Chapter 25 Command
Command
Rain is falling outside in big splotches, leaving inky Rorschach patterns behind all over Cape Despair.
The little dark puddles all flow in a slow torpid funnel back into the gently sloshing sea.
The canopy created by the downpour numbs us to any of the noise around the lighthouse, as we are curled around each other on the stairs in all sorts of puzzling positions.
Much like the octopus trying to get into that bottle any which way it could, Lir is up between my legs in all sorts of curves and curls.
He’s contorting me like some sort of circus performer and he my overzealous ring leader.
My knee is up to my shoulder and wrapped over his back.
Both thighs gripped in his clutch, the soft flesh bending to his will.
He looks up at me with such heat and want, I fear I will never be able to deny him anything again.
Just as I was unable to deny his simple request for shelter from the rain today—and look where that got us.
I don’t think he even minds the rain, but it was a reasonable enough excuse to let him end up back on these stairs with me in his grip.
My head is falling backwards, about to squeal in the most delicious pleasure—when the door knob jiggles in the most alarming way.
“Lir!” I gasp. He hears it too and then a voice or two. “Oh my God!” I pull him off of me, a painful disconnection as the cold air rushes against my skin. I pull my dress down and push Lir up the stairs, panicking and blubbering for him to at least wrap the corner out of sight when the door clicks.
There goes our plan of watching the horizon, all I’ve been watching is the sky while laid up on my back.
The lock! I look left and right for a disguise, but it’s too late.
Who else even has a key to this place? This isn’t a place anyone would want to have a key for, it’s not a summer house at the beach.
I am straightening down my thin linen tunic that I hope will pass as a dress and tucking my hair behind my ears just when the large door swings open with a surprising force as it hits the wall beside it.
Lir’s tail slips just quick enough around the corner into my bedroom.
The silhouette of three men appears in the front doorway, their outlines blurred by the heavy rain. I scream breathlessly and begin to clamber up the steps when the man announces himself. “Madam! It’s Vice Admiral Peterson here. No need to run! I am but as surprised to see you here!”
The tall slender man removes his hat. The rain drips off his wax curled mustache and sputters all about with his frantic words.
He makes his way into the entry room and shakes off the hat that has been now rinsed of all its starch.
Gesturing for the two other shadowy figures to stay outside under the pathetic miniature awning.
As he speaks, he moves further into the threshold.
“I do not wish to crowd you Miss…but, if you would come down here and speak to me I would be much obliged.”
I look at Lir in the corner of my eye. He is tucked in such a twisted compression in the doorway of the bedroom, his tail braided and wrapped all around him to keep it from rolling down the steps like a rug.
There’s no hiding him if they come up the stairs, so I don’t really have a choice.
I straighten my wrinkled attire a little more and try to clear my throat into my most feminine voice.
My cheeks must be more than a little red from what we were doing just before we were disrupted.
“Hello, gentlemen. I am so very sorry for my outburst.” In my head I’m snickering because I don't think Lir has ever heard me talk like a lady. I sway my hips a little bit while walking down the steps. It can help get what I want, to be treated well, and hopefully to be left alone.
“Miss, we here are with Her Majesty’s Navy for which this lighthouse is under the jurisdiction of. You see—” That hat is now being wrung and crunched in his gloved hands. “Well you see, there has been some—disturbances, in the operation of the lighthouse that we were made aware of.”
“Disturbances?” I act aloof, as best I can, and probably fairly convincingly because in the end I don’t really know what has been going on either.
“Well yes, but it’s classified information for the operator of the lighthouse.
And that couldn’t be you, is he— may we—?
” He tries to push past me up the stairs but I instinctively block him.
I’m horrified with myself, to block a military officer, this must be some sort of crime.
To come out here under false pretenses is one thing, but I am being faced with the consequences of my actions head on as my arms press out against the brick on both sides of the hall—desperate to keep them from reaching Lir.
My mouth hangs open on its own for a moment, also shocked at what I’m doing.
“Oh! I am so sorry but my brother, Andrew—my twin brother is the lighthouse operator. When he wrote me that he had come down with some sort of chest influenza. When I heard, I just had to take the first boat out here.” He doesn’t look convinced.
“You can send correspondence to Mr Fritzguard at The F & H Shipping Company. He knows all about us being here, he can vouch for us—”
I shouldn’t be throwing him under the bus, but it will at least buy us some time.
I do not believe that dubious businessman will have any ethical issue with lying to the military, but he will most undoubtedly be annoyed at the intrusion on his business’s privacy.
He may even send his own brigade out here to drag me back as punishment. I shudder.
“That’s who we had correspondence with immediately upon the discovery of the disturbances. This Mr. Fritzgaurd, he encouraged us to come check on the status of the—uh—lighthouse.”
“He what—He!” I stutter. A lump rises in my throat, air only wheezing out in thin shrapnel shavings.
The Vice Admiral who is here invading my privacy, right here and now, moves closer.
Shortening the gap between us in my moment of panic.
I still attempt to block him with my face as he tries to peer this way and that.
“He is very contagious! You don’t want to go up there—” My voice shakes unconvincingly.
A booming over exaggerated cough rushes down the stairs behind me—flemmy and crackling, overall disgusting. I turn with my jaw dropped to listen to it as well. Lir wheezes like salt water is gurgling in his lungs. I think about his gills and realize that really might actually be what he is doing.
Grabbing my wrist the Vice Admiral pushes me aside a little bit. “He sounds horrible! Does he need to be relieved of his duty?”
“No. No! He’ll get better!” He looks at me unconvinced despite my trembling lower lip.
“We really need him to have this job…for my sick mother, yes!” He doesn’t need to know my mother died ages ago.
“I promise he’ll get better, he’s on the mend already, in fact.
” I try to think of some sort of way to prove this to the Admiral, I squint thinking about a trench coat—No, no that won’t work.
Our silly charade only worked last time because those two were idiots.
This man seems boisterous and flashy, but still has most of his brain cells I think.
“Aye.” Lir chimes in unconvincingly breaking the pause. It’s his fault for overdoing the illness noises that he even needs to speak. “I’ll be back to my post soon, Sir!” He calls down the stairs, imitating the man’s cadence which I’m learning is a special skill of Lir’s. He really is such a siren.
In false affinity, I run my hands down the front of the man’s soaked uniform as he leans over me, I look up blinking through my hopefully still alluring lashes. “Please, Mr. Peterson, Vice Admiral Peterson I mean.” I say with a pouted sigh.
He pulls at his collar which digs into his neck, “I will return in a few weeks to escort you home, personally. Then at that time, I will speak with your brother, privately. I do not believe he was ever fully inundated on all the quirks of the lighthouse. I will have to give him a sort of orientation or decide at that time, if he is even fit to be stationed at such an operation.”
Trying to be agreeable, I nod frantically, “Yes. Yes, please. Thank you. Thank you so much.” I will have to decide later how to solve the problem of ‘Andrew’, but maybe I’ll tell him I went—I mean his sister went home already on a boat when he returns.
Maybe, it’s time I shear off my hair again. I look at the Admiral’s comical mustache, a fake one made from my own hair couldn’t look much worse. Hm.
I question if I should inform him of the two men that came last week…
or the light in the distance. He definitely doesn’t need to know about the visiting merman.
I seal my lips up with all the strangeness, I want these men to leave as soon as possible.
No more investigations, nothing to make them think they need to take over this place, at least not this very second.
I need just a little more time, just a little more of Lir and then I can live the rest of my life perfectly content as a lonely old hag.
The Admiral interrupts my spiraling thoughts, “In any case, it seems the—” He looks down at the floorboards, a soft steady hum radiating up through them.
He sputters out, “Lens! The lens is operating smoothly now since the reported disturbance.” He begins to step out of the threshold to put on his now completely deflated lump of a hat.
I follow him, matching his every footprint, still feeling like he will rush past me to Lir. “I will see you soon again, Ms…?”
I’ve run out of lies and blurt out, “Andrea.”
“Ms. Andrea, I will return for you,” he says as a command, not a question. Lir starts again on those horribly convincing coughing noises, the man raises an elbow over his nose disgusted. “Goodbye Ms. Andrea, I do pity you, and your—um, brother.”
He cranes his neck to look up around the corner of the stairs one last time, but I quickly push him out the door. “He’s very infectious!”
Leaning in and I fawn a little to distract him momentarily, he takes just enough backwards steps to get out the door. “Yes. Goodbye sir, thank you for your concern.”
The Admiral leans down close to my face, his breath warm against my skin.
I wince from the familiarity. Screeching above us, it sounds like nails on a chalkboard, or perhaps it’s merman claws on a window…
one who wishes to crawl out and skin this man.
I laugh nervously, “Old brick! Creaking, settling. You know how it is.”
Hesitantly, I allow him to kiss my knuckle and I can feel the wedding ring beneath his gloved hand that grasps mine a little too tightly, beneath his mouth that lingers a bit too long.
Disgusting, he leans into my feminine wiles acting like a prince who will sweep me up out of here, but has a wife back at home.
Turning quickly, he goes along with his men back to their ship.
Of course, only now visible at the dock.
A shiny new Royal Navy vessel, a fucking dreadnought the same width of the island at my doorstep practically.
I can’t believe we didn’t hear it. Shows how… involved we were when it arrived.
I slam the door behind me with a grunt. Yelling up the stairs to Lir and to the universe in general, “Will we now be visited by every ship in the goddamn ocean that chooses to just drop in.” A whole ruckus erupts with my stomping feet up the winding steps.
“Three years, three years of no unannounced visitors Lir. Then you show up—”
I push open the door with a too powerful jut and its moulding shakes, along with a few loose rocks and powdered cement which shower down onto me. I want to be mad, but I am met by the delightful sight of Lir flopped across my bed. A vision I had dreamt about so many lonely mornings.
He’s sitting up with his arms crossed against his broad chest. Mostly in shadow, his deep mahogany skin blends in surprisingly well with his surroundings.
Well, other than his eyes which glow brightly from the lamp in the hall, like an animal’s gaze reflecting the lights from an automobile in the night.
He sits there still in the growing twilight that falls across the room, stalking my every move.
“Do you want me to sink his ship, Andrea?”
“What? No. We can’t do that.”
“I can and I would.” He turns his head to look out the window to watch the boat disappear into the southern horizon. “I hate how he touched you so casually. I wanted to tear down this whole building.” His face looks solemn then, “Did you want—to leave with that man?”
“No! Of course not.” I look at him more shocked at that statement than the idea of him sinking an entire military ship.
Sitting on the side of the bed, I place my hand on Lir’s. The mattress is clutched in his palm, distorting it into a strange shape. The warmth radiating off of him could sizzle the rain outside. It almost burns while I rub his hand to comfort him and myself.
“What are we going to do about him?” I wanted to ignore that whatever-the-fuck is in the basement, but I guess I’ll have to investigate it if I want us to be left alone on my rock. We can’t keep from messing with it, from disturbing it if we don’t even know what it is.
Lir reaches up and holds my face, pinching my cheeks between his thumb and pointer finger. “Him? I don’t want to hear about him anymore. What am I going to do with you?”
“Me?” My voice cracks in surprise.
“Yes, you. I know you had to act like that to get him to go away but I hate that he touched your hand even. That he was close enough for you to smell like him now.” He pulls my face close to his.
“I’m going to mouth you all over until it is washed away.
Until his undeserving touch is cleansed from your flesh. ”
I gladly accept my fate.