The interior of Sable Firth Lighthouse smells of lamp oil and salt and old stone and something under all of that which I do not immediately have a word for. It is not very unpleasant but still lingers on ones senses, strong and strange enough to make it's presence noticeable.
The ground floor is the utility level, storage, machinery access, the base of the spiral staircase that runs up the lighthouse's interior to the lantern room at the top. The stairs are stone, worn smooth in the center of each step by a hundred and thirty years of feet, with an iron railing that has been replaced at some point as it appears newer than the stone, still carrying traces of the original paint in the joints. The lighthouse is not that much wide, it could be wide as twice my height.
He led me up.
I count the stairs, which is a thing I do in unfamiliar structures, which I have learned and done many times in my jobs. There are forty-seven from ground floor to the first level, which is a storage and maintenance room. Thirty-one more to the second level, which appears to be a common room and kitchen of sorts. There is a table, two chairs, a cooking range that is both ancient and recently tended, a small window that shows nothing but the brightening sky and sea. Twenty-three more to the third level, which is where he stops and I almost bumps into him, being too overtaken by counting the steps.
There are two doors at the third level. He opens the one on the right.
The room is small, I would say tiny and perfectly round having the lighthouse's circular shape resolving into the interior space cleanly, with a porthole-style window looking out to sea. A bed, narrow but adequate. A writing desk, wooden, with a small lamp already lit on it. A hook on the wall. A rug on the stone floor that was not warm in color but was warm in its intention, someone had chosen it, at some point, for someone to stand on in the morning before putting on shoes.
He sets my bag down at the foot of the bed.
Then he looks at me, and I look at him, and the silence between us is the kind that I will be going to need to classify; either the silence of a taciturn person establishing baseline communication norms, or the silence of someone who has something to say and is deciding not to say it. I has not yet been here long enough to distinguish between those two silences in this particular person.
Then he finally says, "There's food at six." His voice hoarse and unfamiliar, distant.
And then he leaves.
I stand in the round room listening to his footsteps descend the stairs, which are precise and unhurried.
All right then. I can work with this. I think, briefly and immediately suppressed it, that his eyes in the lamplight has been darker than I'd estimated. Amber-dark. The color of old timber in firelight.
I would need to keep things professional as I am here to investigate in secret about this person, his intentions and what he has been doing here while his assistant keepers kept disappearing.
The lighthouse says nothing back, but I have the distinct impression that it is listening.
I set up my cover instruments first, because this is protocol and because having something practical to do with my hands is, Dr. Mellissa would say, a healthy coping mechanism, and I am choosing to agree with her on this one specific point.
The instruments are weather and atmospheric research equipment, and they are real, functioning, accurate, capable of producing data that would satisfy the scrutiny of a meteorologist. The bureau is careful this way. Nothing in my kit is fictional. The cover works because it is actually also the truth, just not the whole of it. I am here to document atmospheric conditions and weather patterns. I am also here to do approximately six other things, none of which appear in my cover documentation.
I set up the barometer and the anemometer and the portable atmospheric pressure gauge on the desk, where they fit with about two inches of clearance and a sense of optimism. I set up my personal recording equipment. They are three small devices, voice-activated, that I place at the window frame, behind the desk lamp, and inside the hollowed base of the desk lamp where they will survive a cursory search but not a forensic one. Standard deployment. I take out my field notebook and begin a location assessment, which is sixteen pages of preliminary documentation covering physical environment, access points, structural features, sight lines, and initial atmospheric readings. I am reading all this because I have to appear professional and not like a spy who is secretly investigating a person, who can be dangerous and with whom I am all alone.
I am on page nine when there is a knock at my door.
I am at the door in two seconds, notebook closed, pen capped, because that was how my job has worked over the year, someone who has been in enough situations where two seconds is the difference between being prepared and not. But when I open the door, there is nothing and no one there. There is a plate on the floor outside the door, bread, a thick soup in a sealed container still warm, a wedge of something hard cheese.
I look up and down the stairs. But nothing. If there are footsteps, I try to focus and am met only with silence apart from the waves crashing outside and the birds squealing.
I pick up the plate and eat at the desk, looking out the porthole window at the sea, which is clear now, the squall still working at the surface. The soup is unexpectedly very good and I wonder if it has been provided like this in sealed food or has it been cooked. After finishing my meal I take out my field notebook that I have put beneath the mattress and scribble in it.
Subject demonstrates atypical social presentation (my first encounter): further study needed.
That first night, I hear the light as I lay in my narrow bed with the mattress that is not too soft or hard but good enough to make your back feel comfortable. Since evening, I have been hearing the waves crushing with a sort of fury hitting against the rock formation and I guess the ferryman, whose name I didn't even ask, was right out the waters being too unstable at night.
I know intellectually that the lantern room is forty-five feet above me, one hundred and seventeen stairs from ground level, which I counted in my head from the architectural plan in the briefing packet. I know that it is running, that the modern augmentation maintained the original Fresnel lens mechanism. But knowing a thing and being in the acoustic radius of a thing are different kinds of knowledge.
The rotation is slow. Approximately one revolution every five seconds, I timed it, lying in the narrow bed in the dark, listening to the mechanical breath of it. Not a grinding sound, not a struggling sound either. Its a smooth, deep, rhythmic sound, like the turning of something very large and very certain. I could feel it, faintly, through the stone, a vibration at a frequency just below what you'd call a sound, more a suggestion of movement than movement itself.
It is very nearly hypnotic.
I lay in the dark and I listen to the light turning and I think about the briefing packet's list of keepers since 1889 and I think about three men who left their things on hooks and never came back and I thought about Aldric Vane lying on the black rock in the cold, dead. His death assumed to be due to cardiac dysfunction. "His heart stopped." That's what Harlow has said at the last moment, and I think about her reading glasses and the things she had not said.
And then I am almost… almost… asleep.
And then Daniel is standing at the window. The porthole window, round, almost twelve inches in diameter. Daniel is standing outside it and which means he is standing on nothing but air, above the sea, because this level of lighthouse does not have any external surface to stand on. Water is flowing, from his head to toe that I cannot see. He is lit from above, or from below, or from nowhere. But he is always lit in these dreams by a thin, cold light that comes from nowhere.
His mouth is moving.
And I scream that I am listening, I am always listening but the sound won't reach my ears or is it my brain that is not intercepting these waves.
His mouth moves and moves and moves.
The light turns above me and I wake with my face pressed against the cold porthole glass.
I am standing. I have walked from the bed to the window in my sleep, and my forehead is against the glass, and outside is just the dark sea and the foam and the weather working itself out across the surface of the water, and there is nothing in it. Nothing with a face, nothing with an open mouth.
I step back from the window and note the time in my pocket watch which says three twenty-one.