Scott Nicholson - Ashes

“ Yes. I used to be a newspaper reporter. But I’m driven to write of false things. I thought with a change of scenery, and blessed isolation…”

“ You have plenty of both here, I imagine. I know something of isolation myself.”

He gave a grim smile, as if his loneliness were the deepest in all the world and weighed most heavily on his shoulders. He drank more liquor, in gulps instead of sips, and refilled his glass. My legs were trembling from the long climb, but the only place to sit was his bed. I had never been in a man’s bed.

“ Isolation is the devil’s tool,” Poe said. “I want to concentrate on my work, but one hears things in this damnable cylinder. The rush of high tide sounds like voices in the chamber below, like the soft cries of those who have been pulled under the water. Think of all those ships lying on the ocean floor yonder, and the white bones of those who went down with them. Where do you suppose they go?”

For the first time, I had an inkling of the man’s instability. His brooding good looks became sharper and fiercer, his eyes flashing with a morose anger. Beyond the windows, the clouds had gathered and grown darker as if to match Poe’s mood. A squall was pushing in from the sea, and the cutters spread across the sea had taken down their sails as the wind increased.

“ A storm is blowing in,” I said. “Shouldn’t you light the lamps?”

He said nothing, just wiped at his chin.

“ The current shifts here with these spring storms,” I said. “Surely you were told that by your employer.”

“ Damned De Grat. He should have known I could never tolerate this place-or my own company-for an entire year.”

Wanting to pull him from his mood, not yet ready to trouble him to lead me back down the stairs, I asked what he was writing.

“ It’s about a shipwreck.”

“ Shipwreck?”

“ A ghost ship. With a morbid crew.”

I laughed. “One hears plenty of those tales. I found a paper in a corked bottle once, washed up on the beach.”

His eyebrows arched. “What did it say?”

“ The water had gotten to it.”

“ It always does,” he said, with the air of one who had floated many futile messages.

“ Can I hear the story?”

“ It’s no good,” he said. He tapped the rumpled pages beneath the logbook. “This may be the last thing I ever write.”

“ Have you been published?” I asked.

A smile slithered across his moist lips. “Some poems.”

“ Please, read me one.”

“ It’s not fit for ladies,” he said, and I wondered how much of his gallantry was due to drunkenness. He closed the logbook and passed it to me. I opened it to the first page. I’d had some schooling in the village, but could read little. He had started entries on January first. His handwriting was florid and bold, the words scrawled with an intensity that matched his features.

He took it from me. “’January two,’” he read. “‘I have passed this day in a species of ecstasy that I find impossible to describe. My passion for solitude could scarcely have been more thoroughly gratified. I do not say satisfied; for I believe I should never be satiated with such delight as I have experienced today. The wind lulled about daybreak, and by the afternoon the sea had gone down materially. Nothing to be seen, with the telescope even, but ocean and sky, with an occasional gull.’”

“ That’s lovely,” I say. I know nothing of poetry.

“‘ January three,’” he continued. “ A dead calm all day. Towards evening the sea looked very much like glass. A few seaweeds came in sight; but besides them absolutely nothing all day, not even the slightest speck of cloud.’”

“ Much like this morning, only now the wind is picking up and there’s a swell rising.”

He closed the book and stared out at the sea for a moment. “What do you know of murder?” he asked, appraising me, his eyes gleaming.

“ Very little,” I said. “I can’t imagine such a horrid thing.”

“ I can,” he said. “Far too easily. The mind of man is a foul, corrupt thing. And when a man is alone with his thoughts…”

He drained his glass again, refilled it, spilling a few drops on the table. “But forgive me,” he said, louder. “I forget my manners. You are a guest and I have made you stand.”

He rose unsteadily from the chair and sat on the bunk, indicating with his glass that I was to take the chair. I hesitated, afraid to linger but also wary of his wrath. I sensed he could be set off with but the slightest provocation, and I began to regret my bold adventure. The sky outside had grown even darker, and though it was scarcely noon, the ocean and sky merged on the horizon into a single bruised color, clouds whipping like rags on a line. The wind screamed at the gaps around the windows, and from below came the dull roar that the man imagined were the voices of the dead.

I shivered, though the room was warm. “I must be getting home,” I said. “My parents are waiting, and I dare not get caught out in this storm.”

“ Why don’t you stay until it blows over?” he said, leaning back on the bunk a little. Men who worked with shipping had a certain reputation, and I suspected this man was no different. Though part of me had longed for some romance resulting from my encounter with a lighthouse keeper, I didn’t want to suffer the rough attentions of an animal. The desire for solitude in itself did not make a man sensitive.

“ They’ll be expecting me,” I said. I took a tentative step toward the trap door, loathe to negotiate those many steps again without a lantern.

Poe grabbed my arm, and his eyes were dead as coal. “I can’t be alone anymore,” he said. “Don’t you hear them?”

I tried to pull away, but his was the grip of a lunatic. “Please,” I implored, silently cursing my recklessness in coming here. A barren life on a lonely strip of shore was better than no life at all, and the excitement I had craved was now full upon me, but I wanted it no more.

“ The voices,” he said with a hiss, his face clenched, sweat clinging to that high, broad forehead. “With every storm they come, the souls of the shipwrecked and lost at sea.”

As the wind picked up, I thought I could hear them, but perhaps it was only the roaring heartbeat in my ears. I wrenched free, desperate and afraid. He grabbed at me again, and I dodged away. He howled, the mad sound blending with the wind until it filled the watch chamber.

“ Don’t leave me,” he shouted, diving toward me. I stepped backward, into the space of the open trap door, falling to the top step and then into the yawning black abyss, toward those tormented voices at the base of the lighthouse.

I stayed with Poe for the remainder of his term. He disposed of my body, of course, weighed me down by slipping scrap iron into my dress, and set me out to sea in the early morning dark of high tide. I came back with the tide the next night, watched as he brooded with his bottles and occasionally scrawled barely legible words on his papers. I read his logbook over his shoulder, what I could of it.

I waited until he fell into a restless sleep before I began whispering. Poe was right, those voices in the well of the lighthouse were of the dead, and I both imitated and joined them. Poe tossed in his sleep, sweated like driftwood, and finally woke. “Who’s there?” he asked.

I told him my name, as I told all of them my name in the years and centuries to come. He finished his story, wrote poetry, and drank to forget me, though he could not forget the one who was his constant companion. He had come to the lighthouse to be alone, but in the end, that was the last thing I allowed him. He read to me from his journal: “It is strange that I never observed, until this moment, how dreary a sound that word has: ‘Alone.’”