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By The Hooded Hood's horror tale progresses Mon Jun 13, 2005 at 09:28:03 am EDT |
Subject #216: Untold Ghost Stories of the Parodyverse: The Lighthouse –
Part Two: 29th January, 1945
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| #216: Untold Ghost Stories of the Parodyverse: The Lighthouse –
Part Two: 29th January, 1945 29th January, 1945 The naval sloop jerked and pitched in the choppy winter waters, but the pilot knew his business and brought the rescue boat neatly alongside the gunship so that the crew could cast lines across to the larger boat and lash the vessels together. “We need to get an emergency crew across there,” Captain Armbruster shouted over the gale. “We’re too near to the rocks. The tide is turning and the current will have us grounded if we can’t get the engines started.” “You do that then,” Sir Mumphrey Wilton shouted back. “And we’ll take a look over there as well, see if this is another Marie Celeste mystery, what?” It was a difficult and dangerous business changing ships in rough seas, especially when one was drifting dead in the water, but the sailors managed to get the Englishman and his companion over onto the USCGC Brooklyn. They were uncertain about whether it was a good idea for a woman to risk such a transfer, but Miss Canterbury did not intend to be left behind. “I’ve travelled a good deal father than any of you boys,” she assured the crew. “A little bit of water isn’t going to stop me.” “Best not argue with her,” Sir Mumphrey advised. “Saves a lot of time.” The treasury class coastguard vessel was 327 feet long, powered by twin screw turbines, with a usual crew compliment of two hundred men. Today it was deserted. “No sign of battle damage,” Captain Armbruster frowned. Even this late in the war it wasn’t unheard of for a u-boat to get this close to the American shoreline, but there was nothing to indicate an attack. The two 5” guns, the two pounders, and the ten anti-aircraft guns were all in good order. Even the ship’s seaplane was in ready working condition. “Where can a full crew disappear to from a serving military vessel? And why?” “A time anomaly?” Miss Canterbury murmured to Sir Mumphrey Wilton as she saw him surreptitiously checking his temporal pocketwatch. “Evidently not,” the eccentric Englishman frowned. “Not getting’ any sign of such a thing.” “Can you replay events that happened here?” the vicar’s daughter suggested. “I’ll give it a jolly old try,” Mumph agreed. “Can you distract the sailors for a while?” Miss Canterbury gave him a cheeky smile and proceeded to play the ditzy woman for the investigating officers so they didn’t notice the ghostly time-images dredged up by Sir Mumphrey’s Chronometer of Infinity. The temporal echoes were almost too distant for the pocketwatch to discern, a dozen hours old, but Mumphrey finally found an image of a ship’s gunner as he turned and perked his head, then locked down his weapon and calmly walked to the ship’s rail then hurled himself over. The man hit the freezing waters below and began to swim away west nor’west. “Captain Armbruster, what’s over there?” Mumphrey asked, indicating the distant shoreline that the hapless sailor would have had no chance of reaching. “Downstate Paradopolis,” the captain replied with a shrug. “You can just see the bay of a little fishing village called Willingham.” *** There was only one road along the high cliff top then down a steep cobbled hill to the cluster of picturesque timber houses that formed Willingham. Mumphrey drove the Buick Roadmaster down to the harbour and parked opposite a new fish diner. Things had changed since his visit sixty years before. The tangled scrum of fishing cobbles was more modern, relying on motors rather than sails, and the harbour walls had been improved with shingle docks. Electric light poles were strung across the sea-front, and some of the old slanting cottages had gone, replaced with three and four storey buildings including a post office and a harbour master’s building. “Where’s the lighthouse you talked about?” Miss Canterbury asked, looking around the old place with interest. Gulls wheeled over the water, calling to each other dolefully. “Up the coast about half a mile,” Sir Mumphrey answered. “You’d see it if there wasn’t that light sea-fog.” Miss Canterbury spotted a momentary dull glow in the direction her fiancée indicated and decided that the lighthouse was working. “It’s fitted with an electric light now,” Mumphrey noted. Miss Canterbury looked around the quiet town. “So where do we start?” she wondered. “Do we just ask if anybody’s seen two hundred wet sailors or what?” “We can’t easily comb the beaches for ‘em,” Mumph worried. “All the landing grounds along this coast are mined in case of Axis attack.” He looked again at the diner. “Best we go in there, have a pot of foul American coffee, and see what people can tell us, what?” Miss Canterbury smiled. She quite liked foul American coffee. She took Mumphrey’s arm and let him lead her inside. “Oh, it’s all changed since I was a girl,” Molly Tillinghast gushed as she handed over the steaming beverages. “The place used to be so bustling until the Depression, and then all the young people moved away. The fishing’s not very good now. The currents changed and the shoals moved out to sea and down the coast, so the boats have to travel further to bring home less. And of course a lot of our young men volunteered for the war effort, so now we’ve become a ghost town. Miss Canterbury repressed a shiver. “I think I actually heard a ghost story about this place,” she prompted. “About the lighthouse?” “Oh yes, we have quite a good one,” Molly enthused, chattering on while she sliced and gutted fish behind the counter. “Sixty years ago three lighthouse keepers went mad, and three more disappeared.” “So I understand,” growled Sir Mumphrey. “They do say there was some kind of sea devil or pirate ghost that crawled out of the depths to take ‘em,” Molly went on. “But then, there was unusually bad storms that year, so maybe it was just the waves that done for them.” “There must be some old people still around who still remember it,” Miss Canterbury suggested. “A few I suppose,” shrugged Molly. “But if you’re wanting to hear the local legends you need to ask Dr Yarmouth.” Mumphrey’s head jerked up and his coffee spilled into his saucer. “What?” “Dr Yarmouth… as lives in the big house top of main street. He likes to collect all these old legends and stories. One day he’s going to writer a book.” “I think I knew a Dr Yarmouth from Willingham,” the eccentric Englishman said cautiously. “Had a daughter called Sabine.” Molly looked up in astonishment. “Why old Sabine still lives up in the big house!” she exclaimed. “With her son, Dr Enoch Yarmouth.” “A reporter, Miss Canterbury?” Dr Yarmouth said, pouring his visitor a drink. “I don’t think I’m allowed to speak with reporters, even attractive British ones.” “I don’t want to talk with you about your war work,” Miss Canterbury assured him, accepting but not tasting the wine. “Just about some old local legends. I was told in the diner that you have a special interest in such things.” “Well that’s different,” the scientist smiled. “I admit that I have a weakness for a good ghost story. This coast is teeming with them, you know.” “Stories or ghosts?” Miss Canterbury smiled back. “Stories. I’m afraid there are no such things as ghosts. I am a man of science.” Miss Canterbury noticed that the sea-mist had cleared a little and the top of the lighthouse was now visible over Willingham’s high shingled roofs. “There are some odd tales associated with the light,” she commented. “More than a few,” Yarmouth agreed, settling in his arm chair and warming to his subject. “Right from its foundation there were strange tales. Underwater lights. Mysterious fogs. Problems keeping men in the job of lamp attendant. There are all kinds of myths around here of an actual merman who lived on those rocks before the lighthouse was built.” “Really?” Miss Canterbury said. “I suppose all of these legends come from a long time back.” “Mostly,” Yarmouth agreed. “I can remember my grandmother telling me some of them when I was very small. Of course, these days the electric lights chase away superstition.” “The lighthouse has electricity now?” “From a generator I designed myself. But I’m not supposed to talk about that, you understand. The lighthouse is in Navy hands these days.” “Really?” Miss Canterbury filed that piece of information away for later. “The earliest legends come from the Sasquanook Indians who dwelled in these parts before Columbus,” Enoch Yarmouth went on. “They called the bay um-qa ti, which means something like, ‘the soft place’.” “Soft place?” “That’s right. They thought the walls between our world and the spirit land were especially weak here. They only came to Willingham to conduct certain sacrifices. When white men came here they actually directed them to settle here.” “It seems like a natural settlement site. A good sheltered harbour.” “Yes. The first settlers were all wiped out by disease, but later immigrants were shipwrecked here and decided to stay. Those are the ancestors of modern Willingham.” “Dr Yarmouth, I wonder if you could tell me about the three lighthouse-keepers who went missing sixty years ago?” Yarmouth grinned. “That’s the story that always gets put in the mystery books, isn’t it? Do you know the last of the insane keepers only died in 1936? And of course, my father and grandfather had a hand in actually investigating the events, but he died before they could ever publish any conclusions.” “Your father?” Miss Canterbury prompted delicately. She couldn’t help but notice that Enoch took his surname from his mother. “Yes,” sighed the doctor with a familiar grimace. “I was born out of wedlock. My father was a fisherman who died in an accident before he could marry mother. It’s an old scandal now. Anyway, about the great lighthouse mystery…” There was a marine guard on duty in a makeshift security hut perched at the shore edge of the causeway out to the lighthouse. The long rocky ribbon road was little changed except for the addition of a handrail. The lighthouse itself looked more weathered, but Mumphrey was used to seeing things become aged and decrepit. “This is a security zone, sir,” the marine warned the eccentric Englishman. “Absolutely,” Sir Mumphrey assured the earnest young guard. “Got some kind of identification here, and a pass. Hmph. Let’s see. Ah yes. Passport, security clearance, letter from President Roosevelt…” “Sir!” the marine came to attention. “Who’s in command here?” Mumphrey asked. “Sir, Captain Fleetwood, sir!” “Splendid. Just let him know I’d like a chat, would you?” In less than two minutes Mumphrey was inside the cluttered lighthouse looking at the heavy machinery and electronic paraphernalia that lined every wall. “I’m Captain Fleetwood, Colonel Wilton,” the officer in charge saluted. “Jolly good,” Mumphrey replied. “My whole visit is top secret, you understand? There’s been some kind of accident off the coast. Two hundred men from a coast guard cutter lost at sea. Was hopin’ you and your men might have fished one or two out of the water, what?” “No sir,” Fleetwood admitted. “We hadn’t heard anything. We didn’t pick up any distress calls, sir.” Mumphrey recognised the top secret equipment that filled the lighthouse. “Listenin’ post, what?” he concluded. “And you’ve got that new-fangled radar stuff, I see.” “Sir, that technology is classified,” Fleetwood worried. “Absolutely. Damned useful for predicting when Jerry’s sendin’ cabbage crates over the briny to drop eggs on Blighty.” “Sir?” “Detecting incoming aircraft, captain. But this stuff looks different from the sets I’ve seen before.” “We’re a research station, sir. Experimental. We have a local brain called Dr Yarmouth who is contracted to the War Department to do new things with radio waves.” “Do you, by Jove?” Mumphrey considered. “I don’t suppose you chaps were doin’ new things with radio waves last night, by any chance?” Miss Canterbury left a note for Sir Mumphrey with Molly at the diner then made her way back up the steep main street to the Masonic Hall. The crumbling façade betrayed the building’s dereliction. A faded poster behind unwashed glass announced the programme for the 1934 season of activities. That saved Miss Canterbury the trouble of finding an excuse to enter and look around. Instead she just reached for a hatpin and deftly picked the lock. The interior was as dusty and musty as she had expected, thick with the smell of old fish and dry rot. Most of the furniture was gone, and what remained was draped in grubby ragged white sheets . It took the better part of an hour for Miss Canterbury to search the building from top to bottom and locate the trap-door that led into the cellars carved from the rocks below. From there an iron grating covered ancient irregular steps down into foetid water. Miss Canterbury was glad that she was wearing sensible boots. She flicked on a battery-torch and waded along the old tunnel, pushing her way past cobwebs. Blind white crabs scuttled away from the light. “This must be the tunnel leading to the underground island,” the vicar’s daughter reasoned to herself. She removed her gun from her purse. “Yoo hoo, beastie! Helpless young woman coming down here all alone. Where are you?” The water became less muddy as it opened into the large cavern that Mumphrey had described. A new iron gate barred further passage, but its padlock also surrendered to Miss Canterbury’s hatpin. The chamber itself had changed. The central island was now covered by metal scaffolding, floored by mesh and covered with electronic apparatus. Naked light bulbs were strung across the roof of the cave, powered by a throbbing generator set beside a second narrow stairway on the opposite wall. It was Frankenstein’s laboratory as built by the U.S. Navy. Miss Canterbury waded round to the iron bridge that crossed the deeper water and stepped over onto the scaffolding. On a cluttered desk were a set of files and a journal. She flipped open the log and skimmed the entries. It was clear that this was government research. There were columns of readings denoting field strength and bandwidths pertaining to radar detection. Comments scrawled in the margin expressed mystification or frustration, saying things like ‘But why should it do that?’ and ‘This makes no sense!’. It seemed that tests were being made to transmit concentrated radio beams in an attempt to damage enemy ships. “Everybody wants a death ray,” Miss Canterbury sighed. Still, at least this time it was going to be an Allied death ray. She wondered if Dr Vizhnar’s broken nose had healed yet. She flicked on through the log. It was clear that the experiments had been going on for some time, and the person filling out the journal was Dr Yarmouth himself. But then she stopped as she spotted something very strange. Halfway through a sentence, Dr Yarmouth had stopped describing the amplitude changes of his latest array configuration and had begun to write gibberish; or at least some language that Miss Canterbury couldn’t identify and that didn’t use a conventional alphabet. It seemed rather to be comprised of pictograms and equations. And then, four lines later, Yarmouth continued the previous sentence as if he had never deviated. Throughout Yarmouth’s personal journals it was the same thing, with sudden switches to an alien language for words, paragraphs, or even pages at a time. Then Miss Canterbury heard sounds from the other stairway. Somebody was coming. “There’s no reason to be alarmed. You knew there would likely be an investigation of so many disappearances so near to the village.” “Yes, but I didn’t realise there would be so many disappearances at all. I didn’t think…” “There is no price too high for the great work. None! The apparatus is too crude to transfer life force at anything like a 1:1 ratio. You know that.” “But… human life? I thought we could use sea creatures.” “And we have. But we needed human life force too, to animate the human component. And now we have it.” “The siren song and kraken weed were very effective, I admit. If we’d given that technology to Mr Cromlyn it could be used to shorten the war.” “We don’t want the war shortened. End the war and you decimate our budget.” “So what do we do about the man asking questions of Fleetwood at the Lighthouse?” “Ignore him unless he gets too close. If he stumbles onto something he shouldn’t then the kraken is already instructed to add him to the life-force bank.” Miss Canterbury heard somebody pass over the metal gantry ahead, check some readings on the humming machinery, then clank away back up the passage from whence they’d come. The footsteps confirmed the impression she’d had from listening to the conversation. There was only the sound of one person walking over the metal bridge, and both the people speaking had used the same voice. “A secret passage?” Captain Fleetwood blinked. “We’ve been using this installation for three years and we never knew about that!” “I have a knack findin’ these things,” Sir Mumphrey Wilton told him, not mentioning that he’d found this particular concealed entrance sixty years ago. “There, it’s open. Are you armed, Captain?” “Of course. But you can’t think…” “Best to be ready for anything, what?” The eccentric Englishman checked the time on his pocketwatch. “Somebody knows about this passage all right,” he observed, using the Chronometer of Infinity to measure the last time the door had been opened: eleven hours and twenty-seven minutes ago. “From the signs I’d say someone’s been usin’ this recently.” “The signs?” Fleetwood puzzled. “Quite clear to the trained eye, don’t you know? This way, sir.” Sir Mumphrey led the Captain and a pair of nervous troopers down the slippery ancient staircase. It occurred to Mumphrey that the lower steps were very old indeed. He decided he’d feel better if he didn’t use the Chronometer to discover exactly how old. The crude offshoot branch at the foot of the stairs was new though. It had been burrowed rather than cut through the rock, or perhaps eaten away by acid. “I don’t like the look of that,” Mumphrey frowned. A shallow wave of foetid water rippled along the lowest trough of the tunnel, bringing a foul stench of rotting sea life. Then a high keening wail echoed behind it. “What is that?” Captain Fleetwood demanded. “What can it.. can it..” “Don’t listen man!” Mumphrey gasped urgently. “Don’t…” His fingers grasped for his pocketwatch, but his hands didn’t want to obey him. His body wanted only to listen to the siren song and to follow it up the rough tunnel. “We must go to it,” Fleetwood noted, turning and shambling forwards. It was the threat to others that motivated Mumphrey to yank his pocketwatch from his waistcoat and thumb the timestop stud. “Hmph,” he breathed. Even without the unearthly sound wailing in his ears the desire to find its source remained. He decided he would risk a quick scout down the tunnel while time was frozen around him. he hoped that was investigator’s curiosity and not siren’s influence. A hundred yards back the tunnel split. One branch turned back towards Willingham itself. The main tunnel descended into the sea, presumably a part of the same underground cave complex that had been used years before as the merman’s bower. Kelp-green tendrils were trailing out from the immobile ocean waiting for new victims to come to its call. “Not a good thing,” Mumphrey noted. “Hmph. Now let’s see.” The charge in the pocketwatch was sufficient for him to define an area of the tunnel walls heading back over the underwater section then blink them five seconds into the future. When Mumphrey allowed time to slide forwards again the roof of the cave they had been supporting crumbled and fell, joined by additional debris as the shifted sections reappeared. Mumphrey didn’t stop to watch. He was pelting back up the tunnel to the confused Fleetwood and his marines. “Structural instability,” he warned Fleetwood. “This way.” And he led them at a charge down the original tunnel to the lagoon cave. Miss Canterbury decided it was time to leave. She waded back to the iron gate she’d picked before, but found it was now clogged with some strange weed tendrils, wrapped around the bars like ivy. It couldn’t possibly have grown that fast. Something stirred under the cloudy waters. The vicar’s daughter hastily got herself to higher ground, then crossed the bridge again to try the other exit. As she approached it the door opened. There was nowhere to hide. “Good evenin’ m’dear,” Sir Mumphrey Wilton bade her. “May I present Captain Fleetwood?” “Charmed, captain,” Miss Canterbury told him, holding out her hand. If there was one thing travelling with Sir Mumphrey Wilton taught it was poise in strange circumstances. “Almost literally, as it turns out,” Sir Mumphrey told her quietly. “Seems we have some kind of weed monster with a mind-affectin’ wail that draws humans towards it. That’s what happened to those poor blighters on the Brooklyn.” “The gate I came by is clogged with weed,” Miss Canterbury reported nervously. Captain Fleetwood had other concerns. “This is all US Navy equipment,” he objected. “This is materiel from the project!” “Yes, I’ve been conducting some additional experiments down here.” Everyone turned to see Enoch Yarmouth standing by the entrance to the lighthouse tunnel. “I suppose I should have authorised it with you, Captain, but I just couldn’t face the red tape.” “Dr Yarmouth, I presume?” Sir Mumphrey noted. “The same, sir. And you?” “Sir Mumphrey Wilton. What is the meaning of this apparatus, sir?” Yarmouth frowned as he tried to place the familiar name. “Your… father? Your father was once here in Willingham?” “The equipment, Dr Yarmouth. What does all this scientific claptrap actually do?” “It’s a communications device, I think,” Miss Canterbury ventured. “And more. I think it channels energy through… I don’t know the words. From one place to another place. A death ray.” “Not a death ray,” snorted Yarmouth. “Quite the opposite. A life ray! A conduit to channel the intangible energies of life force itself!” he turned to Fleetwood. “Imagine it. Imagine being able to kill your adversary whenever they turned on their wireless? Imagine being able to use that captured life-force to bring life back to those comrades who have died in senseless battle?” “I’m sure that’s not possible, Dr Yarmouth,” the alarmed captain declared. “And I’m sure it is,” hissed Yarmouth. “At least here, where space is soft, and many things can pass through.” “Did you use your device last night?” accused Miss Canterbury. “Did you steal the lifeforce of two hundred sailors?” Dr Yarmouth looked shocked and horrified. “Of course not! What kind of a man do you take me for?” “The mad scientist kind,” Sir Mumphrey grumped. “Who else would create that devilish weed thing with the siren voice?” “That… that wasn’t me,” Enoch Yarmouth gasped. “That was my brother.” “Your brother made that thing?” Mumphrey scowled. The huge kraken strands of rotten weed broke up from the waters that surrounded them. “My brother is that thing,” Enoch replied. The massive kraken rose up around the island, a flailing wall of seething sea vegetation knotted into lethal strands. It screeched its anger at being trapped beneath the rockfall of its lair. It keened its seductive siren song to make the humans quiescent for the kill. And as always when it wished to speak, it spoke through its twin brother. “You come too late, humans. The life-force is claimed. The life-force is transferred. The great work is done!” Mumphrey struggled against the influence. “Balderdash! You’re a murderin’ monster and you won’t get away with your slaughter!” “Mumph, the gantry!” Miss Canterbury pointed. The eccentric Englishman understood perfectly. He shifted the metal platform that held the largest of the generators ten seconds to the future. The heavy live turbine dropped down into the waters that surrounded them. There was a bright electric flash and an echoing bang as the machine discharged itself through the underground sea. Then there was the smell of burning vegetation. Dr Yarmouth screamed and convulsed. The cavern went dark. Sir Mumphrey flicked on his torch. “What the devil was that?” Captain Fleetwood demanded nervously. “Uppity kelp,” Sir Mumphrey told him. “Can’t be doin’ with it.” Sir Mumphrey Wilton and Miss Canterbury visited Sabine Fleetwood in her family home. “You didn’t save me,” she told the eccentric Englishman scornfully. “I told you I was chained in the cavern as the bride of the beast. By the time Enoch arrived to fight off the merman it was already too late. And though you killed the sea god and my father who gave me to him, the merman’s children were already quickening in my womb.” Miss Canterbury shuddered. “Why didn’t you speak out? I mean… there are… things…” “Because after I was saved, before my Enoch was murdered by the people of Willingham for wounding their fortune… well, they might have been his. I prayed they were his.” “Dr Yarmouth, your son Enoch… he’s lost his mind now,” Sir Mumphrey told the old woman softly. “His brother had lived inside his head for so long…” “I know,” Sabine answered bitterly. “I know it all. And I know this isn’t over.” Sir Mumphrey frowned. “Not over? What d’you mean, madam?” “Oh really. Enoch and his brother were transferring life force for a reason. They set up the experiments in the Lighthouse for a reason. They accomplished their great work. And in sixty years, when Cassiopeia rises above the Pole Star again…” Miss Canterbury realised the truth. “They’re brought their father back to life!” The old woman shed a tear down her wrinkled cheek. “So I’m not a widow after all.” Coming Next: 23rd May 2005 Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2005 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2005 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
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