The Lighthouse Keeper, page 6
Monday 20 July
6.45 AM
Rebecca awoke to clattering sounds outside the tent. Groggily, she realised that someone must be making breakfast. As she got dressed, she could hear someone fumbling around on the other side of the partition, in the half of the tent that Nick and Max were sharing. She poked her head through the flaps and saw Nick outside, hunched over the portable gas stove. She hurried herself, glancing over her shoulder at the partition; it sounded like Max was getting dressed as well. Maybe, if Donald and Jennifer were still in their tent, she could grab a few moments alone with Nick outside, maybe give him a hand with breakfast.
She ran a brush quickly through her hair, bemoaning the fact that she would spend the next week without access to a shower, and tied it back in a ponytail before leaving the tent. The air was cool and fresh, with a light north-easterly breeze, and the sky was clear and blue once again. She stood and stretched and smiled at Nick, who still had his back to her. The sea breathed with a loud but soothing hiss all around them.
Rebecca continued to watch him for a few more moments. He was stirring the pot with the intense, deliberate concentration of a complete novice. No great shakes in the kitchen department, eh? she thought. What about the bedroom…?
Any further speculation along such pleasant lines was interrupted when he said: ‘Morning, Becks.’ He hadn’t turned, and Rebecca smiled, flattered that somehow he had known it was she rather than Max.
‘Good morning. What’s for breakfast?’
‘Porridge with honey and dried apples. And coffee.’
‘Mmm… sounds good.’
Nick crumbled some dried apples into small pieces and sprinkled them into the bubbling porridge.
‘That’s a hell of a story you’ve got there,’ he said.
‘Yeah… it is.’
She thought of the first four chapters of Alec Dalemore’s testament, which she had read aloud last night before tiredness finally overcame them and they agreed to stop and turn in. ‘What do you think about it?’ she asked, sitting down cross-legged on the concrete next to him.
‘I think it’s interesting.’
‘More than interesting,’ she said. ‘Damned weird.’
He chuckled.
‘You don’t think so?’
‘Well, yeah… I guess, in places.’
‘Mary Ducat thought that something supernatural had happened to the missing lighthouse keepers.’
‘Yeah, but she was a grieving widow. Bereavement does bad things to a person’s mind, Becks. Everyone knows that. Dalemore says as much himself, doesn’t he?’
‘Yeah, I suppose.’ Rebecca shrugged. She was still thinking of the white fox she had seen yesterday, and how Dalemore and the other relief keepers had seen something like it during their stay on the island.
She could have told Nick about it right there and then, of course. But she was still reluctant: he had enough on his mind already. He and the others had come to Eilean Mòr to do a job – a job which had nothing to do with what three men might have seen or not seen a century ago. And the unforeseen complications with the hydrophones and transducer made her even less willing to start bothering him with the half-formed speculations that had started to grow in her mind.
Better to just read the chapter to them and see how they reacted – or more specifically, how Nick reacted.
But those speculations continued to grow and develop, having taken root in her awareness as she lay awake in their tent last night. She had a strange sense of some connection being made, as if something were reaching out to them across a hundred years, something that had been awoken by her discovery of the stone and the manuscript.
The thought of it made her shudder. Nick noticed and glanced at her. She smiled at him and said: ‘I believe you mentioned coffee.’
‘Oh, yeah.’ He poured some into a large aluminium camping mug and handed it to her.
She murmured in pleasure as she inhaled the aroma. Funny how such simple things seemed so luxurious when one was away from civilisation. She realised it was a feeling she could get used to – as long as she didn’t have to get used to it here.
She took a sip, then said: ‘What do you think that was yesterday?’
‘Hm?’
‘That thing the equipment picked up… what do you think it was?’
‘Dunno, Becks. Probably nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘No piece of equipment’s completely infallible. Sometimes we get weird returns, stuff that doesn’t make any sense. It’s rare, but it happens. The Yanks call it “ratty data”.’
‘Do you think that’s what it was?’
Nick spooned porridge into two bowls and handed one to her. ‘I’m not sure what else it could be.’ He regarded her for a moment and then broke into a broad grin. ‘Do you think it was a sea monster?’
She laughed. ‘Of course not!’
He regarded her through narrowed eyes. ‘Are you sure?’
She sighed. ‘Yes, I’m quite sure, piss-taker. But I was just thinking…’ She hesitated. ‘Are you sure there’s something wrong with the equipment? I mean, Max said it was pretty unlikely that the hydrophones and the transducer would be returning the same false image…’
‘Well, that’s true – but I honestly don’t know what else it could be.’
As he turned to her, his eyes caught something, and he stood up from the stove and waved. Rebecca turned away from the sea to face the wall of rock rising from the crane platform. High above them, a figure was standing at the edge of the island.
‘Who’s that?’
‘Max. Up bright and early, and probably ready for breakfast.’
‘Max?’
‘Yeah. What’s up?’
‘Max is… he’s in the tent.’
Nick laughed. ‘What are you talking about, Becks? Look, here he comes.’
Rebecca watched as Max carefully descended the winding rock-hewn staircase towards the platform, and suddenly she felt something cold and heavy in her stomach, as if she’d seen something she shouldn’t have, or been told something she didn’t want to hear.
‘But I heard him moving around in the tent while I was getting dressed,’ she said in a small, quiet voice.
Nick shook his head, chuckling. ‘I suspect that what you heard was the breeze rippling the fabric. Haven’t done much camping, have you?’
Rebecca was about to say something else. She was about to say that there was someone on the other side of the partition, that she heard and felt another person there. She’d heard movement, heard breathing…
But she said nothing, because suddenly the sea was too vast and the sky was too cold, and she was aware of how very far from home they all were. Instead, she went back into their tent, took a deep breath and unzipped the partition.
Max’s and Nick’s belongings and some spare clothes were there, but apart from that, the other side of the tent was empty. Rebecca sat down in her half and forced herself to breathe deeply, to calm down.
Stupid, she thought. Don’t be stupid. Nick’s right. It was just the wind rippling the fabric. Max wasn’t in here… he wasn’t in here. It was just the wind.
Then she got up and hurried out of the tent. Even though she knew that Nick must be right, she didn’t want to be in there alone.
*
For the rest of that morning, Rebecca said nothing more about the sounds she’d heard from the other side of the tent’s partition. Her silence was for Nick’s sake: she didn’t want him worrying about her when he and the others had so much work to do. But it continued to play on her mind, resisting all her attempts to shrug it off, in spite of the logic of Nick’s explanation.
And yet, maybe Nick was right: maybe it was just the sound of the tent’s fabric rippling in the wind. After all, Rebecca had never really been one for the outdoor life – had never even camped out in her back garden when she was a child, and she’d certainly never been to such a wild and remote place as this. She wanted very much to believe that that was the explanation, and by lunchtime she had almost convinced herself.
Nick came out of the equipment tent as she was heating soup on the little stove. He looked worried.
‘Everything okay?’ she asked.
‘Not really,’ he said. ‘We’ve just spent the morning running diagnostics on the equipment, recalibrating it – you name it…’
‘And?’
‘And there’s nothing wrong with it.’ He hesitated and took a deep breath. ‘But now we’ve got another problem.’
Rebecca stopped stirring the pot and looked at him. ‘What is it?’
Nick offered her a bewildered look. ‘There’s nothing there.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The area that gave the anomalous return yesterday… it’s empty of marine life. No fish, no seals, no plankton. There’s no life in that section of ocean to the north of the island.’
Nick turned away from her, shaking his head.
Rebecca stood up and walked slowly across the crane platform to him. ‘What does that mean?’
‘I don’t know. It’s as if something just scooped up every living thing within that area.’
Max came out of the tent. He looked just as worried as Nick. ‘Still nothing,’ he said. ‘Hydrophones and transducer are working, but they’re not picking up anything. This is really weird, man. I mean, this is freakin’ weird. Even if some large predator had cleaned out the area during the night – not that I’m saying that’s even possible – but even if it had, then the area should have been repopulated with life from the surrounding ocean. It’s almost as if…’
‘As if the other life is staying away,’ said Rebecca.
Max gave a short, humourless laugh. ‘It’s not a very scientific hypothesis, but yeah, that’s what it looks like.’
‘Do you think it could be a giant squid?’ asked Nick.
Max shook his head. ‘Doubtful. Their profile doesn’t match what we saw yesterday. And anyway, not even a giant squid could do… that.’
‘A giant squid?’ said Rebecca, glancing from Max to Nick. ‘You mean they really exist?’
‘Oh yeah, they exist,’ said Max. ‘The largest one ever recovered was about thirty feet long. And we think there are even bigger ones out there. You can see their sucker marks on whales sometimes…’
‘They attack whales?’
‘And whales attack them,’ said Nick.
Rebecca glanced towards the ocean. ‘Jesus Christ.’
Nick put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, Becks. Max is right: it wasn’t a giant squid.’
‘No, from what you’re saying, it was something even bigger and weirder!’
Nick gave a brief half-smile, lowered his eyes and took his hand from her shoulder. She suddenly found herself wanting him to put it back.
Max shrugged. ‘Well… yeah, I guess that’s what we’re saying. Man, I can’t figure this shit out…’
‘None of us can,’ said Donald, who had just emerged from the equipment tent. They all turned to him. ‘At least, not yet. But I’m sure we’ll be able to, if we just put some thought into it – some thought and some further observation – instead of wild theorising about giant squid and other monsters of the deep.’ He gave Nick and Max a stern look.
Max sighed. ‘Okay, Don, I guess you’re right. But I gotta tell you, I’ve been thinking about this, and I’m wondering whether it might be something like the Slow Down or the Bloop.’
Donald looked at him in silence.
‘The Slow Down?’ said Rebecca. ‘The Bloop? What are they?’
‘Sounds,’ Max replied, ‘recorded in the deep oceans. No one knows what made them. The Slow Down was recorded in 1997 on a hydrophone array in the Pacific Ocean. During the Cold War, the US Navy established a huge network of underwater listening devices to keep tabs on Soviet nuclear submarines. The array was composed of hydrophones placed at 3,000 km intervals in a deep layer of ocean called the “deep sound channel”, where the combination of low temperature and high pressure allows sound waves to propagate across great distances. When the Cold War ended, the US Navy allowed the array to be used for scientific research. The Slow Down was detected by three hydrophones at a distance of 2,000km, and slowly descended in frequency over a period of about seven minutes, hence its name. The sensors were able to triangulate its location at approximately 15° S, 115° W. This type of signal had never been detected before and hasn’t been detected since. Its origin is completely unknown.’
Rebecca nodded, taking all this in. ‘And what about the Bloop?’
Nick answered: ‘A few months after the Slow Down, the same array detected another mysterious ultra-low frequency sound on several occasions at about 50° S, 100° W. The sound rose rapidly in frequency over a period of about one minute, and was apparently generated 3,000km from the nearest sensor. The researchers had no idea what it was, what to call it, so they called the “Bloop”. The strange thing is, the characteristics of the Bloop match those of a living creature, although the fact that the sound was detected from such a great distance means that such an animal would have to be truly colossal – much larger than the blue whale, the largest known animal on Earth.’
‘And you think that whatever caused the Slow Down and the Bloop is here, now,’ said Donald. He sounded a little incredulous, but Rebecca thought she detected something else in his voice… something like uncertainty.
‘I’m just saying that something strange is goin’ down here,’ Max replied. ‘Something we don’t understand.’ He caught the look in Donald’s eye and added: ‘And I’ll tell you something else right now: I don’t feel happy about camping here. It’s too exposed, too near the sea.’
‘We’re on a small island,’ said Donald reasonably. ‘Everywhere here is near the sea. And besides, the crane platform does offer protection from the wind.’
‘Yeah, well, it’s not the wind I’m worried about,’ said Max, and he went back into the equipment tent.
‘I think he may be right, Donald,’ said Nick.
Donald gave him a disbelieving look. ‘Oh, come on!’
‘Wait, hear me out. We detected something on our instruments yesterday, and today an area of approximately a square kilometre is barren of marine life. I’m sure you’ll agree that’s a pretty unusual event. I don’t think we should stay here: it is too exposed.’
‘Are you worried that something’s going to come up out of the sea and carry us off?’
‘No, of course not. It’s more than likely there’s nothing out there that’s a threat to us. I’m just saying that we shouldn’t take chances with our safety if we don’t have to.’
‘Are you suggesting we radio the mainland and request an evacuation? Because I can tell you that the JNCC aren’t going to be too impressed with our reason.’
‘No, not at all. I want to get to the bottom of this; I want to find out what happened. Something important is clearly going on here, and it’s our job to investigate it.’
Donald folded his arms and regarded Nick. ‘Then what do you suggest we do?’
Nick indicated the cliff face rising from the crane platform. ‘We can move our camp up there, to the lighthouse. We can pitch the tents against the wall around the tower and the outbuildings.’
‘And our equipment?’
‘We’ll leave the equipment tent here. We can still do our work during the day, and at night we’ll go up to the top of the island.’
Donald considered this for a moment, and then he sighed in resignation. ‘All right, Nick. If it’ll make you feel better, we’ll move our camp after lunch. Then perhaps we’ll be able to get on with the job in hand, eh?’
With a sigh and an irritated shake of his head, Donald went back into the equipment tent.
‘Did you do that for my benefit?’ asked Rebecca, softly.
‘Not really, Becks – or rather, for your benefit and everyone else’s.’
She regarded him in silence for a moment. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you? I mean… you’re really spooked by this.’
Nick hesitated, then replied: ‘Not spooked. Just careful. Respectful.’
‘Respectful?’
‘Yes. Respectful of the sea. You know, my dad spent years in the merchant navy. I’ve been around the sea all my life, and people who know the sea. I grew up listening to tales of all the things that can happen to ships and their crews.’ He laughed softly. ‘Oh sure, some of them are taller than a ship’s mast. But some…’ His voice drifted off, like the call of a departing seabird.
‘Go on,’ said Rebecca. ‘Some of them…’
‘Some of them make you wonder… about what’s really out there, in the deep places where no one’s ever gone, or maybe will ever go. That’s what fascinates me about the sea, Becks. We know more about the surface of the Moon than we do about the deepest seabeds, the great ocean trenches. We have no idea what’s down there. It’s a mystery as profound as space, but it’s right here in the world, within our grasp.’
Rebecca stood in silence for a while, looking out at the vast sapphire sweep of the ocean. ‘What do you think happened yesterday, Nick?’
He paused before replying: ‘I honestly have no idea.’
*
It took them a couple of hours to move the two accommodation tents and their contents from the crane platform to the enclosure containing the lighthouse and its outbuildings. They might have got the job done a lot quicker if Donald hadn’t suggested that Rebecca and Nick do the moving, while he, Max and Jennifer continued with their observations. Nick had glared at him, while Max simply shrugged and gave him a wry smirk, as if to say: ‘Sorry, buddy, he’s the boss.’
Although Nick was mightily pissed off at Donald for demonstrating his scepticism in this way, Rebecca silently thanked him, since it would give her some extra time alone with Nick. But that wasn’t the only reason she felt a sense of gratitude towards the group’s leader: she had been unnerved by the sudden, unexplained absence of marine life in the sea to the north of the island, and Donald’s obvious exasperation with the idea that it might be necessary to move their camp reassured her. She sympathised with Nick and appreciated his unwillingness to take unnecessary risks with their safety, but she was also glad that Donald so obviously didn’t believe that they had anything to be afraid of.
