The Lamplighters

Chapter Twenty-Two

They met Vincent when they were only halfway up the stairs. As they stopped to talk urgently to each other, Marla thought of her foster mother’s old superstition. Should never cross anyone on the stairs—it’s unlucky. Oh well, thought Marla, bit late for worrying about that now.

“Generator’s down,” said Vincent. “Have to get it going again.”

“Okay, we’ll keep an eye on our patient,” Marla replied.

Vincent looked perplexed for a moment. “No, I can’t leave the lighthouse. More than my life is worth, which ain’t much I admit, but there you go. No, I meant you have to go down and restart the genny—don’t worry none, it’s easy. I’ll tell you how…”

“Where is it old man?” asked Jessie.

“It’s in an outbuilding at the foot of the steps below.”

She and Marla listened intently as Vincent described the procedure to restart the genny. It sounded simple enough, but Marla repeated the instructions aloud to Vincent, just to be sure.

“Turn off, turn on, pull lever out then press ‘restart’. If it fails, thump it. If it still fails, start over.”

Then, a question struck her.

“And what do you usually do in situations like this? When you’re alone, I mean, if you can’t go out?”

Vincent looked at Jessie like she was a dozen kinds of stupid. “Well I wait of course. I light a damn candle and wait. Here, take this…”

He tossed a flashlight to Marla. As he turned and headed back upstairs to look after Pietro, Jessie gave Marla a wide-eyed, sarcastic look behind his back.

They both stepped outside, Marla repeating Vincent’s instructions over and over to herself and Jessie cussing under her breath. As the buffeting wind enveloped them, their voices were silenced like the cries of drowning children.

The term “outbuilding” was something of a stretch. The rickety structure was seemingly held together by a random series of coincidences involving masonry and timber. When Jessie pulled open the door, she thought she’d fly away with it—all the way to Oz. As Marla helped her inside, she swung the flashlight beam around, looking for the generator. It was hard to miss. The rusty old metal contraption was mottled and stained with age and the ghosts of past oil leaks. Jessie crouched down to survey the damage, tutting and cursing. She reminded Marla of an old tugboat engineer she’d seen in some movie back in London. Marla couldn’t help but snigger when Jessie hit her head on a metal support poking out of the generator housing, giving rise to further colorful language.

“I’m glad you find this so amusing. Here, point the flashlight over there, will you? Can’t see a damn thing…”

Marla stifled her giggles and held the flashlight as steady as she could. Only then did they see the root of the problem—a large puddle of oil on the floor beneath a sepia-stained pipe that dangled uselessly from the tail end of the genny.

“Jee-zus. Main line’s cut, look…” Jessie said, now wriggling on her hands and knees beneath the generator’s bulk. She grabbed the pipe and studied it carefully, noticing a jagged tear right through it.

“Looks almost like it’s been cut on purpose…” Marla said.

“Damn right, that’s exactly what it looks like,” Jessie replied, looking up at Marla with a worried expression on her face.

“Could’ve been a wild animal I suppose?”

“Out here?” Jessie shook her head. “Why don’t you take a look around, see if we can’t patch it up with something…”

“Like what?”

“Like anything.”

From Jessie’s antsy tone, Marla thought it best to do as she was told and started rooting around on dust-covered shelves and in rotting storage boxes for anything useful. To her surprise, she found some duct tape and an old box of bandages—they’d have to do. Then, she jumped out of her skin at a sharp cry coming from beneath the generator.

Stumbling across the debris-strewn floor, Marla called out to see if Jessie was okay. Hearing more cursing, she guessed that whatever had happened, Jessie would live to tell the tale. She found her sitting with her back against the genny and sucking on her thumb, which was bleeding profusely.

“Let me take a look at that.”

“It’s fine, really,” Jessie mumbled. “Saliva, best antiseptic known to man. And woman.”

Ignoring Jessie’s protests, Marla took a closer look at the injured thumb. A sliver of rusted metal was poking out of the deep cut in Jessie’s flesh.

“Might need stitches,” Marla said.

“Screw that. We seem to have left Doctor George Clooney on the mainland anyway—how careless of us. What you got there?”

After removing the offending piece of metal, Marla got to work fashioning a crude dressing for the wound using a length of bandage and some tape. Jessie rattled on, suggesting Marla head back to the lighthouse and load up with whatever supplies Vincent could spare them. The repair job on the genny could take quite some time.

“We need this fucker up and running or the laptop will zone out…and our signal will stop,” she said delicately. “I don’t know who in the hell would want to cut the fuel line on purpose… I don’t really want to know.”

Marla shivered, suddenly feeling very cold.

“Leave the flashlight here, toots, I’ll catch up to you when I’m done.”

After fighting her way through the wind, Marla closed the heavy metal door and trudged back upstairs to Vincent’s control room prison. The scent of oil and Jessie’s skin was gone. She was preoccupied with the problem posed by having to move Pietro again.

At his bedside, she could see his normally olive skin had taken on a deathly pale hue. He shivered and groaned on the cot bed, physically burning up and freezing at the same time, a torrent of cold sweat pasting his obsidian locks to his clammy forehead. Mentally, thank heaven, he was in another place, his injuries short-circuiting his consciousness and muddying his head with fever.

“You’ll have to leave him here.”

Vincent had read Marla’s mind; there was simply no way they could risk moving Pietro without distressing him further, or maybe even causing him additional harm.

“We can’t just offload him onto you…” she said.

“Be glad of the company. Such as it is,” deadpanned Vincent as he scanned the horizon beyond the filthy windows.

“Will he be okay?”

“No way of telling, ’til he gets to a doctor. That bastard Fowler will know what to do with him. We’ve done all we can to patch him up, make him comfortable, that’s for sure. Damn fool thing your friend did, swimming out in the ocean like that.”

“He spoke so fondly of swimming in the sea. I imagine when he saw the boat, he just couldn’t control himself.”

“Yeah, well. He should’ve learned to control himself by now, especially on this rock,” Vincent grumbled. “Too many goddamn sharks in that sea. And Sentry Maiden’s the biggest damn shark of them all.”

Just then a flicker, like the sepia wings of butterfly, caught Marla’s eye. It was the meager light from a grubby emergency light above the hatch leading out onto the lighthouse walkway. Vincent looked at the flickering light as it faded then returned to unsteady life inside its housing. He nodded to Marla with a wry look of approval plastered across his face. Jessie must have got the generator running again.

Minutes later, the door below opened and shut with a loud clang and Jessie bolted up the stairs and into the control room. Breathless, she gasped for air, her hair wet with oil and perspiration.

“Vincent suggested Pietro might be better off if we leave him here,” Marla said as she filled the flannel with cold water and mopped Pietro’s brow.

“Damn right we will,” Jessie said.

Then, tossing the flashlight back to Vincent, she asked him how long it had been since the lighthouse lamps had been activated. Vincent looked dumbfounded for a few seconds, as if Jessie was speaking in tongues like a woman possessed. He honestly couldn’t remember the last time the lighthouse had been operational.

“I did you a favor, old man, I got the genny running,” Jessie said firmly. “Now you have to do us a favor. Light the lamps, one last time. We have to go right now, so as soon as we’re gone, get them running.”

Marla spoke up. Jessie’s action heroine persona was beginning to grate a little. “What’s this?”

“We have to get to the Big House before Fowler figures out I’ve hacked into the computer system.”

“But… Won’t they just come and get us, once they’ve figured out where we’ve gone?”

“Of course they will. I’ve included the location of the Big House in the SOS subroutine. Anyone who answers our call will know where we are. The trade-off is that Fowler and his mob will know too.”

“That’s mental.”

“Yes, yes it is.” Jessie looked like she was enjoying herself. “But I’ve also triggered an automatic lockdown in the Big House’s security system. We should have enough time to get there if we quit standing around here chatting. And once we’re in,” she made a dramatic “shunking” noise, “Down come the shutters, leaving Fowler locked outside and us safe inside.”

“And then what?”

“We sit tight, wait, and pray someone picks up the SOS beacon before Fowler can shut it down.”

“Or see the lights,” Vincent said.

“Exactly,” Jessie replied triumphantly.

“Light the lamps, one more time,” Vincent whispered under his breath. His voice sounded like a distant sea shanty, dying on the surface of the waves outside. “That’s if they’re still even working.”

Marla shuddered. They were both as insane as each other. And so was she for going along with a plan like Jessie’s.

“Grab whatever food and water you can carry, we have less than an hour to quick march over there.”

Actually the action heroine thing suits her rather well, thought Marla as she did exactly as she was told, shoveling supplies into a backpack.

“That cool with you, old man?” Jessie asked.

Vincent didn’t turn from the window, but just nodded and replied, “You’d better hurry. They’re coming.”

Heart in her mouth, Marla ditched the backpack and rushed over to the window.

She saw the black-clad men approaching over the headland like soldier ants.

Fowler’s men.