I had mastered a technique during my rebellious youth: the best way to fight sentimentalism and despair is, undoubtedly, to approach the problem in a clinical way. I devised the following hypothesis: you’re dead. You find yourself on a cold and lonely island far from salvation. “You’re dead, you’re dead,” I repeated out loud to myself as I waved a cigarette. “This is how things stand: you’re dead. That means that if you don’t make it, you won’t have lost anything. But if you manage to survive you will have gained everything: life.”
We should never underestimate the power of solitary thoughts. That cigarette magically transformed into the world’s best tobacco. And the smoke coming out of my lungs was the symbol of someone who has resigned himself to fight another Thermopolis. Yes, I was worn out, but the fatigue soon dissipated. As long as I was still tired with my eyelids drooping like lead weights, I was alive. What had led me to that isolated spot didn’t matter anymore. I had no past, no future. I was at the end of the world, in the middle of nowhere and far from everything. After smoking that cigarette, I felt infinitely distant from myself.
I had no illusions about my prospects. To begin with, I didn’t know anything about the monsters. So, as the military manuals say, it was a worst-case scenario. Would they attack by day or night? All the time? In packs? With chaotic perseverance? How long, with my limited resources, could I hold out alone against a horde? Obviously, not very long. It was true that Gruner had managed to survive. The lighthouse was as solid as a fortress: the little house got more flimsy each time I looked at it. One thing was certain: I didn’t need to ask what had happened to my predecessor.
As things stood, I had to plot some line of defence. If Gruner’s fort was up in the sky, I would dig a trench in the ground. The plan was to surround the house with a moat filled with wooden spikes. That would keep the creatures at a safe distance. But the problem was time and energy: a lone man would need the strength of a mule to hollow out that much terrain. On the other hand, I had seen the monsters’ pantherlike movements firsthand – the trench would have to be deep and wide. And I was exhausted, not having had an hour’s sleep since my arrival. To make matters worse, I wouldn’t get any rest if I was constantly working and defending myself. There were two options: be killed by the monsters, or die mad from the physical and psychological strain. It didn’t take a genius to see that the two fates converged. I decided to simplify the task as much as possible. For the time being, I would concentrate on digging big holes beneath the doors and windows. I hoped it would be enough. I excavated some semicircles and filled them with sticks. After carving the wood into points with a knife, I drove the stakes down deep, spikes facing the sky. Most of the sticks were dragged off the beach. While I was by the water collecting wood, it occurred to me that the monsters’ shape and webbed hands gave every indication that they came from the sea. In that case, I said to myself, fire would be a primitive but very effective weapon. It would put the theory of opposing elements into practice. And since everybody knows that all beasts have an innate fear of fire, I could only imagine the scale of its effect on amphibious creatures.
I built up my defences with stacks of wood, throwing all the books on top. A paper fire isn’t as steady but it burns more intensely. Maybe that would give them a nasty jolt. Farewell, Chateaubriand! Farewell, Goethe! Farewell, Aristotle, Rilke and Stevenson. Farewell, Marx, Laforgue and Saint-Simon! Farewell, Milton, Voltaire, Rousseau, Góngora and Cervantes. How I revere you, dear friends, but art can’t go before necessity; you’re words. I smiled for the first time since the whole nightmare began as I stacked the piles, doused them with petrol and made bundles to add on to the future bonfire. I smiled because I had discovered while doing all this that one life, specifically my own, was worth more than the complete works of all the great thinkers, philosophers and writers of humankind.
Finally, the door. Trenching and staking out the entrance presented the clear disadvantage of blocking my own exit. So, before doing anything else, I constructed a wooden plank to bridge the gap. But I couldn’t go any further, I was at my limit. I had hollowed out the earth below the windows, collected sticks, made them into lances and driven them into the ground. I had made mounds of wood and books, melding them with a stream of oil. The sun was going down. You could find fault with my reasoning, but not my instinct. Night was coming, and some gut instinct told me that darkness is ruled by butchers. Wake up, wake up, I said out loud to myself, don’t fall asleep. There wasn’t much water, so I splashed my face with gin. Afterwards, a void. Nothing was happening; I treated the blisters I had got on my hands from the burning log and the scratches on my neck, a souvenir of those killer claws. The pit beneath the door wasn’t finished. It was the least of my worries. I had a solid barricade thanks to the heavy chests in my baggage.
I said before that the letter almost got me killed. It’s one way of looking at it. That letter was the reason I had left two crates untouched. I opened them in that moment, mostly because I was afraid of falling apart if I relaxed. And I’m convinced that no one has ever, anywhere, felt such happiness as when I opened that rectangle of wood. I lifted off the cover, ripped the cardboard and found two Remington rifles wrapped in straw. The second crate contained two thousand bullets. I got down on my knees and cried like a child. It goes without saying that it was a gift from the captain. We had shared our ideas about the world on the voyage out and he knew how much I hated soldiers and anything military.
“They are a necessary evil,” he would tell me.
“The worst thing about the military is that they are infantile,” I answered. “The supposed honour of war boils down to being able to tell everyone about it.”
We had lots of late night conversations and he knew that if he offered me a gun I would refuse it. So the captain discreetly added those crates to my luggage at the last minute. With fifty men like the captain I could found a new country, a free nation, and call it Hope.
Darkness fell. The lighthouse beam was lit. I cursed Gruner, Gruner. That name would be forever linked to dishonour. I didn’t care if he was crazy, all that mattered was that he had known about the monsters and didn’t tell me. I hated him with the fervour of the powerless. There was still enough time to cut a few small loopholes in the shutters; rounded incisions big enough for the barrel of a gun to stick through. And above them, some long thin slits for peepholes. But nothing happened. No movement, nor any suspicious sounds. From the window that faced the ocean you could see the coast. The water was calm and the waves, instead of pounding the sand, caressed it. I was seized by a strange feeling of impatience. If they were going to come, then let them come now. I yearned to see hundreds of monsters attacking that house. I wanted to gun them down, kill them one by one. Anything but that exasperating wait. Every one of my coat pockets was stuffed with fistfuls of bullets. The added weight felt comforting and invigorated me. Copper-coloured bullets on the left, bullets on the right, bullets in my chest pockets. I even gnawed on bullets. I clutched the rifle so tightly that the veins in my hands stood out like blue rivers. A knife and a hatchet hung off the belt strapped over my jacket. Eventually, they came.
The heads emerged first, heading toward the coast. They were like little moving buoys or advancing shark fins. There must have been ten, twenty, I don’t know, schools of them. As soon as they hit the sand, the creatures turned into reptiles. Their wet skin resembled burnished steel that had been coated with oil. They dragged themselves about ten feet before standing up as perfect bipeds. But they walked slightly hunched over, like someone battling against a harsh wind. I thought of the sound of rain from the night before. Those duck feet couldn’t but feel out of their element. They crushed the sand and beach stones as though treading on freshly fallen snow. A low conspiratorial hum came from their throats. That was enough for me. I opened the shutter, flinging a burning log that ignited the oil, wood, and mountains of books. I closed the shutter. My shots flew wildly from the loophole. The creatures leaped away, shrieking ferociously, like a plague of locusts. I couldn’t make anything out. Just the flames that, at first, roared high. Behind the blaze were the silhouettes of bodies that jumped or danced with the fever of a witch’s mass. My cries joined theirs. They bounded and squatted, came together and split apart, recoiling as they tried to reach the windows. Monsters, monsters and more monsters. Here, over there, there and here. I went from one window to another. I fired blind, one, two, three, and four shots, swearing like a Berber against Rome as I reloaded. Shooting and reloading for hours on end, or maybe it was just a few minutes, I don’t know.
The bonfires began to die down. I saw that the fire protected my morale more than anything else. But they had vanished. I didn’t realise it at first. I kept on shooting until the rifle jammed. I fumbled the catch frenetically. It wouldn’t release – where was the other Remington? The cylindrical cartridges scattered under my feet made me slip and stumble. The bullets rolled around in my pockets. I wanted to pick them up, but the good bullets and the spent cartridges were all jumbled together. I dragged myself over to the ammunition box, put my hand in and grabbed a handful of icy lead, taking my time. I sensed, to my surprise, that the monsters had stopped wailing. Panting like a beaten dog, I peered out of the loopholes. There was no enemy to be seen from my angle of vision. The flames had faded from red to blue and barely flickered a foot high. They crackled. The lighthouse beam swept the landscape with an even cadence. What horrors were they devising? Nothing was to be trusted. Darkness continued to erode the landscape.
A distant explosion pierced through the layers of mist. What was it? Gruner and his rifle. They were attacking the lighthouse. I stopped and listened. The frenzied sounds of combat were carried over by gusts of wind. On the other side of the island, the monsters roared with the force of a hurricane. Gruner spaced out his gunshots as if he were only aiming at sure targets. The inhuman screams rose in volume with each blast. But the way Gruner wielded his rifle revealed a quiet assurance. He acted more with the ease of a lion tamer than someone teetering on the brink. I’d almost say that I heard him laugh, but I wouldn’t swear to it.
Dawn: light filtered through floury gauze. The blisters on my hands had swollen up, despite all the bandages and ointments. I supposed it was from gripping the gun so tightly all night. My breath stank like stale tobacco. Bile that tasted like burnt sugar welled up in my mouth. My overall condition was deplorable. Weakness in the knees. Loosely strung muscles. Blurry vision with yellow sparks. The piles of logs and books were still smoking. I set to work excavating a pit at the foot of the door. However, at midmorning I was interrupted by a completely unexpected visit.
Gruner was the perfect image of a Siberian hunter, fat and surly. He wore a felt cap with big earflaps and a coat sewn up with thick thread; lots of buckles. His chest was crisscrossed with lacing. He was carrying a rifle and a sort of harpoon strapped on his back. The lighthouse keeper moved slowly but assuredly, swaying like an elephant bowed down by his weight. My body was half in, half out of the pit. I stopped shovelling.
“Nice fellows, aren’t they? Those toads I mean,” he said in an almost friendly way, and then added, coldly, “I thought you would be dead by now. Here,” he said, passing me a bucket with a sack of beans inside, “you can use the fountain too.”
His words were in the same tone that is used with the dying: give them anything but the truth.
“I need something more than beans and a water fountain, Gruner,” I said while still in the ditch. “The lighthouse, Gruner, the lighthouse. Without the lighthouse I’m a dead man.”
“It’s going to rain tonight,” he commented, looking up at the sky. “That drives them away.”
“Be reasonable,” I protested with trembling lips. “What’s the sense of struggling alone? Humans need to unite when they’re surrounded by predators.”
“Take all the water you want; it’s yours, honestly. And the beans. I also have coffee. Want coffee? You’ll need coffee.”
“Why are you pushing me away? You should judge me by my intentions, not my presence.”
“Your very presence shows your intentions. You can’t understand. You’d never be able to understand.”
“The problem,” I said, “is whether we can come to an understanding.”
“The problem,” he said, “is that I’m stronger.”
It was unbelievable. I screamed, “Allowing a man to die is the same as killing him! You’re an assassin! An assassin! Any court in the world would condemn you! By action or omission you’re throwing me into the lion’s pit. You hole up in your lighthouse and contemplate the spectacle like a patrician at the Colosseum. Are you happy, Gruner?” I fumed with growing indignation.
He got down on his knees. Suddenly, we were face to face. He touched the fingers of both hands together and cleared his throat. My protests hadn’t had any effect on him.
“No one else goes in that lighthouse. That’s a fact. You have to accept it, not understand it.” He paused for a long moment without daring to look at me with his small, beady eyes. Then, “I heard shots yesterday. I wonder if our weaponry is compatible …”
Gruner left the sentence unfinished, leaving me to fill in the rest. He had been struggling on the island for a long time and was surely beginning to run low on bullets. It was the height of depravity. Although he made it clear that my life meant nothing to him, he was asking for ammunition to defend his own. And in exchange for a bag of beans. I threw a shovelful of dirt in his face.
“Here! Is that compatible enough for you? Criminal!” I climbed out of the pit. I kicked the bucket and the beans went flying. That gesture managed to unsettle him more than any argument.
“I have no quarrel with you! No matter what you may think, I mean you no harm. I am not a murderer.” He said this while taking the harpoon off his back. It was an unspoken threat, but the weapon was there between us, grasped in his two hands.
“Get out, out!” I yelled with my arm outstretched, just as one would throw a beggar out of an expensive restaurant. Gruner did not budge. He held his ground for a few seconds more, unwilling to abandon his mission.
“Be gone, you human vermin, out!” I moved toward him with determination. Gruner backed away slowly, facing me all the while. He turned and walked away with absolute indifference.
“You shall pay dearly for this one day, Gruner; you shall pay for it all!” I cursed before he disappeared into the forest. He did not deign to reply.
Now I was certain that they attacked only at night. It was true that Gruner had come armed, but it was surely to defend himself against me, not the monsters. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been moving so freely about the island. Unfortunately, I arrived at these conclusions too late. I feared that my first slumber would be my last. Would I be able to wake myself up when night fell? What was to stop me, in my exhaustion, from falling into a deadly stupor? My own vulnerability terrified me as much as the monsters. And despite all this, I was overcome throughout the day by moments of weakness. One couldn’t say that I truly slept. It was a drugged grogginess, more akin to delirium tremens than to actual slumber. A strange mix of visions, memories, mirages and meaningless hallucinations appeared before me, on the frontiers of consciousness. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to be a stretch of the docks of Amsterdam, or perhaps it was Dublin. Pools of oil floated on the water’s surface, washing up against the wooden pilings and echoing hollowly. I could see myself, as if from above, in the house on the island. A demon in human form was asleep on my bunk. I could have practically reached out and touched it with my fingertips. I woke up, more or less. I do not want to die. What shall become of me, what will they do to me?
The third night arrived without reprieve. Buckets of rain poured just as Gruner had predicted. Thunder and lightning. Banks of clouds hung low with white blazes above them, wide as lakes and fleeting as dud fireworks. The thunder pounded like a hammer smashing a thousand-piece dinner service to bits. The churning waves were visible from the loopholes. The night-time horizon was resplendent like a battleship in the heat of combat. The lightning ripped through the sky, falling in jagged and scattered verticality.
Later, the rain lessened into a hazy, damp curtain. It was impossible to see more than a few inches beyond the windowpanes. Drops of water bounced off the slate roof. Raucous torrents sluiced down the gutters. This time I did not see them coming. Suddenly, the door became a marching drum for dozens of angry fists. The barricade of crates and chests gave way under the force of the pounding, and my body with it. I fell down on my knees. A malignant force caused me to crumple and give in. That infernal beating weakened the door even as it shook my spirits.
The horrors of the world were reunited in that shuddering portal. I was beyond hope, beyond madness; but I had yet to give up. I had not yet reached such sublime indifference and refused to go quietly to my fate. The monsters’ cries ceased. All that could be heard was the deluge of fists, one punch on top of another. I whimpered a little as I chewed on a clenched fist, with the knowledge that no amount of good fortune would be enough to get me off that island. The door began to give way. It trembled like a laurel leaf in a boiling pot and would shatter any minute. Locked in a sort of paralysed entrancement, I was unable to take my eyes off that door. And a miracle occurred in those last moments, but it was the opposite of what one would expect.
I was no longer in need of salvation; it was pointless. In a few seconds, I should be carrion. The miracle was this: that I no longer cared. In fact, I was dead already. Being dead, I no longer felt it necessary to curl up in a corner. In light of the situation, it seemed ludicrous. I was dead, but I had ceased to tremble. I was dead, but before I reached oblivion, it was my lot to experience the very nature of the abyss. What else could that quaking door be other than raw horror itself? My body felt so weak that I had to crawl across the floor. My last wish was to touch that door with my fingertips. It was as though its touch would release some source of universal wisdom: an ever present knowledge accessible only to those who had been received in palaces of light. I was mere inches away. I raised my palm in front of the door as though it were glass, not wood. But in that exact moment one of the monsters smashed the slit that served as a lookout. An arm slipped through the gap, slithered down like a salamander’s tail and grabbed my wrist.
“No!”
In the blink of an eye, I fell from the loftiest spirituality to the basest animal instincts. No, no, I had no wish to die. I bit down into that hand with every tooth. The small bones crunched as I ripped the membrane that joined the first two fingers. The beast cried out with a long, unending howl of pain, and yet I refused to let go. I pulled back with my jaw, pressing down with my heels until I felt something give way. My head hit the floor due to the sudden impulse. My face and chest were soaked in blue blood; it dripped off my chin and elbows. I reeled like a drunken orang-utan, incapable of putting myself to rights. Later, days later, I realised that those awful sounds had escaped from my gritted teeth. I happened to rest my hands on one of the rifles. I loaded it like a blind man, without looking, and then fired shots through the door. The bullets perforated the wood. Yellowish shavings flew everywhere. The monsters yelped in a frustrated pack. The door had been reduced to a slice of Swiss cheese. The beasts had gone, but I kept on shooting. The storm was moving off. By dawn, the rain was only a light drizzle. It was only when it grew light that I noticed how rigid my mouth was, as though it were packed full of something. I spat out half a finger and a membrane bigger than a Brazilian butterfly.
The last flash of lightning illuminated my mind. I had a thousand nameless monsters against me. But they weren’t really my true enemies any more than an earthquake has a vendetta against buildings. They simply existed.
I had only one enemy and his name was Gruner, Gruner. The lighthouse, the lighthouse, the lighthouse.