Ten Seconds of Black

Two notes. That was all. Two notes of a tune, and then the wind took whatever I thought I had heard and folded it back into the noise the sea makes against the rock, which is constant on Maren Skerry, a low working sound like something chewing patiently at the foundations of the world.

I stood at the top of the cellar stair longer than a sensible woman would, my torch pointed down into a dark that ate the beam halfway, and I made myself do the thing I always do when my body wants to run and my mind has not yet earned the right to tell it to. I named the room by its sound.

A flue, somewhere. Old houses sing through their flues when the wind gets in at the wrong angle, and this was an old house bolted to the side of an older tower, and the wind out here did not blow so much as press, steadily, like a hand on a door. There would be a gap in the stone where the air came through and made a note, and the note had sounded, for half a second, like a thing I had spent thirty-five years not letting myself hum. The brain is a pattern engine. Give it noise and it will give you a voice, give it a voice and it will give you a name. I had explained exactly this to a frightened old man in a recovery bay once, a man who swore he could hear his late wife in the ventilation, and I had been kind and clinical and entirely correct, and I had gone home that night and slept with the landing light on.

"It is a flue," I said out loud, to the cellar, because I am a woman who talks to empty rooms, and I switched off the torch to save the battery, and I did not feel better, and I shut the cellar door and turned the key, which I told myself was for the draught.

The cottage had electricity, after a fashion. The generator in its shed two hundred yards along the rock fed a board in the kitchen that fed the lights, and the lights came on when you asked them to, most of them, with the brown reluctant glow of bulbs running off a machine that was tired. I had spent the last of the daylight doing the inventory my mother put in my hands before I had words for it. You walk into a new place and you test every bulb. You find out, before the dark does, where the light will and will not go. My mother did it in hotel rooms, in the front rooms of the recently dead when she went to sit with the bereaved, flicking every switch with two fingers like she was checking a pulse. I used to be ashamed of it. Now I do it without deciding to.

So I knew the cottage. Kitchen, two bulbs, both good. The cold front room, one good, one gone, a spare in the drawer. The bathroom, good. My bedroom, the back one, away from the weather, one bulb, a bedside lamp I had brought myself, a wind-up torch, a head-torch with a battery I did not trust, a box of forty-eight candles, a hurricane lamp full of paraffin, a second tin of paraffin under the bed, and matches in three places because matches are the one thing you do not ration. I counted my light the way another woman counts what is in her purse at the end of a hard month. I knew to the candle what I had.

The cellar bulb did not work. That was the only one. New bulb, old bulb, the bulb from the good lamp in the front room screwed in by torchlight at the top of the steps because I would not go down: nothing. The fitting was live, my little tester said so, the current was there waiting, and the bulb simply would not give it back as light. Cellar fitting: live, no illumination, four bulbs tried. Will look in daylight.

In daylight. There is a great deal a person will promise to do in daylight.

I made tea I did not drink and sat in the kitchen with both bulbs burning and the hurricane lamp lit beside me, which was wasteful, and I let it be wasteful, and I listened to the generator. You learn an engine by its sound the way you learn a patient by their breathing, and I did not like what I was hearing. It had a hitch in it. Every so often the steady drone would catch, the aural equivalent of a man missing a stair in the dark, and then it would carry on. The lights dipped when it hitched. Brown to browner and back. I counted the hitches the way you count contractions, and they were not regular, and that was worse, because a thing that fails on a schedule can be planned around and a thing that fails when it pleases cannot.

Outside the window, across two hours of black water, Eorsay was a handful of lit windows. They had lit them early. I had watched from the boat that afternoon as Calum brought me in, watched the houses come alight one by one before the sun was anywhere near down, four o'clock and every croft already glowing, and I had thought, island people, careful with the dark, sensible. I had not yet thought the other thing. That you do not light a house at four in the afternoon to save fuel. You light it early to be sure you are never the one caught flicking the switch as the dark comes in.

The beacon began at dusk without my doing anything. That was the whole point of the place, the brochure word, automated, the word that had sold me a job on the only rock in Britain I should have run from. A light that could not go out because no human hand was trusted to keep it. It sat up there at the top of the tower, the cold modern thing they had bolted in where the old lamp used to turn, and every ten seconds it threw a flat white flash out across the sea and the rock.

I went up to the lamp room to watch it, the first night, because I wanted to understand my colleague. That is what I called it in my head. My colleague, the light. And I stood in the great round glass room with the dead old lens hulking in the middle of it, the beautiful dark dioptric thing they had decommissioned, all those rings of glass built to take one flame and turn it into a blade of light that reached thirty miles, and beside it the new beacon ticked and flashed, ticked.

And I noticed the thing I have not been able to stop noticing since.

It lit nothing.

I do not mean it was dim. I mean that when the flash came, every ten seconds, it lit the inside of the glass and a cone of rain slanting past the windows and nothing else. It did not land. The old lens had been built to put light on the water for thirty miles so that a man on a deck could see it and know where the death was. The new one flashed and the flash went out into the dark and the dark simply took it, the way the cellar took my torch beam, the way deep water takes a stone, no splash, no ring spreading, just gone. Ten seconds of black. Flash. Ten seconds of black.

I started counting the black instead of the flash, which was my first mistake, because once you count the dark you have admitted it is the thing that matters and the light is only the interruption.

Ten seconds is not long. Say it to yourself. It is nothing. It is the time it takes to find your keys. But stand in a glass room a hundred feet above a winter sea with a light that flashes and does not land, and count the dark between flashes, and the ten seconds grow. By the fourth count I was certain, with the flat animal certainty that lives under all the clinical knowledge, that the ten seconds of black were not empty. That out there on the wet stone something stood and was lit, briefly, every ten seconds, by a flash that did not reach it, and stood in the gaps, patient, between the lights, where I could not see.

"Scotopic," I said to the glass. "Rod cells. You are tired and the rods are starved and the brain is filling in." All true. All correct. I have a good eye and a bad one, and the bad one shows me a soft grey patch of nothing dead centre of its field, a coin of absence I have carried for eight years, and I know better than anyone what the eye invents in the dark, how it grabs at noise and hands you a face where there is only wall. I knew all of it. I went down the spiral stair to bed anyway with the hurricane lamp in one hand and the wind-up torch in the other, and I did not look back up at the lamp room, and I did not look at the cellar door as I passed it, and I told myself both of those were choices and not flinches.

I left the bedside lamp on. I left the bulb on. I lit the hurricane lamp and set it on the floor where it could not be knocked, and I put the wind-up torch on the pillow beside my head, switched on, because a torch you have to find in the dark is a torch you do not have. Three lights. I lay in the brown glow of three lights with the blankets to my chin and listened to the generator hitch and catch and hitch, and I did the thing my mother did, the thing I would deny to anyone who asked. I moved my lips. Not a prayer. I do not pray. I left that house young and shut the door on the smell of it. But the cadence is in my mouth the way an accent is, the shape of the words without the belief, and I lay there and shaped them at the ceiling, the light of life, the light of life, the way she used to, half a comfort and half a warning, and I do not know which of us I was saying it to.

I must have slept, because the dark woke me.

There is a particular way the dark wakes you when a light has failed. Before you are properly conscious, before you have a single thought, your body already knows. I came up out of sleep with my heart going and my breath stopped and the small hairs lifted along my good left side, and only then, a full second behind the body, did the thought arrive and name it: the generator had cut out. No hitch this time. No catch. Just the silence where the drone had been, a silence so total it had a shape, and the absolute black of a power cut in a place with nothing else, no streetlight, no glow from the next house, no city throwing its orange up at the clouds. The bulb was dead. The bedside lamp was dead. And the hurricane lamp on the floor was dead, which it should not have been, paraffin does not stop, but it had, and I was lying in the most complete dark I had been in since I was nine years old.

My hand was already moving. That is the order of it. I set it down the way I set down the log, one small true entry after another, because a column like that is a rail to hold in the dark. The fear came first, a cold flood from the spine out. Then the body moved on its own, my hand going to the pillow where the torch was, the one light I had set there switched on so that there would be no fumbling, no looking, no second in the dark. My hand closed on it.

It was cold.

A torch that has been burning all night is warm. Its head is warm where the bulb sits, the way a forehead is warm. This one was cold as the stone of the floor, and I thumbed the switch back and forth and there was nothing, no glow, no failing flicker, just a dead cold weight in my hand and a battery I had put in fresh that evening, and I knew, the way you know a thing in the dark before you can prove it, that it had not died. It had been drunk dry.

And in the same moment, in the soft grey patch of nothing dead centre of my bad right eye, the coin of absence I carry, I became aware, with the whole certainty of my body and none of my reason, that something was standing.

I could not look at it. That is the thing about the blind patch. You cannot turn your gaze onto it. It is the one place your eye will never point. I lay in the absolute dark with a dead torch in my cold hand and the silence shaped like a held breath, and in the half of my sight that has shown me nothing for eight years, where I cannot ever quite look, something stood, and waited, and was patient, and did not need the light at all.