He nodded, then he leaned forward and kissed my forehead in a very surreal moment. The sudden display of affection was touching and terribly out of place.
And just like that, he dropped out of the window.
I poked my head out of the porthole to see if he was OK. He had landed and rolled over, clutching his arm, but was at least alive.
He looked up at me. “Come on!”
I began to pull myself up on the windowsill.
“You can’t leave,” the voice moaned from behind me. It sent chills down my spine, despite the roaring heat of the advancing flames.
I turned around as quickly as I could in the water.
The lighthouse keeper stood in the doorway, his outline stark against the orange light. The flames now snaked into the room along the door frame and steadily climbed the walls like pyrotechnic hands searching for something to ignite. I knew I had little time before the flames engulfed me completely.
I also knew I couldn’t leave just yet.
Though he was completely across the room, I had no doubt his kelp tentacles could easily ensnare me again with a flick of his wrists. No one would save me this time. I had to know how this was going to end.
“Why me?” I asked. “Why did you start coming for me? In my dreams, to this place. What do you want!?” I shouted over the roar of the flames.
He grinned, white teeth against the black void. “I was told you would listen.”
“Who told you?” I barked as the fire came closer. I could hear Dex yelling for me to jump from outside.
“She told me you would listen and that you would come. That you’d help me. That you’d free me. I’ve been so lonely. I’ve been waiting for someone like you.”
His head lowered as if he was genuinely sad. I felt nothing for him.
“You’ll have to keep waiting,” I said, determination rising in my voice.
He looked up with a sneer and the kelp came flying my way.
With less than a second to react, I jumped up on the window and launched myself off the building.
I was going to land to the left of Dex and for a second it looked like a group of bushes might break my fall, but that wasn’t the case. I managed to get in landing position in mid-air and then go limp as my legs, knees bent, slammed into the ground. Thankfully, the grass was wet and soft, and I was able to propel myself off of it and go into a low roll.
I rolled for two revolutions before I sprang up to my feet again. I looked behind me and saw the cliff end less than a meter away.
Dex, who had been yelling this whole time, ran over and grabbed my arm.
“Are you OK?” he asked frantically.
I was OK, so far. I looked up at the porthole to see Old Roddy’s shadow standing there, looking down on us. The flames now had completely taken over the room and were licking at the edges of his raincoat.
“Do you see him?” I whispered to Dex, not taking my eyes off of the horrific sight.
“Yes, I do,” Dex replied quietly and to my relief.
As flames engulfed Old Roddy, he extended his arm out of the window and pointed at the sea, just as he had in my dreams.
I turned to look. There was nothing there except the steady, beaming swirl of the Tillamook Lighthouse doing her duty off shore.
I looked back up and saw him slowly disintegrate into the fire.
Dex turned to me. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
He grabbed my hand and scampered over to the nearby bushes. He reached in and pulled out his camera. He must have tossed it outside before jumping out of the window. The bulb for the light had broken, but other than that it looked like his gamble turned out OK.
With the camera safely tucked under his arm, we were off and running northward, skirting around the lighthouse as far away as we could. The sound of sirens began to fill the air in the distance and the severity of the situation hit me. Uncle Al’s lighthouse would burn to the ground because of us. How the hell were we ever going to explain this?
We slipped and slid down the cliff and made it to the dunes when a large explosion threw both Dex and me into the sand. Instinctively, I covered my neck with my hands as small pieces of debris rained down.
We lay there for a minute. I could feel Dex on the wet, crunchy sand beside me and heard him move, obviously alive.
When I saw the fragments of the blown lighthouse had stopped falling, I lifted up my head and looked at him. He was covering his head with his camera, which was surely embedded with deep grains of sand now. From my shattered lens last week to his scratched-up camera today, this place was not audio/visual friendly.
“Are you OK?” I asked. I tapped him with my hand.
He rolled over on his back, groaning and wincing, with his eyes shut in discomfort.
“Where did you learn to roll like that?” he muttered, his voice low and broken.
“What?” I asked, spitting out sand.
He opened his eyes wide, as the flames from the explosion danced in his dark pupils.
I rolled over on my back, lying beside him, and watched the night sky as the flames from the lighthouse danced high into the darkness. The rain stopped. You could hear the crackling flames and sirens that were still far enough away.
We lay there, watching the light show while catching our breath.
Finally, Dex replied. “When you jumped out of the window. And when it exploded I was ready to cover you, but you had already propelled yourself across the grass and were all in protective ninja mode or something.”
“I’ve...taken some classes,” I answered breathlessly.
“Uh huh,” he gasped and took in a deep breath.
I rolled over and looked at him. He rolled his head to his side and looked at me. I found myself speechless. I honestly couldn’t even get over the fact that we were alive.
He slowly nodded. He looked sleepy, but I saw the understanding beneath his drooping lids. I felt like I could just stare at him and he would just know everything I was thinking.
He reached over and grabbed my hand. He squeezed it and held it in the air above us, about as victorious a gesture as either of us could manage.
I gave him a small smile.
“Are you hurt at all?” he asked.
I didn’t feel anything until now. I wanted to stay in my sandy grave, but I knew I had cut the back of my head when I was thrown into the glass. I felt the bones in my shins throbbing, my elbows burned, and my throat felt raw from where the kelp squeezed me.
Also, my lungs wheezed, my eyes stung, and in general my whole body felt like a truck had hit it.
“I’m OK,” I said though.
He giggled. “Well, shit, aren’t you just Mary Fucking Wonderwoman. I think I broke my fucking ankle from the fall, not to mention when I cracked my head on the stairs.” He reached up and rubbed the cut that ran along his forehead. When he stopped laughing to himself he took in a deep breath and closed his eyes.
The sirens were close now and I could see red lights illuminating the trees in the distance.
“What do we do now?” I asked, hoping I could just close my eyes too. Maybe I would magically appear in my bed at home and everything would be dealt with.
Dex grunted.
“I mean, what do we say?” I continued. “Do we go back to Uncle Al’s? Do we stay here and wait for help? How do we explain to Al, to anyone, what the hell just happened? ‘By the way, some dead fisherman attacked me and blew up your lighthouse?’ ”
“Dead?” he scoffed, eyes still closed.
I nodded. “He was dead, Dex. I mean, he wasn’t alive alive. He wasn’t...like us.”
Even my truthful explanations sounded weak. How could I even begin to explain what happened to anyone when I couldn’t even explain it to the only person who was there?
“He’s dead now,” he said without a trace of interest. “And I honestly don’t think that should even be mentioned. No one was supposed to be in that lighthouse at any rate, let alone some bat-shit crazy Captain Highlander.”
He opened his eyes and rolled over on his side to look at me. “There will be no trace of him. Whether he was already dead or not.”
“We’ll have to lie.”
“No. We’ll tell the police what we were doing there. Tell them I flicked a cigarette down the hall and that started everything. Places like this have all sorts of fuels and chemicals still inside them.”
For emphasis, he fished a package of cigarettes out of his pant cargo pockets, scrunching his face up in pain as he did so, and pulled a cigarette out. I noticed how shaky his hands were before I really noticed what he was doing.
“You don’t smoke,” I told him. I hadn’t seen him smoke at all this weekend, let alone smell it on him.
“I do and I don’t. My toothpick friend comes out when I’m in quitting mode,” he spoke, the cigarette bobbed between his subtly duck-like lips. He pulled out a gold lighter with his other hand from some other unseen pocket and lit the cigarette in one trained swoop. He took in a deep puff and blew the smoke out in rings that joined the flames in the sky.
With a whoop, the urban sound of a police siren or an ambulance (I often confused them) filled the air and echoed out of the trees.
Dex coughed. “OK. Time to do this.”
He got to his feet without making a sound, but I could tell he was in a lot of pain.
He put his hand on his lower back and looked down at me. From his jaunty stance and wiggling cigarette, he reminded me of the silhouette of the Captain Morgan’s pirate.
“Do you want me to carry you?” he asked. I didn’t know if he was belittling me or just being polite. I decided on the former just in case.
“No,” I said forcefully, and sat up. My abs burned with the crunch, especially the sides that bore the brunt of the kelp’s pull earlier.
I got to my knees and then slowly stood upright. I knew the hit on the back of my head would probably make me feel woozier than normal. I didn’t dare touch it, though, in case Dex made a big deal about it. All I wanted to do was get home.
And get to work. Oh God, work. The meeting. That thought alone had me starting to sway a bit. Dex reached out and steadied me with one hand and leaned down.
“Can you make it? I wasn’t kidding about carrying you,” he said.
Well, it’s better to be safe than sorry with you, isn’t it, I thought. I shook my head, took in an invigorating breath of half ocean air and half burning fuel, and straightened up.
The top of the embankment now swarmed with people in uniform and emergency vehicles. I guess a lighthouse explosion was one of the most exciting things to ever happen here.
And now we were caught in the middle of it.