Ashes

LAST WRITES

Ah, the vanity of the living.

Just look at him.

He sits on the upper floor and surveys the flat sweep of ocean. The sea is weak, exhausted from a night of stretching, yet he watches as if some catastrophe will occur at any moment. True, ships have sunk here in sight of shore on the calmest of summer days, but not on this man’s watch. All he knows is what the logbook has told him and what he has gleaned from the tales of those who sent him here.

He will not learn, and he has time ahead of him. His eyes may become bleary and strained, he will grow lonely, he will think things that no normal man should. Yet, when his term is over, he will rejoin the sweeping tide of the living and give this place little thought. He will leave this place, and that is why I hate him. That is why I must become a part of him, invade his thoughts and dreams. We each seek to become immortal, and I must live on through him.

He imagines himself a lighthouse keeper, yet he keeps nothing. He comes and he goes, like the others. And still I shall remain. I am the real keeper here.

He fancies he knows of solitude. Sitting there in his bamboo chair, with his lantern and bottle of spirits. The labels have changed over the years, grown more colorful, but the bottom of the bottle still speaks the same words. The speakers of several languages have sat in that chair: Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, but mostly English and Spanish. Yet the language is the same to me. Theirs is the language of the living.

This one is handsomer than some of the others. He has sideburns clipped close to the lobe, beard trimmed in a fashion I haven’t seen before. He is young. They get younger every year. Or perhaps I am older. Please, merciful God, let me be older.

The object on the table beside him emits a purring sound, like that of a cat stuck in a sewage drain. The man puts the object to his ear as if it were a conch and speaks.

“ Hello, Norfolk Lighthouse.”

He pauses, listening. If it were a conch instead of the strange object, he would be hearing the roar of the ocean. Or the blood rushing through his head. Sometimes those two things are the same.

“ Hi, Maleah,” he says, his face changing instantly, lifting into a bright and open expression.

Maleah. A pretty name. It sounds of Hawaii, that Pacific island region of which sailors sometimes speak. She must be as beautiful as her name.

I hate her, for she occupies him.

I go to the window, stick my head in a sea breeze ripe with the scream of gulls, but I can’t drown out his words.

“ I miss you, too,” he says. “But it’s only for a year. And I’ll get a lot of writing done while I’m here.”

His other hand, the one not holding the non-conch, goes to the bottle. He nods, sips, glances at the window. At me.

I rattle the shutters. Perhaps I am getting older. I don’t bang them with the same enthusiasm of a couple of centuries ago. Still, paint sloughs off and bits of stucco dust fall to the beach far below.

“ Maleah,” he says into the conch-thing. A telephone, they have called it. “Something weird is happening.”

Now I am “something weird.” I would sigh if I had breath. But I must do this the hard way. Just like always.

I knock on the door to the upper chamber. I stand on the winding staircase, the yawning gap of darkness that leads to a pale, gleaming light far below.

The door swings open, the strong stench of spirits marking his breath, and I see his stricken face-as stricken as mine, surely, and then I fall again, far, far, far. As I fall, I smile. He has forgotten Maleah and thinks of me.

Sooner or later, they all dream only of me. To the last.

I wasn’t always like this. When I was alive, I walked the beach in search of shark’s teeth and pretty shells. In bare feet, dawn fast and pink on the horizon, the water licking at my ankles with a gentle, foaming tongue. The lighthouse was a marker, a means to measure the distance I had walked from the cottage I shared with my doting, deaf parents.

Usually, I turned back when the lighthouse window was clearly visible, though on foggy mornings I might not see the towering structure until I was nearly upon it. On those days, a single bright lantern would burn in the uppermost window, serving as a guide for ships that might be daring the narrow passage. I was a ship myself, a vessel with an empty hull, as lost as any rudderless cutter.

On the day I died, I decided to keep walking, though the tide had run out and my parents would be waiting for me to sweep sand from the floors, cook mackerel, and air the mildewed blankets. I loathed the smell of fish. It permeated the walls, and driftwood smoke would leak through the fireplace stones and sting my eyes. That morning, I couldn’t bear the claustrophobic cottage. The day was warm and pleasant, with only a few thin strips of clouds in the blue sky. My feet carried me farther along the shore than I had been in years, to the north, toward the lighthouse that had been built before my birth. My passion for solitude could scarcely have been more gratified.

My father told me strange tales surrounding the lighthouse-how men who kept the light burning through the dark hours somehow lost some of their own light, so that when their year of duty was over, their eyes were dry and hollow, their faces lacking in emotion, their tongues slow to speak. Through the years, several ships had run aground in the shallows, while others had cracked their spines on the rocky outcroppings to the west. Perhaps the memories of those failures haunted the lighthouse keepers, though not every man had witnessed a tragedy. Perhaps it was merely the lengthy solitude that turned them into dull, haggard beasts.

The lighthouse towered before me that day, bright as sand as it stretched higher and higher into the sky with my every step. It was capped with copper that had long ago turned dull green. The masonry that from a distance had seemed solid revealed itself to be covered with spidery cracks, iron bands girding the base. As I grew nearer, I detected rust on the hardware of the single oaken door set in the rounded base of the structure.

The door had a large metal knocker in the center. The keyhole in the door handle was like the black eye of a dead shark. Sand skirled in the breeze around the base of the door, and cool, fetid air oozed from the cracks between the oak planks. I touched the wood, wondering about the man behind. I tapped the door and a hollow echo sounded inside.

In the little fishing village where my parents were born, two miles from the lighthouse, the people often spoke of lighthouse keepers who were only seen in daylight, on those rare occasions when they replenished supplies. The keepers were an odd lot, unkempt and wild-eyed, given to excess whiskey. The keeper position rotated by the calendar year, though sometimes stories emerged of those who had been unable to endure the loneliness and turned up raving in the streets, shouting about shipwrecks and sea monsters and Neptune with a forked trident riding in on the backs of deformed porpoises.

I thought perhaps one of those madmen was inside that morning, high above me, far removed from the smell of mackerel. What strange tales he might share. And I, at eighteen, was as much at a loss for company as any man who had ever consigned himself to that upper chamber. I lifted the knocker and brought it down hard against the strike plate. The only sound in reply was the reverberation inside the base of the lighthouse, the whispering of the surf, and the distant cry of a gull.

I knocked again, looking back toward the point where my parents’ house lay. Desperation fueled my hand as I worked the iron ring. I think I even started to weep, but I can’t be sure, because the sea air was salty and that was centuries ago. But at last there came a turning in the works of the door, and it creaked open.

I found myself facing a man of dark countenance, with black, haunted eyes and a large, pale forehead. He was perhaps twenty, though his eyes looked far older than that, as if he had witnessed tragedies in abundance. His hair was swept away from his brow in a wild manner, like a tangled tuft of sea oats. He wore a vest and a white shirt, both stained and rumpled. The smell of drink hung about him like a mist.

“ Do you know how many steps I had to climb?” he said.

I gave him my sweetest smile, though I’d had little practice in that art. Despite his grave expression, he was handsome.

“ I live around the point,” I said, “Since we’re neighbors-“

“ I have no need of neighbors,” he said. “I wish to be alone.” But I caught him staring past my shoulder at the shoreline. The beach was empty, for the coral was sharp and discouraged bathers, and the currents here were too rough for putting out fishing boats.

“ I was wondering if I could see the view from up there,” I said, leaning my head back to look at the windows far above. “I’ve lived here all my life but I scarcely know what the place looks like.”

“ I have my duties,” he said. “I’ve no time for guided tours.”

“ Please, sir, I will only be a moment. Just one look. And I came all this way.” I smoothed the lap of my dress, a gesture I had seen women use in church when speaking to men they wished to flatter.

He seemed to reflect for an instant, and his eyes grew softer. “Hmm. You remind me of someone I once knew. Perhaps I can spare some time. But you must promise to be careful. These stairs are wretched.”

“ I will take care, sir.” As I followed him inside, I couldn’t help smiling a little. Perhaps I had an untapped gift for getting my way. It is something I have perfected over the years. Something I grew better at after I died.

The base of the lighthouse was hollow, with a well perhaps forty feet deep. The metal stairs wound up into the gloom, and I could see why he thought them treacherous. He had left an oil lantern by the foot of the stairs, and carried it while he returned to close the door. The lantern threw long, flickering shadows up the curved wall of the lighthouse.

“ Come along,” he said, offering his hand as he mounted the stairs.

“ I think I shall hold the rail,” I said, believing myself coy.

He held the lantern below his face, and in his position above me, the flame made the dark creases in his face even more somber. “Very well. Let me know if you tire.”

We navigated upwards, his shoes thundering on the narrow metal steps. I followed close behind, watching my feet. He turned once to check on me, and seemed satisfied that I could keep my balance. We were perhaps halfway up when he paused, breathing hard. I was in better shape due to the great distances I had to walk to the village. He held the lantern high, and I glanced down at the great black space below. I gasped despite myself, and a smile came to his lips. It wasn’t a cruel smile, but a playful one.

“ It’s difficult the first few times, but it gets easier,” he said.

“ You haven’t told me your name,” I said.

“ Poe,” he said. “From Baltimore. And yours?”

I wasn’t prepared to tell him yet. I was still wary of what the villagers might think if he went around reporting that I had visited him alone. Word would also get back to my parents, and while I resented their control of me, I still loved them and wished them no additional worries on my behalf.

“ Mary,” I said, the first name that came to mind. Only later, after my death, would he know my true name.

“ Mary. One of my favorites.”

We continued our climb and eventually reached a small trap door at the top. While I didn’t count them that morning, in subsequent years I have made note of each step. There are 136, all of them narrow and slow and worn by thousands of footsteps. Not mine, though. Since that morning, I don’t use them. Now, I float.

He went first, then helped me up with a strong hand. Poe’s watch chamber was sparsely furnished. A table and a chair were on one end of the round room, a logbook of some type on the table, a quill pen and inkwell beside it. Papers were piled beneath the logbook, and a collapsed telescope lay across the open pages of the book. A bunk sat low to the floor at the other end of the room, a walnut trunk at its foot, presumably to contain his clothes. A cabinet stood near the trunk, filled with bread, dried meat and fish, apples, and several rows of corked bottles filled with amber liquid. A chamber pot, covered indiscreetly with a board, was off to the side. Empty bottles were scattered beneath the bunk, and the cramped room had the same spirited aroma that surrounded the man, combined with the cloying stench of the chamber pot.

Poe waved one florid hand to the three windows facing the seaside. “There’s your view,” he said, then sat in the chair by the logbook.

The flat, gray water stretched for miles, the horizon farther than I had ever seen it. The ocean seemed to curve, and distant full-sheeted masts protruded from the water like tiny clusters of white flowers. The shoreline stretched in either direction, the north sweeping more gently, the south broken by crags and cays. The natural breakwater of which ships’ captains were afraid was black and sharp, gleaming like wet teeth. I took in the view for some minutes, not remarking.

“ One gets bored with it after a while,” Poe said. He uncorked one of the bottles and poured some of the liquor into a glass. He drank without offering me any.

“ Are you not a lover of the sea?” I said. “I would have thought someone taking a post such as this-”

“- must be as mad as a hatter,” he said, looking glumly into his glass. “Four months here, and I’ve barely even started.”

“ I don’t understand,” I said.

He gestured toward the papers on the table. “My work.”

“ You keep a record of the currents, tides, and ships?”

“ Not that work. I meant my writing.”

“ You are a writer, then?”

“ Yes. I used to be a newspaper reporter. But I’m driven to write of false things. I thought with a change of scenery, and blessed isolation…”

“ You have plenty of both here, I imagine. I know something of isolation myself.”

He gave a grim smile, as if his loneliness were the deepest in all the world and weighed most heavily on his shoulders. He drank more liquor, in gulps instead of sips, and refilled his glass. My legs were trembling from the long climb, but the only place to sit was his bed. I had never been in a man’s bed.

“ Isolation is the devil’s tool,” Poe said. “I want to concentrate on my work, but one hears things in this damnable cylinder. The rush of high tide sounds like voices in the chamber below, like the soft cries of those who have been pulled under the water. Think of all those ships lying on the ocean floor yonder, and the white bones of those who went down with them. Where do you suppose they go?”

For the first time, I had an inkling of the man’s instability. His brooding good looks became sharper and fiercer, his eyes flashing with a morose anger. Beyond the windows, the clouds had gathered and grown darker as if to match Poe’s mood. A squall was pushing in from the sea, and the cutters spread across the sea had taken down their sails as the wind increased.

“ A storm is blowing in,” I said. “Shouldn’t you light the lamps?”

He said nothing, just wiped at his chin.

“ The current shifts here with these spring storms,” I said. “Surely you were told that by your employer.”

“ Damned De Grat. He should have known I could never tolerate this place-or my own company-for an entire year.”

Wanting to pull him from his mood, not yet ready to trouble him to lead me back down the stairs, I asked what he was writing.

“ It’s about a shipwreck.”

“ Shipwreck?”

“ A ghost ship. With a morbid crew.”

I laughed. “One hears plenty of those tales. I found a paper in a corked bottle once, washed up on the beach.”

His eyebrows arched. “What did it say?”

“ The water had gotten to it.”

“ It always does,” he said, with the air of one who had floated many futile messages.

“ Can I hear the story?”

“ It’s no good,” he said. He tapped the rumpled pages beneath the logbook. “This may be the last thing I ever write.”

“ Have you been published?” I asked.

A smile slithered across his moist lips. “Some poems.”

“ Please, read me one.”

“ It’s not fit for ladies,” he said, and I wondered how much of his gallantry was due to drunkenness. He closed the logbook and passed it to me. I opened it to the first page. I’d had some schooling in the village, but could read little. He had started entries on January first. His handwriting was florid and bold, the words scrawled with an intensity that matched his features.

He took it from me. “’January two,’” he read. “‘I have passed this day in a species of ecstasy that I find impossible to describe. My passion for solitude could scarcely have been more thoroughly gratified. I do not say satisfied; for I believe I should never be satiated with such delight as I have experienced today. The wind lulled about daybreak, and by the afternoon the sea had gone down materially. Nothing to be seen, with the telescope even, but ocean and sky, with an occasional gull.’”

“ That’s lovely,” I say. I know nothing of poetry.

“‘ January three,’” he continued. “ A dead calm all day. Towards evening the sea looked very much like glass. A few seaweeds came in sight; but besides them absolutely nothing all day, not even the slightest speck of cloud.’”

“ Much like this morning, only now the wind is picking up and there’s a swell rising.”

He closed the book and stared out at the sea for a moment. “What do you know of murder?” he asked, appraising me, his eyes gleaming.

“ Very little,” I said. “I can’t imagine such a horrid thing.”

“ I can,” he said. “Far too easily. The mind of man is a foul, corrupt thing. And when a man is alone with his thoughts…”

He drained his glass again, refilled it, spilling a few drops on the table. “But forgive me,” he said, louder. “I forget my manners. You are a guest and I have made you stand.”

He rose unsteadily from the chair and sat on the bunk, indicating with his glass that I was to take the chair. I hesitated, afraid to linger but also wary of his wrath. I sensed he could be set off with but the slightest provocation, and I began to regret my bold adventure. The sky outside had grown even darker, and though it was scarcely noon, the ocean and sky merged on the horizon into a single bruised color, clouds whipping like rags on a line. The wind screamed at the gaps around the windows, and from below came the dull roar that the man imagined were the voices of the dead.

I shivered, though the room was warm. “I must be getting home,” I said. “My parents are waiting, and I dare not get caught out in this storm.”

“ Why don’t you stay until it blows over?” he said, leaning back on the bunk a little. Men who worked with shipping had a certain reputation, and I suspected this man was no different. Though part of me had longed for some romance resulting from my encounter with a lighthouse keeper, I didn’t want to suffer the rough attentions of an animal. The desire for solitude in itself did not make a man sensitive.

“ They’ll be expecting me,” I said. I took a tentative step toward the trap door, loathe to negotiate those many steps again without a lantern.

Poe grabbed my arm, and his eyes were dead as coal. “I can’t be alone anymore,” he said. “Don’t you hear them?”

I tried to pull away, but his was the grip of a lunatic. “Please,” I implored, silently cursing my recklessness in coming here. A barren life on a lonely strip of shore was better than no life at all, and the excitement I had craved was now full upon me, but I wanted it no more.

“ The voices,” he said with a hiss, his face clenched, sweat clinging to that high, broad forehead. “With every storm they come, the souls of the shipwrecked and lost at sea.”

As the wind picked up, I thought I could hear them, but perhaps it was only the roaring heartbeat in my ears. I wrenched free, desperate and afraid. He grabbed at me again, and I dodged away. He howled, the mad sound blending with the wind until it filled the watch chamber.

“ Don’t leave me,” he shouted, diving toward me. I stepped backward, into the space of the open trap door, falling to the top step and then into the yawning black abyss, toward those tormented voices at the base of the lighthouse.

I stayed with Poe for the remainder of his term. He disposed of my body, of course, weighed me down by slipping scrap iron into my dress, and set me out to sea in the early morning dark of high tide. I came back with the tide the next night, watched as he brooded with his bottles and occasionally scrawled barely legible words on his papers. I read his logbook over his shoulder, what I could of it.

I waited until he fell into a restless sleep before I began whispering. Poe was right, those voices in the well of the lighthouse were of the dead, and I both imitated and joined them. Poe tossed in his sleep, sweated like driftwood, and finally woke. “Who’s there?” he asked.

I told him my name, as I told all of them my name in the years and centuries to come. He finished his story, wrote poetry, and drank to forget me, though he could not forget the one who was his constant companion. He had come to the lighthouse to be alone, but in the end, that was the last thing I allowed him. He read to me from his journal: “It is strange that I never observed, until this moment, how dreary a sound that word has: ‘Alone.’”

And though Poe left at the end of the year, I imagine I haunted him for the remainder of his days. I longed to be the last thing of which he ever wrote.

The sun has risen on a new year. The watch chamber has changed little, though now the lights are electric. I learned from the living as my days ran together, as the lighthouse keepers became park rangers and oceanographic researchers and meteorologists. They brought computers, radars, radios, and televisions, sounds and pictures that compete with the eternal beauty beyond the windows. The ships have changed, no longer using sails, some hovering over the water as if on cushions of air. However, the sea has changed little, and I have changed even less.

In recent years, the occasional paranormal investigator appears, laden with equipment, but they are not as interesting because they too willingly believe. This year, a woman occupies the watch chamber. Over the last century, women have become more common, though usually the chamber is still operated by sole sentinels. I prefer it that way. They end up lonely while I always have company.

I go to her now, my dress like a sheet of torn vapor, my hair trailing, my fingers scarcely visible and cold. I tap on the window, whisper like the wind, aching to know my new companion.

She looks up from the computer and frowns at the sunset on the horizon. She doesn’t yet understand that I am the horizon, the point between the dead and the living. Where, as Poe said on one of those long nights we spent together, the moon never beams without bringing him dreams. All of them dream of me sooner or later. I grow more solid with the sinking of the sun, and I smile as I drift into the chamber.

She pushes back in her chair, the wheels squeaking like frightened rats. She doesn’t believe her eyes. They never do.

“ Who are you?” she says.

I almost call myself “Mary,” but that deception rang hollow centuries ago. As I told Poe, I want to be remembered as my true self, not as another.

“ My name is Annabel Lee,” I say.

I’ll be with her until the end of both of our days. As with Poe, my first and always, she will make me immortal.