The Lighthouse: a short story Read online

The Lighthouse

  Karen Heard

  Copyright 2013 Karen Heard

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  The Lighthouse

  It has been forty days since I last saw a boat, and that was my father’s wooden skiff casting out to sea. Before that, it had been at least forty days since either of us had seen another living soul.

  The vessels from four ports pass by our strait, our lighthouse their only guide past the treacherous reefs and hidden rocks that guard the passageway. Before the lighthouse was built, the mariners’ sons would take turns sleeping up here on the exposed mound to feed the fires. It is said that when the fires would die in the gales, the sailors’ roars could be heard from the shore, miles away, their last thoughts as the rocks tore into their ships for their boys: alone in the dark of the storm. The saw-toothed crag leading up to our mound remains littered with the rusting debris of torn ships from the time before the lighthouse came.

  I do not know when or how we came to be here, only that many have owed their lives to our lighthouse. But now, they do not come.

  The lighthouse is powered by wind and light and needs no human hand to intervene, until something inside it breaks. A windmill, attached to the tower, turns almost constantly, the metal blades groaning in the wind: pushing cogs, turning wheels, pumping levers throughout the lighthouse, like some great mechanical clock. I know the rhythm as well as I know the pounding of my own heart, as if I, too, am part of its workings.

  The motion of the blades does not power the bulbs, but pumps away the marsh of seawater that threatens to consume the soggy mound upon which our lighthouse sits.

  The windmill arms can be angled to catch the wind or, when the gales come on too strongly, can be pulled back to lay dormant by means of a stubborn metal crank as large as my head. I had learnt how to wrench the crank before I was even taught to read, the blades screaming from within the squall as I tugged and urged the handle round, until my wrists felt twisted and stretched.

  It is a difficult task, protecting the blades from breaking in the storms whilst still risking them as often as you dare: too long in a storm without the windmill turning the pump and the muddy land begins to bleed as it is smashed apart by the barrage of rain and the black waves, breaking closer and closer to our home.

  It is the solar panels inside the windmill blades that hold the light. Like strange wooden petals, they soak up the sunbeams during the day. The light is stored, somehow, in the rusty generator on the lower floor. At night, the beams are returned across the water, lighting up the sea ten miles out. They strike the phosphorous rocks deep in the reef, so that their secret positions glow for all to see, shining under the water like wet fish in the sun. I look out each night now, at an empty sea, lit up for nobody but myself.

  ****

  It has been forty days since Father set out in our little boat to find out what has happened to the people who used to come. I continue to tend the pump, polish the glass, and check the light every night, although nobody is here to see it now.

  From inside, I cannot see much of the light shining out, but in my father’s absence, I begin to hear the generator humming, noticing it for the first time. It has sounded constantly my whole life, but it has always been in the background, like a nagging thought you try to ignore.

  The only moments of true silence happen briefly when the bulb needs changing. As the generator holds its breath, we must work quickly, anxiously in the dreadful quiet, fearful for any ship flailing alone in the dark sea. At such times, only my father is usually allowed to touch the switch on the watchtower balcony that turns off the power to the bulb. It has been his responsibility alone since Mother left us. Now it is mine.

  My electricity here could run on forever, as long as the sun and the wind remain, to hold at bay the waves and darkness. The solar energy allows us some power for cooking and warmth, but we hold the light so precious that we use only candlelight inside. It is strange to think that a lighthouse should contain no electric lights indoors.

  As each of my last candles slowly burns, I grow closer to the impending darkness inside the lighthouse, but the light outside will shine on, even when everything is black within.

  I turn the generator off only to change the bulb. Every time I touch the switch, I am reminded that this should be Father’s task.

  I have only three bulbs left now, and my food, once brought by the trawler men, is running low. However, the pumps provide a supply of fresh water, pushed through a filter, up into the tall tap in the kitchen wall. The pump is often blocked by fish and other seafaring creatures. They thrash and twist inside the narrow pipes, until I carefully free them and drop them quickly back into bubbling water, after gently gutting them. There is, however, no food for loneliness.