The Lighthouse

… there was something about a hitchhiker on the dark road outside Bandon, something he couldn’t remember. But it hadn’t been the same one, the girl who’d been strangled; he had a vague recollection of a boy, a boy with long hair. Couldn’t have been that girl. If he let himself doubt that for a minute, it would be like standing on the edge of madness.) And now these damned threatening calls. Three of them in less than three days. Novotny-who else? He’d taken each of them, so Alix didn’t know yet. He couldn’t tell her. She was on the verge of abandoning the light as it was. She’d been trying to get him to leave “just for a week or two,” go up to Washington; she was insistent about it, so insistent that he was afraid she’d eventually make up her mind to go alone, and not just for a week or two. And if she did… would he try to stop her? Not if Novotny tried to make good on his threats; the last thing he wanted was to subject her to any real danger. And yet he would do anything to stave off the inevitable separation-anything except to run away from here himself.

Neither Novotny nor anyone else was going to drive him out, take away this one last refuge before the curtain of darkness came down. It wasn’t stubbornness, it wasn’t pride; it was something deeper than either one, more profound. Ryerson’s Last Stand. He was staying no matter what. They would have to come for him with guns and burning torches, like the villagers in the old Frankenstein movie.

“Jan?” Alix, calling from the top of the stairs. “Is everything all right?”

“Fine. Go back to bed, I’ll be up in a minute.”

He walked into the kitchen, poured himself a glass of milk, drank it slowly. Through the window he could see the closed doors to the garage. No more driving for him; he’d promised Alix that. Just the thought of getting behind the wheel again made his hands moist, his heart beat faster. If he suffered another blackout it would not be behind the wheel of a car, where he might endanger another life, a human one this time.

When he went back upstairs and re-entered the bedroom, Alix was in bed with the covers pulled up to her chin. She said, “Who was that on the phone?”

“Nobody. Wrong number.”

“I heard you bang the receiver… ”

“People ought to be able to dial the right number,” he said. “It’s a damned nuisance.”

He felt her eyes probing at him as he unbelted his robe, got into bed. But after a few seconds she fitted her body to his, held him, and said, “Now where were we?”

He wasn’t sure if he could make love now. But when he blanked his mind, the heat of her body and the stroking of her hands gave him an erection almost immediately. But it wasn’t good sex, at least not for him. She put herself into the act with passion and intensity, as if she were trying too hard to please him, or trying too hard to escape from whatever thoughts and fears crowded her mind. For him it was detached and mechanical. All body and no soul, brain still blank, lost somewhere inside himself, in a place untouched by the sensations of physical pleasure.

They lay in silence afterward. Alix broke it finally by saying, “I’d better get up. My turn for breakfast today. Are you hungry?”

“Ravenous,” he lied.

“French toast and bacon?”

“Great.” It was his favorite breakfast.

She got out of bed and let him watch her walk naked into the bathroom, moving her hips more than she had to for his benefit. It didn’t give him as much pleasure as it should have. He might have been watching her through someone else’s eyes. Was this the way schizophrenics felt? Detached, yourself and yet not yourself? Those blackout periods… what exactly did he do during one of them? The thought of his body in the control of some other self, some stranger, was terrifying. Why couldn’t he remember…?

He heard the rush of water as the shower came on-and half a minute later, he heard Alix cry out.

The sudden horrified shout jerked him out of bed, sent him stumbling across to the bathroom door. He threw it open, and she was out of the tub, bent over and scrubbing frantically at her body with a towel. Her bare skin was streaked with an ugly brown. The shower was still running and the cold water that came out of it was the same brown color; more brown stained the tile walls, the tub, the floor at Alix’s feet. The stench in the room made him gag.

Manure, cow shit. The water pouring out of the shower head smelled like the inside of a barn.

The significance of it didn’t register fully at first. He caught Alix’s arm with one hand, a second towel with the other, and pulled her out into the bedroom. Slammed the door to barricade them against the stench and then helped her wipe the brown filth off her body. She said in a choked, bewildered voice, “I just turned on the cold water, all I did was turn on the cold water… ”