FORTY
Old Barney
The lantern room is encased in glass – or, rather, some windows are glass, some have already been replaced with polycarbonate panes.
They haven't yet replaced the lantern, though.
Louis is bound to a wooden chair next to it. The lantern is a bulbous thing, like a giant insect's eye. Louis is held there by brown extension cords over hands and feet. His head is affixed to the base of the lantern by what seems to be a whole roll of electrical tape.
Ingersoll plays with the rusty fillet knife. The scent of fish guts plays at his nose.
He stole it from a fisherman asleep on a nearby jetty. Broke his neck, and let the poor fool crash into the surf – though not before snatching the knife from beneath his chair.
Ingersoll rolls the bones that he empties from his satchel. They clatter across the lantern-room floor at his feet, and he sorts through them the way one might sort through dried beans looking for stones. His finger shifts the bones this way and that. Like he's reading them.
He's not, of course. He can't read them. He does not possess his grandmother's gift of vision, not like he wants to. He pretends, sometimes, and this act of pretending is sometimes so good that he convinces himself.
This time, he tries as hard as he can to see what will happen here.
One of the windows above his head is broken. Wind keens through it.
"A storm is coming," he says.
His target, Louis, is still bleary-eyed, beaten and half-drugged. His head lolls as he stirs to some greater semblance of alertness.
Ingersoll sighs. The bones are telling him nothing. Once more, as always, he must invent his own truth and direct his own future.
"Why would I kill you?" he asks aloud. "You are meaningless to me. But you've seen my face. And my new employee, Miriam, is awfully fond of you, and this I cannot have. You will forever cloud her vision. She is mine, my friend. Not yours."
He twirls the knife between gaunt fingers. "Besides. I enjoy causing you pain, and I am fond of the fact that Miriam has already seen this scene play out, hasn't she?"
Ingersoll admires the knife. He smells the rusted, pitted blade.
"Get away from me," Louis stammers. "Who are you? Who are you people? I don't have what you want!"
"That no longer matters," Ingersoll says with a shrug.
He moves fast – a coiled spring, unsprung. He stabs Louis in the left eye with the knife. It does not go to the brain and only ruins the eye, a choice the hairless man has made. Louis screams. The attacker withdraws the knife. It makes a sucking sound as he extracts it.
His thin lips form a mirthless smile.
The Barnegat Lighthouse has 217 steps.
Each is an agony. Each a troubled birth, an expelled kidney stone, a black widow's bite.
The steps are corrugated steel painted in flaking yellow. They wind in a tight spiral through a channel of black brick.
It is like ascending the throat of some ancient creature.
What she's going to behold plays out in Miriam's mind again and again like a YouTube video set to repeat. The broken window. The wind through the gap. The rusted knife. The sound of an eye being ruined. Her name, spoken by Louis in sadness and surprise.
Again and again. An endless circle of steps and visions.
Thunder again, outside. Muted through the brick. She wonders: Am I late? Is that the thunder that plays in my vision? When she witnesses a death for real, she often looks for these clues, these cues – visual, auditory, whatever. The honking of a car horn. A commercial on the television. Something somebody says.
When she finally comes upon it, when she finally staggers into the lantern room to witness this tableau of horror, this shoebox diorama of death, she doesn't expect it.
It takes her by surprise and steals her breath, even though she feels like all her life has been rushing toward this moment in one vacuum gasp.
Ingersoll doesn't hear her coming, but when she arrives, he offers her little more than a flick of his gaze and the hint of an admiring smile.
By the time Miriam steps into the lantern room, the knife tip is already in Louis's left eye. It's not buried to the hilt. Not yet. That's a killing blow. That comes next.
It's good that she's here, he thinks. So she can see. She'll have the proof. It strikes him; he should have had her come here all along, to stand as witness to his glory and his cruelty.
Louis sees her with his one good eye. Perfect.
"Miriam?" he asks, but Ingersoll already has the knife out and is stabbing it into the trucker's second eye and brain.
It happens so fast. After all this, it feels like it should happen leisurely, in slow motion.
Things don't seem right.
The gun in her hand feels warm.
She smells something bitter, acrid. Smoke stings her eyes.
Ingersoll holds the knife tight. His hand starts to shake.
He turns and reaches up to touch the hole in his temple. A thin rivulet of blood dribbles down from the entry wound, like rusty water from a busted spigot.
Louis blinks his good eye.
He's not dead, Miriam thinks.
This isn't how it happened in her vision. This isn't how it's supposed to play out.
Her heart skips a beat. She feels sick. Woozy. Queasy. Greasy.
The gun is in her hand. Her arm is extended.
She drops the gun and it clatters against the floor.
"I–" she starts to say, but she's truly at a loss for words.
Ingersoll teeters.
And then he lunges like a tiger, knife in hand.
He's on her, his one hand closing on her throat with fingers like mandibles, and she's carried backward with the momentum. She slams against the metal steps, and she feels him go up over her, and then she goes up over him, and the world goes topsy-turvy. Black bricks and white lines smear into an abyssal spiral, and again and again she's greeted by a face full of hard yellow metal –
Her muscles cry out, her bones feel chipped and cracked, and she thrusts each limb out from her body as hard as she can, and it slows her tumble –
She comes to a stop about thirty feet down.
Fresh blood marks the wall next to her.
Beneath her, Ingersoll's eyes stare up.
His head is cocked at an impossible angle, the chin tucked over the shoulder, the vertebrae pressing so hard against his hairless flesh that it looks like his neck will split like an overripe fruit. His dead gaze seems affixed to her. A painting whose eyes always watch.
Miriam almost laughs.
But laughing – even almost laughing – hurts. Real bad.
She looks down and finds a rusty fishing knife sticking out of her chest. It goes clean through her left tit, right to the hilt.
Miriam tries to draw a breath. It's like sucking in a lung full of fire.
"Shit," she says.
Darkness takes her, and she continues her tumble down the lighthouse spiral.