Chapter 10 - The Last Lantern
The heavy glass bottle struck Thomas’s rear molars and shattered.
One ounce of concentrated, seventy-percent carbolic acid exploded in his throat.
The effect was not immediate silence.
It was a sound so loud, so violent, that the remaining glass panes in the cabin windows shattered outward into the dark, their fragments sparkling like diamonds as they fell through the still air.
Thomas Vance did not scream with human lungs.
The three voices inside his neck tore against each other—the cooper's voice shrieking in agony, the high whistle of the sea-man bubbling into a red froth, and her father’s academic voice repeating three numbers over and over: "Seven-four-nine... seven-four-nine... seven-four-nine..."
The floating chair dropped like a dead stone, slamming onto the broken floorboards with a crash that broke its remaining legs.
Thomas rolled into the black water that was still welling up from the cellar gap.
His hands—still bound with the tarred rope—thrashed against the wet wood, his face turning black as the acid burned through his mucous membranes and dissolved the pale, ribbon-like structures that were trying to emerge from his throat.
Clara did not watch him die.
She turned to the high shelf above her desk.
She took the single remaining oil lamp—the brass one with the lard reservoir that William had lit two hours ago.
She did not turn down the wick.
She unscrewed the brass filler cap on the side of the reservoir, exposing the four ounces of hot, liquid whale fat inside.
She tipped the entire lamp into the open shaft beneath the floor.
The burning wick followed the liquid oil down into the dark.
For three seconds, there was only the sight of the small yellow light falling—down past the iron rings, down past the damp granite walls—a tiny point of fire dropping toward the pale-blue pool two hundred feet below.
Then the oil struck the surface.
The blue fluid in the well was not water.
It was an organic silicate—a complex, highly volatile hydrocarbon that had been sealed under the pressure of three thousand feet of granite for ten thousand years.
The explosion did not make a roar.
It was a single, massive, cold displacement of air that blew the entire floor of the cabin upward into the night sky.
The cedar walls folded outward like the petals of a dry lily. The heavy oak roof-beams snapped into four-inch splinters, flying off over the cliff face into the black air.
Clara Finch felt herself lifted.
She was not falling; she was being thrown three hundred feet out over the dark shelf of Blacktooth Ridge, surrounded by a cloud of flying pine boards, burning peat sods, and shattered brass instruments.
In the fraction of a second before she hit the water, she looked down.
The sea had come back.
It was not the sea she knew—not the gray, foam-capped waves of the North Atlantic.
It was a black, perfectly smooth plain of water that stretched all the way to the horizon, completely devoid of waves, ripples, or spray.
And rising out of the center of the water, three miles off the point of the ridge where the old iron lighthouse had stood—
Was a single, massive, six-sided iron wheel, fifty yards high, its dark spokes turning slowly against the hard, cold light of the winter stars.
One... three... two... four... five...
It turned once.
And beneath the water—deep in her right ear, behind the petrous bone where no surgeon's needle could ever reach—
A tiny, dry voice whispered:
May you like
"...we are home, Clara..."
The cold black water closed over her head, and the light went out for the last time.
