The Lighthouse
A serialised novel
Chapter Twenty-eight
Silence did not hold sway in the crushing, overwhelming darkness outside. From the sibilant chorus of the wave-tips, to the plaintive cry of the roosting birds, to the rush of the scarring wind, to the sighing of the tall grasses: there was a constant background to life’s course.
Inside, there was the tapping.
A reminder.
A rebuke.
A needy call.
Henry stood and moved across to the far side, next to the stove. He pulled a cloth off the chest, held it up in the light and turned to show her. A fine blade of yellow light reflected from the clasp and initiated a pattern on the wall opposite as if some golden pen was dictating a message.
Sitting down, he placed it between the two of them. There was only a gentle tapping now. Martha looked wary.
‘I’ve got so many questions. Where do I start?’ she asked, reaching out to touch it and then drawing back.
They both stared at it as though there were answers to be revealed by just willing it to open and speak.
‘I’ll start without you needing to.’ Henry told her everything now. It spilled out like water from a dam; from the first night and the time the sound had begun, to the discovery of the chest and what he had found inside.
Well, almost everything. The apparitions he kept to himself.
Martha acted like a girl whose dreams had all come true. For a local historian, it was the equivalent of unearthing Tutankhamun’s treasures in her back garden.
She was ecstatic.
‘Can we open it again? I need to see what they wrote.’
‘Of course. Sorry.’ Henry lifted the lid and gave her Caradoc’s writing first. She sat silently, absorbing, revelling, pouring over every detail.
‘I just knew there was more to find out. I just knew it. There must be even more too. It’s incredible. This place has so much hidden history.’ Her excitement was infectious.
Henry decided to cook while she looked at the account from Dr. Durrell. Once again, she sat in silence, totally enraptured in all of the twists of the tale, her face emanating emotion at certain places.
He busied himself with the meal and then turned to find her sobbing. She had arrived at the end of Eliza’s story.
Putting down the spoon, it was his turn to comfort her. Travelling through the aroma of pasta, he bent down to her but she put out her hand as if to stop him.
She felt compelled to ask, ‘Henry, why didn’t you tell me about this before? You acted as if you knew nothing about the history here.’ It wasn’t anger talking, just regret. She was unsettled.
Lowering her hand, she allowed him to settle down next to her, accepting him again.
‘Martha, I let you down. I can appreciate that now. And I let myself down. But it’s complicated.’
He reached out with his mind, trying to contact a place, in some time, some place, where the answer might be found. Like the water from a spring, crystal clear, submerged in the earth for thousands of years, he hoped that a salvation would bubble up. However, it was of his own making. If he drank from the stream, where only pureness dwelt, he could then share the whole truth.
What if, though, in sharing, he was to lose her? Having belief is a difficult compromise, where life’s preconceptions need to be turned adrift, aside.
Martha would have to be predisposed to this way of thinking to believe in the apparitions. Was there a reason to think otherwise of her?
To Henry it had been a case of seeing is believing, but for her it would be a leap in untravelled avenues.
Above all else, he had the possibility of replacing the love that he once had with a different love.
A new love.
A many layered love.
A new entanglement where his body and his mind would merge with another akin to the Rio Negro meeting the Amazon; when they meet there is no turning back, travelling side by side until they coalesce and become stronger.
He had to make a choice. On one side of the scales was his fear of losing her and on the other the need to be truthful.
Perhaps, it was a false equation. He may lose her if he did not reveal all that he knew.
Henry made decision. He would make his past by choosing his own present. He had often informed students that actions propel us through life: not thought. That was only a process, albeit important, and thought was the method of meshing the gears together for a machine that had to be ignited with power.
Action would light up the way.
He wanted to explain all of it: unburdening himself in the process. His truth, if buried at the bottom of a deep sea trench, would need to be relieved from the pressure and as it did, would rise, passing deep sea creatures unknown to science, passing through tunnels and passages where creatures exist without light or skeletal features: it would rise and when it broke free from the surface it would burst out like a water-laden phoenix, great cascades of water crashing into the ocean’s surface, and it would rise, further and further, up to the sky where it would glide with the constellations.
‘Martha, there is something else. Please don’t judge me harshly. My life has been altered forever and will do so even more when I share it with you.’ She looked genuinely concerned, as if shadows had crossed her thoughts and manifested themselves on the contours of her skin.
Had her trust been misplaced? she asked herself.
No. She felt not.
She could see the fierce struggle within him: an interminable miasma of emotions that shifted like the cloud-shadows on the ocean’s surface. If he broke free, he would be stronger.
‘I’m ready, Henry.’ It would have been easy to say so much more but being succinct was often better.
‘I’ll just say it. Each time I read a piece from the chest for the first time, an apparition visits me. A ghost, if you will. A figure from the past. I want to share this with you. I need to.’
Chapter Twenty-nine
Did Henry say, ‘Ghost? Apparition’?
Her mind felt out of control for a second as if it were hurtling down a mountainside and there was nothing to grab hold of. It began to race ahead, faster and faster, speeding through all of the possibilities of what that could mean, if it were true; of what could have occurred. Her thoughts whirred and rumbled like the brass cogs and gears of an early computer shunting and clicking into place.
She waited for an answer; for a white ticket to arrive from a slot; punched holes seemingly random effects but holding the answer.
However, none of that was needed.
It was simple.
There were ghosts or apparitions, who had somehow had their consciousness perhaps, or some version of themselves, imprinted on documents written hundreds of years ago. They had then been sealed in a chest waiting to be discovered.
Why would Henry lie?
In an ideal world, where truth and honesty were ideals set high on a worthy pinnacle like Olympian Gods, worshipped by all, believed by all, honoured by all, it would be unquestionable. There would be no doubt.
However, there is no ideal world.
One scintilla of doubt entered her murky thoughts. Had Henry imagined it all? Was he deluding himself in memory of his wife? Had his mind been distorted, strangled by grief, become deranged and overcome by thoughts of loss and longing? Had these somehow created these mirages?
No.
In his face, she caught sight of a man who had travelled far in the last few months: literally and metaphorically: a man who had begun to come to terms with his new life without his wife.
In his face, she saw an honest man, not a liar or a madman. There was no sign of that in his eyes.
In his face, she welcomed a man who was opening up to her totally now.
It was simple.
Henry was telling the truth.
There were fleeting non-corporeal elements of people left amongst the words. The lighthouse had drawn them towards it as it had done with herself and Henry.
It had a power to collect these powerful emotions.
In that instant, she knew that her life was about to change forever.
‘I believe you, Henry. I’ve no doubts now.’ Henry was relieved. Martha looked tired, all of these new thoughts and emotions taking a toll. She was a little melancholic too which felt strange. She felt no sadness. None at all. Just a fascination, like a young child looking up at the stars and wondering what they meant.
‘So, let me explain more.’ Henry felt he should explain in detail how Caradoc and Eliza had both appeared. How it had looked like a film in a museum, repeating itself. A snapshot of history, of their lives. They had had something to tell him.
Martha listened, rapt.
‘When each one finished, I understood the message they had brought to share with me. Why they had lingered on in this place.’
‘And what were they?’ she asked.
‘Caradoc had sacrificed his whole life for others and Eliza, well, she had shown such forgiveness in the face of human brutality. Forgiveness, for her, was a positive path. Thinking about it, perhaps I should forgive myself more.’ Henry went quiet for a few moments, reflecting. ‘And when the message had been delivered it was time for them to move on.’
Martha felt magnetized by his words. She felt herself drifting again, losing this reality. The lighthouse must…
Where was she? She could feel the wind on her face. Oh, and then the salt of the sea on the air. She was walking along the cliffs but she felt different.
Looking up, she saw the clouds in the sky parting as enemies; swatches of pale blue forming in the gaps created. Birds criss-crossed the sky.
The sea to her right lost its calmness and looked grey and troubled. Small whirlpools formed, eddies circling in motion, and then just as quickly they disappeared before she could capture them, their energy spent in fanciful movements, only to reappear, anew and refreshed as if they had dived down in the water to some secret source of energy.
Yes, this felt different. She suddenly realised that she was wearing old-fashioned clothes.
Then.
She spied the lighthouse in the distance. It was white-bright and in the splinter of sunlight it sparkled and shone: it encompassed a hidden life energy.
The call of the lighthouse. It was relentless. She felt it inside her body and her mind.
She had to get there. It was almost instinctual in nature, akin to what baby turtles sprawled on the beach must feel striving for the foam and the feel of the sea.
She heard something and looked down. Small white chalk chips were falling across her path, after becoming dislodged from the earthen bank next to her; looking like it had been cleaved with a giant axe.
They fell in slow motion, dribbling across the ground coming to rest together in a small white mound.
Her legs were frozen, motionless, stricken by some immobility, as though the course taken by the stones had created an immovable barrier.
The urgency was still there, however: inside. She felt a burning, a flush of blood to her skin and organs.
Waves moved on the shore below, carefully waiting in turn, following one another: prisoners in a concentration camp shackled to their thoughts that no-one will ever comprehend.
They rolled in and disappeared.
Clouds began to gather again above, thrashing and charging at one another like bulls to a matador’s cape.
Martha was still stationary.
Leaning forward, legs still shackled in invisible chains, she stretched out her arms trying to cradle the lighthouse, to force it to come to her: to connect with her.
She lowered her arms to her sides and tried to calm herself.
She eased her thoughts.
Martha returned…
It had only been a split second. Henry was still wating for her to carry on the conversation. He wanted to know what she thought about them.
‘I was at the cliff edge this time. But I was dressed in strange clothes. Perhaps a hundred years old at most. What can it mean, Henry?’
He didn’t answer. He had no answer.
‘And the lighthouse was there in the distance. Calling to me. Beckoning me. I’m sorry Henry. There you were bearing your soul to me and I drift off to somewhere.’
‘There’s no need to be sorry, Martha. It must be important. We need to share all of it, whatever’s going on.’ She looked supportively at him.
‘Thanks. So, the chest. Can we open it? Say we must. I need to see one of these apparitions.’
He lifted the lid again. In it lay the next piece of writing, rolled into a tube, tied with a red silk ribbon. Carefully, he untied it and laid it out on the floor between them. He held down the ends with his fingers.
He looked hesitantly over at her. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked. ‘You want to join me in this life?’
‘I can’t wait. To actually see history. Of course, it’s a little frightening, but so tantalising.’
Together, they read.
Chapter Thirty
September 15th 1828
Dear Isabelle,
My dearest love. My only love.
If you are reading this I have surely passed.
Fear not, for all that I have to say is here. I send it to you now.
Today, the sky is clear of cloud unlike my mind, which is clouded with shadows that cast doubt upon its every thought and deliberation. It is like a recalcitrant child who will not relinquish its hopes.
Shadows, I fear, that may never be released by even the brightest rays of sunlight.
Here I sit, my aged quill in hand, looking out of the small window of the lighthouse. The glass is clear but my thoughts are not. Above me the staircase hovers like a spectre that waits for its chance to pounce.
The sea, however, is always there, like a trusted companion.
It is constant. It is true. Yes, it may be brutal and cold but it is always honest.
So, to my feelings. I have fared better, my love, for my love for you has now grown too strong for me to resist any longer.
I feel that my agony is complete. And, like a worrisome boil, it must be lanced to end the pain.
There is only one escape, my love.
I have left you a poem below. It is only for your eyes. It is my last.
If you harken back to a few weeks ago when you bade me farewell, when you told me that my love was unrequited, that my fervour was too great for you and you would never be able to return it thus, that you would never match my passion for you, I travelled here.
To be alone.
Over the rolling green hills I wandered, my jacket covered in sea mist, my hair glistening like morning dew, my mind distraught and full of regret, anger, shame.
Then, it was there, in the distance, a tower of weathered white skin.
I found it deserted.
I opened the door and found it empty, dirty: only a few possessions were left inside but it welcomed me as a friend.
I felt it had a soul even though it was cold and bare.
I tasked myself to live here, to fashion a table and chair and to light a fire. I watched the smoke rise through the metal staircase.
Then, I began to write. To find the perfect verse was my ambition. The lighthouse helped with its character and the view of the never-ending sea and the motion-filled skies. I wrote every day, almost every hour, sometimes staying awake through the night when the atmosphere changed. The flickering of candlelight can have a hypnotic effect on the senses and produce combinations of words that are new and original.
They flavour the brain.
The words, made alive by the orange-tipped shadows, rippled on the page.
So, my love, I endeavoured to pen a great poem, one of the greatest of this or any century. I believed it to be inside me. It just had to be discovered and then I would be held in high esteem and be something to parallel one of the great poets of our time.
I believed deep in my heart.
If I would be remembered for just one phrase, one line, one novel idea, then you would surely regret not loving me.
I would leave my mark on this damned world.
Alas, all I have left is the stain of failure on my skin. My angst has crippled my talent. I am a failure.
My poetry is dead.
And it shall fall upon the sea and be tossed away, carried like so much flotsam. It shall fall like so much soil on the grave.
So, my love, it is now the turn of my body to fall, to die. And with it, my heart.
I shall climb the black staircase, my hands feeling the metal for one last time as before I touched your skin. I shall climb to where the light lives. I shall climb and let myself join the falling rain.
I will join the ocean and be discarded. All that I leave you is my poem, or you, only you my love.
Be in my memory as you are in mine.
To my love,
Yours forever,
Aidan.
It was excruciatingly painful to read and yet touching. They both empathised with his pain. He had lost everything: her love, his life. Henry thought that in a way the lighthouse had failed Aidan. And yet… it had been the place from which he could try and create magic.
Henry unfurled the paper again. There was a poem underneath his signature.
‘Could you read it to me, Henry?’ He felt unexpectedly nervous as if he were a school child on a stage. There was nothing to be nervous about.
‘When melancholy calls like a weeping crime,
‘That slithers and devours all of its kind,
‘Then my sorrow shall deliver the ultimate rhyme,
‘And feed me death, for I shall find.’
It was beautiful, Martha thought.
Henry let the letter go loose and fall to the floor. He reached out and held her hand.
Just as he touched her, they both heard a wailing, a tortured cry, as if the sea itself was screaming at the white-edged cliffs, as if the clouds were baiting the half-glow moon, as if the wind were bemoaning its fruitless searching.
It was outside.
Receding and then closing in again.
Gaining power and then losing it.
It travelled on the wind.
‘Is that an animal?’ Martha asked.
‘A storm brewing?’ Henry suggested.
They both stood up as if that would somehow improve their hearing. Martha motioned towards the door.
‘Henry. I think it’s human.’
Henry nodded. He knew it was. ‘It’s him. His voice as he fell. From the lighthouse to the shore below. He’s coming back to us.’
A static-cold feeling swept up and down her spine. It made her tingle. At another time, a few years ago, she would have been astonished by all of this, and yet she now took it in her stride. She welcomed the feeling of anticipation.
Slowly, as if the fall was taking an eternity, it lengthened in duration and so did the strength of the sound, becoming stronger and stronger. It was piercing now and Martha put her hands on her ears.
A high-pitched lamentation that didn’t lessen.
On and on, the wailing deeper and resonating.
Unexpectedly, it stopped.
Then, he appeared, morphing through the wall, accompanied by a small writing desk and chair.
It had begun.
Chapter Thirty-one
He was young, perhaps twenty-five at most. His face was striking to both Martha and Henry. It only then dawned on her that here was a man from another time. She studied him more carefully.
His skin was pale and he was cleanshaven. Narrow and thin, his face sported long, large brown sideburns that edged his sallow cheeks. A head of chestnut brown wavy hair was now bowed towards the paper. He sat at his desk, concentrating, focussed, writing purposefully.
A candle on the desk flickered and from its body erupted elongated fingers of shadow and light that interplayed across the paper. His hand now began to move furiously across the paper from left to right as if he had become inspired.
He was wearing a large, deep blue velvet coat than hung to the floor almost covering his brown tweed trousers and thin black leather shoes.
Martha thought how glamorous he looked, like a hero from a Bronte novel, but then she remembered what had happened and she recoiled from her vision. He was a tragic figure.
But he was here, now, in front of her. She felt a kind of honour in being able to watch him.
She started in shock as he threw the quill down in anger, shook his head, making his hair fall over his face. Taking off his coat, he laid it across the back of his chair. Then, he pushed his hair back from his forehead.
His waistcoat was now revealed. It hugged his lean frame, unhealthily thin, in fact. Dirty shirt sleeves were scuffed at the ends. His shirt collar looked well-worn too.
Yellowing fingers picked up the quill again and he turned to face them once more.
It was a haunted face, his eyes red and tired, his cheeks sunken, his expression worried and almost feverish. It was the face of a man who was failing.
‘I have emptied my heart and laid myself bare like a shore to the ocean. But I have lost, lost everything. When the day is as darkened as the night it is time to leave this earthly realm: to shed this mortal coil.
‘Striving, giving, offering myself but never finding. Relinquishing my hopes is the only way to go on. It is time.’
Pushing his hair back again, he sat down at his desk and began to write again, focussing his whole body and mind on his pursuit of magic.
He then stood again and repeated the words as before.
Martha was desperate to get closer, to interact even with Aidan. ‘You said you moved around Caradoc. Is it safe?’ she asked timidly.
‘If he acts in the same way, yes, that’s fine. They shouldn’t interact. As far as we know.’ Henry was sure it was safe but he was still worried as Martha took a step towards him.
Gingerly, she went even closer and then began to walk around him, marvelling at the tableau in front of her.
As she circled, the candle guttered and the flame twisted and leapt as if to take flight from the wick. It had a dynamic power. She wanted to place her palm above it to see if it was real.
But it was real, she convinced herself. Even if he was not of the same substance that Henry and she were made of, it was surely real in its own way. And, the emotions were real, raw and naked.
Aidan was trapped in an agony, even if self-inflicted. And it was self-perpetuating. Feeding itself with the overspill of sentiment. There was no demonic entity that had risen up against Aidan, sadly, just the spectre of unrequited love.
But Martha wanted more, to delve deeper. She wanted a conversation with him, to learn from him, to find out about him as a person, irrespective of what Henry had told her.
‘I can ask a question, though, Henry?’
‘I don’t see why not. Don’t expect an answer though, but perhaps with your connection to this place, whatever it is… it might be different.’
Martha moved closer to his face as he wrote line after line. ‘Aidan,’ she began, so softly, as if talking to a small vulnerable child, ‘what are you telling us? Why are you still here?’ Even though she asked so quietly, she asked in a way that demanded an answer. She watched intently for any change to his expression. For any inkling that he could hear her.
Henry felt that he should intervene, to shield her from the pain, to save her from disappointment. But he knew she was strong. And there was some hidden element to how she had asked, almost as if her voice and hers alone, could ease his pain, could cease his panic, could lay waste to the abhorrent mystery that had consumed him.
He stood. Had he heard her words or intuited their thoughts? He spread his legs out defiantly, grasping the quill like a sword ready to strike away the detritus of his life.
His actions were changing, Henry quickly realised. Instantly, he moved to grasp Martha’s arm in case she was in danger.
Martha stayed perfectly still.
For some reason, Henry stopped himself. Perhaps he wanted to see what might happen: to be a voyeur. Or, maybe Martha was too important. For whatever reason, he did stop just short of her.
‘I think he might be listening to you. Ask him again. Perhaps he has more to say,’ Henry suggested.
She approached him even more. Henry found it fascinating to watch her. She was only a few inches from his face.
She remained unmoved: unmoved by his daunting demeanour and wilfulness. Studying him even more closely, she could see the pupils in his eyes enlarge and the marks on his cheeks, the strong bristles in his sideburns.
‘What are you searching for?’ she asked again, just as softly as before.
Aidan turned to face her. Martha was tempted to reach out that final few inches, to touch his face, to comfort him, to help him in any way she could.
He began in a whisper, his voice now weakened by fear of what he had done, the way out he had chosen. His cowardice, as he saw it.
‘Yes, I was searching. Searching for her love but I wanted so much more. Life’s quest I suppose, cut short by my own volition in the fruitless search for answers. Now, trapped, I understand they were never found. I escaped the quest in the only way that I saw possible: to end my earthly existence but this too gave me no answers, only this infinite agony.
‘For now, I bid you farewell.’
His eyes joined with Martha’s for a brief moment and Henry saw that there had been a connection, however short.
With that final epitaph, Aidan sat back down at his desk, unable or unwilling to continue. He began to write again, more furiously than before.
Martha thought she caught sight of what he was writing. She wanted it to be that final poem, and she imagined that in some place it would have been a success. Worthy of remembrance.
Sadly, he had failed.
It was over.
Chapter Thirty-two
Henry and Martha stood together, as finally, he wrote no longer. Standing one last time, he put his jacket back on and serenely disappeared through the wall along with the desk. The scene had vanished.
They were left alone now with only the essence of him for company. Martha felt empty, drained as if Aidan had taken something from her.
‘Where do you think they go?’ she asked him, leaning against his shoulder, contemplating and then holding his hand soothingly.
‘I’d like to think that this is a release for all of them. A comfort to them but also for us. As to where they go? We can only imagine. I hope it’s not a similar place to where they came from. I hope they do move on in some meaningful way.’ He could feel Martha’s warm hand as she coiled her fingers around his.
‘I think you’re probably right. We can never know. Would he have been able to tell us if we had asked, I wonder? In some part, they have told us of their history and we can be thankful for that. Also, their link to this place and we know of their final acts. They have shared and we have witnessed.
‘There must have been so many unrecognised poets. There always will be. Poets who might have discovered answers to some of mankind’s questions. They grapple with life’s obvious questions like philosophers but they remain unknown and forever unknowable. Lost.
‘But we now have Aidan. At least he can live on through us. I’ll check in the local records, see if there is any mention of him. You never know.
‘Henry, this is exciting, if strange and scary.’
‘So,’ Henry began, ‘what can we really learn from Aidan?’ He released her hand and moved away to see to the food. ‘We still need dinner.’
She answered, ‘Well, we all strive for answers every day. That’s just human nature. Sadly, he gave up. Maybe the lesson is not to.’
‘And we don’t,’ replied Henry, rhetorically, placing the steaming pasta onto plates. ‘Give up, I mean,’ he added.
‘Definitely not,’ she answered, energetically. ‘We’ve only just begun.’ She paused, lost in thought. Then she added, ‘Henry, you must have searched for answers more than most of us, as a philosophy lecturer, I mean. Did you find any of these answers?’
‘Well, the short answer, is, no. Nothing definitive. Although, philosophy, even when we don’t realise it, plays an important role in our everyday lives. It’s always there, as an undercurrent, like background radiation. I’ll try and explain what I mean a bit more.
‘It’s underneath, beneath our everyday thoughts, our, for want of a better word, simple thoughts. It guides us. Or not, as the case could be. As I sometimes lectured: all of the philosophies of life will not alter the human condition or the simple facts of life. There is nothing that can alter that core.
‘I’m going on again. You can’t take the lecture out of the lecturer.’ Henry laughed to himself. ‘Actually, Martha, I wanted to ask you a favour.’
‘Go ahead,’ she offered.
‘I did think that I had finished with philosophy. Now, I realise that I can’t. I’ve been toying with the idea of writing my own personal philosophy now that my head is clearer. Would you help me?’ He wasn’t sure if it was too much to ask on top of everything else that was happening.
‘So,’ she began, teasing him, ‘you’d like me to help with the rebuilding, help with the apparitions and now with a new Henry-style philosophy of life? Is that all?’ She was enjoying this.
It could wait until they had finished the lighthouse, he thought. But he carried on in the same vogue. ‘And anything else you can think of.’
‘Well, I could help you with the cooking,’ she joked. ‘No, I’m sure it’s lovely.’
It was nearly time to eat; the pasta was cooling.
Outside, the wind had strengthened. Martha imagined it was a large phantom with huge wings that was wrapping itself around the lighthouse and beginning to shake it; squeezing it with tremendous power.
She felt safe inside, though. Safer than ever. Even with seeing Aidan and all that entailed, and all that Henry had told her, she still felt at ease; tranquil even. It was strange or curious, to think about all that had happened over the last week or so. Planning your life, she thought, was fine up to a point. Closing herself in, disregarding options in the past, made her wonder what she might have missed.
However, she knew that she had been happy before this. It was just a different happiness. She did feel now like some stone had been lifted or been dislodged from inside her, one that she was unaware of, and now whatever was egging her on, or pushing her further in this direction, was urging her to carry on, find out more, to let more escape.
New desires must be acted upon. She must live them out with Henry. Smiling up at him as he brought over dinner, she knew where her future lay.
After eating, they decided to go outside. Henry gave her a coat to wear and as she opened the door, it felt as if one of the phantoms was pushing back; a remnant of some earlier force of nature.
The wind felt icy-cold, cutting: it howled with razor sharp teeth that had incredible accuracy, finding the skin’s weakest parts. Together, as one figure, they pushed against it, arms interwoven, heads side by side like some ancient merged beast or goddess, fighting against foes hellbent on forcing them away.
As they circled the lighthouse, the wind abated on the seaward side. It was a relief. The lighthouse protected them but out at sea, they discerned the power of the wind.
Beautiful night-light surrounded them.
Moonlight was tossed back up to the sky; broken like shards of shattered mirror. Waves broke free from each other, only to strike another violently, venomously.
It was an elemental fusion of clouds and sea and sky. Like the maelstrom of a Turner painting, the grandiose scope of nature was displayed before them.
Clouds littered the upper sky heavens like paper in a deserted street: the sea foamed in places, a bubbling cauldron; stars flashed incoherently between muscling banks of massing cloud.
The only things missing from the storm was the thunder, lightning and the rain.
Even so, the sea spit pricked their faces, tiny icicles shot from a gun; each one a separate point of intense pain.
As the sea crashed against the shore, Martha saw them again and pointed.
Chapter Thirty-three
Henry saw them too.
The lights.
They were much closer this time. Three of them now.
Chaotic in movement at first, maniacal with energy, striving yet adrift, as if a force greater than them was controlling their actions. Pulling and pushing them, tossing them, making them act against their will.
It was a dance, Martha thought.
Uncoordinated but they now moved with a certain rhythm.
Martha was unable to look away, mesmerised. They pulsed at different frequencies and they were altering her.
She could feel it. Henry sensed something too but was unable to name it.
Was there a pattern that she couldn’t detect? Could they contain a message that only she could decipher? A personal note to her? A benediction of the soul? Her soul? So many more questions sizzled through her mind.
She suddenly felt incomplete as though only answers could fill her needs. She continued to probe their movement, straining her eyes in ultimate concentration. Pretending to be an owl, she became alert, silent, lustrous, able to illuminate the night with her vision, able to determine the slightest movement out at sea, and even to see into the darkness.
Her eyes began to water and she temporarily lost focus.
‘Henry, where do they come from?’ she asked him, but also she was calling to the sky and the sea and the clouds as she believed that they all belonged to the same beast of nature and perhaps, in a wondrous well-told tale, the answer would be revealed via a play of animate, talking clouds or a watery sea creature, festooned with seaweed hair and shells, formed from a white-tipped wave.
Beside her, Henry was silent.
Perhaps, he, too, was enchanted by them, unable to vocalise what he felt.
However, she felt very strongly, as though it was an ingrained belief, that they held a message for them only.
‘Can you feel them?’ She did not expect an answer this time. ‘I can sense a warmth from them: a glow of knowledge, an acceptance of something. Maybe you and me.’
All at once, for her, the night muted.
She felt a slight disorientation but it passed. She was inside a bubble; one customised to her body; one with a barrier of strong, thick skin; so that she would never be able to breakout.
And inside the bubble was a vast darkness. There was no cacophony of the waves, no tortuous chorus of the wind, no blizzard of emotion, no bleeding of sound whatsoever.
Only the lights.
And they were guiding her. Everything else was secondary.
Yes, they were her guides but for what purpose, to what end? Why would they trap her so?
No, she calculated, not trapped, protected: it was a shell to ward off the minions of darkness. As soon as this thought occurred, the lights began to move more rhythmically.
There was definitely a new purpose to their actions: an ultimate goal, but however positively she concentrated with all of her mind it wouldn’t come to her.
Henry finally answered but his voice sounded muffled as if coming from the depths of a dream, as if he was inside his own bubble. ‘I can feel something, Martha, some small connection.’ And, as his voice grew stronger, more definite and clearer, it brought her back to the present.
She must leave the bubble, at least for now. However, she had no need to break free from it: it burst around her like a bubble on a child’s wand in the summer heat. It burst softly.
So softly.
They watched as the lights flew away, disappearing into the distance; a sad farewell. It left the feeling that you experience when you wave goodbye to a loved one who leaves on a train and you’re not sure when you will see them again and you don’t know how long to wave for. In that moment, it becomes the most important question in the universe.
The wind had changed direction. It tugged at their bodies as a reminder to do something.
‘Shall we tie down the materials?’ Martha asked, her hair suddenly having a life of its own, blown unceremoniously by the hands of the wind. Henry thought how wonderful she looked and how at home she seemed in his coat.
For the next few minutes, they tied down a tarpaulin as well as they could. At times, the air got underneath and its body bludgeoned and grew: as though it was out of control, afflicted by some involuntary muscular disorder.
Soon, they had tamed it. It was still.
Sleeping as well as it could.
They hurried inside and Henry made a hot chocolate. They had so many things to talk about, to consider: Aidan, the meaning of the lights, the rebuilding of the lighthouse.
Answers were out there, but just out of reach for a while like a climber’s next handhold on a rock face.
They didn’t want to fall, however.
After the drink, they felt warmer and the wind seemed to lessen.
They didn’t talk about Martha staying for the night.
She just had to.
It was an important step for both of them but lying there on the sleeping bag, side by side, inhabiting the same space, it was the right thing to do.
As she lay next to him, Martha imagined herself lying in an ornate royal yacht side by side with a king, looking up at a blue sky. There was heat too, warmth in their bodies. It would swiftly transport them onto the next stage of their lives, down a long winding river of indeterminate length and width. A river that glided, that meandered its path smoothly through a landscape of wonders. She could not see these treasures but she knew they were there.
As he lay next to her, Henry imagined himself on a gigantic floating raft; serenely moving on a calm sea towards some distant shore: the gentle rocking of the waves’ motion dissolving any fears that he held, creating the illusion that below him the sea’s vast body was that of a friend. One that would take him, however slowly and carefully, to that distant shore, where he would climb off, feel the warm sand between his toes and find some answers he needed written in the sand.
As they lay there, each lost in their own imagine-state, any thoughts that they wanted to share could wait.
For now, they would be still, two bodies immovable from that space, and listen to the lighthouse, itself consumed within its own reasoning.
Then sleep.
Thank you for reading. The Lighthouse will be published Saturdays at 5.00pm UK time.