The Lamplighter (35 page)

Monsignor Dell' Aquila dries his brow, feeling immeasurably old. He has battled demons in Sicily, Prussia, and Egypt, and chased them through the Alps of Austria. He has had his faith challenged and his soul shaken by unimaginable powers. He is now in a vibrating Scottish lighthouse at the request of some coldhearted Calvinists, and he feels saddled with the entire credibility of his creed.

He looks ruefully at the ragged little girl, who is held down with cords and netting and kept awake with smelling salts, and wonders if the torment she has endured is possible to justify. But the equanimity she continues to exude is positively sinister, making a mockery of pity. And her eyes have darkened so much it is impossible to read her mind.

He sighs despondently and returns to a
Rituale Romanum
blotted with his own sweat.

“Exi ergo transgressor. Exi seductor, plene omni dolo et fallacia, virtutis inimice, innocentium persecutor….”

But his voice, initially forceful, has become despairing, because he knows this is a battle that will never be won with mere words. A more drastic statement—an insuperable talisman—is required. Because he has faced many demons before, but never one with the power of Leerie.

They never set out to hate her. For personal reasons Abraham Lindsay in particular has never liked her, but even he recognizes this is partly irrational. They have selected her fully realizing that she will be confused and possibly traumatized, and suffer emotional consequences that might prove incurable. They are not even certain how much she will be harmed physically. But the stakes are of a magnitude that makes such considerations insignificant.

They never set out to hate her. Their enmity is directed solely at the one she houses. But the longer it goes on without success, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish the tenant from the host.

When she is racked with anguish, it is difficult not to interpret guilt.

When she is resistant, and screams invective, it is impossible not to see her as his agent.

When she is quiet, it can only be a sign of complicity.

They never set out to hurt her. But by the time the exorcist retires, defeated, they have squandered months and a small fortune on the engagement. They have wrought so much damage on her that it is impossible to believe she might ever salvage a worthwhile life. They are riddled with doubts about their own accountability and are terrified of their own fates. But they cannot surrender. They are condemned to victory.

When they think of Evelyn now they experience only revulsion and shame. They can barely begin to contemplate the terrible ordeal they have visited upon her. They have flayed from her a personality and replaced it with something hideously mutilated. And all the time Leerie has offered not a hint that he is weakening.

The girl is beyond hope—she is the manifestation of their own self-loathing—and any action becomes justifiable.

They never set out to hurt her.

But desperation has given them no option.

“A lighthouse? What do you see?”

Evelyn was shivering violently, and Canavan looked away, savaged by pity.

“They have removed the little girl to a lighthouse, is that it?” McKnight tried again. “What are they doing there? Continuing the torment?”

Her lips staggered forward and withdrew.

“It is perfectly well that you protect her, Evelyn,” McKnight whispered. “In fact, it is decent and honorable. But please share with us your vision, so that all of us can be enlightened. It is not too late to save the little girl. You must tell us what you see.”

“There are…”

“There are what, Evelyn? We only want to save her.”

“There are waves.”

“You hear the waves? Booming against the rocks?”

“The little girl…”

“Aye?”

“She is in a boat…and there are waves.”

“In her mind, Evelyn? Is she manufacturing a rescue?”

Evelyn shook her head decisively. “She is being saved.”

“Saved, Evelyn?”

“Rescued…”

“Rescued? From what, Evelyn? What has happened at the lighthouse?”

“Waves as high as houses…the girl is so scared…it is so dark…and the boat is so frail….”

The boat is barely adequate and the seas unexpectedly hostile, but Billy Connor will not be daunted. He has seen enough of what they are doing to know that he can no longer live with inaction. He has no illusions about the audacity of his deed, but he is empowered by an enormous redemptive spirit. He is a good man, a true Christian, and he will not tolerate those devils acting in the name of God.

He has rowed out to Inchcaid in progressively more agitated seas. His brother and sister-in-law, fine people, are waiting ashore for his return. They are muttering prayers for him, though he mutters none himself, for he reckons the girl has heard enough of prayers.

He has entered the lighthouse furtively, an hour before dawn, and broken into the storeroom hardly breathing, his shoes wrapped in cloth. He has swaddled the vacant and unprotesting girl in thick blankets, hugged her close to his chest, and bundled her out of the storeroom and down to the landing jetty, a daring operation unthinkable ten years earlier, when he was rarely sober. The only keeper present is Colin Shanks, and from the light room above he has been too preoccupied with the lenses to notice anything through the great dashes of spray. The storm is like a gift from God.

But now a massive swell lifts and sucks them from the island. Billy tries to angle the oars, to find leverage in the water, but they are entirely at the sea's mercy. The rain is sweeping over him in great horizontal drifts, soaking his pullover and dripping from his uniform cap. He knows that in the lighthouse library there is a plaque for six builders drowned in similar conditions, and if he is washed overboard now, there will be no one to rescue them.

Two waves collide in an explosion of froth, gathering the little boat up and hurling it toward shore. When the swell subsides Connor has the briefest moment to glance at the girl, to see her hopeful eyes gleaming above the blankets.

“I will not let ye down, lassie,” he breathes, the first kind words she has heard in weeks.

He works the oars ruthlessly. The lighthouse beam scythes through the mist and rain. A ship's horn bellows in the distance. The little boat rises and plunges with the mountainous waves, and in no time they spy the flickering lamps of shore.

“Not long now,” Billy Connor says. “I won't let ye down. We'll find a new home for ye, I promise ye that.”

But his words are hardly uttered before a brutal wave crashes over the gunwale and sweeps him into the abyss.

“No one could have survived,” Lessels said, as though still to deny the possibility. “They found the keeper's cap washed ashore…and the boat, it was all in flinders. No one could have survived it. We said our prayers for her, and we observed a silence for her soul…for we did not set out to hate her.”

“But not all of you believed she was dead,” Groves stated authoritatively. “There was Abraham Lindsay…”

“Aye. Lindsay said he knew her best—that she had a power in her from the start, and now the power of the Beast. He reckoned she would not die so easily, and he reminded us no body had been found.”

“You chose not to agree with him?”

“Aye…”

“Because you could not live with the idea that she was still alive?”

She looked caught out.

“Because of what you had done to her? On top of everything else?”

Guilty silence.

“And what,” Fleming interjected, “is this thing that you are meant to have done to her, madam? It is a serious allegation that is being made against you, and it is best that we hear it now, for your own welfare.”

Her face reddened and she tried to build the courage to confess.

The boat is overturned. She clings to the wood. There is no sign of the keeper, and the lighthouse is a distant obelisk. She rises and plunges. She is half submerged in the freezing water and for seconds the shock is so great she might well be dead.

Before tonight she has known the sea as only a distant abstraction. Something she has read about in books, glimpsed from a great distance, and heard thundering against the lighthouse walls.

You will not die, lassie.

Another massive wave bears down on her. She closes her eyes as the water smacks her like a punishing fist. She loses her grip. The boat is torn away. She is swallowed completely by the sea.