Western siren finally fixed; touched up the white part of the daymark, seaward side; fixed the ladder, too, but still feels rickety, unsafe. Something knocked down a foot of fence and got into the garden, but couldn’t tell what. No deer tracks, but likely culprit. S&SB? The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower. Didn’t feel up to a hike, but seen from lighthouse grounds, of note: flycatcher (not sure what kind), frigate birds, least terns, cormorants, black-throated stilt (!), a couple of yellow-throats. On the beach, found a large pipefish had washed up, a few sail jellyfish rotting in the sand.
There came an incandescent light. There came a star in motion, the sun plummeting to Earth. There fell from the heavens a huge burning torch, thick flames dripping out behind it. And this light, this star, shook the sky and the beach where he had walked a second ago under a clear blue sky. The scorched intensity of the sudden object hurtling down toward him battered his senses, sent him sprawling to his knees as he tried to run, and then dove face-first into the sand. He screamed as the rays, the sparks, sprayed out all around, and the core of the light hit somewhere in front of him, his teeth smashed in his mouth, his bones turned to powder. The reverberation lived within him as he tried to regain his footing, even as the impact conjured up an enormous tidal wave like a living creature, aimed at the beach. When it fell upon him the weight, the immensity, destroyed him once more and washed away anything he could have recognized, could have known. He gasped and thrashed and hurt, dug his tortured hands into the shocking cold sand. The sand had a different texture, and the tiny creatures living there were different. He didn’t want to look up, take in his surroundings, frightened that the landscape, too, might have changed, might be so different he would not recognize it.
The tidal waves faded. The burning lights receded.
Saul managed to get to his feet, to stagger a step or two, and as he did, he realized that everything around him had been restored. The world he knew, the world he loved: tranquil, unchanged, the lighthouse up the shore undamaged by the wave. Seagulls flew by, and far in the distance someone walked, looking for shells. He brushed the sand from his shirt, his shorts, stood there for a long moment bent over with his hands on his thighs. The impact was still affecting his hearing, still making him shake with the memory of its power. Yet it had left no evidence behind except melancholy, as if he held within him the only memory of some lost world.
He could not stop trembling in the aftermath, wondered if he were going insane. That took less hubris than thinking this was a message from on high. For in the center of the light that had come storming down, an image had appeared, a pattern that he recognized: the eight leaves of the strange plant, each one like another spiraling step down into oblivion.
Midmorning. The rocks were slippery and sharp, encrusted with limpets and barnacles. Sea lice, ancient of days, traveled across those rocks on quests to scavenge whatever they could, and the seaweed that gathered there, in strands thin and thick and sometimes gelatinous, brought a tangy, moldy smell.
It was a relief to sit there, trying to recover—peering into the tidal pool that lay at his feet as the rock dug into his posterior. As he tried to control his shaking. There had been other visions, but none as powerful as this one. He had a perverse urge for Henry to appear, to confess all of his symptoms to a man who, once revealed as a passionate, delusional ghost-hunter, he recalled almost with fondness. But Saul hadn’t seen Henry or Suzanne since the incident in the night, nor the strange woman. Sometimes he thought he was being watched, but that was probably nothing more than a reflection of believing Henry when he said he would “find it,” implying a return.
The tidal pool directly in front of him became frustratingly occluded when a cloud passed overhead and changed the quality of the light, or when the wind picked up and created ripples. But when the sun broke through again and it wasn’t just the reflection of his face and knees he saw, the pool became a kind of living cabinet of curiosities. He might prefer to hike, to bird-watch, but he could understand a fascination with tidal pools, too.
Fat orange starfish, either lumbering or slumbering, lay half in, half out of the water. Some bottom-dwelling fish contemplated him with a kind of bulging, jaded regard—a boxy, pursed-lipped creature whose body was the same color as the sand, except for bejeweled sapphire-and-gold eyes. A tiny red crab sidled across that expanse toward what to it must be a gaping chasm of a dark hole leading down, perhaps into an endless network of tiny caverns carved into the rocks over the years. If he stared long enough into the comforting oblivion of that microcosm, it washed away everything else, even the shadow of his reflection.
It was there, some minutes later, that Gloria found him, as Saul perhaps had known she would, the rocks to her what the lighthouse had become to him.
She dropped down beside him as if indestructible, corduroy-clad rump sliding hardly at all on the hard surface. Not so much perched as a rock atop another rock. The solid weight of her forced him a little to the side. She was breathing hard from clambering fast over the rocks, managed a kind of “uh-huh” of approval at his choice of entertainment and he gave her a brief smile and a nod in return.
For a long while, they just sat together, watching. He had decided he could not talk to her about what he had seen, that pushing that onto her was wrong. The only one he could tell was Charlie. Maybe.
The crab sifted through something in the sand. The camouflaged fish risked a slow walk on stickery fins like drab half-opened fans, making for the shadow-shelter of a tiny ledge of rock. One of the starfish, as if captured via timelapse photography, withdrew at a hypnotically slow speed into the water, until only the tips of two arms lay exposed and glistening.
Finally Gloria said, “Why are you down here and not working by the shed or in the tower?”
“I don’t feel like working today.” Images from old illuminated manuscripts, of comets hurtling through the sky, from the books in his father’s house. The reverberation and recoil of the beach exploding under his feet. The strange creatures in the sand. What message should he take from that?
“Yeah, I don’t always want to go to school,” she said. “But at least you get money.”
“I do get money, that’s true,” he said. “And they’re never going to give you money to go to school.”
“They should give me money. I have to put up with a lot.” He wondered just how much. It might well be a lot.
“School’s important,” he said, because he felt he should say it, as if Gloria’s mother stood right behind them, tapping her foot.
Gloria considered that a moment, nudged him in the ribs in a way as familiar as if they were drinking buddies down at the village bar.
“I told my mom this is a school, too, but that didn’t work.”
“What’s ‘this’?”
“The tidal pools. The forest. The trails. All of it. Most of the time it’s true I’m just goofing off, but I’m learning things, too.”
Saul could imagine how that conversation had gone. “You’re not going to get any grades here.” Warming to the idea: “Although I guess the bears might give you grades for watching out for them.”
She kind of leaned back to get a better look at him, as if reappraising him. “That’s stupid. Are you feeling okay?”
“Yeah, this whole conversation is stupid.”
“Are you still feeling different?”
“What? No. No, I’m fine, Gloria.”
They watched the fish for a bit after that. Something about their conversation, the way they’d moved too fast or been too loud, had made the fish retreat into the sand so now only its eyes looked up at them.
“There are things the lighthouse teaches me, though,” Gloria said, wrenching Saul out of his thoughts.
“To stand up straight and tall and project light out of your head toward the sea?”
She giggled at that, giving him too much credit for an answer he’d meant at least half ironically.
“No. Here’s what the lighthouse teaches me. Be quiet and let me tell you. The lighthouse teaches me to work hard, to keep my room clean, to be honest, and to be nice to people.” Then, reflecting, looking down at her feet. “My room is a mess and I lie sometimes and I’m not always nice to people, but that’s the idea.”
A little embarrassed, he said, “That fish down there sure is frightened of you.”
“Huh? It just doesn’t know me. If it knew me, that fish would shake my hand.”
“I don’t think there’s anything you could say to convince it of that. And there are all kinds of ways you could hurt it without meaning to.” Watching those unblinking blue eyes with the gold streaks—the dark vertical pupil—that seemed like a fundamental truth.
Ignoring him: “You like being a lighthouse keeper, don’t you, Saul?” Saul. That was a new thing. When had they become Saul and Gloria rather than Mr. Evans and Gloria?
“Why, do you want my job when you grow up?”
“No. I never want to be a lighthouse keeper. Shoveling and making tomatoes and climbing all the time.” Was that how it seemed he spent his time? He guessed it did.
“At least you’re honest.”
“Yep. Mom says I should be less honest.”
“There’s that, too.” His father could have been less honest, because honesty was often just a way of being cruel.
“Anyway, I can’t stay long.” There was real regret in her voice.
“A shame, given how honest you’re being.”
“I know, right? But I gotta go. Mom’s going to come by in the car soon. We’re driving into town to meet my dad.”
“Oh, he’s picking you up for the holidays?” So this was the day.
A shadow had passed over the tidal pool again and all he could see were their two faces, peering down. He could’ve passed for her father, couldn’t he? Or was he too old? But such thoughts were a form of weakness.
“It’s longer this time,” she said, clearly not happy about it. “Mom wants me up there for a couple of months at least. Because she’s lost her second job and needs to look for another one. But that’s only eight weeks. Or maybe sixty days.”
He looked over at her, saw the serious expression on her face. Two months. That was an impossibly long time.
“You’ll have fun. When you get back, you’ll appreciate this place even more.”
“I appreciate it now. And it won’t be fun. Dad’s girlfriend is a bitch.”
“Don’t use that word.”
“Sorry. But she is.”
“Did your mom say that?”
“No. I made it up myself. It wasn’t hard.”
“Well, try to get along,” Saul said, having reached the end of any advice a lighthouse could convey. “It’s just for a little while.”
“Sure. And then I’ll be back. Help me up, I think my mom’s here.” He couldn’t hear a car, but that didn’t mean anything.
He took her hand, braced himself so she could lean on him and get to her feet. She stood there, balanced against him, hand on his shoulder, and said, “Goodbye, Saul. Save this tidal pool for me.”
“I’ll put up a sign.” He tried to smile.
She nodded, and then she was gone, scampering across the rocks like some kind of deranged daredevil—showing off.
On impulse he turned and shouted “Hey, Gloria!” at her before she was out of earshot.
She turned, balanced with both arms outstretched, waiting.
“Don’t forget about me! Take care of yourself!” He tried to make it sound without weight, sentences that could float away into the air. Nothing that mattered.
She nodded and waved, and said something he couldn’t hear, and then she was running up the lighthouse lawn and around the curve of the lighthouse wall, out of sight.
Below, the fish had its mouth around the small red crab, which was struggling in a slow, meditative way, almost like it didn’t want to get free.