Chapter Two #2
surface at high tide.
It gave
him a fleeting sense of having something to do. Strange lights
painted the whitewash. The moon was catching the tips of the surf,
silvering the manes of the white horses as they raced for shore or
demolished themselves on Hagerawl Rock. Priddy found his pillbox on
the window ledge. The box had a separate container for each day’s
meds, but it wasn’t one of the grim little plastic devices you
could buy in Boots. Kit had handcrafted it for him out of plywood,
painted it with various shades of nail varnish from his sister’s
make-up kit, and encrusted it with glued-on shells. The finished
effect was hideous, but that was what Kit had intended. Priddy
couldn’t easily lose it or forget it. He checked the Friday
section. Yeah, he’d missed his dose, despite Kit’s best efforts.
“You can lead a horse to water, mate,” Priddy reminded his absent
friend, shaking the pills out into his palm.
Kit had
made other boxes, too. These ones were on paper, A4 printouts with
rows and columns to schedule Priddy through his daily tasks around
the lighthouse and other activities such as eating, sleeping and
going for walks on the clifftops. He’d left room for a tick at the
end of each row.
Priddy was glad he was gone, although until he’d left—until
all the boys and girls of last summer had flown, like swallows from
the barns on the Morvah cliffs—Priddy had never really known what
true loneliness was. Kit deserved better than a life spent here,
making instalment payments on his remorse. There were other
benefits. With Kit had vanished the last witness to the outbreak of
fish-demons in the Penzance club. Priddy had made the papers, or
the Penwith Herald at any rate. They’d sympathised briefly with his near-death
experience, then hung him out to dry as an example of feckless
youth and the dark side of the neo-hippie drug culture consuming
the decent southwest. He’d been a nine-days wonder. All those
editions of the Herald had long since passed to the recycling dump or the chip shops.
As soon as Priddy had got the lighthouse job, his ma had let out
his bedroom to a short-order chef from Portugal, who would probably
make better use of it. Priddy wasn’t sure he could go
back.
And the
lighthouse had been good for him. Only ten miles out of Penzance,
it was still perched on a vast chunk of granite at the end of a
rutted track he didn’t dare cover too often in his clapped-out car.
Priddy had been as virtuous as Rapunzel over the last few
months.
He put
the kettle on, swallowed his pills with a glass of tap water. He
hadn’t hallucinated anything significant in months. The meds made
him sleepy as well as keeping the sea gods and demons at bay. He
spent most of his off-duty time curled up in his bunk, telling
himself he was healing, not just depressed and hiding
out.
The wind
bellowed. The white horses galloped harder. Priddy shrugged into an
ankle-length oilskin, pushed his bare feet into wellies and
unhooked his binoculars from the rack by the door. Carefully he let
himself out onto the deck. The door was weighted but could still
swing wildly if the gale caught it. Priddy had learned this the
hard way after almost being catapulted over the rail on his third
night here. Now he knew enough to let the wind anchor him, crushing
him against the white-rendered wall like an impatient lover. That
left his hands free for the binos. He raised them, trying to shield
their lenses from flecks of foam.
There
were lights on the horizon, but they were piled high and handsome,
probably one of the floating cities that plied the Atlantic between
New York and Falmouth harbour. Nothing closer to shore. All clear
for now. Priddy often felt better for making his check, and he
waited for his sense of guilt and general unalleviated wretchedness
to subside.
Not
tonight. The binos felt heavy in his hands. He lowered them a
little, and the moonlit tips of the Teeth jumped into focus at him,
grinning. He was freezing cold beneath his oilskin coat. Lowering
his head against the storm, he went back inside.
***
When he couldn’t sleep, he sometimes worked his way through
the DVD collection left behind by previous bored and stranded
keepers. One of them had possessed a taste for vintage horror, and
either a masochistic streak or a twisted sense of humour:
Jaws was there among the
battered plastic cases, Leviathan, Piranha. The
Fog, too—not the grim James Herbert number
but the John Carpenter classic, about the little town of Antonio
Bay and the undead zombie pirates who roll in with the mist off the
sea to terrorise the heroine, a feisty DJ who’s set up shop
in...
Yes, a lighthouse. Priddy had sat through this one several
times before. He liked the world-building, the offbeat relationship
between Jamie Curtis and the trucker she hooks up with. The special
effects were mostly limited to dry ice and balefully glowing red
eyes, but these were handled well, the musical score helping
ratchet up the tension and atmosphere. Priddy enjoyed the idea of
watching it all on his own in the small hours of the morning. Like
watching Thelma and Louise
from a cliff-top drive-in, or Titanic on board a leaky boat. He’d
always loved sea-monster movies, even if they scared him. Loved the
idea of something mysterious out there. That wasn’t the same as
wanting to study marine biology, was it? But that had been the life
he’d thought he’d have. Following Kit to university, then following
him onward to wherever he’d gone after that.
He guessed that a lot of his plans had revolved around
following Kit. He made a mug of instant coffee, switched on the
electric heater and curled up in the battered armchair in front of
the TV. The Fog began to play. The DJ made the long trek down the steps to the
studio, playing her breathy-voiced promo reels. Janet Leigh was
excellent as the harried, irritable chairwoman hiding her
grief-stricken terror for her missing husband. The little boy found
the spar from the Elizabeth Dane on the beach. The fog rolled in,
hook hands clawed at windows. Priddy’s meds caught up with him in
one tidal rush, and he fell fast asleep in the chair.
He woke to the long, slow scrape of metal on glass. He lurched
upright, knocking cold coffee off the arm of the chair. The
scraping came again. They’ve come for
me, he thought, with perfect clarity, and
shocked himself with a burst of laughter. He was so fucking lonely.
Anything choosing to arise from the deeps tonight—sharks, krakens,
zombie pirates—could have him, body and soul. He staggered back out
onto the deck to meet his fate.
A chain
had detached itself from the rusted lantern cage and was dragging
across the window, back and forth. Back and forth. Priddy grabbed
it and hung on. The wind had slackened off but the deck was
lurching under him, and down in the water there were
lights.
Lights!
God, no.
Sick fear boiled up in his throat. Lights this close to Hagerawl
Rock meant that every safeguard had failed, every flash from the
vigilant tower, and a boat was about to run aground on Hell’s
Teeth. A boat this close was doomed, her belly slashed open
already. Her crew would have bailed, or—more likely for a bunch of
partygoers on a hired yacht—drowned in their bunks. Priddy hoped
they’d been good and pissed. He dived back indoors, snatched the
radio handset off its cradle and cranked the dial to the
coastguard’s frequency. Static crackled and hissed, but the pickup
came quickly, the Hawke Lake graveyard-shifters on their toes.
Priddy gave his location, snapped out the codes—Kit’s granddad had
made him learn them off by heart—for a vessel in
trouble.
The
adrenaline had cleared his head completely. Not just his head,
either. His heart was pumping strongly, taut-muscled vigour
strengthening his limbs. He hadn’t felt like this since the last
time he’d waded in to help a bunch of surfers caught in the rip.
His meds had cleared his system, flash-metabolised. There was no
way on earth the coastguard would get here on time, even if Hawke
dispatched choppers and the Porth Bay lifeboat launched right
away.
Priddy
shoved his feet into his trainers. He invested the time to lace
them right up. A stumble on the spiral stairs would ruin
everything, drop him in a broken-necked heap on the concrete floor
below. For the first time since his awakening in the Trelowarren
ICU three months ago, the thought of such extinction upset him. His
survival instincts flared, and then—brighter, better—the instinct
to save someone else. On the TV screen, Jamie and her trucker were
smashing their way into the DJ’s house to rescue her little boy.
Those guys had the right idea. Priddy grabbed a coil of rope, a
grappling hook and an emergency pack for first-aid on the shore. He
held little hope—most likely the bodies would wash up downcoast in
a week’s time—but that didn’t matter. He could try.
He took
the spiral four steps at a time, keeping a token grasp on the rail.
The tight curve of the walls was hypnotic, like being caught in an
Escher drawing, and he concentrated fiercely on his footing,
counting breaths and levels until finally the ground floor heaved
up at him. He leapt to meet it, ran for the rusted metal door,
threw back its bolt and dragged it wide.
The
lighthouse was anchored to a vast concrete foundation block.
Security lights flicked on, illuminating the cube’s edge and beyond
it the roiling sea. There were two life-belts attached to wooden
boards by the railing, and Priddy unhitched both of them, slinging
them over his free arm. He leapt off the block onto turf-covered
granite and half-ran, half-slid his way down to the beach, pungent
scents of crushed yarrow mixing with ozone and wind-driven salt.
Once he felt shingle under his feet he let his armload of equipment
fall. He tugged the pack open and extracted a high-powered
flashlight: got his balance, braced, and lifted the light
shoulder-high.
Unbelievably, a boat had made it through. She was wallowing
up past her gunwales, but not reduced to matchwood yet. Strangest
of all, a young man was swimming beside her. He raised a hand to
Priddy, flashed him a dazzling smile and waved.