Test Every Bulb

The boat came in low to the rock with its engine cut, and the first thing I knew of Maren Skerry was the sound of it: water working in under the granite, a deep hollow swallowing somewhere below the slip, the kind of noise a place makes when it has been alone a long time and has forgotten anyone is meant to come. I turned my head the way I do, putting the slip into my good eye, and let the rest of the island arrive in pieces, the white tower, the black lantern at the top of it dead as a chimney, the cottage hunched against the weather behind, the long pale scar of the helipad. I did not look at it all at once. I have not looked at anything all at once in eight years.

Calum brought us alongside without a word and held the boat there against the heave of the swell with one big hand on the gunwale, like a man steadying a horse he did not trust. He was sixty if he was a day, weathered down to gristle and patience, and he had not said more than ten sentences in the two hours from Eorsay. I had filled the silence myself the way I always do, talking low and steady to nobody, naming things as I sorted them, that is the cistern, that is the fuel store, mind your feet, Imani, the step is slick. My mother used to say a tongue that keeps moving keeps the dark out. She said a great many things about the dark.

"There is your generator shed," Calum said. He nodded at a low building with a tin roof furred green. "She is old and she is tired and she will let you down. Keep your torches charged."

"I always keep my torches charged," I said. I had four of them in my bag, two head-torches, a wind-up that needed no battery at all, a box of candles, a hurricane lamp, and a thing my old ward sister would have laughed at me for, a little keyring light I have carried since I was thirty-six and the curtain came down across half my world. I do not go anywhere without counting my light first. People count their money. I count what I can see by.

He handed up my cases and the crate of supplies and he did not get out of the boat. I noticed that. I notice things. A man brings a stranger to a winter posting on a rock in the north Atlantic, and he does not step onto the slip even to shake her hand, even to point out where the cistern tap sticks. He kept his weight in the boat and his eyes went past me, up the tower, to the dead black lantern, and stayed there a moment too long, the way your tongue goes to a bad tooth.

"The beacon is automatic," he said. "She tends herself. You do not need to climb to her. You keep the cottage, you keep the engine running, you keep yourself." He paused. "You keep a light on, nights. All night. Every night."

"That is rather the idea." I tried to make it light. "I took the job because the advert said the place can never go properly dark. Automated lighthouse. Self-tending beacon. A woman who likes a lamp on could do worse."

Something crossed his ruined face that I could not read with one eye and a heaving deck between us. He looked at me then, properly, for the first time, and there was something in it close to pity, and I did not like it, because I had not earned pity yet, I had only arrived. Then he put the engine on and the diesel stink came up and he said, over it, "Light it early. Do not wait for the dark to come to you." And he took the boat out, and I stood on the slip of Maren Skerry with my cases at my feet, and I watched him go small across the grey water toward Eorsay, where, even now, in the middle of the afternoon, I could see the windows beginning to come on, yellow square by yellow square, the whole island lighting itself up against a dark that was still hours away.

I told myself crofters keep early hours. I told myself a lot of things on that slip. The cold went into me anyhow.

The cottage was two cold rooms and a kitchen and a deal of damp, and it smelled of paraffin and stone and the green underwater smell of a place the sun does not reach for long. I went round it the way my mother taught me, the very first thing, before the kettle, before I had even set my cases down properly, the old ritual she drilled into the two of us so hard it lives in my hands now and not my head. Test every bulb. The day you come into a new place, before night can find you in it not knowing, you go round and you put your hand to every switch and you see what light you have, so that when the dark comes, and the dark always comes, you are not learning the house and losing the light at the same time.

So I tested every bulb. Kitchen, on, a bare flex with a sour yellow forty-watt that buzzed. Hall, on. The first bedroom, on, a shade like a cataract. The second bedroom, on. The little scullery, on. The privy, on, with a pull cord soft as old skin. I went through that cottage saying it out loud as I went, on, on, on, my mother's voice in my mouth thirty-five years after I stopped speaking to her about anything that mattered, light of life, that is one, light of life, that is two, and the warm tally of it built up in me the way it always does, the small animal comfort of knowing, room by room, that I had somewhere to stand when the night came.

There was one door left. Off the back passage, low, a plank door with a black iron latch worn smooth, a door that did not want to open and then opened all at once onto cold air coming up. The cellar. A flight of stone steps went down into the rock, narrow, turning out of sight, and at the top of them was a switch, an old round brass switch, and above the third step down a bulb in a wire cage.

I put my hand to the switch.

Nothing happened.

I felt it before I thought it, the way you always do, a small drop in the chest, a coldness, my hand going still on the brass without my telling it to. Only then did the thinking come up behind, the sensible ward-sister thinking I have leaned on my whole life: a dead bulb, that is all, old wiring, a tripped breaker, the most ordinary fault in the most ordinary world. I clicked it off and on again. Off, on. The buzz of the scullery light behind me, steady. The cage bulb above the third step, dark.

"All right," I said to it, out loud, calm, because that is what I do. "All right. You are a dead bulb. I have a hundred dead bulbs in my life and not one of them ever did me any harm." I took the wind-up torch out of my bag, the one that needs no battery, the one I trust the most, and I wound it until the little dynamo whined and the white beam came up strong, and I shone it down the cellar steps.

The beam went down and lit the first step, and the second, and the turn of the third where the dead bulb hung, and then it stopped.

I want to be careful here, because nineteen years of my trade have gone on teaching frightened people not to trust what they think they see in poor light. I know the eye. I have held the eye in my two hands in a cone of theatre light and watched a surgeon give it back its sight. I know that in the dark the rods take over from the cones and the rods are liars, that a light-starved retina will invent edges and shapes and movement out of nothing, that the harder you stare into the black the more the black gives you, all of it made up, none of it there. I know all this the way other people know the way home. So believe me that I tried, standing at the top of those steps, to make it be the ordinary thing.

But the beam stopped. Not faded. Not lost its strength against distance, the way a torch will, the cone going soft and grainy and grey at the far end of its reach. It stopped, clean, a hand's breadth past the turn of the third step, as if there were a wall there. As if the dark below had a surface, a still black surface like deep water seen from above, and my good white beam went down to it and lay on it and could not get past, could not get in, and below that surface there was nothing my light would touch, not the steps, not the floor, not the walls, only the dark holding my light off the way the rock held off the sea.

I wound the torch harder. The dynamo screamed. The beam got brighter and the surface of the dark stayed exactly where it was, a hand's breadth past the third step, and did not give an inch.

My breath had gone shallow and quiet without my noticing. The hairs had come up along my left forearm, my good side, the side I trust. I stood there at the top of the cellar of Maren Skerry with the whole cottage lit warm and buzzing behind me, on, on, on, every bulb but this one, and in front of me a stairwell that drank my torch a yard from my face, and I did the only thing a sensible woman alone on a rock can do. I reasoned. I told myself it was a trick of the angle, the steps turning, a black-painted wall just out of sight, my one tired eye at the end of a long cold day. I told myself I would put a new bulb in tomorrow in the daylight and laugh at this. I told myself I would shut the door now and have my tea.

I did not shut the door.

I stood there a moment longer than I should have, with the cold coming up the steps onto my face, and I kept the beam on that black surface, foolish, the way you press a bruise. And out of the dark below where my light would not reach, from somewhere past the place the torch could not go, very soft, very small, came a sound.

Two notes. Just two. A low note and then the one above it, the start of something, a thread of a child's voice carrying a tune up out of the dark, and the worst of it was not that it was there. The worst of it was that I knew it. My hand on the brass switch had known it before the rest of me caught up, had known it eight years and thirty-five years deep, the first two notes of a song I had not let cross my mind since I was nine years old and standing in another dark, on another stair, holding a hand that was no longer there. The song my mother taught the two of us to sing when the light went out. The song I have spent thirty-five years making sure I would never, ever, be in the dark long enough to need.

The two notes finished, and hung, and the dark below the third step waited, patient as water, for the third.