The Lamplighters (28 page)

“There? You’re taking him in there?”

Now the boy spoke, in that strange little voice of his.

“My daddy can fix him.”

“Vincent? Is he your daddy?”

He didn’t answer. Marla rounded on the boy, using her free hand to lift his chin a little so she could look him in the eye.

“Are you Vincent’s son?” It didn’t seem possible, he’d be much older by now, unless the old man was even more confused than she’d credited.

The boy resisted her touch, and her questions, breaking free from both her and the injured swimmer. As she watched him back away, Marla looked again to the black circle leading into the pipe. Perhaps Vincent had managed to get away and hide inside. She pictured him lighting a little stove, making coffee for her, and recalled how tenderly he’d attended to Pietro’s injuries. This shocked guy was in bad shape, but not half as bad as Pietro had been. Vincent would know what to do. But what about the boats, they’d be ashore by now? Maybe help was on its way, but then again Marla had no idea who was on those boats. She would follow the boy, find Vincent and they could all leave the island together. It wasn’t much, but it was the only plan she had.

“Okay, lead the way.”

She helped the swimmer along with her. Together, they climbed into the pipe. The curve of the pipe meant if she walked dead center, they could almost stand fully erect, as if in a tunnel. The floor of the tunnel was treacherously uneven, littered with gritty sediment and moss underfoot. Trickling water that smelled of blocked drains flowed constantly in little rivulets through the pipe and dripped from above. The air was damp, colder and mustier the further inside they traveled. As Marla made her way carefully behind the boy, the moonlight began to fade into the distance.

“Christ, it’s pitch black in here,” Marla complained, realizing now just how bright the moon had been outside. She glanced over her shoulder. The opening through which they’d entered now looked a marathon sprint away.

The boy didn’t answer. He just made strange little grunts of effort as he walked on into the pipe. The sounds were almost comical to Marla’s ears—like the noises of elderly people getting up out of their seats.

“Where… Where we going?”

It was the muscular swimmer’s voice in her ear. As he spoke, she felt his upper body stiffen in fear. He was having a moment of lucidity and was clearly perturbed to be stumbling into a pitch-black outlet pipe with a complete stranger propping him up.

“It’s okay, it’s okay. We’re going to get help.”

“Where the hell am I?”

His speech was slurred like a drunkard’s, his accent strongly Australian. Or maybe Kiwi. Marla could never tell, and had often offended Antipodeans back in London by making a wild guess.

“You’re…on an island. I’m Marla, I kind of work here. But now I’ve resigned. And I’m going to… Oh, never mind—we’re going to get you some help.”

Her voice echoed off the curved walls. The pipe had widened into a tunnel. The young man lapsed into semi-consciousness again, his heels dragging. Marla shouldered his weight as best she could, feeling a sharp twinge in her lower vertebrae. She wondered how long she could keep going like this.

Several minutes of walking and Marla was in near-total darkness, her steps slowing to a crawl. Struggling on, she could vaguely discern a bend in the tunnel and followed the quick shape of the boy around a corner. There was a flicker of sepia light on the wall of the tunnel in the distance and the faint odor of sulfur. The light was immediately comforting to her, now she had something to aim at. The muscles in her lower back screamed in protest as she shifted the weight of the swimmer upwards in an attempt to get a better purchase on him. But as she did so, she lost her footing and they both crashed to the floor. The injured man landed on Marla awkwardly, a dead weight knocking the wind from her stomach. Painfully, she lifted her head and tried to focus on the light up ahead. Still a way to go. She called out after the boy, but he was dozens of feet away now, his little shadow disappearing around a curve in the tunnel.

Then the light was extinguished, plunging the tunnel into total darkness.

“Hey! Hey!” Marla’s voice was cracked with fear, and with hurt from her fall. She could feel the clammy skin of the swimmer against her cheek, still pinioned beneath the weight of his slumbering body. Her breaths were quick and shallow, ringing out a heartbeat tattoo in the icy darkness. Another sound joined the frantic rhythm—a dragging, loping sound. Footfalls in the tunnel up ahead, drawing near. Her eyes widened, begging to admit light that simply wasn’t there. Then the weight of the swimmer’s body was gone from her. It felt as though he had simply levitated into the air like some theatrical illusionist. Blind instinct made her reach out for him, but he was gone. She heard a dull thud and a dragging sound. Marla scrambled backwards in terror, still on the floor, and her hand squished into something moist and spiky. Crying out, she pushed the thing away, smelling rotting fish. The curved wall of the tunnel met her other hand and she struggled upwards into a standing position. Her heart seemed to stop suddenly as she felt something clutching tight around her waist. She shrieked, and pushed at it, feeling the mop of the little boy’s hair between her rot-streaked fingers.

“We have to get out of here. Now.”

Behind her, heavy hot breaths. She jolted in fear again as a violent spark rang out in the tunnel and her vision was filled with viridian flame. A flare.

“Run!”

The boy was clinging to her too tightly. She looked down at him, intent on quelling his fears even as she felt her own terror falling over her like a tidal wave. But the boy was smiling up at her. His grin made her feel rotten to the core. A rapist’s smile painted on the face of a child. Even now she could feel his little hand at her breast, grimy fingers searching out her nipple beneath the fabric of her shirt. She felt the hard throb of his erection against her leg. As the light of the flare danced in his eyes she realized she was not looking down into the eyes of a child after all. An old man’s eyes were looking back at her, through her and into her, perversely knowing and horribly lecherous. How could a look so chilling and evil reside in the innocent features of a young boy? Her heart sank to witness such a perversion of all things holy. Hot tears flooded her eyes and she began to sob in deep despair. She waited to feel the touch of the giant’s hands on her neck, for it was surely he who was standing there hot-breathed behind her, just as sure as it was the hideous man-child at her breast that had led her right to him.

Vincent felt like driftwood, bobbing along on the crest of a cold, indifferent wave. His hand still felt the weight of the gun he’d used to shoot Chief of Security Fowler in the face. Even in his catatonic state he knew that he’d feel its weight for the rest of his days. Heavier still was the crushing pressure of seeing her again, his beloved Susanna. There she’d stood, so proud and lovely—majestic—on the jetty, like nothing had happened and not a day had passed since she’d been taken from him. His psyche had flipped cartwheels upon seeing her face. Was he mad? Had he been insane all these years, eking out damp days in the lighthouse? It didn’t matter. The events that he’d seen unfold recently, that he’d been a part of, would be enough to imbalance any mind however strong. Cold tears formed as he tried to shun the dread image of his son, crawling like a plaything across the rotting timbers of his home. Fear and anger curled his lip as the image was blotted out by the huge blackness of the giant who accompanied his boy and kept him to heel like a little dog. Vincent allowed the twin images to penetrate his brain in a pincer movement, like vultures pecking at the skull of a dead man. He chuckled through their assault, they couldn’t hurt him now; nothing could. He’d remembered everything. When she’d kissed him and held him like that and stroked his hair,
hush little baby don’t say a word
, it had all come flooding back to him. 

And then they’d let him go, carrying his memories around him heavy as a cursed mariner’s albatross, back to his prison of guilt and madness and regret. Shooting Fowler had unlocked something buried deep inside the old man. His lover’s kiss had done the rest, drawing his memories out of him like poison from a wound. He knew she’d seen them too, had sensed that she was feeding on them. How was that possible—how was any of it possible? She’d be as old as he was now, minus a few years of course. But there she’d stood like Aphrodite with her golden hair and gleaming smile and perfect skin. Oh and the smell of her, like the faintest wisp of cotton candy framed by bee pollen. He’d wanted to dive into her along with his memories, for her to drink every drop of his futile life force until there was nothing left. But even as he’d wished it Vincent had seen the dark core at the heart of the woman, the taint that exists deep within every treasure. And from that moment he knew that she had not kissed him out of kindness, nor stroked his brow in sympathy. Her motive was to feast on his pain, to gorge herself on the endless loop of suffering that had defined his daily existence all these long years. He was merely a battery to her, a functional thing that existed only to sustain whatever cruel tastes she hungered for. He’d been glad to leave the jetty then, gathering up what he could of his memories, his pain and his old man’s pride, reclaiming them as his own. 

The sound of the waves crashed into him as he approached the cove nearest the lighthouse and he began to weave together fragments of past like a spider rebuilding its web after a storm. He saw that night again, when he’d taken to the waves with his boy—intent on escaping the island and all its dreadful secrets. He saw himself as a younger man, saw what he’d done then just as he had tonight. He watched himself murder the security chief from years ago as he fought bitterly to stop them taking his boy away from him, saw the blood on his hands. He hadn’t meant to kill him, hadn’t meant for a lot of things. All these years he’d carried the guilt of what he’d done and buried parts of it in the dirt of the hole he’d been digging, only to find it uprooted and staring him in the face the very next day each and every time he buried it. History had echoed back on itself, sounding out death like the deep melancholy bass of a foghorn, and here he stood a murderer again. He felt his body folding in on itself, filled to the brim with cold despair and craving the grave. He was a man without hope. Let his mouth be filled with maggots, let his eyes burst like plums and his belly swell and split with the gas and bloat of his wasted life. He teetered on the rocks and saw a black shape ahead of him. All light had left him, he could not return to his tower nor climb the steep steps there. He gravitated toward the black hole, aching for its darkness.

Brett regained consciousness painfully and in near darkness. The surface he was lying on was hard, wet and covered in silt. He fancied that he could hear waves in the distance, crashing onto far shores. He longed to be back in the cool of the ocean. Anywhere but here. Turning his head toward the sound of the waves, he felt a lick of heat warming the sweat on his face. A dry crackle and a sharp spitting sound, like Hell’s inferno clearing its throat. He was near to a fire. He wanted desperately to get his hands free but they were tied firm behind his back, which arched uncomfortably. Kicking his feet out, he felt only hot air around them. His mouth was salty dry and he remembered the seawater as the boat had been torn apart by the explosion around him. He’d thought himself lucky to bail at the moment he did, just as the explosion had happened, but now he felt only a series of numb discomforts. He wondered how long he’d been lying here, and what had happened to his shipmates. That gorgeous girl. Where had she said she was from? That was it, Ibiza. Was she still alive, washed up on this island like him? Was she sweating hot and cold like him in a dark cave somewhere near? Then the memories came flooding back, a tsunami of eviscerated bodies crashing onto the shoreline of his sanity. He saw the girl’s head,
Idoya that was her name
, bobbing on the surface of crimson waves like a Halloween apple in a bucket of water, her bloodshot eyes fixated on him. Brett wanted to scream, but his mouth felt alien to him somehow. He tried to lick his lips but couldn’t. Something was wrong, very wrong. He attempted to cry out and heard his voice, disjointed like someone else’s voice, a barely recognizable impotent wet gurgle of a sound. Blood gagged his throat and his fingernails clawed behind him at the silt on the floor. His tongue was gone. Oh dear God his tongue was gone. Writhing now, he pulled in shock and fear at his bonds and felt his eyelids blinking wetly. The fire crackled somewhere close by. Perspiration dripped from his matted hair onto his cracked lips. More salt water for the drowning man. He blinked again, and felt the beginnings of a searing pain behind his eyes. If a fire was burning, then why couldn’t he see it? Brett cried out, loud as he could. His voice was like out-of-tune music, the desperate discord of a deafened man. Tears fell from his eye sockets. No, not tears. More blood. He shook his head violently from side to side, becoming maddened by the crackling of that damned fire. Even as he asked himself why he couldn’t see it he knew his eyes were gone too. All the breath left his chest in a dreadful rattling sigh and he laid there, a broken thing. His extremities had begun to conspire against him now. Each part of him was awakening and remembering what had been done to it, the nerve endings in his mouth and eye sockets reaching out in a kind of muscle memory for their lost comrades. Nearby, the fire flickered and its amber glow danced on the chrome surface of a surgical steel dish. Inside were his tongue and eyes. Then little hands were on him, attending his most private and tender parts, and Brett screamed a hot gargle of blood and bile until he died.

Marla dreamed of far forests and plains, of bright birds and of a wet humidity that penetrated every pore of her body. These visions were soundless and distant, and she fought to keep them for fear of what she might find when awake. The fight was already lost. She heard the sudden rush of wind through trees and felt herself returning to her body. The sound of the wind diminished and she opened her eyes to find she was on a cold, hard table in a large, dimly lit room. The walls were rough, hewn from the rock, which told her she was in a cave. But it was unlike any cave she’d ever seen. Spotlights and mirrors illuminated the scene, their sleek modern designs contrasting with partially melted candles that flickered brightly here and there. She was strapped to a large surgical steel table, a spotlight on a snake-like angle poise arm above her. She pulled at the bonds restraining her upper body and ankles. They didn’t budge, and caused little spasms of pain to prick at her skin the more she resisted them. So, she stopped resisting and looked around the room as best she could.