slightest provocation, and I began to regret my bold adventure. The sky outside had grown even darker, and though it was scarcely noon, the ocean and sky merged on the horizon into a single bruised color, clouds whipping like rags on a line. The wind screamed at the gaps around the windows, and from below came the dull roar that the man imagined were the voices of the dead.

  I shivered, though the room was warm. “I must be getting home,” I said. “My parents are waiting, and I dare not get caught out in this storm.”

  “ Why don’t you stay until it blows over?” he said, leaning back on the bunk a little. Men who worked with shipping had a certain reputation, and I suspected this man was no different. Though part of me had longed for some romance resulting from my encounter with a lighthouse keeper, I didn’t want to suffer the rough attentions of an animal. The desire for solitude in itself did not make a man sensitive.

  “ They’ll be expecting me,” I said. I took a tentative step toward the trap door, loathe to negotiate those many steps again without a lantern.

  Poe grabbed my arm, and his eyes were dead as coal. “I can’t be alone anymore,” he said. “Don’t you hear them?”

  I tried to pull away, but his was the grip of a lunatic. “Please,” I implored, silently cursing my recklessness in coming here. A barren life on a lonely strip of shore was better than no life at all, and the excitement I had craved was now full upon me, but I wanted it no more.

  “ The voices,” he said with a hiss, his face clenched, sweat clinging to that high, broad forehead. “With every storm they come, the souls of the shipwrecked and lost at sea.”

  As the wind picked up, I thought I could hear them, but perhaps it was only the roaring heartbeat in my ears. I wrenched free, desperate and afraid. He grabbed at me again, and I dodged away. He howled, the mad sound blending with the wind until it filled the watch chamber.

  “ Don’t leave me,” he shouted, diving toward me. I stepped backward, into the space of the open trap door, falling to the top step and then into the yawning black abyss, toward those tormented voices at the base of the lighthouse.

  I stayed with Poe for the remainder of his term. He disposed of my body, of course
, weighed me down by slipping scrap iron into my dress, and set me out to sea in the early morning dark of high tide. I came back with the tide the next night, watched as he brooded with his bottles and occasionally scrawled barely legible words on his papers. I read his logbook over his shoulder, what I could of it.

  I waited until he fell into a restless sleep before I began whispering. Poe was right, those voices in the well of the lighthouse were of the dead, and I both imitated and joined them. Poe tossed in his sleep, sweated like driftwood, and finally woke. “Who’s there?” he asked.

  I told him my name, as I told all of them my name in the years and centuries to come. He finished his story, wrote poetry, and drank to forget me, though he could not forget the one who was his constant companion. He had come to the lighthouse to be alone, but in the end, that was the last thing I allowed him. He read to me from his journal: “It is strange that I never observed, until this moment, how dreary a sound that word has: ‘Alone.’”

  And though Poe left at the end of the year, I imagine I haunted him for the remainder of his days. I longed to be the last thing of which he ever wrote.

  The sun has risen on a new year. The watch chamber has changed little, though now the lights are electric. I learned from the living as my days ran together, as the lighthouse keepers became park rangers and oceanographic researchers and meteorologists. They brought computers, radars, radios, and televisions, sounds and pictures that compete with the eternal beauty beyond the windows. The ships have changed, no longer using sails, some hovering over the water as if on cushions of air. However, the sea has changed little, and I have changed even less.

  In recent years, the occasional paranormal investigator appears, laden with equipment, but they are not as interesting because they too willingly believe. This year, a woman occupies the watch chamber. Over the last century, women have become more common, though usually the chamber is still operated by sole sentinels. I prefer it that way. They end up lonely while I always have company.

  I go to her now, my dress like a sheet of torn vapor, my hair trailing, my fingers scarcely visible and cold. I tap on the window, whisper like the wind, aching to know my new companion.

  She looks up from the computer and frowns at the sunset on the horizon. She doesn’t yet understand that I am the horizon, the point between the dead and the living. Where, as Poe said on one of those long nights we spent together, the moon never beams without bringing him dreams. All of them dream of me sooner or later. I grow more solid with the sinking of the sun, and I smile as I drift into the chamber.

  She pushes back in her chair, the wheels squeaking like frightened rats. She doesn’t believe her eyes. They never do.

  “ Who are you?” she says.

  I almost call myself “Mary,” but that deception rang hollow centuries ago. As I told Poe, I want to be remembered as my true self, not as another.

  “ My name is Annabel Lee,” I say.

  I’ll be with her until the end of both of our days. As with Poe, my first and always, she will make me immortal.

  SEWING CIRCLE

  “ The only Jew in town,” Morris said as Laney pulled into the church parking lot.

  He pointed to the stained-glass window cut into the middle of the belfry. It looked expensive, more than a little country church could afford. Jesus smiled down from the window, arms spread in welcome and acceptance.

  “ The story’s about the sewing circle, not the church,” Laney said.

  “ Jesus as a ragpicker. Was that in the Bible?”

  “ You’re too cynical.”

  “ No, I’m just a frustrated idealist.”

  Morris rubbed his stomach. He’d gone soft from years at a desk, his only exercise the occasional outdoor feature story, usually involving a free meal. He’d given up the crime beat, preferring to do the “little old lady in the holler” stuff, the cute little profile features that offended no one. Still, the fucking quilt beat was the bottom rung on the ladder he’d started climbing back down a decade ago.

  “ Come on, it’ll be fun,” Laney said. She was the staff photographer, and true to her trade, she managed to keep a perspective on things. Cautious yet upbeat, biding time, knowing her escape hatch was waiting down the road. For Morris, there was no escape hatch. The booby hatch, maybe.

  “‘ Fun’ is the Little League All-Stars, a Lion’s Club banquet where they give out a check the size of Texas, a quadriplegic doing a power wheelchair charity run from the mountains to the coast. But this”-he flipped his notebook toward the little Primitive Baptist church, its walls as white as pride in the morning sun-“Even my Grandma would yawn over a sewing circle story.”

  “ You can juice it up,” Laney said as she parked. She always drove because she had two kids and needed the mileage reimbursement. All Morris had was a cat who liked to shit in the bathtub.

  “ That’s what I do,” he said. “A snappy lead and some filler, then cash my checks.”

  Though the checks were nothing to write home about. He’d written home about the first one, way back when he was fresh out of journalism school. Mom had responded that it was very nice and all but when was he getting a real job? Dad had no doubt muttered into his gin and turned up the sound to “Gunsmoke.” They didn’t understand that reporting was just a stepping stone to his real career, that of bestselling novelist and screenwriter for the stars.

  They headed into the church alcove, Laney fidgeting with her lenses. Morris had called ahead to set up the appointment. He’d talked briefly to Faith Gordon, who apparently organized the group though she wasn’t a seamstress herself. The sewing circle met every Thursday morning, rain, shine, flood, or funeral. Threads of Hope, the group called itself. Apparently it was a chapter of a national organization, and Morris figured he’d browse the Web later to snip a few easy column inches of back story.

  The alcove held a couple of collection boxes for rags. Scrawled in black marker on cardboard were the words: “Give your stuff.” Morris wondered if that same message was etched into the bottoms of the collection plates that were passed around on Sundays. Give your stuff to God, for hope, for salvation, for the needles of the little old ladies in the meeting room.

  “ Hello here,” came a voice from the darkened hallway. A wizened man emerged into the alcove, hunched over a push broom, his jaw crooked. He leaned against the broom handle and twisted his mouth as if chewing rocks.

  “ We’re from the Journal-Times,” Morris said. “We came about the sewing circle.”

  One of the man’s eyes narrowed as he looked over Laney’s figure. He chewed faster. “‘M’on back,” he said, waving the broom handle to the rear of the church. He let the two of them go first, no doubt to sweep up their tracks as he watched Laney’s ever-popular rear.

  The voices spilled from the small room, three or four conversations going at once. Morris let Laney make the entrance. She had a way of setting people at ease, while Morris usually set them on edge. His style was fine on the local government beat, when you wanted to keep the politicians a little paranoid, but it didn’t play well among the common folk in the Appalachian mountain community of Cross Valley.

  “ Hi, we’re with the paper,” Laney said. “We talked to Faith Gordon about the circle, and she invited us to come out and do a story.”

  Five women were gathered around a table, in the midst of various stitches, with yarn, cloth scraps, spools of different-colored threads, and darning needles spread out in front of them.

  “ You ain’t gonna take my picture, are you?” one of them asked, clearly begging to be in the paper. That would probably make her day, Morris thought. The only other way she’d ever make the paper was when her obituary ran. She was probably sixty, but had the look of one who would live to be a hundred. One who knew all about life’s troubles, because she’d heard about them from neighbors.

  “ Only if you want,” Laney said. “But a picture makes the story better.”

  “ We just thought the community would be interested in t
he fine work you ladies are doing,” Morris said. That wasn’t so bad, even if the false cheer burned his throat like acid reflux.

  “ If Faith said it was okay, that’s good enough for us,” said a second woman. She was in her seventies, wrinkled around the eyes, the veins on her hands thick and purple, though her fingers were as strong as a crow’s claws. “I’m Alma.”

  “ Hi, Alma,” Morris said. He went from one to another, collecting their names for the record, making sure the spelling was correct. You could miss a county budget by a zero, apply the wrong charge in a police brief, and even fail to call the mayor on Arbor Day, and all these mistakes were wiped out with a Page 2 correction. But woe unto the reporter who misspelled a name in a fuzzy family feature.

  Alma Potter. Reba Absher. Lillian Moretz. Daisy Eggers. The “other Alma,” Alma Moretz, no immediate relation to Lillian, though they may have been cousins five or six times removed.

  “ Just keep on working while I take some shots,” Laney said. She contorted with catlike grace, stooping to table level, composing award-quality photographs. The janitor stood at the door, appreciating her professional ardor. He was chewing so fast that his teeth were probably throwing off sparks behind his eager lips.

  “ So, how did you ladies meet?” Morris smiled, just to see what it felt like.

  “ Me and Reba was friends, and we’d get together for a little knitting on Saturdays while our husbands went fishing together,” Alma Potter said. “They would go after rock bass, but they always came home with an empty cooler.”