The Lighthouse

I bunched up the billowing plumes of my nightdress, slicing through the thrashing grass. It was almost time. Affronted by the vicious torrent brought on by greys and purples above, I was far behind schedule. The crest of the hill reared its end, and I tore down the side against knives of clear water, a bitter scent that clashed with the salt spray. The damp grass whipped my ankles. The ruthless thrust of the wind’s hand propelled me like a rag. But although my looming lighthouse destination held its red stripes and glimmering beam at the forefront of my mind, my heart was locked on the roaring waves beyond it that carried my husband home. 

The pulse in my throat and my lightning veins, mirror images of the electricity above, didn’t make me any less of an observer. I was watching. I was a racer, kicking with every fibre in my body to make it to the lighthouse in time, but I was attentive to the plumes of violet. Because I was waiting. Waiting for Robert.

The clouds rumbled as the ground levelled off, and I planted my palms against the jagged white stone. A shudder spread up from my feet. It jostled the key ring in the damp pockets of my wool cardigan, and I clamped my fist over its indentation. Property of the lighthouse keeper. 

My chest tightened. 

“I’ll have these back to you soon, I just have to get up there,” I attempted to mutter, but the words never reached my ears between the clash of the waves and the wind. Likewise, the click of the latch I anticipated from the turn of the key was swallowed by the storm. 

I wrestled the gusts to pry the wooden door open, but as soon as my foot was through, it twisted sides, giving me a shove in. I pressed my back against it to drive it shut, kicking off to a slam that rocketed up the walls with an earsplitting ache. My skull shook against the thin barrier. It matched the shallow rhythm of my breath. The walls, so imposing on the outside, felt brittle within the cylinder of white, so skeletal they could collapse at any moment.

“Robert will be home soon,” I whispered to ease my chattering teeth.

The day my husband left, he had spared a few pennies to buy me carnations from the market and explain the need for his trip out to the mainland. The commercial ship rates were too high, he had said. He worked a lot, but he claimed that the worst way that money could be wasted was on something he could do himself. The image of the confident creases in his face, the self-assured sparkle in his dark brown eyes, brought some warmth flooding back to my arms. 

My watch, an ancient tarnished facet and a hand that had never once strayed from its course, ticked gently at just half past the hour. It was almost time. I pulled back my shoulders and they answered with a grumble, the product of a weight imposed upon them by my husband’s whereabouts. That weight had remained for so long it seemed to be a part of me.

An avalanche of plaster cascaded off the wall, scattering the metal staircase with a hollow clatter. Tugging my cardigan to my neck and rubbing my hands against my goosebump-speckled arms, I set my foot on the first narrow step. The metal vibrated so quickly that it didn’t seem stirred by the wind, rather, amplified by it, expelling a shimmering silver radius.

I set my hand on the railing, and my bones shook in response. My chest seized in protest, but the metal breathed cold up my veins, temporarily freezing them. I staggered, resuming my course around the tight spiral through a series of claps that echoed through the tower. The room smelled like fish and polish, paired with the familiar salt spray. A faint rain smell intercepted it, again, clashing with the other type of water, but the wind didn’t fully circulate the stench around. It was as though it came from the ground up. Reaching out. Not moving me, but moving with me. 

I was no stranger to those gusts, but I had not felt one so strongly since my youth. Not since I had run through the fields of my home with my toes in the grass. Not since I had met Robert.

I had met him by the sea. He was a fisherman, but you could see his higher aspirations in his decisive gait, see his entrepreneurial spirit in the ease with which he flashed charming smiles and quick-witted words. It was with this ease that he led me around town. It was with this ease that he took me for his wife. The wind, those days, had danced. But Robert and I had found a steady rhythm, and I no longer needed to taste the ever-changing currents to feel the beat.

In the lighthouse, the ground rumbled with a vastly different tempo. Sea salt filled the cavity of my nose, scratching my throat like sandpaper. The gaps between the metal slots blurred, and I kept moving, my shoulder brushing the wall at my left. I passed by the first landing, the chill in the air increasing. The wide window lit up as I crossed it, illuminating the writhing sea.

A clap of thunder followed a second later, propelling a second waterfall of dust. The steps shook, and I tightened my hold on the railing, keeping myself steady but not daring to compromise my pace. I skidded past the landing, breathing heavily.

The image of what was at stake if I didn’t make it to the light in time invaded my mind. It was a still evening ripped apart, a shade tremendously deeper than the clouds wreaking havoc outside. Robert had told me what to do when I was nervous like that. I wasn’t listening to him very well.

I rounded the bend to the second landing and was met with an unbridled torrent of icy droplets. Ducking out of their path, I skidded to a stop. The window had been left dangling open, letting in the gusts and pushing around the glass pane back and forth.

I pressed myself to the wall and resumed my course, flinching as the wide glass frame swung my way, missing the stairwell by a hairbreadth. It slammed against the wall, allowing the wind head-on passage to my face. I drew in an icy breath.

The craggy cliff was alive below. A blanket of reeds draped it, their sharp edges furrowing violently and flickering in the moon’s pale glow. Their shadows mounted as they fell behind the crest of the hill, abruptly surrendering to the rock and the waves that ravished it. Their sharp drumbeats clashed with the cadence of the hillside, but it matched the wind in a discordant symphony that raised the hairs on my arms, but did not seem altogether unnatural.

Robert hated it when I kept the windows open. It chilled the house, he said. It invited prying eyes. The rustle in the white curtains that dappled the kitchen sunbeams lifted my heart, but I ceded to his whims because he let me keep the blinds open. I loved the rays of afternoon light, but when I couldn’t feel the music to which they danced, there was almost no point to welcoming them. Yet although Robert didn’t understand my wishes, I understood his reasoning. We were still, the two of us. Immortalised together. We were moving no more, and thus no longer in need of ever-changing currents and temporary summer birdsong that only connotated to the passage of time.

But when Robert would go to sleep, I would open the window yet again and let in the wind. Just to listen. I would rise from my bed and there I would crack open the window to a still night and feel freedom.

A second bolt of lightning struck the cliff face, searing my eyes. With nothing standing between me and it, I was completely at its mercy, blind for a second before staggering back into the railing. My spine slid down it like a serrated knife, and I caught myself with a quick cry and a rip of fabric. When I pulled myself up again, the air was still.

The thunder crack followed, beating like a second heart.

I pulled up my dress, which had ripped along the bottom hem, and turned back up the stairwell. The wind had always been two-faced. I didn’t know what it was trying to tell me, but it was outspoken, and it carried a strong message. Robert was like that too, sometimes.

Regardless, the final landing was ahead. My mind swam, bogged down by fog, as though I were observing my own life from the dazed lens of another.

I had been told once that the lighthouse keepers of the 18th and 19th century had gone mad up in the highest room. It was not just due to their isolation, but also due to their condition. Before the lighthouse got access to the power generator, the keepers had to turn the light manually, and to facilitate the task, they would turn the crank in a steady boiling stream of liquid mercury. The metal would poison their mind. They would see ghosts. Speak to specters. They would have no idea how to escape it, and they would grow dependent on the smooth mechanical churn with no idea what was ailing them and no chance at being saved by the society they had alienated themselves to.

I strode up the last steps two at a time. My heavy breaths were my glimpse into life before the 1960s, a dark age of mercury poisoning and loneliness and bitter delusion. My stomach lurched. Sweat collected beneath my hands.

“This is what to do when you are nervous,” I repeated, recalling Robert’s guidance. “You stay calm. You take a deep breath. But no matter what...”

The wind hissed, cutting off my words. It was calling for a parlay, but it was vengeful, crying a high pitched howl from where it continued to pour out of the second floor. 

“No matter what…” I continued, but as I rounded the bend, the words died on my throat.

The lighthouse opened up to wide panels of windows, a dark navy panorama that opened up the sky but let the billowy clouds, highlighted with flecks of light and swashes of purple, to close in. In the center, the multifaceted lens rotated, sending out bright beams harnessed through the calculated art of refraction.

I kept my pace as I left the stairwell, circling the base. I checked my watch. I had to be fast. He would be there within minutes.

“Come on,” I muttered, bending down and feeling the tight embrace of my damp cardigan. “It has to be here somewhere.”

He was almost there. My pulse reached my throat, and the windows rattled. The panel at the base was nothing but metal, and I sprinted around it, heart hammering. Three minutes.

“I’m nervous,” I had told Robert the day before he had left.

“Don’t be,” he said. “But if you dare leave this house, you know what will await you. You mustn’t go outside. You mustn’t leave me.”

I had nodded. Robert had smiled, because he had no reason to doubt me. It had been two years, after all, since I had crossed the threshold, two years since I had touched the wind, since I had tried to understand its side or motive. Two years since he had let me step outside.

At the base of the lantern panel, on the end opposite to the stairwell, I picked out a small black wire sticking out of the paneling. I pounced on it, my eyes lighting up.

Tracing its course, I found the panel it led to. I pulled the ring out of my pocket and pinched the small key between my fingers, sizzling, giddy. I popped open the panel, where the outlet stuck out. I glanced at my watch. Two minutes.

The lighthouse keepers of old had grown dependent on their life in the lighthouse, but only because they were so unaware of the source of their poisoning. But I was not. I had let the wind in, and everything was crystal clear.

I curled my hand over the wire and pulled, enveloping the lighthouse in darkness. The lens shut off. The plateau stopped rotating.

Captured in every window, a third bolt of white lightning struck, but this time, I welcomed it, rising to my feet and facing the pitch dark, writing sea. I crossed to the other side, un-clamping the bar leading to the window and propping it open. It slicked back my wet hair. I welcomed the rejuvenation of the rain, even though it was a stranger in a land of saline air. 

Because the wind was on my side, after all.