The Dark Lighthouse

	Chapter 1 Thunder, Lightning and the Latest News	Return to

Wham! Thunder jolted the ground an instant after lightning lit up our tent like noon in June, except it was July and it was after midnight.
"That one hit me!" yelped Dillon McBride from the sleeping bag next to mine. The wind was making the tent go whap-whap-whap while the rain hit fast and hard.
I scoffed at Dillon. At least I think I scoffed. Isn't that halfway between a sneer and a cough? "Don't you know the first rule of lightning? If you hear thunder, it didn't hit you." Meanwhile I scooted myself as far as possible from those four aluminum tent poles.
A flashlight beam swept the bouncing ceiling and waving walls of the tent. "No leaks," Bobby Brown reported from the other side of Dillon. We all call him Brownie, and he soon changed his mind about leaks. "Wait! There's water coming in at this corner! Yuk, my sleeping bag is all-"
Cr-r-r-ack! Bam! Another lightning-thunder duo. I was fairly sure it hadn't hit me, since I heard thunder rolling away across the bay like a herd of lumber trucks.
I tried to remember whose idea this camping trip was. That way I'd know who to get mad at after I survived it and was home and warm and dry. Not that this could really be called a camping trip. We were out at the end of Jackpine Point, not far from where any of us live.
The wind made the jackpines howl between here and the lighthouse. Brownie howled louder than the jackpines. "My sleeping bag is smooshed against the tent wall! You guys kept shoving me over all night!"
"You've got exactly as much space as me and David," Dillon informed him. Dillon had been careful to place himself between me and Brownie, so he couldn't get shoved anywhere near the side of the tent.
"Doesn't look that roomy to me," Brownie complained, swinging his light around. Dillon snapped, "Turn that thing off, you're blinding me!" The beam shot around the tent as they wrestled for the flashlight.
Ri-i-i-ip! Our outside tent flap was zipped open. Cold wind rushed in. Now somebody was yanking on the zipper of the inside screen flap. Over the storm noise came two girls' voices: "Let us in!" "We're soaked!"
It had to be Marmy Albright and Cathy Knutson, who had been sharing a tent not far off. Dillon said, "Go easy! You'll wreck the screen!"
Marmy came back, "If there were any bugs out here, they drowned already." The screen was jerked open and the girls tumbled in, bringing a good dose of rain and wind along.
I was already damp and chilled. Now I felt damper and chilled-er. Add two wet cold people to a tent, and it gets ten times wetter and colder.
Marmy was still talking as usual. "It's raining more inside our tent than outside! The flew of our fly blew off!"
"She means the fly of our tent flew off," Cathy said. She was tugging the outside tent flap closed. "That last bolt of lightning took the power out. You can't see town across the bay. No lights anywhere."
"Must have hit a transistor or translator," Marmy decided. "Oh, let me see your flashlight!" She grabbed it from Brownie and held the beam under her chin. "I like doing this. It makes your face look so weird."
Pow! It was like some Great Director in the Sky called "Cue the special effects!" As the weird beam lit up Marmy's face weirdly, thunder and lightning boomed and flashed. I mean lightning and thunder flashed and boomed.

"That one hit me!" Dillon yelped.

This time Brownie scoffed, if scoffing is what I think scoffing is. "Don't you remember David Malloy's First Rule of Lightning?"
"The first rule of lightning," Cathy said, "is, do not camp in the middle of it. If you'd all listened to me when I tried to tell you the weather report-"
Marmy was still holding the flashlight under her chin. "I'm going to do this at the pageant. There must be a part for somebody who's haunting somebody or something." Brownie told her to stop wasting the batteries and grabbed the flashlight back and switched it off.
Cathy's voice asked, "Do you mean that in your Christmas pageant you have people haunting people?"
"Not the Christmas pageant," Marmy's voice answered, "the pageant they're doing here on the Point this summer."
I knew what Dillon was going to say, and he said it. "Don't talk about pageants with David Malloy here! Do you know he once wrecked our entire Christmas pageant? Let me tell you what he did-"
Brownie interrupted, "We all know what he did. Some of us were even there."
I had to defend myself. "I did not wreck the entire pageant. That is a lie which has become a legend. Or a myth. Or something. What really happened was-"
Cathy broke in on my story. "Marmalade, what pageant are you talking about? You are being unclear."
"Yeah," I said, "you've got us all in the dark, ha ha ha."
"Ha. Ha. I mean the lighthouse pageant. The historical pageant for the Bell Harbor light. It's part of the hundred-year clean-up, paint-up, fix-up thing. I wrote a paper on it for history class, remember?"
I did remember Marmy spouting a lot of lighthouse facts just before school let out. I hadn't listened much because I was busy writing my own paper on-whatever it was I wrote my paper on.
Right now, between lightning bolts, I'd better explain something. The town of Bell Harbor, which couldn't be seen because it was blacked out, is on a bay attached to the Big Lake. At the entrance to the bay, at the end of the peninsula called Jackpine Point, is the lighthouse I told you about.
All five of us live on Jackpine Point. We've been friends all our lives. We do just about everything together. I don't know why or how, but we've become experts at starting out doing something and having it go in all directions that we don't expect it to go. I could give you lots of examples, but we're in the middle of a good example right now, which is camping in the middle of a thunderstorm.
Cathy said, "Even if no one else recalls Marmy Albright's paper, I recall it distinctly. She practically lived at my house, going on line looking up lighthouse facts. When she wasn't distracted looking up light years. And light verse. And the Charge of the Light Brigade."
"I think there's water coming in on my side," I said.
Brownie offered, "Use my flashlight . . . What?! It's dead! Marmalade used up the batteries doing her weird face trick!" I heard the thwack-thwack of him hitting the flashlight against his hand, which never does any good.
"Don't worry," Marmy assured us, "it'll be good practice for the pageant. Don't you think there were times when their lanterns didn't work and they were in the dark? What I'm saying is, you guys need to get in the spirit of this thing if one of you is going to play the lighthouse keeper."
I froze. Not because I was cold. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.
Three male voices said together, "Play the lighthouse keeper?" One of those voices was mine.
"Well, Cathy and I can't. That's why I want to play somebody from a mysterious shipwreck like the wreck of the Moth."
Dillon asked, "How will they decide who plays the lighthouse keeper?" He was trying hard to sound casual. In his mind, I knew, he was already trying on his uniform and polishing the buttons.
"I don't know," Marmy answered, "but I do know it's a youth-type play and the actors are all people our age."
Brownie gave us the latest weather bulletin: "Storm's blowing over. The rain's quit."
The only sound on the tent was like somebody watering the lawn. The flapping had stopped. The thunder was far off. We could hear what had been drowned out before: waves swooshing against the rocks of the Point.
Brownie said, "Let's go see if the power is back on."
"And we may as well walk over to the lighthouse," Dillon suggested. "You know, to get into the spirit of the thing."
Outside it was cold, the cold that comes even in July at night on the shore of the Big Lake. We stood unbending from the cramped-up feel you get from too many people packed into one space. I looked across the bay toward town.
Town wasn't there!
"Blackout," Cathy said, "precisely as I told you."
"The lighthouse must be out too," Brownie concluded.
I knew the answer to that. I spoke up quick before Marmy Albright and her research beat me to it. "It's a solar-powered light now. Battery."
What would happen if the lighthouse batteries went dead? Would a giant hand pick up the lighthouse and thwack it like Brownie thwacked his flashlight? I'd have to ask our Sunday school teacher, Miss Wainwright, if she thought God would do that, or would He make the batteries work again, or would He keep boats away from the rocks until the Coast Guard could recharge the batteries?
We pushed through jackpines that dripped cold water on us. I couldn't see anything, and I told whoever was ahead of me to quit letting go of branches so they hit me in the face. Whoever was behind me told me the same thing.
In a couple of minutes we weren't eating wet pine needles anymore. We came out onto slick black rock that would be black even in daylight. The waves were slamming the rocks, though the wind had died down.
Ahead we felt, more than saw, the shape of the Bell Harbor lighthouse: the keeper's brick house, square-ish and simple, and sprouting at one corner of it, the octagon-shaped tower. A walkway with a railing went around the glassed-in top of the tower. The Coast Guard light was fastened to the outside.
We stopped and waited. A long streak of light shot across the choppy water. It was a reflection of the beam in the air above it. Then everything went all black again.
I held my breath. Twenty heartbeats in my ears, each getting louder. On the twentieth ear-beat, the light shot across the waves again, disappeared again.
We felt our way along the side of the house until we came to the tower at the corner. My fingers found a metal rod running down the side. I thought it was still quivering from carrying bolts of lightning into the ground.
On. Out. Count to twenty. On. Out.
This was new for us, being able to touch the lighthouse. All our lives, at least until a few months ago, the lighthouse and the other buildings around it had been surrounded by a chain-link fence. There were yellow signs warning you to Keep Out. The Coast Guard took care of the solar light, but otherwise the place sat empty, looking more run down every year.
Now the fence was gone. The city of Bell Harbor or the historical people or somebody in town had gotten dibs on the lighthouse, and they were in the middle of fixing it up to celebrate its 100th birthday.
On. Out. Count to twenty. On. Out.
Dillon asked, "How do they decide who plays the lighthouse keeper?"
I was tired of hearing about it. "Well why would somebody want to play a lighthouse keeper anyhow? All you do is light the light every morning and put it out again every night. Wait, that doesn't sound right. Maybe it's the opposite."
Marmy sighed. "David, I'm very glad you weren't the lighthouse keeper and I wasn't out in the Moth."
"As I recall the story, the Moth got wrecked and sunk anyhow. Even if I wasn't the lighthouse keeper."
"Well it would have got wrecked and sunk worse if you'd been there."
I wanted to say something biting and brilliant back at her, but I couldn't think of anything. Some people are good at making comebacks on the spot. I usually think of them several days later. Anyway, in Miss Wainwright's class we'd been learning about getting back at people, or rather not getting back at people, so maybe it was good I couldn't think of anything.
A cloud over the lake started glowing. Half a moon showed up from behind it.
Brownie said, "Hey, you can see the other tower."
Above the jackpines several patches of white floated in the darkness. To somebody new to the Point, they would have looked ghostly. They were only chunks of plaster stuck to the remains of a round brick tower. It had been painted or whitewashed so the plaster was still very white.
That wreck of a tower was all that was left of the first Bell Harbor lighthouse-the one the 100-year-old light replaced. It shot up impressively and then ended halfway to where you expected it to end. The top was jagged like a broken bottle.
Dillon almost scared me up the lightning rod when he yelled, "Let's go look for the graves!"
I'm surprised the Great Director in the Sky didn't order a thunder crash. It would have been appropriate for what happened later. Instead the next sound was Marmy screeching "No! I'm not going looking for any graves!"
Cathy was more calm. "In my opinion, there are no graves to go looking for. The story of the three graves is nothing more than that-a story."
"But it's a true story!" Marmy said. "The lighthouse keeper's wife and two kids died when the house burned, and he buried them and put up three crosses-"
"Yes, and tell me precisely what is the location of those three crosses?"
I knew the answer to that. "Nobody knows."
Dillon said, "That's why I say let's go look for them!"
Cathy's voice was still steady. "What I am saying is, there's no proof they exist. No one alive has ever seen them."
"It's been a hundred years," Brownie said slowly. "The crosses could have decayed into the ground, or somebody could have taken them. They were nothing but stick crosses the keeper made in a hurry."
The moon got all covered by clouds again. I looked out across the Big Lake and saw only dark. It was dark everywhere else too, but dark over the lake is real dark. Darker than any dark from the batteries going dead in your flashlight or power going out in town. It's miles-deep darkness. It goes over the curve of the world.
I turned away from the lake to look across the dark of the bay, which felt safer.
The opposite shore was on fire! No, it didn't look like fire. It looked like electric lights. It was electric lights-street lights from town.
I was glad to change the subject. "Power's back on!"
"So who gets to play the lighthouse keeper?" Dillon asked for the hundredth time. At least he was dropping the subject of searching for graves.
"Who cares who plays the lighthouse keeper?" I asked. I guess I snorted too. Notice, though, I didn't lie. I didn't say "I don't care who plays the lighthouse keeper."
"Lights!" said Marmy.
"Sure, I told you, it's the lights from town. The power's back on."
"No! Coming through the trees! Right at us!"
Bright beams were bouncing toward us through the pines! Lanterns? Wandering lost lighthouse keepers? Shipwrecked sailors come ashore?
There were two beams. Car headlights. They came jolting along the uneven ruts which would be filled with water after the storm. And they looked familiar.
It was the McBrides' car. Dillon's parents must have come looking for us to make sure we hadn't gotten blown off the Point or struck by lightning.
As we headed back to our tents, I looked toward the broken tower of the ruined lighthouse. I tried to fill in the missing top where the light had shone. Somebody had kept that light burning in storms like the one tonight, when it would have been needed most of all.
And I wondered how I would manage to get the part of the lighthouse keeper in the pageant when I was up against such a tower-sized ego as Dillon McBride's.