THEY MAKE A small fire out of driftwood at the base of a cliff, notched in by high walls of chalky orange clay. From here Lewis cannot see the lighthouse, but it doesn’t matter. Even with his eyes closed, the light burns bright in his mind. He hears a whispering, what could be the surf but sounds like his name said softly a thousand times. He feels something almost tidal. Whatever drags the waves to the shore and crashes them against the sand, he feels too.
They try to engage with Gawea, but she refuses to answer their questions, and when Colter grabs her by the wrist, she rips away from him and says, “Don’t touch me.”
Her tone implies this is more than a command—it is a threat—and Colter takes a few steps back with his prosthetic held before him in defense. But Gawea only stares at him long and hard before saying that she has to pee. Then she turns her back on them, walks from the campsite, from the circle of light thrown by the fire, and lets the dark swallow her up.
They wait five minutes and then ten and then twenty—watching the fire dance on the driftwood and listening to the waves boom—before Colter says, “Well then, I suppose it’s time we came up with a plan.”
In a few minutes, Colter says, while they retain the advantage of darkness, they will approach the lighthouse. If they find someone there, or more than someone, they will sneak close and then attack. Not to hurt, though that might be necessary, but to detain. To question and better understand what it is they face. “We go to it before it comes for us.”
Colter opens and closes his claw when he says they cannot risk an alarm sounded. If they find the lighthouse empty, they will return here before the sun rises and then scout their surroundings.
Normally, at the end of the day, after so many hours of hiking or paddling, Lewis has to force his body to move, as if his joints were calcified and his muscles hardened to wintry stones. But he finds it effortless now. His body does not complain. It does not want to rest. It wants to go where it has been beckoned, as if there awaited the end of pain, a solution to pain.
They belt on their holsters. They walk near the water to camouflage their tracks. The beach rounds a corner and the cliff face falls away into a rocky hillside, the lighthouse speared at the top of it. They push through manzanita clusters and a cedar forest and moss-slick rocks and finally enter a moonlit clearing that anchors the lighthouse.
They wait a moment, studying the structure, white columned, black capped. A cone of light pours from it, swooping in circles, cutting through the night.
Colter lifts an arm and Lewis follows the line of it. He spies movement. A grated catwalk. A figure walking along it. The red glow of a pipe or cigarette. The figure leans against a railing, staring out at the silvered waves. He will not hear them, with the roar of the surf, and he will not see them, so long as he keeps his eyes on the ocean.
The moon makes a long shadow that reaches from the lighthouse to their feet. Colter waves Lewis forward and they duck down and follow it like an avenue, maybe thirty yards, before reaching the base of the structure. They flatten themselves against it. The stone is furred over with moss and slick with moisture that dampens their backs. Colter waits a few seconds, then steps back and cranes his neck, making sure the figure remains where he stood before, a shadow darker than the rest high above them.
There is a black door with a brass knob that they try and find loose. It pushes open with a screech, but the noise is drowned out by the waves crashing below, high tide, full moon. A metal staircase spirals up and up and up to a square of light, a hinged trapdoor. They unholster their revolvers and begin to climb.
The lighthouse lantern spins and creates a strobe effect, so that they are alternately cast in shadow and light. Colter uses the railing to steady himself, his claw gripping it, clicking and tonging their progress. His revolver is raised beside his face as if he is listening to it. He pops his head through the open trapdoor. “Bunkhouse,” he whispers. “Come on.”
They enter a low-ceilinged room with a wraparound bench, a squat cupboard, a ticking woodstove, a tiny desk with a map wrinkled across it, a bunk bunched with blankets.
A ladder rises through another trapdoor to the lantern room. Colter scales it, darts his head up, and ducks down again, a second’s glance. “I see him.”
“Do we wait?”
“We could be waiting until dawn.”
“Then what?”
“Up above, one of those glass panels opens as a door. I’ll push through it and take him out. The more movement, the greater chance he’ll spot us. Stay put for now.”
“What are you going to do to him?”
“Hopefully nothing. But maybe something.”
He climbs through the trapdoor, and Lewis follows him halfway up the ladder. His head breaches the lantern room at the wrong moment, his eyes seared by the light swinging toward him. Lewis curses and blindly descends the ladder and blinks away the bright cobwebs clinging to his vision.
For this reason he does not see the bunk stir, does not see the blankets pull back, does not see the man squinting confusedly at him. He only hears a voice he does not recognize say, “What are you doing here? Who are you?”
Lewis stiffens.
A gauzy face—with traceries of light glowing around it—floats before him. Gaunt. Bearded. Lewis lifts his revolver, too late. The man knocks his hand aside and the trigger snaps and a gunshot batters the air.