Chapter Text
I don’t like the stairs but I don’t mind the damp or the ghosts. I like the sound of the waves and the view from the top.
I hire a housekeeper. We live in such solitude nobody would ever suspect that I love her as an equal.
As a fellow keeper (of household rather than lighthouse), Clara understands what it is to maintain routines, to take care.
We find ways to be each other's keepers.
She looks after me and twice a day she holds my hand as we climb the tall spiral of stairs.
We sit at the top and look out for hours.
Some days go by without a single word spoken.
Some are filled with conversation or books read aloud by the woman I call my wife.
Some days we sing in the kitchen.
It's not lonely, even though we're nearly alone with the wind and the waves and the ghostly whispers.
I barely step foot off of the island.
It's Clara who leaves for supplies, usually. I hear the town news through her every month or so. She leaves less often in the winter.
When the people in the town send word that nobody wishes to take my position, Clara tells me with a spark in her smile. She says she wouldn't mind living like this a while longer.
I don’t mind, either.
We stay for another five, ten, twenty years.
17 July 1824
People call it a pity for a woman to die in the arms of her housekeeper.
Those people could never learn the language of the wind and sea.
Of course they could never be satisfied by the life I’ve lived.
When they do not understand any of my loves, why should I expect them to see that I was happy?
She buries me in a shallow grave by the lighthouse, marked with a simple stone: Altheda.
No date, for an incomplete headstone is how the lighthouse may choose to keep us.
(The ghosts who don't want to stay tell keepers their names).
Clara knows that my soul would never leave the mortal world if given the option to stay by the sea.
She honors my wishes.
08 September 1824
I watch her as she goes about the housekeeping.
I never thought I would wish death upon my wife, but I yearn to hold her in my arms.
It's rare that I'm strong enough to speak. Storms are the easiest, and the other ghosts—keepers, mostly, now that we've properly introduced ourselves—they generally climb during storms.
I would, too. I can feel the pull. In life I used to climb and watch for wayward ships like the rest of them.
But Clara doesn't climb with the new keeper. She offers, but her knees aren't what they once were.
We grew old together. It was lovely.
I said it—that we'd grown old together—to her. Once or twice.
Oh, well, maybe more than that. It made her smile.
Now, she smiles when her joints ache in the morning.
"Storm's coming, Hedy," she says while pinning her hair. "We'll be chatting away by sunset, I guarantee."
She can't see me, except sometimes from the corner of her eye, but that doesn't matter.
Both of our eyesights have been going, anyway. I died without my spectacles on, so it's possible sometimes she sees me better than I see her.
Neither of us mind the invisibility of my presence at the dinner table in the evening.
The wind and the rain and the sea are doing battle outside, and I have energy enough to speak whole sentences.
It's a blessing just to tell her, "I love you," and " I saw where you left the flour."
The latter has been bothering me.
(The old ones, the generations of keepers, say only the freshly deceased souls really care about things like that.
But I'd still care in a hundred years, if it was my Clara wondering where the flour was.)
The door slams open, startling us both.
The keeper is there. He tells Clara he's "—going out. Someone's on the rocks. Near enough to rescue."
Clara argues he waits "—eleven minutes, then it will be safe to set out. They won't go anywhere, not between those rocks."
She keeps her head on in a crisis, my Clara.
She's seen more of these than him by decades, but he doesn't want to listen. He thinks waiting will hurt more.
Clara is usually right about these storms. I trusted her gut more than my own.
The new keeper should heed her warning, but he doesn't.
The storm turns before he reaches the small ship caught between two rocks.
He dies, but the ship remains.
"You already know I'm going out there, my love," Clara says.
I do. I knew before she pulled on her coat and boots.
"Be safe, darling." I tell her. "You deserve a comfortable passing."
"I'll be alright." She blows me a kiss and she's gone.
Outside is hard. On a dry night, or a dark day, I can follow Clara silently.
With this rain—I linger by the window.
09 September 1824
Clara returns with two others just after the old clock chimes midnight.
One of them is hurt. They lean on their companion, but fall into the chair closest to the door with a look of relief.
"They are stranded," Clara says to me. The strangers exchange a glance, but they do not ask who she speaks to. "Looks like they'll have to stay awhile."
"Lay me to rest," demands the new ghost, the lingering soul of Martin, the newly dead keeper, "I died in the water. I died trying to rescue lives."
He has been on about this incessantly.
I don't remember being this repetitive before my stone was down, but the others say I was.
They say we all are.
"In the morning, we'll lay Martin a stone. You'll help with that, won't you? It'll soothe the fellow, whether he wants to linger or not."
The strangers shrug.
"I was only here through the new year. I don't want to be fuckin' stuck here."
"With the date, then." Clara says, " Shouldn't be too hard. I've got the calendar up to date, as you know, Martin."
"Lay me to rest. I died in the water. I died trying to rescue lives. But they're already dead. Bloody pointless. Lay me to rest."
They don't act dead, and they are not ghosts—but I suppose they are not alive.
The injured one has shaggy shoulder-length hair and a—feminine face?—but is dressed in men's clothes.
Warm ones, the kind I died in and still appear to wear.
The uninjured one is dressed similarly. He has a beard, graying. His hair is streaked with silver as well.
Their hearts beat, but their life is not their own.
The injured one grimaces, and we all see a flash of fang.
"Undying." says Old Isaac, one of the elders returned from the tower to see the commotion. "I'd know one a league off."
"Yeah, and I can fuckin' hear you," the unhurt one snaps.
I would have known these strangers weren't human if they had spoken earlier.
It's clearer to me than the speech of the living, but it comes from the body nonetheless.
Not like the words of ghosts, forced out exactly as they are formed in the soul.
Ghosts cannot lie.
Lucky that I've never said much less than what I meant, I suppose.
"Oh, you can hear them already?" Clara asks pleasantly. She has a knack for disarming people with warmth.
It works—the unhurt stranger is surprised.
He nods curtly.
"It typically takes some weeks of living here to hear the spirits," Clara says. "Can you see them, too?"
He nods again, and glances around the room.
I can tell he means it. His gaze lingers on Fish Hooks Frank, who died gruesomely and likes to greet the newly dead.
Frank is a kind soul, though cheeky, and I forgave him quickly once I remembered his voice from my keeper days.
He blew out the lamps once when we left them burning. Might've prevented a fire.
We've gotten along well since, but he was stirring up trouble with Martin before Clara returned.
Old Isaac notices the undying one's preoccupation with Frank, and addresses the spirits in the room.
"Out, all!" He says, and Frank pulls Martin out of the room.
Good he noticed before Frank did.
"Altheda?"
"If you honestly think I plan to leave my wife alone with these strangers, Isaac—"
"Alright, alright. Peace with you."
Clara rolls her eyes at me.
"They won't hurt me, not when I saved them. Not to mention, I showed them my cane makes a passable stake. Isn't that right, dearie?"
The injured one stares at Clara. One would think she was the ghost in the room, based on the look on this undying stranger's face.
The uninjured one looks at me.
"This is your wife?" he asks.
"Oh, yes. How rude of me. This is my Altheda, Hedy I call her. She was the keeper before young Martin came."
"Izzy. This is Jim."
The names are meaningless to me. They're gone as quick as they came, like a wave soaking back into the sea.
The other souls tell me that it's nearly impossible to learn new names, especially of the living. Some struggle with the newly dead.
I finally learned Martin's name today. That is a comfort, although the fact that he intends to pass on soon means it will be inconsequential soon enough.
09-26 September 1824
The injured undying apparently recover quicker than the living, but they still take some weeks to heal.
Their wounds had been worse than their stoic expression led Clara to believe.
The unhurt one follows me up the stairs while Clara tends the other's wounds.
I'm not strong enough to speak, but he hums as we climb. Some old sailor's song.
I don't know it, but I find I enjoy listening as I climb.
Clara and I climbed in silence, hand in hand.
Step by step. Level by level. It was a time for meditation, not for speaking.
But his song sets a steady, slow pace, and when he begins to sing in earnest, it doesn't itch at me the way it did when I followed Martin up the stairs with one of the men from the town and they chattered all the while.
His voice is deep. It rasps and wraps its way around the vowels in a manner foreign to me. There is a melody, but his song seems at times to turn into a recital. Not the poems of school-children, but perhaps a reading of the Christian Bible. It has been over half a century since I have heard either, to be sure.
The lyrics are my favorite part. He sings of the sea:
I'm an old friend of the fickle seas
I've sailed waters cold enough to freeze
but I once swam in the warm
waves of the Caribbean
all this time, I'm a witness
to the changing tides
I'm a wrinkled friend of the fickle seas
I've sailed waters cloudier than the English sky
but I once saw a surf so clear
you could count the grasses on the seabed
all this time, I'm a witness
to the changing tides
I'm an ill-sighted friend of the fickle seas
I've sailed waters a league deep
but I once watched a man drown in shallows
that wouldn't reach his waist
all this time, I'm a witness
to the changing tides
all this time, I'm a witness to the changing tides
all this time, I'm a witness to the changing tides
I suspect it's a very old song, but it's new to me.
I haven't heard a new song in a while.
I'm a bit sorry when we reach the top.
It's a good thing the undying can see us, because he can watch as I show him how to tend the equipment.
He takes to the work well.
Clara sees this too.
She glances at him and says, "You're a natural keeper, aren't you, pet?"
"Fuck off," he grumbles, as if he hasn't caught on that the more gruff he is the more pet names Clara will use.
(It's one of the many reasons I fell for her.)
"You could stay here, you know. Both of you. You could be co-keepers, though it's not yet the season we have so many on shift."
They both snort, but they don't explain the joke.
"It's not like that," the older-looking sailor says later, when his injured companion is asleep.
"No?" Clara doesn't disbelieve him, but Izzy cannot read her as well as I can.
"They called me uncle once." He says. "We were drunk. I don't speak much Spanish, but I know that one."
"That's nice," Clara means it. "They say the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb."
"I suppose. I don't know they meant it."
"I'm sure they did."
"They... had someone. A long time ago. I was part of the reason they lost him."
Clara raises an eyebrow. She still uses that move on me, sometimes.
"Have you apologized?"
The old sailor sighs. "'S much as anybody can apologize to Jim without gettin' stabbed. 'N then a bit more."
My wife laughs. I like the man more, just for that.
"They stabbed you?"
She's always had a strange sense of humor.
"Yeah, right in the fuckin—well, it doesn't matter, anyway. I know now they'd rather I just—don't make the same decisions over again."
"Well, it sounds like you try to do that."
The sailor shrugs.
Clara moves to add firewood to the stove, but the sailor waves her off and does it with ease.
"Least I can do," he says, and she beams at him.
"No, I don't think it is... Anyway, you never answered my question. How would you feel about being a keeper here? You seem to like it."
He tries to help cook, but she waves her knife at him. She's never liked anyone interfering in her cooking.
He takes the hint.
"I couldn't—I have a—team. And my... boss. To get back to."
"Your boss?"
"Used to be. Still is. Even though Jim does a lot of what I used to do, and I'm... something else. An advisor, I suppose. Not that Edward needs one, exactly, but..."
"Two heads are better than one?"
His head glints in the lamplight as he nods.
"Well, you're welcome to return."
27 September 1824
The strangers leave after the sailor shows the new keeper how to keep.
"Can't say I'm sorry to see them go," he says to Clara.
"Won't be the last of them," she says.
He scoffs, but my Clara is usually right about these things.