The squall hits at exactly the wrong moment, which is to say it hits when the ferry is trying to dock. The ferry has been moving for some time, maybe an hour, maybe more, the lighthouse coming nearer and nearer until it stands as a vertical giant against the sky that is not grey anymore but a slight orange with yellow-red clouds all over. The sun is rising at the horizon.
The light has stopped blinking a while ago as the night turned into dawn. The lighthouse is pale and thin and impossibly vertical against the low sky, rising from the black rock formation the way something grows rather than something built. It is older-looking than its history should make it, stone darkened unevenly by weather and time. There is a gallery around the lantern room, a thin iron railing at a height that looks, from this distance, like a dare.
I have been awake the whole night with Daniel who stood at the foot of my bed. When the ferryman sees me he looks at me surprised.
"Looks like you haven't slept the whole night. Was it difficult on the ferry?"
"I wish it was just that."
By the time we reach the approach to Sable Firth, the sea is running high and the wind has opinions.
I stand in the doorway of the cabin and watch the lighthouse approach through spray and grey-dark air, and I note, that it is larger than it appeared from the harbor town. Photographs do not convey the verticality of it, the way it rises from the rock formation with a confidence that suggests it has been here so long it no longer considers the sea worth acknowledging. The rock itself is black and wet and unglamorous, a rough platform extending perhaps thirty feet in radius from the lighthouse base, barnacled and salt-stained and deeply indifferent to human arrival.
The ferry contact, I still do not know his name and has stopped expecting to, brings us alongside a docking structure that has metal bollards set into the rock, a chain railing, a narrow walkway cut into the stone that leads from the dock to the lighthouse door. The boat moves with the swells in a way that makes the mathematics of stepping off it a moving problem, and the wind is doing something between a howl and a scream that my ears start tracking for human content out of reflex but find none.
"You'll want to go now," the ferry contact says, appearing beside me with my bag already in his hand, which I had not asked for. "Between swells. There's a rhythm to it."
"I can see the rhythm," I reply, which is mostly true.
"Wait for the third swell," he says. "Step on the pause."
The third swell comes and I step on it, which I almost do not make. I land on the dock with both feet and grab the chain railing with one hand, standing there while the world reorganizes itself around the fact of solid ground, and that also do not feel particularly solid. I do not understand why I find all this so difficult when I have been doing it for the most part of my life. All that hard trainings coming to zero only because of the past several months.
The ferry man throws my bag beside with precision which tells that he has done this many times, in many weathers, maybe for many people who also has made the same miscalculated step I did.
"Just keep yourself present on the Firth and I hope you complete your research and make sure to come tell me." He says as he waves at me, the ferry pulling back slowly. As I watch it go along with the ferry man, I suddenly feel, strangely for some reason, that I should have asked for a name at least, something to remember. I stand there for several moments with that strange feeling that I have no idea what to do with, while the ferry becomes only a suggestion at the distance.
When I turn back to the lighthouse, there is a man standing at the top of the walkway who, initially, was not there when I stepped off the boat.
He is tall, I would say a little taller than how Daniel used to be, wearing a coat the color of deep harbor water just before it goes completely dark, wool, heavy, clearly not new. His hands are in his pockets. He watches me with an expression that I cannot read from this distance while the light is still low and behind him. His body is entirely still which struck me as unusual given the harsh wind, that is doing significant things to everything around him. The railing chain is swaying, a piece of canvas clattering somewhere, spray lifting off the rocks in irregular gusts. Everything is in motion, except him. He is standing as though it is simply weather and he is simply here, and both things have been together for long enough that the relationship between them is settled, peaceful.
I walk up the walkway, because there is nothing else to do, nowhere to walk except up, towards him. I try to keep myself balanced in the kind of wind that is threatening in every way to push me off the stairway and onto the black rocks and into the water, while the man standing above starts to cast a shadow over me.
I stop when I reach what I think are the legs of the shadow. I look up and all of a sudden my world shrinks to the two dark orbs staring back at me. His eyes dark deeply set under heavy brows, the kind I suspect in better light wouldn't be black or brown but somewhere in the amber-dark range that photographs don't reproduce well. He has a strong jaw and is somewhere in the middle of his thirties, I suspect.
There is a scar along his left collarbone that disappears below his collar. It seems old, pale-edged, and I figure, not surgical.
He looks at me for a moment longer than is social and I realize I also have been staring. Then he reaches for my bag and for a moment, I pull away a little because all the way here I only thought of him as a potential killer that I have to investigate rather than a handsome man waiting for me outside who would help carry my bag.
He takes the bag from my hand anyway, without uttering a single word. He didn't ask or offer, simply reaches out and takes it, the way you take something heavy from someone who has been carrying it long enough that you don't need to discuss it. Then he turns and opens the lighthouse door, which is low and heavy and iron-banded, and he goes inside, and I follow, because there is nowhere else to go.
Its just me and him and the lighthouse in the middle of nothing but deep water surrounding us, and maybe Daniel at night, that I hope and pray in my head to be not true.