“I don’t know.I...Oh, shit.Yeah, I do.Priddy, man!I’m sosorry.Come to the bathroom and we’ll try and make youpuke.”
It wastoo late for that.Priddy knew this, as surely as he knew that hisblood was turning to molten lead, his brains catching fire.Heclutched at his skull, doubled up and vomited anyway, all overdemon-Kit’s nice new sandals, which looked weird with greatred-clawed feet in them.Kit was holding on to him, like the friendand gentleman he’d always been before his transformation.“Kit,”Priddy choked out.“Don’t take those pills.Not the purple ones,mate.Don’t take those...”
Theshoal of devils closed in.Their faces gawped and floated, jaws andtentacles and razor teeth, and Priddy began to sink, a vortex ofglowing eyes rotating around him.Down he went into the sea ofnightmare, down and round and down...
***
He woke up in cloud-scudded moonlight.One good thing aboutsolo watch in a lighthouse—he could scream until his lungs burst,and not bother anyone at all.He sat up in his bunk, bunching sheetand blanket against his chest.Had he been yelling?His throat wassore, and weird displaced echoes like the deadly sound-machine inthe Kate BushExperiment IVtrack were careening off the walls.That might bethe wind, though, or the various rasps of the great rotating lampon the floor above him.Or mermaids, God knew—as likely as anythingelse to Priddy’s fried circuits, and Hagerawl Point was infested bythem, to judge by the legends.The round walls could warp evenordinary sounds.The flush of the toilet sent whale-song spirallingthrough the Victorian pipes.Shakily Priddy got out of bed andpulled a dressing gown on over his T-shirt and boxers.
Hedidn’t normally dream that vividly unless he’d forgotten his meds.Fastening the dressing gown, he went looking.His living spaceconsisted of one big circular room, and was easily searched.Kit’sgrandfather had grumpily offered him the keeper’s cottage, huddledlike a frightened animal at the foot of the tower, but he’dpreferred the storm-watch accommodation up top.He had no officialrole of guardianship—would never have got a gig withresponsibilities like that—but on very wild nights, he liked tosweep the bay with binoculars from time to time.His predecessorhad left behind a radio set, and a few times now he’d been able topatch through a warning to vessels straying close to Hell’s Teeth,the savage line of pointed rocks whose tips barely broke thesurface at high tide.
It gavehim a fleeting sense of having something to do.Strange lightspainted the whitewash.The moon was catching the tips of the surf,silvering the manes of the white horses as they raced for shore ordemolished themselves on Hagerawl Rock.Priddy found his pillbox onthe window ledge.The box had a separate container for each day’smeds, but it wasn’t one of the grim little plastic devices youcould buy in Boots.Kit had handcrafted it for him out of plywood,painted it with various shades of nail varnish from his sister’smake-up kit, and encrusted it with glued-on shells.The finishedeffect was hideous, but that was what Kit had intended.Priddycouldn’t easily lose it or forget it.He checked the Fridaysection.Yeah, he’d missed his dose, despite Kit’s best efforts.“You can lead a horse to water, mate,” Priddy reminded his absentfriend, shaking the pills out into his palm.
Kit hadmade other boxes, too.These ones were on paper, A4 printouts withrows and columns to schedule Priddy through his daily tasks aroundthe lighthouse and other activities such as eating, sleeping andgoing for walks on the clifftops.He’d left room for a tick at theend of each row.
Priddy was glad he was gone, although until he’d left—untilall the boys and girls of last summer had flown, like swallows fromthe barns on the Morvah cliffs—Priddy had never really known whattrue loneliness was.Kit deserved better than a life spent here,making instalment payments on his remorse.There were otherbenefits.With Kit had vanished the last witness to the outbreak offish-demons in the Penzance club.Priddy had made the papers, orthePenwith Heraldat any rate.They’d sympathised briefly with his near-deathexperience, then hung him out to dry as an example of fecklessyouth and the dark side of the neo-hippie drug culture consumingthe decent southwest.He’d been a nine-days wonder.All thoseeditions of theHeraldhad long since passed to the recycling dump or the chip shops.As soon as Priddy had got the lighthouse job, his ma had let outhis bedroom to a short-order chef from Portugal, who would probablymake better use of it.Priddy wasn’t sure he could goback.
And thelighthouse had been good for him.Only ten miles out of Penzance,it was still perched on a vast chunk of granite at the end of arutted track he didn’t dare cover too often in his clapped-out car.Priddy had been as virtuous as Rapunzel over the last fewmonths.
He putthe kettle on, swallowed his pills with a glass of tap water.Hehadn’t hallucinated anything significant in months.The meds madehim sleepy as well as keeping the sea gods and demons at bay.Hespent most of his off-duty time curled up in his bunk, tellinghimself he was healing, not just depressed and hidingout.
The windbellowed.The white horses galloped harder.Priddy shrugged into anankle-length oilskin, pushed his bare feet into wellies andunhooked his binoculars from the rack by the door.Carefully he lethimself out onto the deck.The door was weighted but could stillswing wildly if the gale caught it.Priddy had learned this thehard way after almost being catapulted over the rail on his thirdnight here.Now he knew enough to let the wind anchor him, crushinghim against the white-rendered wall like an impatient lover.Thatleft his hands free for the binos.He raised them, trying to shieldtheir lenses from flecks of foam.
Therewere lights on the horizon, but they were piled high and handsome,probably one of the floating cities that plied the Atlantic betweenNew York and Falmouth harbour.Nothing closer to shore.All clearfor now.Priddy often felt better for making his check, and hewaited for his sense of guilt and general unalleviated wretchednessto subside.
Nottonight.The binos felt heavy in his hands.He lowered them alittle, and the moonlit tips of the Teeth jumped into focus at him,grinning.He was freezing cold beneath his oilskin coat.Loweringhis head against the storm, he went back inside.
***
When he couldn’t sleep, he sometimes worked his way throughthe DVD collection left behind by previous bored and strandedkeepers.One of them had possessed a taste for vintage horror, andeither a masochistic streak or a twisted sense of humour:Jawswas there among thebattered plastic cases,Leviathan,Piranha.TheFog, too—not the grim James Herbert numberbut the John Carpenter classic, about the little town of AntonioBay and the undead zombie pirates who roll in with the mist off thesea to terrorise the heroine, a feisty DJ who’s set up shopin...
Yes, a lighthouse.Priddy had sat through this one severaltimes before.He liked the world-building, the offbeat relationshipbetween Jamie Curtis and the trucker she hooks up with.The specialeffects were mostly limited to dry ice and balefully glowing redeyes, but these were handled well, the musical score helpingratchet up the tension and atmosphere.Priddy enjoyed the idea ofwatching it all on his own in the small hours of the morning.LikewatchingThelma and Louisefrom a cliff-top drive-in, orTitanicon board a leaky boat.He’dalways loved sea-monster movies, even if they scared him.Loved theidea of something mysterious out there.That wasn’t the same aswanting to study marine biology, was it?But that had been the lifehe’d thought he’d have.Following Kit to university, then followinghim onward to wherever he’d gone after that.
He guessed that a lot of his plans had revolved aroundfollowing Kit.He made a mug of instant coffee, switched on theelectric heater and curled up in the battered armchair in front ofthe TV.The Fogbegan to play.The DJ made the long trek down the steps to thestudio, playing her breathy-voiced promo reels.Janet Leigh wasexcellent as the harried, irritable chairwoman hiding hergrief-stricken terror for her missing husband.The little boy foundthe spar from the Elizabeth Dane on the beach.The fog rolled in,hook hands clawed at windows.Priddy’s meds caught up with him inone tidal rush, and he fell fast asleep in the chair.
He woke to the long, slow scrape of metal on glass.He lurchedupright, knocking cold coffee off the arm of the chair.Thescraping came again.They’ve come forme, he thought, with perfect clarity, andshocked himself with a burst of laughter.He was so fucking lonely.Anything choosing to arise from the deeps tonight—sharks, krakens,zombie pirates—could have him, body and soul.He staggered back outonto the deck to meet his fate.
A chainhad detached itself from the rusted lantern cage and was draggingacross the window, back and forth.Back and forth.Priddy grabbedit and hung on.The wind had slackened off but the deck waslurching under him, and down in the water there werelights.
Lights!
God, no.Sick fear boiled up in his throat.Lights this close to HagerawlRock meant that every safeguard had failed, every flash from thevigilant tower, and a boat was about to run aground on Hell’sTeeth.A boat this close was doomed, her belly slashed openalready.Her crew would have bailed, or—more likely for a bunch ofpartygoers on a hired yacht—drowned in their bunks.Priddy hopedthey’d been good and pissed.He dived back indoors, snatched theradio handset off its cradle and cranked the dial to thecoastguard’s frequency.Static crackled and hissed, but the pickupcame quickly, the Hawke Lake graveyard-shifters on their toes.Priddy gave his location, snapped out the codes—Kit’s granddad hadmade him learn them off by heart—for a vessel introuble.
Theadrenaline had cleared his head completely.Not just his head,either.His heart was pumping strongly, taut-muscled vigourstrengthening his limbs.He hadn’t felt like this since the lasttime he’d waded in to help a bunch of surfers caught in the rip.His meds had cleared his system, flash-metabolised.There was noway on earth the coastguard would get here on time, even if Hawkedispatched choppers and the Porth Bay lifeboat launched rightaway.
Priddyshoved his feet into his trainers.He invested the time to lacethem right up.A stumble on the spiral stairs would ruineverything, drop him in a broken-necked heap on the concrete floorbelow.For the first time since his awakening in the TrelowarrenICU three months ago, the thought of such extinction upset him.Hissurvival instincts flared, and then—brighter, better—the instinctto save someone else.On the TV screen, Jamie and her trucker weresmashing their way into the DJ’s house to rescue her little boy.Those guys had the right idea.Priddy grabbed a coil of rope, agrappling hook and an emergency pack for first-aid on the shore.Heheld little hope—most likely the bodies would wash up downcoast ina week’s time—but that didn’t matter.He could try.
He tookthe spiral four steps at a time, keeping a token grasp on the rail.The tight curve of the walls was hypnotic, like being caught in anEscher drawing, and he concentrated fiercely on his footing,counting breaths and levels until finally the ground floor heavedup at him.He leapt to meet it, ran for the rusted metal door,threw back its bolt and dragged it wide.
Thelighthouse was anchored to a vast concrete foundation block.Security lights flicked on, illuminating the cube’s edge and beyondit the roiling sea.There were two life-belts attached to woodenboards by the railing, and Priddy unhitched both of them, slingingthem over his free arm.He leapt off the block onto turf-coveredgranite and half-ran, half-slid his way down to the beach, pungentscents of crushed yarrow mixing with ozone and wind-driven salt.Once he felt shingle under his feet he let his armload of equipmentfall.He tugged the pack open and extracted a high-poweredflashlight: got his balance, braced, and lifted the lightshoulder-high.
Unbelievably, a boat had made it through.She was wallowingup past her gunwales, but not reduced to matchwood yet.Strangestof all, a young man was swimming beside her.He raised a hand toPriddy, flashed him a dazzling smile and waved.
Chapter Three
He should have been torn to shreds.Priddy decided he couldn’tbe seeing right.The smile was probably a scream.Not waving but drowningwas a joke, a cliché or a line from Stevie Smith’s poetry,depending on your disposition.I was muchfurther out than you thought.The dark headvanished into a trough between waves.Priddy jammed the grapplinghook into the shingle.Threaded the rope through its ring andsnapped the knot tight.The life belt had a big carabiner at theback.His hands were slippery from his scramble down the slope andhe dropped the torch: missed the catch on his first and secondtries.The lighthouse, which until now he’d regarded as a soullesstube of concrete, swept a beam like saving grace across him at justthe right moment.
Thethird try opened the clip.He secured the belt to the rope and ranfor the sea.This was a good rescue method because, even if hepersonally drowned in the process, the guy in the water would stillstand a chance if he could tow himself inland by the rope.Itseemed a fair trade-off.Priddy waded in.
