Abby Geni - The Lightkeepers

We had wine. Remember that, because it will be important later. It has never been my habit to drink; I don’t particularly like the sharp bite of alcohol, much less the ensuing mental muddle. I am not a person who enjoys a confused mind. But Mick had been storing a few bottles under the porch for weeks, hiding them from everyone. That night, we all needed a little cheering up. That night, I figured that it would be festive to raise a glass — or three, or four — with the rest of them.

I went to bed late. I remember cannoning into my doorjamb, under the impression that it had moved a few inches to the left. I could hear Lucy’s soft voice in her bedroom downstairs. Galen, I knew, was out cold on the sofa, a bottle still hooked in his limp fingers. Charlene was in her room with headphones on. She often listened to music before bed, claiming it helped her sleep. In my drunken state, I’d found amusement in watching her work the apparatus over her mane of red.

I heard a sound in the corridor. Mick and Forest were whispering. Then the front door creaked. They were outside on the porch. Evidently they were heading off to whale-watch by starlight. This was a wild risk, but I was too tired to consider its ramifications. The wine had reduced us all to drunken fools. I lay down in bed, feeling that my body was an enormous weight, one I had been carrying far too long. As I drifted off, I caught sight of a shape in the corner of the room. It was moonlight — I was almost sure it was only a streak of moonlight. Pale and gaunt. A suggestion of movement. I was already tumbling into sleep.

My dreams were fitful. I was in a courtroom facing an angry judge. I was being accused of taking a life, an act I held no memory of. The jury seemed to be made up of the biologists on the islands. Lucy, in particular, looked forbidding.

My bedroom was cold at first, but it began to grow warmer until I was sweltering, even sweating. I threw off the sheet without fully waking. The dream shifted. The octopus appeared, slithering over the mattress, groping my flesh with his suckers. I could not get him off me. He was slick and wet, smelling of salt, his tentacles surprisingly rough. The dream changed again. I was undergoing torture now — some medieval device, two slabs of stone crushing me between them, like a flower being pressed and dried. It seemed vital that I remember the name of this device before it took my life. I could not remember it. I could not move my arms.

Gradually I realized that someone else was there. Breath on my cheek. Weight on my chest. Another presence. Something was shaking — the whole island, or else the bed.

It took me a long time to understand what was happening. That was the fault of the wine and the dreams. It was difficult to sift out the reality of the situation. I was still half-aware of the octopus, his suckers palpating my skin. There was pressure on my hips, pain in my belly. I could still hear the rough voices of my torturers, the squeak of their ropes. Then I understood the noise to be the bedsprings.

A man’s shape. A man’s body on top of mine. The medieval vise was, in fact, his rib cage, squeezing the breath out of me. His face was in shadow.

I was still calm, waiting for the dream to shift again, waiting to wake up. Maybe he would morph back into the octopus, tiny and damp. Maybe he was one of the medieval torturers. Maybe he was a stranger — a stranger had broken into my childhood bedroom — I was not in my father’s house — no stranger could have come to the islands. He must be someone I knew. My legs were stuck beneath his. My arms were stuck beneath his. I was no longer dreaming. The octopus and the ropes were gone. But the man remained. The terrible weight of his limbs held me captive.

I should stop there. You can imagine what came next. I will say only that it did not hurt — not exactly. Physically, it was just unpleasant. In retrospect, that does seem odd to me. I would have expected there to be an immediate, protective response: tensed muscles, torn tissue, pain. But my body, stupefied by wine and sleep, had stood aside to let him enter. In such a state, it could not distinguish between what he was doing and the act of love.

Then the sheet slipped off his shoulder. In the moonlight, I saw blond hair. A pale forehead. It was Andrew.

In that moment, everything splintered. I opened my mouth to scream for help. At once, his hand slammed across my lips. A kind of seizure overtook me. I wriggled like an eel, snorting against his fingers. I kicked against the dense, bony burden of his calves. His eyes were lifted above my head, a little dazed; he looked like a man on drugs. His hips went on pumping like a piston, but the rest of him was dead weight. He was in no hurry. He kissed me clumsily on the cheek, like an inexperienced teenager making the first move on a date.

I arched my spine, trying to work my arms free. I could not get even a few fingers loose. His palm was too broad and flat to bite. As rapidly as it had come on, the seizure passed over and left me limp.

After that, it gets harder to remember. Minutes or hours might have passed before he left me. I cannot tell you all the bizarre thoughts that passed through my brain. Lucy asleep in her bedroom downstairs. Charlene hidden inside her music. Galen, who was supposed to know everything that transpires here. Mick and Forest out staring at whales. Explorers on the moon. You — you — you. Your coffin. Your gravesite. Your bones, your musculature, crumbling into the earth. All the material elements that had once made up a living woman. Tiny particles of you, strewn across the world, carried on the rain. How we are broken down to just the essentials.

Andrew was still moving. He was panting and sputtering. I let my gaze roam around the room. I could feel the heat of his breath. I ignored him for a splash of moonlight on the wall. A tall, slim shape. One beam radiated outward like a raised arm. The curtains moved, and the figure trembled.

The ghost was coming into focus. I could almost see the dial swiveling on my mental camera, pulling her into greater and greater clarity. The swing of her nightgown. Her bony wrists. The plane of her cheek.

She was nothing like I had imagined. She was at once more and less real — raw, ethereal, icy. Her body was of an indeterminate density, shifting in the murk and moonlight. Her torso was a pearly smudge, her fingers as distinct as piano keys, her legs lost in a haze. Her eyes were dark holes. There was something weary in her expression, as though corporeality had cost her a great deal.

For the first time, I understood why ghosts were antithetical to photography. I was certain that she would never have turned up on film. She was like a column of salt dropped in water — soluble, permeable, mixing with the surrounding matter. The camera would not have been able to perceive her the way I did. Its mechanism was designed to replicate the action of the human eye — precise and objective — rather than the subjective, suggestible mind. I could not tell whether she was beautiful. Her face was too elemental to register inessential qualities like symmetry or shapeliness. Burning eyes. An oval skull. I could not find her mouth among the shadows. Her hair drifted in a wind I did not feel. Then her arm swung in a gesture of entreaty. The intent was unmistakable. A welcome, from one ghost to another.

YOU AND I binge-watched crime shows one winter. I had just turned thirteen. D.C. was an unpleasant place that year, a wasteland of icy pavement and billowing wind. Rain fell by the bucketload. Snow carpeted the parked cars. You and I sheltered on the couch, bowl of popcorn at the ready, watching episodes about cops and crime scene investigators. We would argue about whether the D.A. was on the take, which suspect had committed the violent act, whether the unwholesome brother-in-law might be hiding something. Usually these shows dealt with murder, but sometimes they would shift over to rape.