The Lighthouse, page 21
The rain picks up again as we reach a wider section of beach where the cliff stands tall at our backs and the clouds are low and angry. James begins to slow down, and that’s how I know we’re almost there. And it’s also how I know that James remembers more than he’s been telling us. He knows exactly where the cave is, and he’s afraid.
‘Oh.’ Jess stops walking and I almost crash right into her back. I drop my phone and scramble to pick it up.
Then I see it. There’s a section of the island that stretches further into the water: from above, it probably seems like a bundle of grassy earth. But from down here it looks more like a mouth, yawning and dark, over fifteen feet tall at the entrance I bet. What weak daylight there is seems to be being swallowed into the gaping hole, a black maw into which the sand and stones disappear. I’m glad we brought the torch.
‘Shit,’ Lucas says. He turns to me. I shrug. Lucas doesn’t really care what I think about this, so I don’t speak, but this does mean something. It means that at least some of James’s story is true.
Further ahead I can see the way the island creeps further out, the lighthouse standing on a pinnacle where the point of the land juts into the sea. A warning for all sailors heading this way: land approaches. Above, right above our heads, is the path we’ve been walking this weekend, from the lighthouse to the shack and back again. Traipsing back and forth, blindly. And right underneath our feet this whole time …
The cave.
‘I don’t want to go in there,’ Jess says. She’s holding onto Moira’s arm tight, hugging it like she might never let go. Even James looks reluctant. ‘I don’t care what I said before. I – I can’t do it. God, just the thought of all of that rock over my head …’ She looks like she’s about to lose it; Moira holds her tight.
‘James. Did you go inside on Friday?’ Kira asks.
James shakes his head.
‘No. No, I was out here. I don’t …’ He stops, clearly realising it’s pointless to lie any more. ‘I made it to about here. I could see the lights overhead, the lighthouse up there. Everything seemed so dreamlike, I told you. I just stood here for God knows how long, staring and staring at that – hole. And then … I blinked and she was there.’
‘You’re sure she came from the cave?’ Moira asks.
‘Almost certain, but I guess I could be wrong. But where else? I’d walked this way and the beach ends up there … I can’t see where else she’d have come from.’
‘What did she look like?’ I ask. ‘What was she wearing?’
‘It was dark. I don’t know.’ This time he isn’t lying. ‘I’m not entirely sure. Lightish hair, I guess; skinny. Baggy clothes. Her voice was rough, but it wasn’t deep. That’s all I know. It was too dark and she was all in my face, yelling, too close for me to take it in, and then too far away, and I was drunk, so drunk. And then she was gone and I didn’t … I didn’t stick around long enough to see where she went. I just … I just went back. And I tried to pretend I hadn’t seen anything at all. It felt like she was there. All the way back. But she wasn’t. She can’t have been. I don’t know.’
‘I’m not going in there,’ Jess says again, calmer now. ‘We don’t know what might happen. We can’t even call for help if somebody gets hurt. What if there’s a pool in there? What if somebody drowns?’
Moira pulls herself free from her wife’s grasp and squeezes her shoulders tight.
‘You don’t have to go in,’ she says. ‘You and Lucas stay out here. Keep an eye out, make sure that we’re okay. And if anything happens – you’ll have the radio.’
She gestures that I should hand it over. And honestly, I’m glad to be rid of the thing, hissing and spitting like that. I miss the peace and tranquillity of before, back when it was just energy – at least for us, if not James. Even the excitement I felt as we came onto the beach was better than the nervous bubbling I’m feeling in my belly now. It’s starting to feel like fear, even though I know there’s nothing to be afraid of. Ghosts don’t hurt people. James was probably just dreaming.
But, of course – what if she isn’t a ghost?
‘So the rest of us are going in then,’ Kira murmurs. She wipes a hand over her forehead to clear the rain that’s dripping under her hood.
‘We’re going to have to.’
‘Oh for goodness’ sake,’ I say. I’m not waiting around for the rest of them to make their minds up. ‘I’m going in. Give me the torch.’
I march across the sand, aware that the others are watching me, and then I hear James hurry to my side. The others – Moira and Kira, anyway – follow. I’m half convinced that we’ll get in here and there will be nothing except stagnant water and seagull droppings, but we won’t find out by standing around.
As we reach the mouth of the cave I realise that I was wrong before. The opening might be fifteen feet high, but it rapidly gets narrower. Ten feet, then seven. Lucas would be lucky to even fit. The walls are slick and wet from the rain at the entrance, but they seem to dry out as we go further in, the torchlight bouncing off them in shallow pools.
‘Watch your heads,’ I murmur. My voice echoes.
It’s not as cold in here as I thought it would be. Not as cold as the beach. The entrance to the cave isn’t just narrowing in height but in width, too, and it isn’t long before I could touch both sides without even stretching my arms all the way out if I wanted to. I’ve never been claustrophobic but I can feel it now, the sensation of all that earth and rock pressing in over my head, waiting to bury me.
I let out a breath, which turns into a small laugh. And I hear it echo in Kira, who releases a whoosh of air.
‘I don’t want to be here,’ James says quietly. ‘We shouldn’t be here. She told me to leave. She told me if anybody found out about her—’
‘Shh,’ I hiss. He shuts up.
The path is narrow but fairly straight. The sand is waterlogged underfoot but soon progresses to stone, polished pebbles and larger, more jagged rocks that don’t look inviting. I’m careful to avoid them and whisper to the others to watch their step.
And then the path starts to widen again. It’s not far enough in that I can no longer hear the roar of the sea and the whipping of the wind, but the light is gone, only my torch beam and the light from James’s phone behind me.
And then it opens up into a bigger space, an antechamber of sorts. A proper cavern, maybe fifteen feet high again, a strange oval shape. The energy in here is wild. I can feel it like a flame in my chest. It feels like life, like darkness. Like sadness. I’ve never felt anything like it.
My torch beam picks out sparkling flecks in the dark and grainy rock, and then I flick it down.
Kira is beside me. I can smell her body cream, feel her warmth more than I can see her. She makes another gasping sound, but this time it’s not laughter.
‘Do you see that?’ she says.
‘What?’ Moira asks.
‘It’s—’
I train my torch back down again, following the line of the wall until I find the ground, which is uneven in places but packed with dry sand. And then – blankets. Pillows. An old cast iron pan, and the candlestick from the shack.
My heart leaps but it’s not excitement now. It’s a bone-deep feeling, regret and fear mingling to make my blood freeze sluggish in my veins.
Not a ghost.
‘Somebody has been living here.’
30
Moira
‘You have got to be fucking kidding me,’ Kira mutters. ‘This is … What the fuck is this?’
I think of my wife, keeping vigil outside, and I’m so impossibly glad she didn’t follow us in.
James swings the faint light of his phone torch back and forth, picking up detail after detail. The blankets are thin and moth-eaten but there’s a bunch of them, layered thick. I force my eyes to peer into the dimness, to search every roll and divot in the cloth to make sure there isn’t a sleeping soul nestled somewhere deep inside them. The thought makes me feel a bit sick, that we’re even in here, that we’re intruding. That I don’t feel any less scared than I did before.
There’s a faint smell of burning in here and my eyes find the skinny pillar of a candle poking out of a small metal candlestick. I cross to it, my boots kicking up dry sand, and up close I can see that I’m right. It hasn’t been extinguished long, the wax still cooling and the scent of smoke still rife in the air.
‘Whoever was here hasn’t been gone long,’ I say.
‘What the fuck,’ Kira repeats. ‘Who …?’
‘Somebody’s been living here.’ James shuffles from one foot to the other. ‘She has been living here. This whole time. I bet she’s been here for ages. The builders, those stories they had about stuff going missing. I bet it was her.’
‘Who is she, though?’ Kira demands. ‘Why the fuck don’t the owners know about her? You can’t just – you can’t invite people to an uninhabited island if it’s not fucking uninhabited!’ She’s shouting now, her voice echoing, and I rush over to her.
‘Kira,’ I soothe. ‘Just calm down a second.’
‘I’m so fucking calm I can see the future,’ she spits.
‘I know. And it’s – it’s unbelievable. But shouting won’t help.’
I don’t say it, but we don’t know for sure yet that we’re on our own. Genevieve continues to scan the shape of the room with her torch but until I know that there’s no other way out of here, a crack or crevice we haven’t noticed, I don’t want us to make too much noise.
‘Just calm down,’ I say. ‘Breathe. Let’s look at this logically. We don’t know that this woman – whoever she is – is dangerous.’
‘Not dangerous?’ Kira scoffs. ‘She broke into the cottage. She smashed the mirror.’
‘And she didn’t hurt anybody.’ I clench my fists, trying to fight the nerves that are desperate to make my hands shake. ‘She told James to leave, she threatened him, but she never touched him. Did she, Jay?’
James shakes his head, a trembling silhouette in the darkness behind his torch beam.
‘No.’
‘Exactly.’
Genevieve wanders towards one of the walls and I watch her with half my attention, the other half fixed firmly on Kira, who looks like she’s about to break down into a puddle of tears.
‘Look,’ I say. ‘This is weird. We know this is weird. But … it’s human. Right? It’s not ghosts. We’re not being haunted by some … some … sailor’s widow or lighthouse keeper’s mother. This is just – human.’
Kira blinks slowly, her dark eyes very shiny in the dim light that criss-crosses back and forth as Genevieve kicks up blankets. She picks up something thin and white and holds it between two fingers, inspecting it.
‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ Kira says quietly. ‘Ghosts I can deal with. Ghosts aren’t real.’
‘And we’ll deal with this.’
‘Guys,’ Genevieve says. She lifts the object up to her torch beam. It’s a cigarette. I feel a tremble in my gut. It’s the kind of cigarette I would smoke if I was still smoking. The kind I bought and then couldn’t find.
‘And this.’ James picks up a book. Red, clothbound. Hardback. The book James has been leaving lying around the lounge all weekend.
‘Fuck that,’ Kira mutters. ‘Maybe we don’t know that she’s dangerous, but does this seem like the actions of somebody who isn’t unstable?’ She turns back to me again. ‘Does it? Stealing stuff? Breaking in and scaring the shit out of us? James said she was acting wild, threatened. Threatening.’
I can’t argue.
‘Let’s just keep looking,’ Genevieve says. ‘Maybe we’ll find something useful.’
James grunts and we fan out, kicking up more blankets. I discover a whole set of cutlery, old but still in good condition. There’s a cast iron skillet and a big, heavy black pot that’s filled with water, a metal cup and a Thermos-style bottle next to it that looks new.
‘Wonder if she took that when they were having the renovations done,’ I say. ‘Some of this stuff looks new, but the rest of it … I dunno, it looks really old.’
Kira doesn’t answer but she holds up a pair of rusted scissors in one hand. I feel a shudder of something like revulsion run through me. I can’t explain it but the idea of Kira and the others touching all this stuff when it doesn’t belong to them – when we don’t even know who it does belong to – feels incredibly wrong.
‘I’m not sure we should be in here,’ I say. ‘Like, I want to have a good look around like you guys do but it’s clear she isn’t here. It feels wrong. Intruding—’
‘Bullshit,’ Kira says. ‘She’s been intruding on us all weekend. This is just payback.’
Genevieve shakes her head. ‘It’s not about paying anybody back,’ she points out, her voice low. ‘I just want some answers. Don’t you?’
‘We don’t even have proof it was her,’ I say. ‘This feels – it’s just wrong. Okay? I’m just saying how I feel.’
‘If it’s not her, then who could it be?’ James gestures at the detritus of human life around us. ‘It’s not like there are a hundred people on the island. There’s us, and there’s her.’
‘That we know of.’
My words feel heavy, and having spoken them I realise that it’s what I’m really afraid of. It’s scary that this woman has been here all weekend, perhaps taunting us, trying to make us leave. But what proof do we have that she’s the only one?
‘Mo, what are you saying?’ Kira asks.
‘I’m saying that we don’t know for sure that she’s the only person here.’ I mirror James’s gesture, picking out piles of blankets, pillows, genderless clothes: shirts, trousers and sack-like dresses that look old-fashioned, as though they once belonged to somebody a long while dead. ‘Look, none of this stuff says it’s just one person living here. Jesus. I’m just pointing out that we don’t know for sure. It wasn’t long ago that we were thinking maybe the guy who brings the boat might have had something to do with it. Now we’re just ready to write everything off as being her? She could be in as much danger as us if there’s somebody else hanging around.’
James looks like he might be sick. He’s dropped the corner of the blanket he was lifting, exposing a sheet of blue tarp, and he folds his arms.
‘That’s not funny, Mo,’ he says.
‘I’m not trying to be funny. I don’t want to stay here. Please, let’s just go back to the lighthouse and try to get hold of somebody with a boat. Surely we must be able to get the emergency coastguard somehow? Do we have flares or anything? I don’t like this at all.’
‘I don’t think we need to rush off,’ Genevieve says quietly. ‘But you might be right. We don’t have any proof. And that shack – it looks like more people used to live there, doesn’t it?’
‘Exactly,’ I say. ‘Surely that alone is reason to leave?’
‘We don’t know why she left the shack though,’ Genevieve says. She doesn’t look as afraid as the rest of us: more thoughtful, although the glimmer of fear is there under it all. She is still inspecting the cave, her torch beam picking out a rug that’s been placed carefully over a thin, flat rock, a pile of leaves stacked there beside a wooden board with a knife laid carefully on top.
‘We don’t know that she ever lived in the shack,’ I reply. ‘And what does it matter?’
‘I think she did.’ Genevieve points at the candlestick. ‘I saw that there. The other night. I don’t know why I remember it but I do. And when I was there earlier I realised it was gone. Look at this stuff. It looks like stuff you’d have in a cottage like that. Some of it’s fairly rudimentary but the rest has been well-used.’
‘Well there’s nothing to say she didn’t steal it,’ I point out.
‘Is it even stealing if nobody owns it any more?’ James says. ‘Probably she just saw it and took it.’
‘But then why not stay there?’ Genevieve is pacing back and forth, nudging things with her toes and bending down occasionally for a closer look while the rest of us stand clustered by the tunnel back to the beach. I can feel a cool breeze snaking down my spine, my clothes drying slowly and crisping up with the salt from the air.
‘You mean, if she was going to steal things anyway, why not just stay in the shack and use it?’ I ask.
‘Exactly. If she had the motivation to steal, she’d also have the motivation to find somewhere warm and dry to sleep. This is fine, but it’s not exactly cosy. And it’ll only be worse in the winter. Now, if you took all this stuff up there and set it up in the cottage, I think that could be quite a nice life. There are probably rabbits and birds on the island you could eat. Plenty of fish. You could make a comfortable life here.’
‘And yet she’s living in a cave.’ James is shivering now, but whether with fear or the cold I can’t easily tell. I’m sure we’re all tormented by the same combination and it’s impossible to tell which is winning. ‘So there must be a reason for her being here and not up there.’
‘That’s exactly it,’ Genevieve repeats. ‘So why hide like that? And why does she want us to leave so badly?’
‘And you think we’ll find answers in here?’ Kira says. Her voice is cold but it’s tinged with curiosity.
‘I don’t care,’ I say. ‘Don’t you realise how dangerous this is? We need to go back to the lighthouse and try to get home.’
‘You were all for coming in here before.’ Genevieve is frowning in confusion. ‘I don’t get it. Why the one-eighty?’
‘That’s before we found this.’ I point indiscriminately. I can feel the panic worming up inside me right now and it feels like seaweed, slimy and thick. ‘Lucas and Jess are out there waiting for us. Can we at least go out and tell them that we’re okay?’
‘I just want to finish looking,’ Genevieve says.
‘No. Okay, you know what, you can do that. But I’m done. I’ve seen everything I need to see. I stand by what I said, Kira. There’s no evidence that whoever James saw on Friday is dangerous, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to dig around here in somebody’s life to try and figure out what on earth has driven them to live in a cave.’
