The Wickie

I came to the lighthouse for solace. Exquisite isolation. I would welcome the loneliness the same way the beacon would welcome incoming ships.

In the weeks leading up to my internment as keeper at Pachad, the port master kept going on about how lucky he was to have found me, how their last keeper had been “indisposed.” He didn’t elaborate and I didn’t ask questions.

A week later, I stood on the barnacled dock outside the house, bearing my sole tethers to civilization (identification papers, toothbrush, shaving cream and razor, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) in my hands. I watched the vessel that had delivered me to Pachad as it slipped off again, back out to sea, making itself slave again to the lustful evening tide. I turned away from it before the ship disappeared around the jagged, crescent-shaped cliff of the island. The port master’s parting words— “Always keep the light burning”— swam through my head as I walked through the bitter, biting wind toward the lighthouse, pushing the strangely unsettling image of the port master’s pale eyes from my thoughts.

The lighthouse was sparsely furnished, yet lent more in the way of comfort than I’d expected. There was a flannel bedspread, a painting of a mighty vessel as it cut through a shimmering sea, a sturdy, cherry-wood desk positioned to look out at the water. That horizon would be my world for the next year.

Checking the drawers of the desk, I found a matchbox and a canister of cigars. The sole remnants of the last wickie, or perhaps of the one before him.

I lit one of the cigars, blinked at its boldness, and sat down at the desk to make my first recording in the logbook:

25th of August, 1903, 0800 hours— Arrival.

I puffed on the cigar again, glancing out the window again to watch the waves roll up on shore, each one more eager to eclipse the last one and leave its foam on the gravelly sand.

“It seems you’re the perfect man for the job, Mr. Thackitt,” the post master reiterated in my memory. “Decorated officer, no wife, no children.”

I brushed some ash from my trousers, grimaced at a smoke cloud as it filled my vision.

“I will say, though: a man could lose his mind all alone out there.”

I stood up quickly, having realized that my heart rate was increasing unnecessarily. I shook the port master’s words from my thoughts and stepped away from the desk, intent on finding a task with which to occupy my mind.

But as I quit that room and mounted the stern, iron staircase that led to the gallery, the port master’s words floated through my mind over and over again like waves rushing and receding from the shoreline.

“…all alone out there… all alone… all alone…”

I was alone— the only man on the whole island, in fact— but if I’m honest, it didn’t take much adjusting for me to get accustomed to it. Rather, I barely noticed the absence of other people. I did my duty, as keeper, throughout the day: I kept a weather eye on the horizon; I maintained the grounds, keeping the high, dusky grasses from choking out everything else; I cleaned the lamplight, the glass globe, and the windows every morning as if they’d never been cleaned before. If a new barnacle appeared on the dock, I noticed it and documented it.

I did my duty to the lighthouse, just as every wickie had done before me.

So where did everything go wrong?

—

I didn’t record it the first time it happened. Can you imagine? ‘11th of October, 1903, 1600 hours— Scene in painting changed: ship that was peacefully sailing now caught in storm.’ The next wickies would’ve looked back in the log, read that, thought me crazy. Out of my mind. So no, I kept it to myself.

But then, just days later, the following happened: 13th of October, 1903, 1800 hours— Gallery staircase, previously sturdy, now completely rusted through; one disintegrated beneath the weight of my foot as I walked up to bed. Have swollen ankle now. Broke oil lantern in fall. Since this—… incident… had to do with the physical maintenance of the house, I felt compelled to record it.

But after that second occurrence of strangeness, my head began to spin. I lay in bed that night, consumed by my thoughts— for once, not thoughts of strong drink or of conversations that I planned to have one day when I saw another human being again, but thoughts riddled with confusion, thoughts un-detangle-able.

Until an hour before I made my recording in the logbook, every step in the staircase had been sturdy, polish-black, and completely devoid of rust. Then, suddenly, this. Just decay out of nowhere. There was simply no explanation for it, and it drove me to the end of my mind.

Eventually, however, I could puzzle no longer, and fell asleep.

But things worsened.

In the logbook, you’ll find this entry wherein I recorded yesterday’s occurrences:

27th of October, 1903, 1630 hours— Several stairs rusted through, incapable of holding weight. Dropped portable lantern in attempt to jump gap between stairs, glass shattered and cut hand. Painting changed again: what’s discernible in the shreds depicts blood-red sea and corpses in water. Red substance on floor beneath painting: investigated— blood.

But that’s not the worst of it. Tonight—… God, I can hardly see to write. This shed is so dark and besides, my eyes! Yet it can’t be helped. It’s vital that I record this.

Yes, someone has to know this: that tonight, I neglected the port master’s one command. I didn’t keep the light burning. And someone has died because of it.

It’s the lighthouse’s doing. I’m telling you, I’m not crazy. I don’t know why the house is doing this, I don’t know why any of this has happened. And I certainly don’t believe that the last wickie was simply “indisposed.”

I don’t want to think about what may have actually happened to him. Nevertheless, I will tell you what has happened to me:

Only an hour ago I was standing on the rocks, watching the horizon through my binoculars. I’d spotted a vessel with its distress lights illuminated, and as I ran toward the lighthouse, I happened to look up at its gallery windows and see with horror that the lantern had somehow become extinguished, and the windows of the house were completely black.

Charged with adrenaline, I rushed into the lighthouse and practically threw myself up the staircase. I’d gotten halfway up the stairs before the one I was standing on disintegrated right underneath my boots, chipping away under the weight of me and falling with a deafening clung to the stone floor at the bottom.

I tell you: if I hadn’t undergone physical training, and if I hadn’t had the presence of mind to quickly grab the railing and hang on for my life, I wouldn’t be writing this. I would be lying on the stone floor of the lighthouse, bleeding into that puddle of unexplainable rust. But by some wild combination of agility and sheer luck, I managed to make it up the remainder of the staircase and into the gallery— where I found the oil well dry and barren as a desert.

Pushing aside the knowledge that I’d filled the well earlier that day, I poured yet more oil in— and groaned in horror as the bowlful of fuel immediately sank through the bottom of the well and disappeared, as if the bowl had secret pores or a drain at the bottom of it.

I reached inside the bowl and felt around, but it was impossibly solid. No pores, no cracks, no fissures.

It didn’t make sense.

I shook my head despairingly. There was nothing left for me to do except to hope that some oil would be enough to light the lamp, so I poured yet more in and then reached in to ignite it—…

And this is where my account grows fuzzy.

I remember reaching in to ignite the oil well… and then, suddenly, as if all the oil that I’d poured had suddenly reappeared, the bowl burst with an inferno so fierce that all the glass around it exploded into a thousand pieces.

Some of these shards flew into my face, into my eyes for I was of course standing very close to the bowl, and I stumbled away from it. I dug at the glass, trying to get the larger pieces out of my skin, cutting my fingertips in the process… and I think I must have stumbled backward over the railing and fallen head-over-heels down the stairs.

I can’t be certain, the shock and the fall might have rendered me unconscious, but I believe that that’s what happened. My head is booming as if it was struck by every step on the way down, and I still have yet to get every piece of glass out of my skin.

The light is broken. I do not know why or how. If you look, the logbook explicitly details how I have cared for and maintained the house every day since I arrived here— especially the light. Now it is broken, and the gallery is gone dark, and the stairs are unclimbable, and there is blood all over me.

And yet… I know, in the same indescribable way in which we simply know things while we are dreaming, I know that not all the blood that smears my hands and my shirt and my face, belongs to me. I can’t be certain, but I think that most of it belongs to the sailors in that painting.

As I look at it now, the ship in the painting— the one that was first sailing on calm seas when I first arrived on Pachad and which then appeared to pass over troubled waters, though you of course won’t find that detail in the logbook— is now sinking to the depths of a crimson-red sea and seawater— real seawater, as briny as the ocean outside— is pouring forth from the painting’s frame, and flowing onto the floor of the bottom of the lighthouse. Even as I write this, it is beginning to pool around my feet and stain the floor a somehow deeper red.

This sounds mad… I know that…. But I have this feeling, deep in my gut, that that painting is where the house keeps them… Where the house keeps men like me. The mysterious place where wickies go to be “indisposed…”

My eyes are so tired. My head is throbbing so painfully that I can barely think to form words anymore, much less write them. You’ll have to just forgive me for speeding ahead in this account, but someone needs to know:

There is a ship full of people out there, people who are likely either dying or dead by this point, sailors who should have been able to trust the lighthouse. But they didn’t know they were searching hopelessly, pointing their vessel toward a lighthouse that didn’t care whether they lived or perished.

And no one else in the world besides me knows that these people need help. And no one will know that the lighthouse is trying to kill me until long after that crew doesn’t show up at their next stop and is reported missing. By the time someone turns up for a search, it will be too late for all of us. The sea will have drowned what the lighthouse refused to protect, and the lighthouse will have drowned its own protector.

But, if by the mercy of God this letter gets to someone in time, please come. I’m running out of time.

Please come.

I’m not crazy.

I’m not crazy.

I’m