Bill Pronzini - The Lighthouse

Almost anything.

His pipe had gone out; he relighted it. He watched his hand as he did so, watched it tremble. An indicator of how overwrought he was today. How afraid.

The pain had been bad last night-that awful bulging. But that wasn’t the worst part. He’d lied to Alix about the worst part, his second lie to her in two days, because the truth was too painful. And the truth was, he didn’t remember the drive into the village proper, what had happened there or afterward, nor most of the drive back here. His memory ended with the bulging as he neared the county road, picked up again as he jounced along the cape road a half mile or so from the lighthouse.

Blackout. More than two hours of lost time. That sort of thing had never happened to him before… or had it? It could have; that was what made it so terrifying. You blacked out, you did things during that blank time, and then afterward you not only couldn’t remember what those things were, it was possible you didn’t even realize you’d had a blackout.

But no, this was the first time-it had to be. It was all somehow connected to the atrophying of his optic nerves, his imminent blindness, even though Dave Sanderson had been carefully noncommital when he’d called Dave earlier and told him about the blackout (but not the details of it, not that he’d been out driving and killed a dog).

“Blackouts aren’t common with the type of eye disease you have,” Dave had said. “But that doesn’t mean they can’t happen or won’t happen again. Your condition is rare; we just don’t know enough about it. I think you ought to see another ophthalmologist, find out if the degenerative process has speeded up any, or if there are any new complications. There’s a good one in Portland; I’ll call him for you right away.”

Then Dave had paused. And then he’d asked, “Have you told Alix yet?”

“No.”

“When are you planning to?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet.”

“Doesn’t she suspect you’re having vision problems?”

“Not yet, no.”

“She will before much longer. Jan, I really think you’re making a mistake by not confiding in her. She’s your wife, she has a right to know. Why do you insist on hiding the truth from her?”

Because I’m afraid, he’d thought. Damn you, I’m afraid!

He’d gotten in touch with the Portland ophthalmologist, Dr. Philip R. Meade, and made an appointment for early Tuesday afternoon. And he didn’t want to go, because he was afraid Meade might tell him the degeneration was accelerating and he would be blind sooner than the year or two the others had projected; afraid he wouldn’t be able to stay here the full term, wouldn’t be able to finish his book; afraid he would experience more blackouts. Afraid of everything these days, that was Professor Jan Ryerson, eminent authority on beacons in the night.

Abruptly he stood, went to the stove, added fresh lengths of cordwood to the blaze inside. His pipe had gone out again; he laid it in the ashtray alongside the telephone, reclaimed his chair. God, he thought then, that poor dog. But it’s not possible I deliberately ran it down last night, even in a blackout state. Novotny’s wrong. It had to have been a freak accident.

Try calling again, he told himself. Whoever had been occupying the Novotny line the past hour-he had called three times in those thirty minutes, busy signal each time-had to hang up sooner or later.

Sooner the line was clear this time. Three rings, four. And then a man’s voice said, “Hello?”

“Mitchell Novotny, please.”

“You’re talking to him. Who’s this?”

“Jan Ryerson. Out at the lighthouse.”

Silence for several seconds. Then, coldly and flatly, “What the hell do you want?”

“To tell you how sorry I am about your dog.”

“Yeah? Then what’d you run him down for?”

“I didn’t, not deliberately—”

“I seen you do it.”

“No, you’re mistaken. It was an accident. I don’t remember seeing the dog; I didn’t know until just a little while ago that I’d hit anything.”

“You trying to tell me you didn’t hear him scream?”

Jan winced. “I’m sorry, Mr. Novotny. Believe me, I—”

“Bullshit,” Novotny said. “You didn’t stop. You didn’t even slow down.”

“I had a headache, a bad headache. It’s a chronic condition—”

“That’s no damn excuse.”

“I know that. I know I shouldn’t have been out driving. I’m not trying to excuse myself, I’m only trying to tell you how badly I feel about the accident.”

“Sure you do.”

“Worse than you can imagine. I’d like to make it up to you somehow, if you’ll let me. Perhaps buy you another dog, any kind you—”

Novotny hung up on him.

Jan sat holding the receiver for a time before he cradled it. Then he got up again, went into the kitchen. Alix, wearing a pair of old jeans and one of his old shirts, her hair tied back with a scarf, was up on a stepladder scouring the smoke-grimed ceiling with abrasive cleaner and a sponge. Her face was flushed and shiny with perspiration.

“I talked to Mitch Novotny,” he said.

She stopped her scrubbing and looked down at him. “What did he say?”

“He doesn’t believe me that it was an accident. He hung up when I offered to buy him a new dog.”

“Maybe you should try talking to him in person.”

He nodded. “But not today. After he’s had a chance to cool down.”

“Whatever you think best.”

She returned to her cleaning, still with that vehement determination. He watched for half a minute, wondering if he should offer to help. No. Any other time she would have been pleased if he had, but not now. She needed to be alone a while longer, needed to finish regrouping.

He left her and climbed the stairs to the second floor. The idea of physical labor, the kind Alix was doing which didn’t require thinking, appealed to him too; perhaps it would help him regroup. He continued up to the lightroom. In one corner was the lighthouse’s diaphone, removed from its mounting halfway down the westernmost cliff wall when the Coast Guard abandoned the station in 1962. The air compressor that had operated it was also there, along with most of its four-inch air line.

Diaphones fascinated him; he intended to do a full chapter on them in Guardians of the Night. Large or small, they produced an amazing amount of noise and vibration-one high-pitched note that could be heard during most kinds of weather for a distance of seven miles, one low-pitched note, or “grunt,” that could be heard much farther away. The volume of compressed air that passed through the instrument, even at a pressure of thirty pounds, was so enormous that the actual operating time of the diaphone was seldom more than eight seconds per minute. He had had the pleasure (if you could call it that) of standing within fifty feet of the big diaphone at the Point Reyes Light-house, near San Francisco, when it was in operation; any closer than that and it would have damaged his eardrums. He had literally been able to feel the noise and vibration all over his skin.

He assembled his tools and began to dismantle this one, taking time and care so as not to damage its working parts. Inside the cylinder, the brass reed-shaped somewhat like an automobile piston-that was the diaphone’s heart looked to be free of corrosion, and it moved freely enough when he tested it. When you pumped compressed air past the reed, it vibrated back and forth in short strokes, rather than rotating as the reeds in the air sirens that had preceded diaphones as the preemptory fog-signal had; that produced the high-pitched note. You got the grunt by rapidly diminishing the quantity of air being fed to the reed.

He cleaned the reed and the other interior parts, reassembled the instrument, and cleaned and polished the outer brass casing. Then he examined the compressor and its air line. The line looked to be in reasonably good condition, considering its age; the compressor was dusty and needed cleaning, but he thought it would probably work well enough. He tinkered with it for a time, confirming his suspicion-and then found himself wondering if the diaphone would actually work after all these years. If he could make it work. Mount it outside somewhere away from the lighthouse, run the lines, see what happened. A test, an experiment-why not?