The lighthouse-keeper’s quarters were white-walled andaustere, almost handsome in their simplicity except that no one had washed thedishes or cleaned the countertops or swept the floor in days, possibly weeks.An oriental rug unfurled massively across the floorboards in the center of theroom, the ends vanishing beneath the footboard of the four-poster bed where thelighthouse-keeper slept, curled fetally beneath thick layers of flannel. He hadnot stirred when Miss Augusta first came inside, and he did not stir now thatshe approached the bed. For a moment, she thought he must be dead, but then sheheard his breathing come steadily, a soft intermittent wisp of sound betweengusts of wind. She lifted her eyes to the room’s sole window, bare andobtrusively large. Outside the cliffs protruded blackly into the mist, as ifthere were no sea, as if Branaugh were melting into the horizon. When MissAugusta saw the lighthouse-keeper’s wife and daughter, at first she thoughtthey were walking on air.
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Mrs. Eisner’s hair was as dark as Lilianne’s, though muchthicker than Lilianne’s hair was now. She was pale in her nightgown, but hermouth was insatiable-red, and her eyes blazed when she whirled to face MissAugusta. Yet she was distant, as if in a trance, and her feet crept unceasinglyforward, steps now from the precipice, moments from the sea.
Lilianne, weak and loose-limbed beside her, was still awake;with great struggle, Lilianne reeled her mother back. “Miss,” she cried throughthe flume of waves and wind, her voice muffled and obscure. “Miss, my motherwants to leave.”
There was no possibility of the lighthouse-keeper’s wife, orany of them, leaving Branaugh. “Lilianne, walk her back to me,” said MissAugusta, and the girl obeyed. Halfway back to the lighthouse, Mrs. Eisner beganto weep with the loose unrestrained sobs of a child, her eyes red-rimmed andher mouth opened in a choral O.
“I want to go home,” she said to her daughter.
“We’re almost there,” said Miss Augusta.
“She doesn’t mean the lighthouse,” Lilianne said. “Shedoesn’t even go inside anymore, hardly. She’s been sleeping on the beach.”
“Why not?” The lighthouse-keeper’s quarters assumed,abruptly, a sinister quality for Miss Augusta. She hesitated before the door.
“She saw something one day, she said.”
Lilianne’s mother collapsed on the threshold, curling herknees to her chest. “Look under the rug,” she urged Miss Augusta. “Don’t makeme go in, but look under the rug.”
Miss Augusta knew that if she returned home now, despite thelightning, despite the wind, she would be safe: she would remain where she hadalways stood, and tomorrow when she opened the schoolhouse doors, LilianneEisner would not be there, and for a few days she would feel the girl’sabsence, but soon she would not notice anymore.
“Please,” said Lilianne. “None of us are ever quite awakeanymore.”
Miss Augusta opened the door to the lighthouse, steppedinside, and rolled back the oriental rug. The floorboards beneath were pale androunded, a divot cut into the center which Miss Augusta could grip like ahandle. The hatch in the floor opened with a soft compliant whine, and inside,Miss Augusta found the old lighthouse-keeper, and his predecessor, and thatman’s predecessor too. But they weren’t skeletons, they weren’t corpses, theywere still living. They were stranger than they had been before, hairless andwax-colored and limp as if boneless, but they were still alive. In fact, they lookednot unlike Lilianne Eisner.
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Miss Augusta closed her curtains and hid thelighthouse-keeper’s work boots beneath her front porch, but someone still foundout that she had the Eisners in her house, the daughter on the sofa and theparents on a makeshift mattress of folded blankets. When Miss Augusta went tothe schoolhouse in the morning, a padlock she’d never seen before had beenthrown across the doors and a paper notice had been posted, its message nowrain-blurred almost to incoherence: she caught the word closed and theword breach, and the word safe, but she could not decipher themeaning as a whole, and she was afraid to linger long.
The first knock on her door came in the afternoon, whenenough hours had elapsed that she should have come to her senses and sent theEisners home. So said Mrs. O’Neill, and then Mrs. Bryant, and then Mr. Tillmanthe grocer, who promised he had a basket of fresh bread and salted cod fortheir supper, then lingered carnivorously on the doorstep for several minutes beforehe retreated. Miss Augusta knew the food, if he truly had any, was only a meansof getting the door open. No one in Branaugh would dream of forcing open theschoolteacher’s front door, but once the door had been open, the barrierbroken, they might never be persuaded to go until she had done as they wanted.
It was close to dusk when the Widow Clary came. Miss Augustarecognized the sound of her plodding step, the small seismic creaks of herframe in motion.
“You might as well come outside,” the widow said, afterwaiting on the doorstep for a moment. “If you pull aside that curtain, you’llsee that I’m alone now, but if I have to come back, I’ll bring all the men inBranaugh to tear down your front door.”
She spoke so lightly, so gently, that the prospect of thebroken-down door sounded like a bothersome eventuality instead of a threat.Miss Augusta peered through a crack in the curtains and saw that she wastelling the truth about being alone.
“It’ll just be a moment,” she said to Lilianne, who sat withher legs drawn to her chest in one of Miss Augusta’s threadbare secondhandarmchairs, a novel open across her knees.
Miss Augusta stepped onto the porch and locked the frontdoor, gripping her housekey in a closed fist. “Do you know what’s happening inthat lighthouse?” she demanded of the Widow Clary. “Does everyone know?”
“You are a stupid girl,” said the widow, “but that doesn’tmatter anymore. Someone should have interfered much sooner, I suppose. How oldare you? Twenty? Twenty-one?”
“Twenty-four,” said Miss Augusta primly.
“Well, at any rate, you were too young then,” she said. “Notso many years ago, we had a lighthouse-keeper who said he wanted to build ahouse instead of living in the lighthouse-keeper’s quarters. I told him that hecouldn’t be
