A Fate Worse Than Drowning

1 Elle To Gut

Elle

To Gut

I cut the cod downward, behind the head and near the gills, to create a space in the cavity.

The blade runs down its back in shallow sections until the body becomes thin enough to slice end to end.

A sharp knife makes all the difference between a quick, clean cut and a massacre of choppy, gut-covered bits.

Smaller fish, like pollock or mackerel, can be opened with one quick swipe of the blade down the backbone. Cod requires patience.

“You’ve gotten better at that cut since you did it to me,” says the man I murdered last year. He floats a few inches off the ground, idling near the stairs.

I’m thankful our nets caught the cod. It will feed us much longer than the tiny perch they usually dredge up. I’m not thankful for the lighthouse keeper’s persistent presence.

“It would’ve been quick if you’d kept the knife in as good condition as I do now,” I counter. The blade was bent and rust-worn on our first meeting.

I travel the knife inside the fish, feeling the ridges of the bone like the edges of an accordion. I angle my blade to keep the piece intact when I reach the belly.

He ignores me. “Bad sign to catch such a big fish close to shore. A storm’s brewing.”

The lighthouse keeper has few pleasures now, but his favorite is to get under my skin. As my knife did his. But I won’t give him the satisfaction of success. I focus on carefully sliding the blade until the white piece comes loose from its host.

He approaches the counter. The floorboards don’t creak, yet I hear his steps.

“It’s surprising that you haven’t learned to sense the storms, girl. Should’ve taken weeks. You’ve failed for an entire year. Impressive.”

Loathsome man. Always trying to guilt me, tear at my resolve. But there’s no point giving in after the sin has long since been boiled to the bone.

I place the slab of cod meat aside and dislodge the second piece. Sunlight streams through the kitchen window and onto my back, warming the light cotton of my work shirt. Once the lighthouse keeper’s, now mine. It fits me better than bleach-stiffened dresses ever did.

“How do you tell?” he asks, as though I’ve responded. “Changes in the wind. The birds. The salt on the air. Perhaps your senses have dulled, along with your humor.”

I’d like to see him stay pleasant in my shoes. He can lecture and taunt all he wants through the veil of death. He doesn’t have a debt racked up with the damned.

He looms over the other side of the counter until the end of his blood-soaked beard almost tickles my forehead. He’ll stay persistent until Liney comes back inside. Sermons may have suited him better than solitude, given the judgment he rains down.

He can’t hurt me. Not how I’ve hurt him.

“Make yourself useful, if you must act up.” I point to one of the small windows across the room, near the chesterfield and fireplace. The lighthouse’s ground floor is only one large room, quartered by the kitchen counter. “The shutters have been stuck open all week.”

The lighthouse keeper doesn’t move. Droplets of blue-hued blood splatter onto the counter, inches from the cod’s exposed spine. I look up. My rough gash across his throat is dripping.

“Must you? Now?” I’ve become numb to his tactics, inconvenient as this is.

“Is my wound offensive to you?” His low voice is a pale echo of the night we met. The night he died. “Are you feeling culpable? Dare I hope, regretful?”

I swallow down an always-lingering spark of anger.

The lighthouse keeper is no more a threat than motes in sunlight or foam on waves.

I breathe out slowly through my nose. If I’m not careful, my rage may call on the dark power beneath the lighthouse.

It’s too great a risk to use frivolously, and I have no reason to believe it could touch a ghost. I’ll never risk my sister’s safety here on his account.

“Liney will be back any moment.” Her name usually distracts him. “Fix it. Do you want her to freeze in this storm of yours?”

She won’t see the bloom of blood that has spread across the counter.

It’s not her burden. Liney has no idea of the gruesome history on my hands.

She can never know all I’ve done to protect her, to bring her here.

She knows nothing of the lighthouse keeper’s fate.

In her mind, our parents are alive, searching for us.

I’ll do anything for my sister. Anything but tell her the truth.

The lighthouse keeper wrinkles his nose.

“Fine, I’ll do it,” I snap, throwing the second slab of cod aside. “And when I break them off completely and Liney gets frostbite, you’ll surely be proud of yourself for standing up when it counted.”

His pity for my sister is a helpful tool.

“Damnable wretch,” he mutters as he floats toward the window. If only his voice were as dead as his body. “She’s not safe here tonight. Put your hubris aside for once, and you might see what’s in plain sight. If not this storm, the next. A passing ship? An asthma attack?”

My jaw aches from the tension his conversation has caused. Nowhere is safe for Liney anymore. It’s a shame she must be in such isolation and under the influence of forces she can’t understand, but that’s exactly what will keep her from discovery.

He stops, gazing longingly at the stairs. The ones he climbed to the light every night to warn sailors away from our rocky shore. Now my stairs, my light, his tomb.

He believes he’ll forever haunt this lighthouse. He’s mistaken. He haunts me. Blakeney Pratterman, my infernal savior and debt collector, didn’t request him in our contract for the lighthouse. So long as I live and breathe, the ghost remains bound to me.

“You may control this island, girl, but your sister doesn’t. She deserves better.”

“Elle,” I correct. He never calls me by my name, nor offers his. “Liney’s place is here. This lighthouse can handle storms. Don’t think you can frighten me.”

The lighthouse keeper drifts through the opposite wall, and a moment later the shutters clatter closed. At least he’s good for something.

I cover the piece of cod with salt and sugar, then set it aside to be cooked tonight.

Normally I’d leave it out on the racks to dry, but that must wait until after the storm.

Should I trust the keeper’s instincts? He was a new wickie, full of bluster and laughter, when I came calling last year.

Yet he’s never been wrong about the weather.

The storm coming now, the night before the first anniversary of our arrival, ushers in memories I’ve long kept at arm’s length.

I woke Liney at the witching hour, only the hunter’s moon lighting our way out of the house.

I gripped her hand too tight as we snuck out and down alleyways.

Mr. Pratterman’s infernal power scorched under my muscles and behind my eyes.

We kept stopping for precious minutes to let Liney catch her breath, so I hitched her onto my back.

I followed instructions and found Mr. Pratterman’s boat at the edge of the harbor.

I rowed toward the lighthouse’s red beam between white-capped waves and lightning strikes, never tiring.

And I made a ghost out of a stranger as the rain pounded on the same window that I look through now.

The contract I made, even the blood I shed, was worth it. We escaped Thomas Seymour and his hold over our family. Once my fiancé, then Liney’s, but always the cruelest man I’ve ever known.

He was dashing and genteel and possessed all the right manners. He held my chair out for me when we ate together, plucked flowers from the front garden to put in my hair, and wrote me poetry in beautiful script.

But the chair was always pushed in too far, the rose’s thorns pricked behind my ear, and the lines were lifted from real poets.

My mother saw no problems in him. Only that I must have gained weight, that he mustn’t have noticed the thorns, and that it was the thought of giving me poetry that mattered, not the craft.

“Be grateful, Eleanor,” she said. “This isn’t a marriage of peers. Your father didn’t make such gestures to me, I assure you.”

I observed my parents in the following days.

My father finished my mother’s sentences, but she never did his.

My mother hovered like a hummingbird, always a heartbeat away from offering to fetch him a drink or cigar.

After guests left our evening soirees, my father would toss his dinner jacket on whichever surface was closest. My mother would shoo any staff who dared try to pick it up.

My mother lived in a world where subservience was a near-religious duty.

Thomas’s cruelty was the quiet sort. Never around others. Never causing a scene. Predatory.

While onlookers believed he whispered sweet nothings to me at the dinner table, his acrid breath on my ear instead brought promises of our future.

He took pleasure in how I’d squirm. I heard more darkness from his mouth than I ever would from Mr. Pratterman’s.

Promises of pain, of humiliation, of control.

My great-aunts would sigh from across the room. Oh, how Thomas dotes on you, they’d gush at teatime. That one will never leave your side. You are such a lucky girl, Eleanor.

But I knew the monster that waited for our bridal bed.

Married women served their husbands in such exhausting manners.

How had I never noticed the blush of trepidation on my mother’s face while my father judged her choice of dress or table setting?

How many times had my Great Aunt Agnes’s fingers trembled while offering her husband his cup of tea?

No one in my life saw Thomas as a threat. Worse, they wouldn’t care if they learned he was.

He brought me out to stroll across the back garden one summer evening. As my family tittered at young love, he dragged me into a dark corner of the trees that separated our property from the next.

He pressed me against the oak and kissed my neck, whispering intensely of grand plans with my father. Business I didn’t understand. A network of misery, something to do with my father’s company and new investors he’d brought on.

“Things will be different, Eleanor,” he promised in a harsh whisper between nips at my skin, “when I am lord.”

I looked up at the stars and counted backward from ten, over and over. I didn’t correct him that marrying me would grant him no title. I was planning how I’d explain the marks he left on me to our families. He had no similar concerns. I was already his possession in all but contract.

I scrubbed at my neck and décolletage until every inch of it screamed red. I told my family it was an allergic reaction to the oak the next day at breakfast. They humored me.

I was prepared to sacrifice. I always have been.

I breathe in through my nose, centering back to the present.

There’s no reason to fear him or our old life.

The lighthouse keeper can’t touch us, and neither can our parents.

So long as I fulfill the contract set by the true owner of this island, Mr. Pratterman, our savior and my infernal employer.

A man I hope never again darkens our doorstep or my dreams.

I’ll make codfish au gratin, Liney’s childhood favorite. She’d ask for cheesy chod at tea, and the cook would scramble to fetch the ingredients by supper.

We have a small supply of cheddar left that will spoil soon. It is a poor comparison to the rich sauce of her childhood, but Liney will love it regardless. Despite her passing fancies, she appreciates the little miracles of our home.

That’s settled. A treat.

For our first anniversary on Devils Island.