The Lighthouse Keeper, page 12
How strange, I thought, that there should be such complicated and rigorous rules associated with staying on these islands. I had the impression that the men of Lewis were genuinely afraid of contravening them, and that both their customs and their fear owed more to pagan beliefs than to Christianity. It seemed that those ancient clansmen were aware of some great and incomprehensible power at work here, and that to anger it would bring dreadful misfortune upon them. For the first time, I had a sense of the Seven Hunters as being a kind of meeting point between the pagan and the Christian worlds, and that this meeting point was like the collision of opposing weather fronts, resulting in dangerous and unpredictable storms.
For what seemed like a long time, I sat in the armchair and looked out through the window, and presently I realised that I had watched the sky deepen into night.
The sudden clatter of a pot being placed upon the stove brought me out of my reverie, and for lack of anything else to do, I replaced the book on the shelf and returned to the kitchen, where I was surprised to see Milne still preparing the meal. How long had it been since I had left him? What had he been doing in that time?
‘Alec,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘Would you please bring in a can of oil from the store-room? We’ll be needing to fill up the fountains this evening.’
‘Of course, John,’ I replied and, lighting a storm lantern with a piece of kindling from the stove, I stepped out through the kitchen door into the yard. The night air was still and silent, and I shivered suddenly in the deep cold. At a height of some sixty feet above me, the light turned twice every thirty seconds, casting sudden, brief daylight into the depths of the bitter darkness. Overhead, the stars glistened like hoarfrost on a vast, black windowpane, and the sea whispered its secrets in the distance.
I hurried across the yard to the larger of the two outbuildings, which served as our main storage room, and threw the iron bolt that secured the door, which opened inward, but to my surprise it did not move easily. Thinking that perhaps something had fallen across the threshold and was blocking the door, I pushed harder, holding the lantern awkwardly in my left hand as I did so.
Slowly, the door began to open under the heave of my shoulder, and I wondered what could have fallen in front of it to impede it so. When I had succeeded in forcing it open eight or nine inches, I stopped and thrust the lantern through the opening, hoping to see the obstacle.
Craning my neck, I put my head around the edge of the door and peered inside, with my arm held out before me. The light from the lantern dimly illuminated the interior, but such was my position that I could not see very much. From what I could see, all of the equipment and supplies in the outbuilding were in order and in their proper place. Lowering the lantern, I looked down at the floor, but could see nothing that might have prevented the door from opening.
Perhaps there was something lying just beyond my field of view, I thought, and in growing puzzlement, I withdrew my head and arm from the opening, and prepared to heave against the door again.
At that moment, the door slammed shut in my face with a loud crack of wood against stone.
In shock, I recoiled and staggered a few paces back across the yard. ‘What in God’s name…?’ I whispered, and felt fear and incomprehension rising in me like a rolling wave. ‘There is someone in there,’ I said quietly to the night, my words all but lost in the distant whisper of the sea. But how could there be? We three keepers were alone on the island. And yet the door to the outbuilding had been pushed closed with great force, from the inside. Had there been a storm, I might have believed that the wind had seized it and thrown it shut – but there was no storm, and no wind.
And then a thought occurred to me, which filled me with a mixture of great hope and a strange, unaccountable fear, and I dashed across the yard and threw open the kitchen door.
‘John!’ I cried.
Milne turned from the stove, saw the look on my face and said, ‘Alec, what’s wrong?’
Breathlessly, I told him what had just happened, and as my words rushed out, a dark frown of alarm spread across his face. ‘John,’ I concluded, ‘I don’t think we are alone on the island.’
‘What are you talking about? Of course we are alone. Who else could…?
His eyes widened as realisation dawned.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘It could be one of the missing keepers – Ducat, or one of the others. Come on, it’ll need two of us to get the door open.’
Without waiting for a reply, I rushed back across the yard, and again threw myself against the door to the outbuilding. Milne came up beside me and lent his efforts, and for several moments we pushed with all our might against the door.
‘Who’s in there?’ Milne called out. ‘Whoever’s there, let us in! It’s John Milne and Alec Dalemore! Ducat, Marshall, MacArthur! Let us in!’
But the door remained shut, and in another minute we had both all but exhausted ourselves and leaned breathlessly against the wall of the outbuilding.
‘Why won’t they let us in?’ I wondered desperately, my words carried on the ghostly white vapour of my breath. ‘If it’s them…’
I was interrupted by a soft, quiet creak as the door moved open an inch. Milne’s eyes flew to the narrow band of darkness, and he bent down to retrieve the storm lantern from the ground. Holding it above his head, he reached out slowly, gingerly, and pushed open the door, which now gave easily, and we both stepped inside.
Milne held the lantern before us, swinging it left and right, so that the whole of the interior was illuminated.
But there was no one inside, and every item of equipment was in its proper place, undisturbed.
‘There’s no one here,’ whispered Milne, and my heart trembled at the confusion and despair in his voice. ‘Oh God, Alec… there’s no one here.’
SIX
Tuesday 21 July
8.15 AM
They were all sitting in the larger of the two accommodation tents, the one used by Rebecca, Nick and Max, and Max was repeatedly running his hand through his hair and saying: ‘What the hell was that?’ over and over again. He was hunched forward and shaking his head, as though trying to rid himself of the memory of what they had seen.
Everyone was silent, except for Donald, who merely said, ‘I don’t know.’
‘I mean, for Christ’s sake! What happened to the sky?’
Max looked at them each in turn, but no one said anything.
It had been about ten minutes since the sky returned to its normal state. Rebecca had been certain she was about to die, and she still couldn’t quite believe that the phenomenon hadn’t killed them all. But it had passed, like a cloud or a shower of rain: the rotating cylinder, which had seemed to contain the sky as it should have been, had reached the island and then expanded, sweeping across the strange rippling and finally dissipating it. And then the sound, too – that horrible, shimmering metallic sound – had ceased, leaving only the cries of the seabirds.
Max turned to Nick. ‘Have you ever seen a weather phenomenon like that?’
Nick shook his head.
‘I don’t believe any of us has,’ added Jennifer.
‘Perhaps some kind of optical illusion,’ Donald suggested. ‘Something like heat haze…’
‘Bullshit!’ Max poured himself a cup of coffee from the flask Rebecca had prepared for them. Donald looked hurt, and Max sighed. ‘Sorry, Don. It’s just… I’m a little rattled over this.’
‘Things aren’t right here,’ said Rebecca quietly.
Max glanced at her. ‘No kidding, babe!’
Rebecca picked up Dalemore’s testament and held it close to her chest. ‘That sound we heard just now… while the sky was… anyway, Dalemore heard the same thing, soon after he arrived on the island. So did Joseph Moore and Robert Muirhead; they all heard the same thing.’
‘That’s right,’ said Jennifer, looking at the book. ‘It was exactly as he describes it.’
‘Ever since we arrived, things have been happening,’ said Nick. ‘Things we can’t explain. Those anomalous readings from the hydrophones and the transducer, the absence of marine life in that area of ocean, the white fox… whatever just happened now…’
‘And the sounds I heard in the tent yesterday morning,’ added Rebecca.
Max looked at her. ‘What sounds?’
‘When I woke up, I heard someone moving in the other half of the tent, behind the partition. I thought it was you, Max, but it wasn’t. You were already outside. Nick said it was just the sound of the tent’s fabric rippling in the breeze, and for a while I thought… well, I wanted to believe that was the explanation.’
‘Maybe I was wrong about that,’ Nick conceded.
‘I’ll try to bear that in mind when I’m in bed tonight,’ said Max glumly.
‘Whatever happened to Dalemore and the others is happening again,’ said Rebecca.
Donald was about to say something, but then he hesitated and shook his head.
Rebecca looked at him. ‘I’m sorry, Donald, but it’s true. I don’t know what’s happening, or why… but it’s happening.’ She opened the book to the eleventh chapter and pointed to the handwritten text. ‘This chapter is called “The Living Sky”.’
‘What?’ said Max. He took the book from her. His eyes flashed back and forth as he speed-read the text. ‘Holy shit. They saw something… something like what happened here just now.’
‘I’d like to hear some more,’ said Jennifer in a voice devoid of inflection. ‘We’ve reached the chapter which describes the white fox… now I’d like to hear some more.’
‘What’s the point?’ asked Donald.
‘The point,’ said Jennifer, ‘is that Dalemore and the others spent a whole month here. They may have experienced something that might give us a clue as to what’s happening now – perhaps something that they wouldn’t have understood, but we might.’
‘We’re wasting our time,’ said Donald.
‘Christ, Don!’ said Max, so loudly that Rebecca jumped. ‘Aren’t you even curious about this?’
Donald closed his eyes. ‘Max, will you please stop using that language?’
‘What language?’
‘You shouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain.’
Max looked at him aghast, then shook his head. ‘Oh man. With all this shit that’s goin’ down… you’re worried about me swearing.’
‘Max.’ Jennifer placed a hand on his shoulder and shook her head.
‘You’re all reading too much into this,’ said Donald in a quiet, measured voice. ‘We’ve encountered some unusual natural phenomena… some unusual natural phenomena. I won’t deny that they’re strange – unprecedented, even. But there’s nothing supernatural occurring here, do you understand?’ His voice rose a little, as he added: ‘Nothing supernatural. Now… we have a job to do here, and we’re going to do it. We only have until the end of the week, and we have a timetable to keep to. So I suggest that we put all of this nonsense to one side and get on with our work.’
There was silence for a few moments, then Nick indicated the book and said: ‘Max, carry on from where we left off.’
Donald gave Nick a furious look. ‘I am in charge!’ he shouted.
Max laughed and said: ‘This ain’t boot camp, Don. Fuck you.’
Donald’s face became impassive as he replied: ‘Very well. Since you all seem to have lost interest in this project, I’ll carry on by myself.’
Without another word, he left the tent. Jennifer gave Max a reproachful look and made to follow Donald, but Nick stopped her. ‘Jennifer,’ he said, ‘let him be. You wanted to hear more…’
Jennifer regarded him in silence.
‘You may be right,’ he continued. ‘There may be something here… some clue…’
Jennifer hesitated, glanced through the open flaps of the tent, then sat down again. ‘All right,’ she said. She looked at Max. ‘Go ahead.’
10
The Carved Stone
John Milne and I came back into the kitchen and sat facing each other on opposite sides of the table. Neither one of us spoke for a long time. We were confused and fearful; I was thinking furiously about what had happened, and trying to understand what it meant, and I assumed Milne was silent for the same reason.
Presently, Milne said, ‘We should not tell Joseph about this.’
I looked at him askance and replied, ‘But you yourself said that we should keep no secrets from each other.’
‘I know what I said, Alec,’ he replied quietly. ‘Anything that has a direct bearing on our safety, on our ability to do the job at hand, should be reported immediately. But I don’t think this comes under that category, do you?’
I shook my head. ‘I suppose not – although what category to place it under is beyond me.’
‘And me,’ he agreed.
I sighed. ‘For some moments, I thought… I thought that the others were not gone, that they were still here, alive.’
‘So did I. It feels as if we’ve lost them a second time.’
I felt an awful sadness rising in my breast, and kept my silence for fear that any words I spoke would unlock the tears in my eyes. Presently, I said in a measured tone, ‘All right, John. What was it? We’re not children; we’re men, with the minds of men. We have lived and worked in strange and dangerous places – you especially…’
‘Me?’ he retorted. ‘You think I have the answer, simply because I’ve seen more storms than you, because I’ve spent more days away from people, and the places and things of people?’ He shook his head and lowered his voice, as if afraid that we would be overheard, although Joseph was still above in the lightroom. ‘I’m sorry, Alec. I have no answer for this, nor for the light we saw that first night… nor for that infernal creature we saw today.’
I glanced at him sharply. ‘Then you don’t think it was just some poor deformed beast?’
He gave a grim, dismissive chuckle. ‘Well, perhaps it was, and perhaps it wasn’t. If it had only been that… if we hadn’t seen the light, and,’ he pointed at the kitchen door and the yard beyond, ‘if this hadn’t just happened, I might have held with your theory. But the truth is, Alec, I’ve never experienced anything like this before. It seems that Eilean Mòr is a place of cruel wonders indeed.’
‘Perhaps so,’ I replied. ‘But why this place? Why Eilean Mòr?’
‘Who knows? Perhaps these things happen more often than we might think, out here in the wild regions of the world, where men have yet to set foot with their civilisation and their sensible thoughts. Our science and our cities are manacles on the feet of Nature; we bind it to our will, and most of us have forgotten what it was like when we lay naked and defenceless in its hands.’
‘Nature is one thing; this is something else entirely!’
He smiled at me. ‘Are you so sure, Alec? Do you really know what Nature is? Are you really so familiar with all of the parts that make up the whole of the world? Can there be such a thing as the “supernatural”… or are such things simply parts of Nature which we don’t understand?’
‘I’m no philosopher,’ I said.
‘Nor I. But sometimes I wonder whether the lowliest beastie scampering through the forest knows more of the world than we men.’
*
I awoke on the morning of the 12th of January to the sound of mournful gales and the shouting of the sea beneath a grey-painted sky, and a single thought hung in my mind like a great, dark seabird riding motionless upon a rising wind: Three more weeks.
Three more weeks of duty in this humanless place, with the wind and the sea and the sky… and mystery upon terrible mystery.
I rose, washed and dressed, and went to prepare breakfast. Milne had taken over from Joseph in the lightroom, and I brought him a mug of tea before returning to the kitchen to see about some porridge. I was due to relieve him in an hour’s time, at nine o’clock, and once the breakfast was made, I swept out the kitchen and made sure that everything was clean and in order for the rest of the day.
I was glad to be performing these mundane tasks, for they soothed my mind and reminded me that, first and foremost, we were Lighthouse Keepers, with responsibilities to fulfil for the sake of the men who guided their ships through these regions. When I went up to the lightroom later, I would continue to perform my duties: to trim the wicks of the lamp to make certain that its light was clear, to fill the oil fountain and polish the lens assembly, to wind up the escapement mechanism that kept the lens turning smoothly.
