Continued from Part V:
The Lighthouse, Part V
Continued from Part IV: “I heard it from one of the other guys afterwards. When they went down to the dock the next morning, Johnny’s boat was missing. Apparently he had gone out alone. How he managed it I’ll never know. His wife, Cindy, she said he had left at two in the morning—poor thing, she didn’t think anything of it, we all took third shift sometimes. Well, within the hour big seas came up, and by the time anyone knew he was gone there was a snowstorm to boot, the worst kind, that turns to ice as soon as it touches your hull. Nobody could go out. We called the Coast Guard, and soon as they could, boats were out like a shot to look for him, but out there—that’s a whole country where men don’t belong. If you catch her in the wrong mood, it’s worse than being stranded in the desert. If you have the newest, slickest safety equipment on the market, she’ll crush it to bits in her jaw and leave you helpless as a baby.
The Lighthouse
Part VI
I woke to the immense stillness of the house. It was still very dark, and I heard nothing now but my own breathing, and the torn shrouds of crying echoing still from my dream. It was not past two in the morning. Rarely indeed have I spent such a dreadful hour, as that which interposed itself between my mind and further sleep. The house, as I have said, was perfectly still, there was not even a wind abroad to leave in its wake any alarming creaks or rattling. Yet this very stillness implied to my addled brain, a consciousness, and an observer—as though the house itself regarded me, or something within the house, which nevertheless had eyes in the beams, and that peered at me from where the linoleum curled up from the floor, and revealed the house’s foundation. The door to the tower did not shake, yet no less did I fear something beyond its heavy frame, that might at any moment grow restless of its long confinement.