The Lighthouse Keeper, page 10
My first instinct was to go out and see for myself, for there was a part of my mind that told me there could be nothing in there to cause a man such fear. The chapel had stood in empty solitude for centuries – and might stand for centuries more – containing nothing but the lost history of a man who had long since gone to meet the object of his lonely devotion. And yet, from elsewhere in my being there came a voice whispering with the greatest urgency, Don’t look. Don’t go out there.
‘What did he see?’ asked Milne, and as he spoke he edged hesitantly towards the door leading to the yard.
‘Leave it, John,’ I said. He glanced sharply at me. ‘There’s nothing out there. The lad’s nerves must be frayed worse than we thought.’
‘But you saw his face,’ said Milne.
‘There’s nothing out there,’ I repeated. ‘We’d spend our time better if we tried to calm him down.’ I walked towards the door leading to the sitting room, and when Milne still hesitated before the outer door, I called his name sharply. ‘Come on, now. If we can settle his nerves, perhaps he’ll tell us himself what happened.’
After a pause, Milne nodded. ‘Aye, perhaps you’re right.’
*
It took us nearly half an hour of coaxing to get Joseph to remove whatever barricade he had placed against the door to his room. When finally he allowed us inside, I saw that he had used a stout rocking chair, for it stood out of place in the centre of the room, rocking slowly back and forth, back and forth.
We asked him to come back to the kitchen with us, to have a cup of tea and take a bite to eat, but he refused with a vehement shake of his head and sat himself on his bed with silent determination.
Milne turned the rocking chair to face him and sat down, while I stood with arms folded by the window. From my vantage point I could see into the small courtyard and beyond to the chapel. The raucous cries of the seabirds were muted but still audible through the windowpane.
‘Now then, Joseph,’ said Milne with a gentle, friendly smile. ‘What’s got you into such a bother?’
Joseph regarded him in silence for some moments, then gave a loud, ragged sigh. ‘It was in the chapel,’ he said in barely more than a whisper.
‘What was?’ asked Milne.
‘The fox.’
There was a pause, and then I said, ‘The fox?’
‘Aye… the white fox.’
Milne shook his head. ‘Laddie, there are no foxes on Eilean Mòr. There’s a few wild rabbits… but no foxes.’
‘I saw it in the chapel,’ said Joseph, his voice rising a little, his breathing growing faster. ‘I saw it through the door… it was sitting there in the dark, watching me.’
‘Could it have been a rabbit?’ I asked. ‘You said yourself that it’s dark in there.’
Joseph gave a short, hysterical laugh. ‘For God’s sake, Alec! Do you think I can’t tell the difference between a fox and a rabbit?’
I sighed. ‘Sorry, Joseph. I just thought…’
‘And it was watching me… and I saw its face… and…’ His voice trailed off as he closed his eyes tight.
‘What about its face?’ asked Milne, but Joseph merely shook his head and would not answer.
Milne looked at me helplessly. I could only shrug and say, ‘I’ll go and have a look.’
‘That might help,’ said Milne, but Joseph leaped to his feet and took me by the shoulders, and I winced as his fingers bit into the bruise I had taken when I fell down outside.
‘Don’t, Alec! It might still be there. Oh, God save us, it might still be there.’
I had heard enough. Roughly I shook Joseph’s hands from my shoulders. ‘I’ll not take fright at the sight of a wee fox, whether it belongs here or not! And what about its face? Why won’t you tell us that?’ Joseph remained silent, and so I repeated the question in a shout that brought Milne to his feet.
‘Easy now, Alec; don’t be hard on the lad.’
‘Are we men or bairns, John?’ I shot back. ‘Will you listen to us! What are we doing?’ I lapsed into a confused silence, for the memory of Joseph’s face as he looked into the chapel sprang unbidden before my mind’s eye. Presently, I turned to Joseph. ‘I’m sorry, but if you won’t tell us what frightened you so, then I’ll go and see for myself.’
Joseph turned away from me towards the window, and at that moment he let out a moan of such despair that I felt my heart falter in my chest. ‘There,’ he said. ‘There it is, Alec, John… there it is!’
He backed away from the window, and Milne and I huddled together and peered through the glass. The fox was walking away from the chapel, and it was perfectly white, from its nose to the foaming fur of its tail. It was large, and it walked slowly, pausing periodically to take the scent of the rough grass that covered the island. Its ears twitched as it raised its head, as if surveying the limitless ocean beyond.
And then it turned and looked at us.
John Milne and I gasped in unison as we instinctively recoiled from the window. We both looked at Joseph Moore, who had sat upon the edge of the bed and buried his head in his hands.
The white fox turned and looked at us, and we saw its face so clearly that there was no room for doubt, for the blessed possibility that we might be mistaken in what we saw.
There was no mistake.
The white fox had five eyes.
FOUR
Monday 20 July
10.00 PM
Nick stopped reading and looked at Rebecca. She returned his gaze without a word.
‘Five eyes?’ said Max. ‘Jesus Christ.’
Donald glanced sharply at him.
‘It’s the same one we saw,’ said Rebecca, looking at each of her companions in turn. ‘It’s still here.’
‘That’s impossible,’ said Donald. ‘Foxes don’t live for a hundred years.’
‘I know that, but I’m telling you it’s the same one.’
‘How do you know, Rebecca?’ asked Jennifer.
Rebecca looked at Nick. ‘There’s something wrong with its face – you said so yourself.’
‘Yeah, but…’ He hesitated, clearly trying to recall the animal, to picture it in his mind. ‘It was quite far away… I’m not sure that’s what it was.’
Rebecca regarded him in silence for a moment, then said: ‘Yes, you’re sure.’
Everyone looked at Nick, waiting for him to respond, but he lowered his eyes and said nothing.
‘What the hell happened here?’ said Max, looking up at the lighthouse. The automated light swung around every fifteen seconds. The sun was gone, leaving a blue-black wash of sky in which the stars began to gather their strength. ‘And what about that light they saw, during the storm?’
‘Dalemore was right,’ replied Donald. ‘A bright star, seen through a break in the clouds… or do you think it was a flying saucer?’ he added with a smirk.
Max gave him a dirty look but said nothing.
‘What do you think, Rebecca?’ asked Jennifer.
‘Me? I…’ She sighed. ‘I’m not sure. I know it sounds crazy, but I just know that Nick and I saw the same thing the lighthouse keepers saw. And that light above the ocean wasn’t a star. But I don’t know what it all means.’
Jennifer smiled and nodded. ‘Natural versus supernatural. It’s an interesting dilemma, isn’t it?’
‘It’s no dilemma at all,’ said Donald decisively. ‘There’s a rational, logical explanation for everything. The light they saw was a star.’
‘And the fox?’ said Jennifer.
Donald shrugged. ‘A deformity, a genetic aberration, or perhaps a set of facial markings that only made it look like it had five eyes. And as for the animal Nick and Rebecca saw… well, I think it most likely that there’s a colony of foxes on Eilean Mòr – whether they’re arctic foxes or albinos makes no difference – and the one they saw is simply a descendant of the one the lighthouse keepers saw, with the same genetic traits.’
‘I doubt it,’ said Jennifer.
Rebecca glanced at her. ‘Why?’
‘It would have to be a fairly large colony to survive for a century or more. I doubt there’s enough food here to support such a group, and even if there were… then where are the rest of them? Why haven’t we seen foxes all over the island?’
‘Perhaps they’re hiding from the flying saucers,’ said Donald.
Jennifer gave him a look which struck Rebecca as being full of sweetness and understanding. ‘You’re the one who’s hiding, Donald,’ she said.
He made a dismissive sound. ‘Hiding from what? Fairy stories?’
‘No, not fairy stories. From mysteries which can’t be theorised away at the drop of a hat. Strange, for a man of faith.’
‘I have faith in science.’
‘And God.’
‘Yes, in God too.’
Rebecca looked at him in surprise. She wouldn’t have figured him for a religious man. She’d never been able to understand how scientists could believe in God – surely the two world views were mutually exclusive? Science was all about proving that things were true or false, whereas a belief in God could only ever be supported by faith in the absence of any real evidence.
‘And yet you want to separate the natural world from its First Cause, the supernatural agency which created it.’
Donald sighed. ‘We’ve been over this before, Jennifer. I believe that God created the Universe, but He designed it to follow the immutable laws that He also created. Those laws cannot be broken, but God gave humanity the faculties of reason and logic to understand them, and to apply that understanding in order to solve the mysteries of creation. I don’t try to separate the world from its Creator, but I do try to separate it from woolly-headed mysticism and pseudoscience.’
‘So how do you explain what we saw on your equipment?’ asked Rebecca. ‘That object in the ocean, the disappearance of the marine life, the fact that all the other life seems to be avoiding that area?’
Donald smiled at her. ‘I can’t explain it. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be explained. As I said before, all we have to do is put a bit of thought into it – thought and observation – and we’ll solve the mystery.’
Rebecca turned to Jennifer. ‘What do you think about this?’
Jennifer replied with a question of her own. ‘How, exactly, did you find Dalemore’s manuscript? If it was buried under the floor of the chapel, you couldn’t have simply stumbled upon it.’
Rebecca couldn’t stop herself from smiling. The answer, she felt, was yet more evidence that something truly strange was happening on Eilean Mòr. ‘The white fox led me to it,’ she replied.
Nick shook his head. ‘Becks…’
‘It’s true, Nick.’
She told them all how the fox had disappeared into the tiny, ancient building, how it wasn’t there anymore when she’d looked inside, and how she had noticed the mound of earth concealing its strange treasures.
‘The fox led me to it,’ she repeated. ‘To the manuscript… and to the stone.’
Donald puffed on his pipe in irritation. ‘So you think it’s intelligent, that it wanted to show you where they were buried.’
‘I know it sounds insane…’
‘Indeed!’
Rebecca was about to say more, but she hesitated and lapsed into silence. How could she convince him of something which she didn’t understand, something which she herself doubted because it did sound insane?
Donald smiled condescendingly at her. ‘All right, let’s assume, for the sake of the argument, that it is intelligent, that it’s something other than an ordinary animal… why is it here? And why did it want you to find these things?’
‘How the hell should I know?’ Rebecca snapped. ‘I’m sorry,’ she added quietly.
‘It’s all right, Rebecca,’ said Donald. ‘Being in strange, remote places can play tricks on the mind – and I’m not saying that to be patronising, believe me. Many people have experienced it – explorers, researchers, adventurers – and when certain unusual or puzzling events are experienced, such as our own little mystery in the ocean, the mind tends to fill in the gaps in its knowledge with speculation. It’s perfectly natural – and from what I’ve heard so far from Mr Dalemore, it also happened to those three lighthouse keepers a century ago.’
‘Which three?’ asked Max, pointing to the book. ‘These three, or the three who vanished for no apparent reason?’
Donald sighed and shook his head. ‘May I remind everyone of the reason we’re here? We are here to observe the distribution of seabirds and marine mammals, to update the JNCC database. We are not here to conduct paranormal investigations, using a hundred-year-old manuscript as our guide.’
‘Perhaps that is why we’re here,’ said Jennifer, more to herself than to anyone else.
Rebecca was about to ask her to explain her comment, but Donald stood up and said: ‘I doubt it. And I’ve heard quite enough for one night. I’ll see you all in the morning, bright and early.’ Before ducking into his tent, he turned and said with a chuckle: ‘Pleasant dreams, everyone.’
The others decided that they had best turn in as well. As she helped to clear away their things, Rebecca found herself looking at Jennifer Leigh in a new way.
FIVE
Tuesday 21 July
7.45 AM
During breakfast, Donald made a point of focusing the conversation on what they had to do that day. It was clear that, as far as he was concerned, the matter of the white fox was closed: he had come up with a theory that satisfied him, and now they could return their attention to the tasks at hand. No one contradicted him, which didn’t surprise Rebecca, nor did she hold it against them. They were here to do a job, after all, and she understood that the mystery of the white fox was an unwanted distraction.
Nick, Max and Donald went up to the top of the island to make a visual survey of the seabirds in the area, while Jennifer remained in the equipment tent to continue working with the hydrophone array and the transducers.
Rebecca briefly considered reading more of Alec Dalemore’s testament, but she realised that she didn’t want to – at least not then. The truth was, she was frightened by what the manuscript contained and how the events of a century ago seemed to be sending strange echoes into the present. She felt the smallness of the island pressing in all around her, and the impossibility of leaving until their pickup arrived in a little under a week’s time made the breath catch in her throat. It was like a weird combination of claustrophobia and agoraphobia: she couldn’t decide which was more oppressive, the smallness of Eilean Mòr or the vastness of the sea and sky.
Rebecca poked her head through the flaps of the equipment tent. ‘Hi,’ she said.
Jennifer turned away from her displays and smiled. ‘Come in, Rebecca.’
‘How’s it going?’
‘Everything seems to be working fine now. Sit down, have some coffee.’
‘Thanks.’ Rebecca poured herself a cup from Jennifer’s thermos and sat beside her. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m working on a way to reroute shipping from areas where whales gather in high concentrations.’
‘Oh,’ said Rebecca. ‘Is that a serious problem for shipping?’
‘Actually, it’s more of a problem for the whales. Many of them are killed each year as a result of collisions with ships.’
‘I didn’t realise that.’
Jennifer nodded. ‘I’m afraid so. We’re hoping to establish a programme for deploying hydrophones along the world’s main shipping lanes, which would enable mariners to detect the presence of whales in real-time and avoid the high-concentration areas. There’s also an international project to install fish-finding sonar in the bows of vessels, which would allow them to detect whales that are just below the ocean’s surface.’
‘How would that work?’ asked Rebecca, leaning forward and watching the images flickering on the displays.
‘They use equipment similar to our transducer here, which sends and receives high-frequency signals, typically between twenty and two hundred thousand cycles per second. The pulses detect the air in the swim bladders of whales and fish, and the energy is reflected back to the detector. Look at these.’
Jennifer pointed to several dark-coloured arches scattered across the display, like shallow, inverted ‘U’s. ‘These are called “fish arches”. Each one represents a fish.’
‘Why do they look like that?’
‘The beam transmitted by the transducer is like a cone, which spreads out with distance. The mark you see here begins when the fish enters the outer edge of the cone; then, as it swims through the cone, the distance between it and the transducer decreases, and the mark curves upwards. Then, as the fish continues towards the other edge of the cone, the mark curves downwards again, and stops where the fish exits the cone. And that’s how we know what’s in the ocean, how big it is and how far away it is.’
‘I see,’ said Rebecca. ‘And that thing that showed up soon after we got here, on Sunday… what do you think it was?’
‘I’ve been thinking about it ever since. The short answer is “I don’t know.”’
‘What’s the long answer?’
Jennifer gave a short chuckle. ‘There isn’t one.’
‘Oh.’ Rebecca took another sip of her coffee. ‘Do you think Max might be right – that it might be the same kind of thing that made those sounds they detected in the Pacific? The Slow Down and the Bloop?’
Jennifer considered this for a moment. ‘I suppose it’s possible. Oceanographers believe that there are still many undiscovered species in the deepest oceans… and some of them may be very large and very strange. Mind you, the idea that one of them could have come so close to the surface here… well, it’s a little hard to accept, but it is possible.’
Jennifer regarded her in silence for a few moments, then turned back to the displays. ‘Eilean Mòr guards its secrets well, doesn’t it?’
‘I certainly think it has some to guard.’
