Sunlight and Shadows
by JW Schnarr & John Sunseri
L |
aci had come to the ocean looking for ghosts, and the old lighthouse at Frenchman’s Head was the perfect place to start.
The car was back a few hundred yards, alone on the roadside turnoff. She’d dragged herself over the guardrail, climbed down into the low forest and fought her way through the muddy earth, cold rainwater hitting her in huge drops as it fell from the branches. The sun was still clawing its way toward the ocean, bloating as it grew lower and larger, and she’d only have another half-hour of light to play with. There was little time to look for a better vantage.
She wrestled her way up the tallest spruce she could find, filthying her clothes in the process. Her head throbbed, and she stopped fifteen feet up to dry-swallow another couple of Advil. They hadn’t been helping much, but she didn’t want to think about the pain that would result if she stopped taking them altogether. She sucked the water from her lips, grimaced, and fought upwards ten more feet before settling into a sturdy crotch.
There was the lighthouse, all right. She’d found her clear shot.
A promontory of rocky land stretched northward and out into the choppy gray of the sea. The lighthouse at Frenchman’s Head stood on its tip, stark and sentinel. The building caught the dying light of the falling sun, but only on its western flank—the other side was shadowed and hidden.
Perfect.
She snapped a couple of quick shots to capture the chiaroscuro, using the spruce needles around her to frame the pictures. Whoever viewed them would sense the surrounding flora, would feel like a lurker in the woods peering out at the half-shadowed building as if in ambush.
She slowed down and started playing with the digital settings. The machine was the closest thing she had to a lover, and she touched it with knowledge born of long experience, caressing and coaxing and prodding all the right places. Like a lover, she knew how to produce what she wanted from the Canon, and the two of them moved in perfect, primal rhythm.
Lightning flared in the distance over the ocean and Laci cursed. Halfway up the tallest tree in the short forest wasn’t where she wanted to be if the storm hit in earnest. She started to inch her sneaker down to the next branch. Her head throbbed as a roll of thunder swept in over the beach, over her. Rain fell harder, hitting her exposed face like the sting of a wet towel. Looking out over the water, she decided she had time for one more shot before it was time to pack it in.
She raised the Canon to her eyes, scrolling back over the pictures she had just taken. At frame seven she stopped.
She squinted through the mist. Another explosion of lightning out at sea, and then a sweep of thunder. She ignored the flash and the shadowed darkness that followed, peering intently at the little view screen on her camera.
Something—someone—stood there, on her screen. Atop the empty lighthouse, half a mile distant. A black silhouette.
She pressed closer to the slick bark of the spruce’s trunk and started pushing the zoom buttons. She enlarged, enlarged again, clicked on the upper-right quadrant to focus; enlarged again.
Two faces, not one. Young faces, grainy with distance and low resolution. Black eyes moist, peering across the rocks, over the trees.
Four arms, two of them lightly grasping the rail outside the lamp chamber, two held in the air at odd angles. Wind whipped their hair into a spiderweb around them. Their clothes were strange, archaic.
The two boys were joined at the hip.
They stared straight at her, solid black eyes making the hundreds of yards of space disappear.
They hadn’t been in the previous frame, taken only a second before.
She managed to get to the ground and shook the water from her hair. When she did, pain hit her with stiletto sharpness, and an involuntary cry left her mouth as she whipped her hand up to the side of her head, cradling the small scar above her ear. She massaged the bulge, born of scar tissue and healing bone, and forced her breath into controlled bursts until the light behind her eyes receded.
Eventually, she opened her eyes. She could see the lighthouse through the trees, but it was still dim February and whoever was in charge of the historic lighthouses of the coast hadn’t started the season yet. The distant building was now fully shrouded in gloom as the sun shimmered weakly on the horizon, an old man going to bed. She moved through the slick leaves and greedy, slurping mud of the little forest toward Frenchman’s Head.
There were two young boys atop the lighthouse in the storm. They might need help.
But that wasn’t it—not really. She was sensitive to phenomena, and she knew a little about the spirit world. It was why she was on this trip, after all—she normally photographed auras and haunts, and she’d only stopped to shoot the lighthouse on a whim. And in her deep places, she knew that the boys weren’t going to need help when she got there.
But she needed help, all right. She needed this, whatever it was. She moved a little faster. If she hurried, she could make it there in twenty minutes.
The lighthouse was monolithic; a great pale erection jabbing out of the earth and thrusting toward the sky. It loomed over Laci as she struggled through the wet tangle of trees and brush that covered the gorge below the cliffs. Far below, the ocean surf spasmed and released onto the rocks.
As Laci approached the sentinel, her stomach churned. There was energy here. It danced along her spine and tickled the back of her neck.
“Hello?” she called, blocking the rain from her eyes with her hand. She held her camera in her other hand and as she rounded the side of the building she instinctively pulled it close, like a shield.
The children loomed over her, not speaking, barely breathing.
The two boys, identical twins, watched as Laci approached. Their black hollow eyes stared down at her from the promenade of the lamp room. They were attached at the hip, their old-fashioned schoolboy uniforms perfectly stitched to allow for the disfiguration.
Their black hair shone like kerosene dripping from their pale brows. They barely moved as they clutched the guard rail. The wind tugged at their clothes, but if the driving February rain was cold on them their faces didn’t register it.
“Hello?” Laci said again, but more quietly, more hesitantly. Acting on instinct, she drew the camera to her face and pressed the trigger. The Canon fluttered, snapping off a flurry of shots.
The boys said nothing.
She framed her shots and bled the last bit of light from the sky. Then she opened her cell phone and called 911.
The Sheriff’s car was quickly followed by a camera crew from the local news station, and when Laci saw it coming she looked at Officer Danton.
He shrugged. “They scan the police band.” He wore his rain slicks and had his Maglite out. Adjusting his hat, he clicked the light on and flipped it toward the third level of the lighthouse.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, taking a half-step back toward his car.
Two pairs of black eyes shone down at him. The boys stared at Laci, ignoring the cop. They were soaked to their pale skin.
“Conjoined twins,” Laci said, snapping a slow-shutter picture in Danton’s light. ‘I have no idea where they came from. They weren’t there—then they were.”
“Hello?” Danton asked. He kept the light on their faces. The stark, bright beam elongated the shadows on their cheeks, under their eyes. “You…kids all right?”
The boys said nothing. They briefly swiveled their heads, looked at the source of the light, then turned back in tandem to stare again at Laci.
“I think they could be deaf,” she said, shuddering in the chill rain. “They don’t respond to me. I don’t know that they can hear us.”
The television crew parked their van several meters back from the squad car. Laci watched as a young woman got out and unloaded some camera gear while a man checked himself in a side mirror.
“Can you hear me?” Danton suddenly yelled. “How did you get up there?”
“The door on the side is locked,” Laci said. “I already tried it.”
“Maybe they locked it when they went up there?”
“Doubt it,” said Laci. “It’s a big old padlock. Looks like it’s been there a while.”
Danton turned to Laci. “Guess you thought of everything, then, didn’t you?”
“Sorry,” Laci said. “I’ll let you do your job.”
“Thank you kindly, ma’am,” said Danton. “Since you’re so eager to help, you want to hold this flash for me while I grab some my lock tools out of my trunk?” He smiled disarmingly at her, showing perfect teeth. No hard feelings, the smile said.
“Glad to, Sheriff.” She took the Maglite from him and held it on the boys.
They said nothing. They did nothing.
All along the coast, windows were shuttered and doors locked as the wind picked up and the rain intensified. A storm was on the way, and there was no telling what it was going to bring with it.
Eventually they got the children off the balcony, and Sheriff Danton called an ambulance to come get them. Aside from their bizarre condition, they appeared to be physically fine. They were pale and thin, but the medics announced that their hearts were healthy and all their vital signs stable.
The children refused to speak, however, and because they hadn’t appeared in any missing person reports, the sheriff decided that they would go to the children’s hospital in Calamity Falls until the proper authorities could be determined and contacted.
Laci, meanwhile, spoke to the local TV crew about finding the boys and what she had been doing in the woods. They offered her five hundred dollars for her photos, which she accepted, and then the Sheriff gave her a ride back to her car.
She checked into a Motel 6 with strict instructions that she was not to leave town until the Sheriff had talked to her again, and the police department paid for her room. She waved as the Sheriff drove away, but as soon as he was out of the parking lot she ducked behind her car and vomited until there was nothing left in her stomach.
She was exhausted from her exertions and the miserable weather, and her head pounded flashes of blinding light behind her eyes with every beat of her pulse. She massaged the tender flesh behind her ear and it relieved a bit of the pressure, but not as much as some Percocet and a hot shower would.
The Percocet she had in her handbag. The shower was waiting for her in her rented room. She stood there for another few seconds, in the antiseptic glare of the vapor lights of the parking lot, then slowly began to walk toward the motel and warmth.
She awoke to the sound of knocking, and for a few moments was disoriented—she wasn’t in her bed, she wasn’t in her apartment, and she couldn’t hear the normal morning noises of traffic and the upstairs neighbors arguing about money.
And then it came back to her—the boys on the balcony. That strange silhouette, the gently waving arms, the spiderweb hair.
Those black, black eyes.
She heard the knock again, and looked toward the door of her room. It would be Sheriff Danton, she was sure, ready to continue the interrogation of the night before.
“Just a minute,” she called, and frowned at the sound of her own voice. Before the operation and all the treatments, she had sounded like a robust young woman. Now her voice was that of a much older person—a frail person, a weak person.
“Just gotta put some clothes on,” she told the door, and she forced herself to put some strength into it. She rolled off the bed and looked for her slacks and shirt, found them in a crumpled heap and shrugged into them. She checked the night table, saw the camera and her keys, nodded, and dragged herself over to the door. In some odd way she was looking forward to this, the questions and answers. Her attention, her imagination, had been completely captured by the twins at the lighthouse, and maybe she could learn more about them from the policeman.
But when she opened the door, it wasn’t Sheriff Danton standing there on the other side. It was an old man, seventy or eighty maybe, with a face lined like ancient parchment, hands gnarled by arthritis and a shock of white hair over each ear.
“I’m sorry, miss,” he said, his voice hesitant, his posture uncertain. “You don’t know me, but I got your name from the folks at the newspaper, and I figured you’d be staying here, so I thought…”
They both stood there for a moment, the man holding one hand in the other, not looking straight at her, Laci confused and feeling rumpled in her already-worn clothes. Then he spoke again.
“You took those pictures of the boys at Frenchman’s Head yesterday,” he said, “and I’d be obliged if I could ask you a few questions about them.”
“You—who are you?” she asked finally.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “No manners at all! My name’s Caleb Mears, and I’m from here in Calamity Falls. I used to be the keeper at the lighthouse, back in the fifties, after the war.”
“Oh my,” she said, a rush of interest shooting through her. “Absolutely you can come in—sorry I look like this, but I didn’t get much sleep last night, and I was too tired to get my stuff out of the trunk…”
“Oh, no need to apologize,” said Mears, smiling. And now he looked at her, and she felt a frisson as she saw his eyes—they were clear and black, and for a moment she had a vertiginous sense that it was the twins standing there before her, in their schoolboy outfits and mussed hair—but the moment quickly passed as she stood aside and let the old man enter. “I’ve been married to three women, and they were none of ‘em fashion models straight out of bed. You look a damn sight better than most early risers.”
“Thank you,” she said, and motioned toward the chair next to the bed. Then she laughed.
“Something funny?” he asked, his smile slipping. She could see his teeth white and strong - dentures, probably.
“Oh, I was just going to ask you if you wanted something to drink,” she said. “Forgot I wasn’t home. All I can offer you is water.”
“Never drink the stuff,” he said somberly. “Takes years off your life.”
Instantly, the smile returned to his face.
“All right, then,” she said, dropping to sit on the side of the bed, looking at her guest. “What can I do for you, Mr. Mears?”
“Caleb,” he said. “You can call me Caleb, if you want.”
“Caleb, then,” she said. “You said you had some questions?”
“Yep,” he said. “Just a few. But the most important one is—can I look at those pictures you took yesterday? They ran one of ‘em on the news last night, but it was only on the TV for a second, and when the paper came out this morning they only had a picture of the boys being taken away in the ambulance. I’d…I’d like to see those boys, if I may.”
Laci sat there motionless for a moment, then nodded her head. “I suppose that’d be okay,” she said, leaning over and reaching for the Canon. “Mind if I ask why you’re so interested?”
“If I could just look at them for a minute,” he said, “I’ll tell you the whole story. I promise—on my honor.”
“All right,” she said, bemused. “Here, lean over a little so you can see the screen.” He complied, and she could smell the old man’s cologne - something cheap and manly, something a grandchild would give him for Christmas, maybe. Old Spice.
“These are all just shots of the lighthouse from that little forest down by the viewpoint…”
“Right above Corpse Cove,” murmured the old man. “I know exactly where you were.”
“Corpse Cove?” she asked. “It’s not called that on the map.”
“Bodies used to wash up there,” he said. “Every time a ship wrecked, you’d get half the dead sailors washed up on the beach a few days later. The ones the sharks didn’t get, that is. And, no. The official name is Beaulieu’s Cove, named after the same French fellow the cape is. Nice pictures, by the way—pretty enough to be in a book.”
“I’ve had my stuff in books,” she murmured, clicking the finder forward. “But not this kind of stuff.”
“You a, whaddyacallit, photojournalist?” he asked.
“I take pictures of auras and spirits,” she said. She used to be self-conscious when she told people what she did, but she eventually grew a shell. Mostly, people just nodded and changed the subject, or asked asinine questions, but occasionally she got sarcasm or hostility. None of that mattered anymore, though—after all the suffering she’d been through, she could handle idiocy from the Philistines.
But Caleb just nodded, intently peering at the view screen. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
She was going to ask him what he meant, but then they got to the money shot, and he gasped and stiffened beside her. Alarmed, she whipped her head around, fearing that the old man was suffering a heart attack next to her, and what she saw didn’t comfort her at all - Caleb had gone completely pale, his black eyes were open so wide she could see the little veins on their sides, and he shook silently.
“Mr. Mears?” she asked. “Are you all right?”
“My Lord,” he breathed, and she sensed those two words were more prayer than ejaculation. “They’ve come back.”
“Who?” she asked, fear warring with excitement in her brain. Whatever was coming, whatever had come with the storm, was going to reveal itself to her. She knew it as surely as she knew that she was meant to be here right now, in a cheap room at the Motel 6 next to this old lighthouse keeper. “Who’s come back?”
“My sons,” he whispered, and tears began to roll down that ancient face.
“My first wife’s name was Sarah,” he said after they’d ordered down for whiskey and soda, “but everyone called her Sally. I married her before I went off to Europe in forty-three, and when I got back we bumped around Oregon for a while before we decided to settle back on the coast. They were lighting the lighthouses up again - you know a Japanese sub got all the way over here, once? Happened in ‘42, and the Lighthouse Service shut ‘em all off for the duration of the war, but in ‘45 they needed families to run the things again, and there I was, looking for work.” He smiled. “It was a dream, young lady. We had a nice little house, plenty of privacy, and it wasn’t too far to town in case Sally wanted to shop or something. And every nine months or so, the USLS would drop off another tank full of coal oil and boxes of books for us to read.”
“Sounds…maybe a little boring?” said Laci.
“Sometimes it was,” said Mears. “Sometimes it was indeed. But we were young and in love, and Sally and I weren’t really all that sociable a couple, anyway. It’s why we were vagabonding around in the first place. I got my fill of people during the war in Italy—don’t like being too close to anyone, you know? Foxholes and such…”
His voice trailed off, and he closed his eyes momentarily, lost in memory. But he soon reopened them and looked again at the picture on the view screen, the twins standing there in the gloom, their hair whipped by the wind and rain.
“And Sally came from a big Eye-talian family up in Portland, and they had about a thousand kids, you know? She loved the idea of having her own bathroom, having her own clothes without having three older sisters wearing ‘em first. It was a stroke of luck, this job was.”
“And you had kids?” Laci prompted.
“And we had two sons,” he said quietly, nodding as he looked at the camera. “We didn’t know we was having twins when she caught pregnant, nor during the pregnancy itself. Sally was huge, all right, but what did we know? Tom Foster came out from town every month or so, make sure Sally was eating enough, check her blood and such, but they didn’t have them ultrasounds or anything back then, and Doc Foster was a bit of a drunk anyway, so we never knew. Not ‘til they came, anyway…”
“The twins,” said Laci. “The boys on the balcony.”
“We never let ‘em up there,” said Mears. “Too dangerous. The house is only about fifty feet tall, but the winds you get up there will whip you right off, you’re not careful. And Jed and Jerry weren’t all that coordinated sometimes.”
“Those are their names?” she asked softly. She was enrapt in the tale, and her questions were all lubricant for the story, meant to oil it along. It was working, too.
“Jedidiah and Jeremiah,” he said. “Lucky they have names at all, you know. I ended up delivering ‘em myself—they came a few weeks early, and we couldn’t get to town for the birth. I had an old Packard, and it wouldn’t run half the time without you took apart the whole engine and put it back together, and when the twins came it was dead on the drive, so there we were. There was a storm going, just like there is right now, and they hadn’t electrified all the way out to Frenchman’s head, so we were in the dark, there in the Keeper’s house.” He stopped for a second, and wiped his eyes.
“You know, I’d fought at Monte Cassino and Rome in the Big One, I’d had a ship torpedoed from under me and had to swim for six hours to get to land. But that night—well, it was the hardest thing I’d ever gone through. Sally—poor, beautiful Sally—had a hell of a time with the birth. She was a small woman, and we were both little more than kids, you know? We didn’t know what we was doing at all, and when Jed’s head came out, I was so scared I think I would’ve rather faced a whole squadron of Krauts right at that moment.”
A knock came on the door. Laci took a second to come out of her entranced state, gave Mears an apologetic look and stood.
“You wanted room service?” asked the man at the door, his look signaling what he thought of customers who wanted whiskey at ten in the morning. Laci ignored him, signed for the booze and shut the door.
“Soda?” she asked Mears.
“No thank you, ma’am,” he said. “If you’re gonna drink good whiskey, I see no point in watering it down.”
“How about if you throw up easily?” she asked, moving to the bathroom to get the plastic cup that was there.
“Then maybe you shouldn’t be drinking at all,” he said, standing to join her as she unwrapped the sanitary protection on the glass. “I appreciate the whiskey, and you letting me look at the pictures, Miss Powell. You don’t need to drink with me.”
“I’m alive right now when I should be dead, Mr. Mears,” she said, setting the cup down so that she could unscrew the cap on the Maker’s Mark (a forty-dollar extra on the police department’s hotel room tab). She poured herself a couple of fingers, handed the bottle to Caleb and opened the soda water. “I’m not going to worry about what I should and shouldn’t do anymore.”
He looked at her curiously. “You’ve got a story, too, don’t you?”
“A boring one,” she said, pouring club soda into her drink. “Cancer’s not nearly as exciting as delivering conjoined twins in the dark in a rainstorm.”
“Exciting,” he snorted. “Yeah, it was exciting, all right. You got a glass for me?”
“Just take the bottle,” Laci said. “What I’ve got should do me fine.”
He shrugged and lifted the bottle to his lips, drank. He swallowed, the Adam’s apple on his neck jiggling as the fiery liquid went down, set the whiskey on the bed table and sighed contentedly.
“I almost killed them right then,” he said.
Laci looked at him.
“I stood there in the flickering candlelight, looking at Sally, who was near unconscious by then, been ripped apart and was bleeding so strongly that I thought I’d never be able to stop the flow. And in my hands, covered with blood and slime, I had…I had this thing, this freakish spidery-looking tangle of limbs and heads and squalling screams, and my first impulse was to take them and throw them as hard as I could against the wall. You believe that?”
Laci took a long pull of her drink and didn’t speak. She moved past Mears, back to the bed, and sat down. He stayed in the doorway of the bathroom, looking at her with his black eyes. Finally, she answered.
“I think that’s natural,” she said. “Last night, when I saw them up there on the lighthouse, saw them staring down at me, I wanted to…I wanted them to be gone. I didn’t want them to exist. They scare me, Mr. Mears, and even though they’re at the hospital right now, they scare me still. And I don’t know why.”
“They went to that hospital before,” he said. “After Sally killed herself.”
Laci looked up at him.
“They were nine, just like they are in those pictures you showed me,” he said. “We kept them at the lighthouse because people were scared of ‘em, and because they were odd.” He used the word carefully, as if he’d said it before a million times in reference to his sons. “They didn’t talk much. Not to us, anyway. When they were alone, and they thought we couldn’t hear ‘em, they’d chitter like jaybirds in a cornfield - but as soon as they saw their mother or I coming, they’d clam up again. And you know what? It was scary, Miss Powell. Those children scared the living Jesus out of me. And Sally felt the same way—we’d be in our room at the Keeper’s house, and the twins were in the next room over, and it would be pitch black. I’d be lying there next to my wife, both of us awake though it was the middle of the night, neither of us saying a word but both of us knowing we were still conscious. And the boys never cried, never screamed, were always perfectly quiet throughout the night…
“Except sometimes, every few nights, they’d make a noise.”
“What noise?” asked Laci, gripping the plastic cup in her palms so tightly the material was bent.
“A scrabbling noise,” said Mears. “A noise like they was slowly, carefully crawling out of their crib in the middle of the night. A noise like one of them maybe slipped a little on the way down to the floor, had to grab for one of the slats real quick, and then it would be silent—me and Sally lying still and quiet in our bed, Sally crying without making any noise, and Jed and Jerry hanging there in the blackness, waiting to see if I’d get up, light a lantern and come see what they were doing. Sometimes, that stillness would go on for hours.”
“Did you ever go check?” Laci asked.
“No,” whispered Mears. “No, I never did. But I thought about it all the time. I’d be in the lantern room, changing the wick, and that image would come to me. And I’m sure Sally thought about it, too—she’d be back in the house with the boys, feeding ‘em, changing ‘em, watching ‘em grow up into what you saw last night—and they never talked to her. Never told her they loved her. When they got old enough, they’d start to just disappear, go rambling in the woods for hours, come back all burrs and smudges and skinned knees, never say a word.
“Once, they disappeared all day. I got back to the house, Sally was frantic. She hadn’t seen them since breakfast, and she was about ready to bust a gut, she was so incoherent and terrified.
“Well, we went looking, and guess where we found them?”
Laci was startled. As if she would know…
But she did. Somehow, she did.
“Corpse Cove,” she said.
“Bingo,” whispered Caleb, and took another long pull from the bottle. “There’d been a wreck that I didn’t know about—some pleasure boat on a long fishing trip from Astoria. They hadn’t bothered to let anyone know where they were going, so none of us were on the lookout for ‘em or anything. But they wrecked, all right, and the five people on board all washed up in the cove that day. And Jed and Jerry—they were there.”
“What were they doing?” asked Laci querulously. Her weak voice was back, and she didn’t care.
“Standing over those poor men, chittering,” said Caleb. “Standing over them, waving their arms, gabbling to each other in that language they had. I didn’t find ‘em—Sally did. I just heard all about it that night, in bed. How they would sometimes kneel down, stroke the bloated skin of the dead men, smile and chant, and how Sally screamed at them while she spent ten minutes picking her way down the slope to get to ‘em. But they never heard her, or just plain ignored her.”
He stopped again. Looked at Laci.
“You haven’t asked me how it’s possible,” he said.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
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