The Lamplighters

Chapter Twenty-One

High above the rocks, in the control room, Vincent took a dirty rag from his pocket and spat on it. Wiping at a patch of dark green mold on the windowpane, he peered out at the three figures approaching his lighthouse.

At first he’d thought they must be Fowler’s boys, come to check up on him again. He hated their little visits, always picking and pecking and messing with his stuff. No business of yours, he always said, best left alone, but it always fell on deaf ears with Fowler’s mob. Bunch of bastards. No matter; this wasn’t the goon squad anyhow, it was young Marla and she’d brought some friends. He hadn’t expected her to come back so soon, certainly not with company. Vincent frowned at the three of them then tore his gaze away from the window. Rifling through drawers and cupboards, he eventually found his rusty old telescope beneath the fat Sudoku puzzle book that had helped him while away many long evenings of late.

He returned to the window and peered out through the ’scope at the three figures as they stumbled over the headland and onto the rocks leading to his door. The one in the middle looked in pretty bad shape. He was all cut up and bloodied like roadkill and Marla and another girl were doing their best to carry him, shouldering an arm each. It looked like thirsty work that was for sure. Sliding the little telescope shut with a click, Vincent made his way over to the kitchen area to get a pot of strong coffee on the boil.

He paused for a moment as the wind rose up outside and rattled the windows. An ill wind brings an ill guest, he thought. Then, no matter, as the coffee began to bubble its welcome in anticipation of the familiar clatter and bang of the door downstairs.

Pietro weighed a good deal heavier than he looked. Marla remembered his weight, his heat, bearing down on her during their brief drunken tryst just hours ago. Then, his movements had been controlled and supported by contracting muscles, yet here on the wind-blasted lighthouse steps he was hanging from her shoulder like a dead weight. She shifted her own weight onto first one leg, then the other, praying the whole time for Jessie to get the bloody door open. A rusty metallic grinding sound told her Jessie had done just that.

“Come on, let’s get him inside,” Jessie said.

They dragged Pietro’s ragged and bleeding body over the threshold and heard him murmur indistinctly as his feet slid from the cool winds outdoors into an even colder puddle of water at the foot of the stairs. He was alive, but only barely.

“Shit, get him onto the steps,” Marla said, really struggling to bear his weight now they’d reached their destination.

His murmurs became agonized groans as they laid him out on the cold hard steps. Marla stretched and rotated her arm in its shoulder socket in an attempt to alleviate the stiffness and pain caused by carrying a grown lad what felt like halfway across the island. Pietro looked terrible. As Marla placed her palm on his burning forehead, his eyes rolled back. He looked, for all the world, like he was going to pass out any moment, which was possibly a good thing. Marla could only guess at the extent of his injuries, but however concussed his brain and broken his insides they had to get him up the stairs to warmth and a bed. Jessie, it seemed, had other plans. No sooner than Pietro’s damaged body had hit the steps, she turned and headed back down to the entrance. Carelessly splashing her way through the puddle, she pulled open the closet doors and wriggled inside frantically.

“Hey, I could do with some help up here.”

No answer, save for Jessie cussing as she bumped her head on something. Marla had no choice but to leave Pietro alone on the steps and went down to see what Jessie was up to. Peering inside the closet, Marla saw the source of the blinking lights she’d noticed on her first visit to the lighthouse. A beaten up old laptop was connected to a nightmare of wires and cables, its little lights blinking like some ancient prop straight out of a retro sci-fi movie. Jessie was typing and clicking furiously at the laptop’s keyboard and trackpad, her face a mask of pure concentration. Droplets of sweat fell from her brow and sizzled on the laptop’s hot plastic casing like raindrops on a barbeque. Jessie chewed anxiously on her lip as she worked. Marla felt almost scared to disturb her.

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?”

“It looks like you’re playing Tetris in a broom closet to be brutally honest,” Marla retorted.

“Well I’m not. I’m actually trying to get us rescued,” Jessie said sharply.

“Where’d you get that computer from anyway? I thought they were forbidden on the island?”

Jessie tutted. “I told you that already, got it from Adam.”

“Handy. That your dealer also dabbles in electrical goods…”

“It’d be a damned sight handier if he’d gotten me a computer from this century,” Jessie hissed. She winced as the hard drive made a threatening grinding noise. “Hell’s teeth, hang in there old gal. Almost there…”

Marla watched as Jessie made her final calculations and clicks. Whatever she was doing, she’d better get a move on. Pietro was looking to be in a pretty bad way. They had to get him upstairs, and fast. Marla chewed her lip, wondering if Vincent had anything in the way of a first aid kit. A startling yelp from Jessie broke Marla’s train of thought. The grin on Jessie’s face told her she’d managed to make the ancient laptop work in their favor.

“I’ve widened the beacon, put it on a shifting loop, like a distress signal. Now all we have to do is hole up for a while and wait.”

“Wait? What for?” Marla was dumbfounded by Jessie’s techno babble.

“For help. From the outside world. Someone’s gonna come and help us get off this rock Marla, you’ll see. Fowler can’t blow everyone who answers our call out of the water.”

“There’s a casualty up there needs our help first.”

Jessie nodded and clambered out of the closet, untangling her arms from the electronic entrails and closing the doors behind her carefully. She marched over to Pietro and gestured for Marla to grab his ankles. As Marla did so, Jessie reached under Pietro’s arms and hoisted him aloft. Together they heaved his dead weight into the air and began the difficult climb up the stairs. Pietro groaned loudly in protest. The painful, melancholy sound echoed Marla’s own dread. Fowler can’t blow everyone who answers our call out of the water, Jessie had said. Marla wasn’t so sure.

Once upstairs, the heady smell of boiling coffee hit Marla’s nostrils. It was a welcome scent after the cold dank of the tunnel and the metallic sourness of Pietro’s bloodied skin. She and Jessie shuffled inside the control room, stooping with his weight and sweating from their exertion. Vincent regarded them with a curious raising of the eyebrow and set his coffee down on the little table.

“Boy looks in a bad way. Set him down over there. In back.”

He gestured at an unkempt cot bed that lay partially hidden behind a vast pile of books and almanacs. The girls wasted no time, heaving Pietro’s bulk across the room and onto the mess of blankets that covered the bed. For a moment Marla was concerned about getting blood on Vincent’s sheets, but as she drew closer to them she began to wonder if they’d been washed this century—if at all.

“D’you have a first aid kit up here?” Marla asked hopefully.

“Got some bandages and stuff in one of them drawers somewhere,” said Vincent matter-of-factly. “Take a look and see if you can’t find ’em, while I clean this here feller up.”

Marla got to work and rifled through the kitchen drawers. Most were littered with sand and dust and contained a random series of utensils, broken crockery and other bric-a-brac. Eventually she located a faded cardboard carton containing bandages, gauze and a couple of bottles of antiseptic fluid. Turning one of the bottles in her hand, she saw from the label that the use by date had long since expired. She sighed and looked around the lighthouse room with its tidal wave of rotting books and molding furniture. Pretty much everything is past its use by date in here, she thought as she made her way over to the cot bed.

Jessie had filled a chipped ceramic bowl with lukewarm water at the behest of Vincent, who was now mopping congealed blood and dark matter from Pietro’s once olive-perfect skin. The act of cleaning revealed the true extent of the young man’s injuries. Deep lacerations ran almost the full width of his chest, giving him the appearance of a shark attack victim. Blood oozed from a wound in his left side, just below the rib cage. Marla gulped down nausea as she caught sight of pale yellow bone protruding from the wound—the flesh had been torn down to Pietro’s ribs. As Vincent continued his work Pietro let out a gurgling rattle, which sounded almost as traumatized as he looked.

“Here, I’ll have to pack this wound the best I can. Soak a coupla those bandages in some of that antiseptic,” Vincent said. “What the hell happened to this boy anyhow? Looks like he went fifteen rounds with Orca the Killer Whale.”

“Fowler’s men,” Jessie said.

Her speech was clipped and bitter, as she replayed the horrific scene in her mind. The pleasure boat, floating on the water. Pietro’s lithe form swimming for all he was worth towards it. Then the shock of smoke and flames and the dreadful sight of the Sentry Maiden’s black form, patrolling the water like a carrion bird. She blinked the memory away, feeling suddenly cold.

“They did this to him? Why?”

“There was a… a yacht, just offshore. One minute he was swimming towards it and the next, FOOM, they just blew it out of the water.”

Vincent frowned and shook his head grimly as Pietro bucked violently beneath him at the touch of the antiseptic drenched bandages.

“Will he be all right?” Marla asked.

“Hard to tell. Depends how much is plain shock and how much blood he lost from these wounds. Bleeding’s subsided, but he needs more than vinegar and brown paper that’s for sure.”

“We have to get him to the other side of the island. They’ll be able to give him proper medical attention over there, maybe even ferry him off the island to a hospital.”

Jessie glared at Marla. “Take him to Fowler’s compound? Are you nuts? Those are the same people who just blew him out of the damned water. They won’t be in the slightest bit interested in ferrying him to a hospital. God, we are so royally fucked.”

At this, Vincent nodded sagely. “She’s right Marla. Only one way off this rock—and this poor bastard damn near swam himself right into it.”

“What do you mean?” Marla asked. She looked over to Jessie pointedly, recalling her exact same words in the cave tunnel. She saw the grim despair etched into Jessie’s face, a sight that only furthered her own rising panic. “Only one way off? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean,” Vincent said firmly as he packed yet more bandages around Pietro’s ribs. “If you want off of Meditrine Island you’d better not have any unfinished business is all.”

Marla looked from him back to Jessie, her mouth sucking air and her eyes searching for answers.

“You mean death, don’t you?” Marla knew she was right. “The only way off this island is if you die?”

The old man’s eyes seemed to glitter wetly as he looked up at them both.

“Better get the stove burning again,” he said quietly.

A piercing chill had descended on the room, like a sharp winter fog.

It was getting dark outside, the dying sun a thin vein of crimson bleeding into the sea. Marla sat watching Pietro sleep fitfully as she listened to the wind whistling by the lighthouse windows. He hadn’t so much fallen asleep but rather blacked out, the shock of his injuries and the stress of being dragged to the lighthouse finally getting the better of him. She glanced over at Jessie, who had bedded down on a pile of old magazines and was finally getting some shut-eye beneath a thick woolen blanket. She had made a compelling argument; Fowler’s men were the very same people who’d mercilessly blown Pietro out of the water in the first place—but had they actually seen him before the boat blew? Perhaps it wasn’t an attack but an accident, a gas explosion or the like. Whatever the reason, the reality of Pietro’s injuries was undeniable. Looking at Pietro’s clammy skin and the bloodstained bandages barely holding him together, Marla felt sure Vincent was right. He’d lost too much blood to survive without proper medical attention. Marla was certain Jessie’s paranoia and fears were preventing her from thinking straight. Hopefully a few hours’ sleep would see her right and they could discuss their options in the clear light of morning. Too wired to sleep, Marla mopped Pietro’s brow with a damp rag and felt his flesh burning angrily with the beginnings of a fever. Her fingertips were dry and flaky and her hands bore mystery cuts that she couldn’t remember acquiring. She thought of her cozy summerhouse on the other side of the island with its hot shower, moisturizer, well-stocked larder and fragrant garden. Then she imagined Adam and the security patrols, their flashlights cutting through the gloom of the night to find her and Jessie’s beds empty. Spy cameras would show no lights on in the main houses, nor any sign of life at Pietro’s place, no chores being done. Then Fowler’s men would come looking for them. It was just a matter of time. She grew frightened, Vincent’s disturbing mantra looping inside her head like an old stuck record, only one way off this rock…only one way. With these fears weighing heavy on her already troubled mind, Marla fought to keep her eyes from closing and giving in to sleep. She imagined those awful hollow black eyes staring at her through Jessie’s kitchen window again, and tumbled into their depths.

Her own loud yelp woke her and she sat bolt upright, opening her eyes. Marla shivered and looked down at Pietro, still sweating in Vincent’s old cot bed. His eyes were closed and his mouth clamped tightly shut behind dry lips. He looked awful; sleep was the best place for him. The crick in her neck told Marla she had drifted off with her head hanging over him. Massaging her neck with a cold hand she got up carefully, not wishing to disturb their patient.

Crossing to the window, Marla saw the first moments of morning and the sky she’d fallen asleep beneath was in reverse. This time the sun’s rays were spiking upwards, creating watercolor blurs of yellow, green and muddy reds where they met the sky’s vapors. For a moment the surreal quality of her situation struck her—here she was taking shelter in a lighthouse on the other side of the world under an alien sky.

“Strange, the light this time of morning.”

It was Vincent. Marla hadn’t even noticed him, sat in his chair with his feet propped up on a rickety wooden stool.

“It’s beautiful,” she replied before crossing to sit in the chair opposite him. “You must have seen so many mornings like this one.”

“Oh I’ve seen ’em all right. Winter sun is best, sharp and cold as a shark’s tooth out here. But the seasons drag. Seen too many mornings and far too many nights.”

“How long have you lived out here Vincent? What brought you?”

Vincent reached over and picked up a pipe, filling it with coarse, dry tobacco as he gathered his thoughts.

“Truth is, in a way I was the first of the Lamplighters.”

Marla listened intently as Vincent went on to describe arriving at Meditrine Island as a young man in his early twenties, to take up the post of lighthouse keeper. The island was then, as now, owned and operated by The Consortium Inc. on the mainland. The great white stucco mansion houses had just been built back then and soon enough The Lamplighters had arrived to look after them. Fairest of these was a girl called Susanna, pink in complexion with flowing blonde hair and a Nordic lilt to her accent. Marla found herself smiling wistfully as Vincent described falling in love with Susanna on first sight of her as she gathered seashells in the cove near the lighthouse. She’d fallen pregnant not long after they began their courtship, her visits becoming more frequent as they conspired about their future together. They were both happy on the island and so approached the Master of the Watch, Chief of Security Fowler’s predecessor, to ask The Consortium’s permission for them to live in the lighthouse together with their child. After she gave birth however, Vincent never saw Susanna again. The Watchman told him she’d been sent back to the mainland, never to return to the island again, as punishment for breaking her code of conduct as a Lamplighter. Vincent’s own punishment was to raise their child, a boy, alone in the lighthouse until he was old enough to replace his father as lighthouse keeper.

One night, Vincent took a boat from the island determined that he and his boy should return to the mainland together and find the boy’s mother; his beloved Susanna. The Watchmen used his own lighthouse against him. By its light, they pursued him through the waves in a skiff and ran him and his son to ground. Their discipline was harsh and Vincent was told he and his son were confined to the lighthouse, their only contact with others being the sporadic food drops made by the security staff on their rounds. One or two of the men were decent enough types and showed some pity in the reading material they smuggled out for Vincent and his boy. With each box of canned food and powdered milk came a puzzle book, comic book or novel—the foundations of the mildewed library that helped keep the draft out in the control room today. The years passed and as Vincent’s son grew, so too did his desire to see beyond the lighthouse windows, to run across the beaches and explore the island’s coves. Vincent woke one morning to find his boy had snuck out during the night. He heard barking from outside and from the window saw the lad tearing across the sand in hot pursuit of a black dog. The animal was ragged and skinny and, as is often the case with such black dogs, proved to be a portent of doom. For as the beast was swept away by an almighty wave, as big as a house, so too was Vincent’s son. The waves crashed down on the rocks like heaven’s thunder, drowning out Vincent’s cries as he battled his way through the wind and spray. Upon his next delivery of supplies he sent solemn word to the Master of the Watch that he would remain at the lighthouse as agreed, but that his son would no longer be able to replace him. And here he had stayed for over forty years, amassing the books and periodicals his kind jailers bestowed on him month after month, year after year.

“I like puzzle books the most. Their solutions are always the simplest.”

He sighed dryly and Marla blinked a tear from her eye. The old man’s story had touched her more than she’d realized. Vincent stood, breaking the spell conjured by his oration, and busied himself making the now customary fresh pot of coffee. Only then did Marla realize Jessie had gone.

It hadn’t taken Marla long, about a nanosecond, to figure out where Jessie had gotten to. Walking down the lighthouse’s winding stairs, she could hear faint sounds emanating from the service closet down below. Avoiding the pool of stagnating water, Marla approached the service hatch and sure enough found Jessie squatting inside working intently at the old laptop.

“Sleep well?” Jessie asked. Her voice had a “just another day at the office” tone to it. Maybe it was the laptop. Computers have that effect on some people, thought Marla, turn them into robots.

“Kind of. How long have you been down here?”

“Dunno, toots, maybe a coupla hours. Had to try another subroutine, had to dig deeper, see if I could boost our signal some.”

“Did it work?”

“We’ll only find that out if someone comes to save our sorry asses.”

“Speak for yourself. My ass is toned—I went jogging, remember?”

Jessie sidestepped her remark.

“So you’re on side now you’ve had some time to think?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, you were looking at me like I was crazy or something when I told you we had to get off the island. I know I can come across as a bit…paranoid sometimes, but it’s not like I don’t have my reasons.”

“Jessie, I’m sorry I doubted you, it’s just—it’s all been a bit of a whirlwind since I got here and I can’t take things at face value you know. But for what it’s worth I do believe you that Fowler and The Consortium are up to something. After what Vincent just told me well I…”

“That old looney? What’d he tell you?”

Marla recounted his account of how he arrived on the island, his lover’s disappearance and the tragedy of their young son. Jessie listened intently, her eyes darkening as Marla described The Consortium’s betrayal of Vincent’s basic human rights, his imprisonment on the island.

“Hate to say I told you so,” Jessie said bitterly after Marla was done. Marla smiled in spite of herself.

“There’s more,” Jessie continued. “When I said I had to dig deep, I meant real deep. I found something.”

She moved the laptop around on her lap so Marla could see the screen. Several windows were open on the display, running complex background programs that looked like something from a science fiction movie to Marla’s eyes. Then she saw a window that looked different from all the others, a spreadsheet of some kind with dozens of rows and columns of data.

“What am I looking at?”

“The Consortium Inc.,” Jessie said triumphantly, “More specifically some of their employee records. Look, on that line you can see the German girl I told you about, Vera. See?”

Marla leaned in closer to the screen, peering at the data entry.

“How did you get this?”

Jessie grinned, “I sure can dig, can’t I? Do you see the line or not?”

“Yes, I see it. Name, date of birth… Termination date?”

“That’s the date Fowler said she’d left for breaking contract.”

“Oh, okay, that makes sense…”

“Now look a little further down.”

Marla’s eyes traced across and down the next line.

Pietro’s listing.

“Look at his termination date Marla.”

It was yesterday, the day of the explosion.

“Now the next line.”

“I don’t…”

“Read the next line Marla.”

Marla’s eyes found Jessie’s listing.

“And the next one. Go on.”

A chill began to clog Marla’s throat as she read her own listing. It too had a termination date.

The date was the same as Jessie’s. Today’s.

No one knows we’re here. Expendable, Jessie had said. Marla felt her skin prickle.

Then Marla jumped at a sudden loud fizzing sound from deep within the wiring inside the service closet, the shock making her cry out. The security light above the door blanked out. The stairwell lights flickered violently in tandem with the electrical cacophony, then died. The laptop made a painful grinding noise, its screen the only light inside the cramped space. The battery indicator popped up on the screen counting down its forty-five minute lifespan.

Jessie took a sharp breath.

“We haven’t got much time.”

A sudden, violent piercing sound, like that of a kettle’s whistle began to ring out in Brett’s ears and he opened his eyes. A troubled sky was far above him, and for a moment he imagined himself stranded on his back, high up in the branches of some vast tree. Then he felt the waves lapping gently at his face and he realized he was on his back all right, but still in the bloody ocean. And it was bloody. He rolled over painfully and began to tread water and as he did so, saw the carnage all around him. Debris from the yacht was floating all around him on the waves, which were stained blood red. He spat out water as his disbelieving eyes took in the horror of the severed limbs and other body parts of his crewmembers as they bobbed horribly on the undulating surface of the red water. Perversely a section of arm drifted past him, its elbow hooked over a life preserver. Salt-water bile churned in Brett’s stomach as he screamed and splashed, desperate to find a way out of this fleshy minefield. The waves moved all around him, churning up the soup of dead bodies and pieces of broken yacht. His screams died in his throat as he saw Idoya’s beautiful hazel eyes looking right at him. She’d made it, she was a survivor too, and together they could… Then the waves barreled and churned again and the girl’s head capsized in the water revealing a mess of shredded flesh and tube-like innards at the place where her neck and shoulders used to be. Brett could feel blood pulsing from his wounds now. If there were sharks in these waters, they’d be along soon enough. Brett tried to swallow his tears and began to swim, his fevered imagination feeding his mortal burning terror—of swift black predators snapping at his heels.