Acceptance(59)

“What the hell are you doing here?”

Their calm faced by a man with an ax baffled him, took some of the ire out of him, this delay between accusatory question and any response. Even Henry had composed himself, gone from a look almost of fear to a thin smile.

“Why don’t you go back to sleep, Saul,” Henry said, unmoving. “Why don’t you go back to bed and let us finish up. We won’t be long now.”

Finish up with what? Henry’s ritual humiliation? His usually perfect hair was mussed, his left eye twitching. Something had happened here, right before Saul had burst in. The condescension hit Saul hard, turned bewilderment and concern back into anger.

“The hell I will. You’re trespassing. You broke in. You turned off the light. And who is this?” What was the woman to Suzanne and Henry? She did not seem to even belong to the same universe. He was more than sure that the bulge under her overcoat was a gun.

But he wasn’t going to get an answer.

“We have a key, Saul,” Henry said in a cloying tone, as if trying to soothe Saul. “We have a permit, Saul.” Head turned a little to the side. Appraising. Quizzical. Telling Saul that he was the unreasonable one—the one interrupting Henry in his important studies.

“No, you broke in,” he said, retreating to an even safer position, confused by Henry’s inability to admit this basic fact, confused by the way the strange woman now regarded him with a kind of gunslinger’s sangfroid. “You turned off the light, for Chrissake! And your permit says nothing about sneaking around at night while I’m asleep. Or bringing … guests…”

Henry ignored all of that, got up, and, with a quick glance at the woman and Suzanne, came closer than Saul wanted. If Saul took even two steps back he’d be stumbling down the stairwell.

“Go back to sleep.” An urgency there, a whispered quality to the words, almost as if Henry was pleading with him, as if he didn’t want the woman or Suzanne to see the concern on his face.

“You know, Saul,” Suzanne said, “you really don’t look well. You are sick and need to rest. You are sick and you want to put down that very heavy ax, this ax that just looks so heavy and hard to hold on to, and you want to put it down, this ax, and take a deep breath and relax, and turn around and go back to sleep, go to sleep…”

A sense of drifting, of sleepiness, began to overtake Saul. He panicked, took a step back, swung the ax over his head, and, as Henry brought his hands up to protect himself, buried the axhead in the floorboards. The impact reverberated through his hands, jamming one of his wrists.

“Get out. Now. All of you.” Get out of the lighthouse. Get out of my head. In the darkness of that which is golden, the fruit shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth.

Another long silence spread, and the stranger seemed to grow taller and straighter and somehow more serious, as if he had her full attention. Her coldness, her calm, scared the shit out of him.

“We’re studying something unique, Saul,” Henry said finally. “So perhaps you can forgive our eagerness, our need to go the extra mile—”

“Just get the hell out,” Saul said, and wrenched the ax free, although it cost him. Held it high on the handle, because in such close quarters it would be no use to him otherwise. There was such a terror in him now—that they wouldn’t go, that he couldn’t make them get the hell out. While still in his head a thousand lighthouses burned.

But Henry just shrugged, said, “Suit yourself.”

Staunch though he felt weak, to fill the silence they kept leaving like a trap: “You’re done here. I’m calling the police if I ever see you here again.” Curious, the words that came out of his mouth, that he meant them and yet was examining them already for their truth.

“But it is going to be a beautiful morning,” Suzanne said, the words hurled at him with a knife’s blade of sarcasm?

Henry almost contorted himself to avoid brushing against Saul as they passed by, as if Saul were made of the most delicate crystal. The woman gave him a mysterious smile as she turned into the spiral leading down, a smile full of teeth.

Then they disappeared down the steps.

* * *

When he was sure they weren’t coming back, Saul leaned over to switch on the lens. It would need some time to warm up, and then he would have to go through the checklist of tests to ensure Henry and his acolytes hadn’t changed the direction of the main reflective surfaces within the lens. In the meantime, still holding the ax, he decided he would go downstairs to make sure the odd three hadn’t lingered.