Frazer Lee - The Lamplighters

And then they’d let him go, carrying his memories around him heavy as a cursed mariner’s albatross, back to his prison of guilt and madness and regret. Shooting Fowler had unlocked something buried deep inside the old man. His lover’s kiss had done the rest, drawing his memories out of him like poison from a wound. He knew she’d seen them too, had sensed that she was feeding on them. How was that possible—how was any of it possible? She’d be as old as he was now, minus a few years of course. But there she’d stood like Aphrodite with her golden hair and gleaming smile and perfect skin. Oh and the smell of her, like the faintest wisp of cotton candy framed by bee pollen. He’d wanted to dive into her along with his memories, for her to drink every drop of his futile life force until there was nothing left. But even as he’d wished it Vincent had seen the dark core at the heart of the woman, the taint that exists deep within every treasure. And from that moment he knew that she had not kissed him out of kindness, nor stroked his brow in sympathy. Her motive was to feast on his pain, to gorge herself on the endless loop of suffering that had defined his daily existence all these long years. He was merely a battery to her, a functional thing that existed only to sustain whatever cruel tastes she hungered for. He’d been glad to leave the jetty then, gathering up what he could of his memories, his pain and his old man’s pride, reclaiming them as his own.

The sound of the waves crashed into him as he approached the cove nearest the lighthouse and he began to weave together fragments of past like a spider rebuilding its web after a storm. He saw that night again, when he’d taken to the waves with his boy—intent on escaping the island and all its dreadful secrets. He saw himself as a younger man, saw what he’d done then just as he had tonight. He watched himself murder the security chief from years ago as he fought bitterly to stop them taking his boy away from him, saw the blood on his hands. He hadn’t meant to kill him, hadn’t meant for a lot of things. All these years he’d carried the guilt of what he’d done and buried parts of it in the dirt of the hole he’d been digging, only to find it uprooted and staring him in the face the very next day each and every time he buried it. History had echoed back on itself, sounding out death like the deep melancholy bass of a foghorn, and here he stood a murderer again. He felt his body folding in on itself, filled to the brim with cold despair and craving the grave. He was a man without hope. Let his mouth be filled with maggots, let his eyes burst like plums and his belly swell and split with the gas and bloat of his wasted life. He teetered on the rocks and saw a black shape ahead of him. All light had left him, he could not return to his tower nor climb the steep steps there. He gravitated toward the black hole, aching for its darkness.

Brett regained consciousness painfully and in near darkness. The surface he was lying on was hard, wet and covered in silt. He fancied that he could hear waves in the distance, crashing onto far shores. He longed to be back in the cool of the ocean. Anywhere but here. Turning his head toward the sound of the waves, he felt a lick of heat warming the sweat on his face. A dry crackle and a sharp spitting sound, like Hell’s inferno clearing its throat. He was near to a fire. He wanted desperately to get his hands free but they were tied firm behind his back, which arched uncomfortably. Kicking his feet out, he felt only hot air around them. His mouth was salty dry and he remembered the seawater as the boat had been torn apart by the explosion around him. He’d thought himself lucky to bail at the moment he did, just as the explosion had happened, but now he felt only a series of numb discomforts. He wondered how long he’d been lying here, and what had happened to his shipmates. That gorgeous girl. Where had she said she was from? That was it, Ibiza. Was she still alive, washed up on this island like him? Was she sweating hot and cold like him in a dark cave somewhere near? Then the memories came flooding back, a tsunami of eviscerated bodies crashing onto the shoreline of his sanity. He saw the girl’s head, Idoya that was her name , bobbing on the surface of crimson waves like a Halloween apple in a bucket of water, her bloodshot eyes fixated on him. Brett wanted to scream, but his mouth felt alien to him somehow. He tried to lick his lips but couldn’t. Something was wrong, very wrong. He attempted to cry out and heard his voice, disjointed like someone else’s voice, a barely recognizable impotent wet gurgle of a sound. Blood gagged his throat and his fingernails clawed behind him at the silt on the floor. His tongue was gone. Oh dear God his tongue was gone. Writhing now, he pulled in shock and fear at his bonds and felt his eyelids blinking wetly. The fire crackled somewhere close by. Perspiration dripped from his matted hair onto his cracked lips. More salt water for the drowning man. He blinked again, and felt the beginnings of a searing pain behind his eyes. If a fire was burning, then why couldn’t he see it? Brett cried out, loud as he could. His voice was like out-of-tune music, the desperate discord of a deafened man. Tears fell from his eye sockets. No, not tears. More blood. He shook his head violently from side to side, becoming maddened by the crackling of that damned fire. Even as he asked himself why he couldn’t see it he knew his eyes were gone too. All the breath left his chest in a dreadful rattling sigh and he laid there, a broken thing. His extremities had begun to conspire against him now. Each part of him was awakening and remembering what had been done to it, the nerve endings in his mouth and eye sockets reaching out in a kind of muscle memory for their lost comrades. Nearby, the fire flickered and its amber glow danced on the chrome surface of a surgical steel dish. Inside were his tongue and eyes. Then little hands were on him, attending his most private and tender parts, and Brett screamed a hot gargle of blood and bile until he died.

Marla dreamed of far forests and plains, of bright birds and of a wet humidity that penetrated every pore of her body. These visions were soundless and distant, and she fought to keep them for fear of what she might find when awake. The fight was already lost. She heard the sudden rush of wind through trees and felt herself returning to her body. The sound of the wind diminished and she opened her eyes to find she was on a cold, hard table in a large, dimly lit room. The walls were rough, hewn from the rock, which told her she was in a cave. But it was unlike any cave she’d ever seen. Spotlights and mirrors illuminated the scene, their sleek modern designs contrasting with partially melted candles that flickered brightly here and there. She was strapped to a large surgical steel table, a spotlight on a snake-like angle poise arm above her. She pulled at the bonds restraining her upper body and ankles. They didn’t budge, and caused little spasms of pain to prick at her skin the more she resisted them. So, she stopped resisting and looked around the room as best she could.

Everywhere around her were tables and trays of implements. Knives and saws and clamps, all gleaming. Shiny, shiny things. Jars and bottles stood on every available surface, some perched on nooks and crannies in the cave walls, filled with liquids of a stagnant yellow hue. Floating in the liquid were what looked like organs and tissue samples. Others housed bare bones, swimming above fronds formed of clumps of human hair. Marla could make out a row of teeth in one jar, sharing its glass home with part of a hand. She looked away from these unlikely bedfellows, feeling suddenly and acutely vulnerable lying there on the table. Then, a shadow and a movement from the corner of the room. Her body jolted and she tried to see what was over there, moving in the candlelight. She tasted acid spittle in her mouth, the fear once again holding sway over her body. The roof of the cave seemed to bend and curve as her eyes darted toward the other side of the room in reaction to another movement. She imagined rats scurrying beneath her, seeking out the source of her fear-smell, ready to gnaw at the delicious taste of her dread as she lay there bound and helpless. A chill ran through her hair, each follicle pinpricking icicle cold.