He was still in shock from the bar, kept believing that if he went back it would prove to be some kind of waking vision or even a terrible joke. The smashing of Old Jim’s bloody fingers against the piano keys. Sadi’s look of being undone, betrayed by her own words. Brad, standing there, gaze locked on the wall as if someone had frozen him in place. Thank God Trudi had already left. What would he tell Gloria when he saw her again? What would he tell Charlie?
Saul parked the truck, stumbled to the lighthouse, unlocked the door, slammed it behind him, and stood in the entrance breathing hard. He’d call the police, tell them to come to the bar, to check on poor Old Jim and the others. He’d call the police, and then he’d try to get hold of Charlie out at sea, and then call anyone else he could think of. Because something terrible must be happening here, something beyond his illness.
But no one answered. No one answered. The phone was dead. He could run, but where to? The light had gone out. The light had gone out.
Armed with a flare gun, Saul stumbled up the stairs, one hand against the wall to keep his balance. The splinter was an insect bite. Or an overture. An intruder. Or nothing, nothing to do with this, as he slipped and almost fell, some kind of moisture on the steps, a fuzziness on the wall that came away in his hands, that he had to brush off against his jeans. The Light Brigade. They’d given him an experimental drug or exposed him to radiation with their equipment. And the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive.
Near the top, the wind whistled down briskly and he welcomed the chill, the way it told him a world existed outside of his mind, helped him deny these symptoms that had now crept back in. He felt a strong tidal pull, and a vibration that went with the pull, and he was burning up.
Or was the lighthouse burning up? Because a glow awaited him at the top of the stairs, and not the faint green phosphorescence that now arose from the walls, the steps. No, this was a sharp light that knew its purpose, he could tell that already. But it was not the light from the lens, and he hesitated just below the lantern room for a moment. He sagged onto a step, not sure he wanted to see what new beacon had supplanted the old. His hands shook. He trembled. Could not get Old Jim’s fingers out of his head, nor the words of the sermon that still uncurled all unbidden from his mind. That he could neither resist nor keep out.
But this was his place now, and he could not abandon it.
He rose. He turned. He walked into the lantern room.
The rug had been moved.
The trapdoor lay open.
A light shone out from that space. A light that circled and curved even as it had the discipline not to trickle across the floor, or refract off the ceiling, but instead mimicked a door, a wall, rising from the watch room.
Quietly, flare gun held tight, Saul crept closer to the edge of the trapdoor and the source of the light, while the feeling increased that the stairs behind him had grown stranger still, that he should not look back. Bending at the knees, he peered down into the watch room, feeling the heat of that light crossing his face, his neck, singeing his beard.
At first all he saw was a vast mound of papers and what looked like notebooks that now rose from the watch room, a great behemoth, a disheveled library of shadow and reflection that leaped into and out of focus—ghosts and figments, curling and questing, there but not quite there, a record that he did not understand because it did not yet exist.
Then his eyes adjusted and the source of the light coalesced: a blossom. A pure white blossom with eight petals, which had unfurled from the top of a familiar plant, whose roots disappeared into the papers below. The plant that had enticed him on the lighthouse lawn, so long ago, to reach down, drawn by a glitter, a gleam.
An almost holy intensity rose from somewhere within and filled Saul up, along with a dizziness. Light was leaking out of him now, too, coursing down through the trapdoor to communicate with what lay below, and there came the sensation of something pulling him close, holding him tight … of recognizing him.
In rebellion against that, he rose from his crouch, arms out to the side for balance, teetering there on the edge of the trapdoor, staring down into that swirl of petals until he could resist no more, was falling into the pure white corona of a circle of fire, into a congregation of flames, a burning so pure that turning to ash was a kind of relief, engulfed by light that consecrated not just him but everything around him, anchoring receiver and received.
There shall be a fire that knows your name, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you.
* * *
When he regained consciousness, he was lying on the floor of the watch room, on his back, looking up. There was no mound of notebooks. There was no impossible flower.