The Dead Love Longer: A Novella Page 9

  It was useless, I knew. We were two against the ocean's might, two against nature, two alone. But I didn't care. All that mattered was Mary, pleasing Mary, being with Mary.

  Lightning lashed again, and I saw the now-familiar tableau of sinking clipper and endangered rowboats. It may have been my imagination, but I thought I saw a man standing in the fore of one of the rowboats, waving his arms in our direction. Certainly I imagined it.

  "Benjamin!" she shouted, looking over her straining shoulders. A wave crested nearby and the salt stung my eyes and nose and throat.

  "Row faster," Mary yelled to me. "We have to save Benjamin."

  And if we did? If somehow we managed to beat the brutal sea and pull alongside his boat, if we then were blessed with the miracle of returning to shore, what then?

  Mary would have her Benjamin, and I would have nothing. I would lose Mary.

  I stopped rowing, and the longboat careened against the waves. Mary saw that I had stopped.

  "Help me," she said, those beautiful eyes confused, her precious mouth moving in silent question.

  I shook my head. "No," I said. "Benjamin's dead. You're mine, now."

  I reversed direction with the oars, working one side until I turned the boat around. I expected her to fight, to thrash her own oars opposite mine. But she released them, and they slid into the waves.

  She stood in the rocking boat, all grace and glory and the deepest beauty ever crafted. Without a word, she dove into the sea.

  I shouted, "I love you," but I don't know if she heard me.

  I waited several minutes that seemed hours, fighting the currents, watching for her to surface. The lightning struck again, and in its luminance, I saw that the clipper and rescue boats were gone, victims of the callous ocean. I imagined that each flash of foam, each breaking wave, was the lace of Mary's dress.

  But she didn't appear. I battled the oars and clawed my way toward shore, though I lost my sense of direction. All that remained was to row and row, to drag the foundering boat through the sea that desperately wanted to swallow it.

  The storm soon dwindled and died, and I found myself on the sand. As I coughed the salt water from my lungs, the east glowed with the pink of dawn. I struggled to my hands and knees and looked across the bay. No boat, no wreck, no Mary.

  I hauled myself back to the house where I was staying. It took me many minutes to navigate the stairs, then I finally made it to my room and my chair and my high window. I took up my post, a watcher, a lighthouse keeper for the dead.

  Three days, and still I keep my post.

  I hope the boatman has given up on me. As much fear as filled his eyes when he hinted at the island's secrets, I don't think he even came ashore. I wonder if he will report my absence, or if he has his own orders, his own obsessions. It may take a week or more before anyone finds me.

  Plenty of time for her to find me first, if she so desires.

  Desire is an odd thing, a destructive thing, a strangely beautiful thing. Perhaps that is the lesson of this tale, the one that has replaced the travel article on my laptop. Whoever finds this account can make of it what they will. For the story was written many decades before, the ending the only thing left in the balance.

  The ending.

  I hear her now, below me, her footsteps as graceful as the rhythm of the sea. She climbs a winding stair, closer now.

  Or perhaps it's only the wind creaking ancient wood.

  I don't know which I dread the most.

  Her arrival in lace and deceived rage?

  Or her never arriving, never again granting me a glimpse of her everlasting and nonexistent beauty?

  I can almost hear her now.

  Almost.

  THE END

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  ###

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