Escaping the Lighthouse

I grew restless, lying there on my back in my rented house in the northern Wilmington, Delaware, fringe and watching the light from the lighthouse in back sweep across my bed through the window, leave me, and then when I almost had gone to sleep, sweep across me again. I'd taken enough Benadryl before going to bed to knock out a horse, but it wasn't putting me to sleep.

I rose from the bed and went over to the window to pull the curtains closed, only to find the curtains didn't close; they were just narrow panels at each side of the window. I had rented the place furnished, such as it was. Looking out into the backyard and, beyond that, into the yard behind mine, to the square-cornered concrete lighthouse incongruously located there, I saw him. At least I intuitively assumed it was a "him."

The door at the base of the lighthouse was open, emitting light from the interior and illuminating the figure of a stocky man. He was just standing there, the only notable feature of him other than his burly figure being the rampant bush of hair on his head. I couldn't tell what color it was in the darkness of the night, but, again intuitively, I knew it was flaming red. I knew that just as I knew that he was looking at me. He shouldn't be able to see me, of course, I reasoned. But I knew he could. I knew he was looking straight at me, seeing me, and willing me to come to him.

I was in Edgemoor, in a Wilmington residential area high above the Delaware River, although the river couldn't be seen from here, which made the presence of a functioning lighthouse eerie. When I'd walked across the backyard of the Brandywine Boulevard house I'd rented to the backyard of the lighthouse on Lighthouse Road, the man was holding out his hand to me. I couldn't see the features of his face. All I could see was that, indeed, his bushy hair was flaming red. His attire wasn't of this era. He wore a billowy white cotton shirt, open in front to show a hairy, muscular chest, and britches, with a codpiece, the britches being so tight that the material followed his muscular legs closely to end mid-calf. He was barefoot.

I didn't seem to be disconcerted that his dress wasn't of the current era. Everything about this was surreal.

I put my hand in his and he led me into the lighthouse. We took the stairs that wound around two sides of the interior, up and up, concrete stairs, cold concrete walls and floors, empty spaces. Three staircases took us up to a circular room that was furnished for habitation, but stark, bare. The atmosphere was one awash in a reddish glow. An iron ladder went up the wall of this room to the level above. The open hatch to that level was the source of the red light, which pulsated from strong to dimmer, as the lighthouse beacon revolved above our heads.

An iron-frame bed protruded from one wall, and, without prompting, I lay down on the mattress on my back. I raised my arms above my head to let the stocky man with the red, bushy hair tie my wrists to the iron pipe running along the top of the headboard. I had come to him in just my sleeping pants. He pulled those off my legs, and I was naked to him. Standing over me beside the bed, he unlaced his codpiece and freed a thick erection protruding from a red pubic bush. I watched him stroke himself a couple of times. I heard myself moan as if from a distance.

"Yes, inside me," I heard someone moan as if from a distance, only half realizing that it was me.

Without an answering word from him, he positioned my legs, spreading them and bending them, placing my feet flat on the mattress. I gave him no resistance, just lying there and watching his erection as he swayed beside me.

"Yes, now. Fuck me now," the familiar voice murmured.

He came up on the bed on his knees, between my spread legs. I sensed as much as felt his hand fondling my balls and then pressing under them, sliding along my taint. I knew when he penetrated me with a finger, although, again, it was something I sensed more than felt. He leaned over, looking down into my face, but his face was still a blur to me. The red bush of his hair, though, was quite distinctive. I sensed each separate strand, just as I had done with the rampant hairs of his bush as he had been manipulating my legs. I intuitively knew his finger was inside me, moving, in and out, in and out, and I moaned—again sounding as if it were from across the room. I rocked my pelvis against the heel of his hand pressed into my taint.

There was no scent from him. I usually tuned into that with a man, searching for a scent of the man's sex, of his want, his arousal. Now it was all touch and only a slightly detached hint of that.

I sensed the finger being removed and the pressure of the bulb of his cock at my entrance, as he hovered over my chest, placing an arm on either side of me on the bed. I whimpered and arched my back, raising my pelvis to him, clutching his buttocks with my hands, squeezing and pulling him into me. "Now, now. Inside me. Deep," the voice murmured. This despite also being frightened by having seen how thick he was. I groaned for the thrust I knew was coming. I still couldn't discern his facial features but I knew, as well as I knew anything, that he would be cruel.

At no time did I think of resisting him. I groaned and gave a little jerk as he penetrated, breaching, violating, thrusting. I knew he was inside me, but that too was more a sense of being stretched and filled than the sensation of a cock moving inside me, a feeling I was not a stranger to. Hovering over me, he rocked back and forth, fucking me, breathing harder, grunting, rocking more rapidly, tensing and jerking, coming inside me. At no time did I think of resisting him. I didn't even have the sensation that I was fully there.

I had set my hips in motion, going with him, surrendering and submissive to the cock, leveraging the balls of my feet and the muscles of my thighs to push up as he thrust down, his throbbing cock pushing deeper, moving faster, my senses concentrating totally on the shaft possessing me and moving inside me—coming nearly simultaneously with him with a small cry of release and satiation—and a slightly bitter aftertaste of embarrassment and guilt that I had been so easily conquered, had wanted it so badly.

At his climax, clutching his buttocks to me, I had called out "Do it! Take it. Take it!" And I released again too. But the satisfaction from the release of the ejaculation deep inside me was being tainted by the guilt washing over me that I had given it, that I had fully submitted, had wanted it so much. That I had wanted it from him, knowing full well that this hadn't been about sex; it had been about control, about submission.

* * * *

I woke with a start, the pass of the lighthouse light blinding me when my eyelids flipped open. I was lying in my bed, soaked in sweat. My pajama pants were on the floor beside the bed. I was hard and had been stroking myself—and had just come.

With a groan, I rolled out of the bed and went to the adjacent bathroom, the window of which overlooked the backyard. I turned on the light, opened the medicine chest above the sink, and took out the packet of Benadryl tablets.

The light from the lighthouse panned across the window, bringing a red glow into the room. I turned to the window, to pull down the shade, but the shade stuck. I looked across the backyard toward the lighthouse in the neighboring yard. The door at the base of the lighthouse was open, allowing the light from the interior to spill out onto the concrete pad outside the door. I looked around for the figure of a man, assuming there should be one there. There wasn't. But, as I was turning away, I thought I saw the figure in the doorway of the lighthouse. It was just a fleeting sense that someone had been there. When I looked fully back on the scene, no one was there. But now the door was shut and no light shone from the lighthouse except for the incessant revolving red-lit beacon at the top of the square-cornered concrete tower.

I had the bathroom light on, though. If anyone had been out there, he could clearly see me backlit in the bathroom window.

Groaning, in a daze, I tossed two more Benadryl tablets down the hatch, turned off the bathroom light, struggled back to the bedroom, fell into the bed naked, and slept the sleep of the dead.

* * * *

"Bad news, Craig?"

I looked across my desk to Paul Dewitt's facing desk in the New York Times features section. Yes, it was bad news, but it was balanced by good news. My request for a year's sabbatical at half salary as long as I provided a feature a week had been granted. The not-so-good news on that was that I hadn't counted on getting it, had not planned for it, and it started in four weeks. I'd have to have some features ideas to negotiate with the editor before I took off—wherever it was I'd take off to. I knew I couldn't get my novel finished by staying here in New York. There were too many distractions, most of which involved day-long hangovers.

"Some bad news, yes," I answered. "The short story I submitted to the New Yorker has been rejected." Maybe I was shooting too high, but I thought that, being at the Times and in town . . .

"Tough. It happens to us all," Paul said with a breezy tone.

"Not to everyone," I answered, a bit gloomily. I'd be on half salary for the sabbatical, but that wouldn't be enough to live on. I'd have to get some acceptances backed up by checks. It was tough trying to make the transition from newspaper features to literary short stories. But it was a new arrow I wanted to put in my quiver.

"Probably to everyone. It happened to F. Scott Fitzgerald here." He lifted up the box of manuscripts and letters by the writer that had been bequeathed to the Times and that our editor wanted a feature done on. Paul wasn't that interested in working on that, but he had been rummaging around in the box.

"It never," I answered.

"It did," Paul insisted. "It happened to Fitzgerald too. Here's a short story he wrote that was rejected by Collier's back in 1929. He had to fall back on trying to sell short stories after The Great Gatsby didn't take off and before Zelda started going gaga and gave him the inspiration for Tender Is the Night."

"A rejection? Never," I said. "Let me see that."

"Here. The story was titled 'In the Lighthouse,' and here's his cover letter giving background. He said it was inspired by something that happened where he and Zelda were living when he was really down. Fred seems to think this might be the central nub of a feature somehow."

I stood and reached across the desks for the manuscript and the two letters. Sure enough, Collier's had sent him a form letter, saying just about the same thing my rejection letter from the New Yorker said, and with just about the same wording, even though the letters were sent nearly ninety years apart: "Shows promise, with work; not what we're looking for at this time; feel free to submit something else." Blah, blah, blah.

The cover letter said that the story was based in real events, concerning the disappearance of young men in Fitzgerald's neighborhood in the northern, hilly section of Wilmington, Delaware, ten years before the Fitzgeralds lived there. The mystery was connected to a lighthouse being completed in the winter of 1919 above the Delaware River. The contractor for the lighthouse was kidnapping young men, sexually assaulting them in the lighthouse, and murdering them. He was only caught when one of the young men escaped. Until then the authorities had been baffled by the disappearances. A yellowed newspaper article was attached to the letter. The contractor was identified as an Irish immigrant who often appeared in historical pageants in nearby Philadelphia, where he lived. He was in his forties, a loner, and his distinctive features were his stocky build and an unruly head of red hair.

I read the short story. It twisted the facts of the case into a paranormal Halloween-type story that played off the man's red hair and the costumes he wore in the Philadelphia historical pageants. The writing was quite good, but Fitzgerald seemed to be trying out a Poe-style horror mystery technique that wasn't at all vintage Fitzgerald and that he probably abandoned altogether, for good reason, after this unsuccessful outing. Still, Fred wanted something done with this treasure trove—something could be researched to be published at the end of 2019, a hundred years after the lighthouse was built. It was interesting news to me—and thus probably to readers as well—that Fitzgerald had ever lived in Wilmington. I needed some features ideas to take to Fred before I went on sabbatical. And Wilmington was not New York but was not that far from New York, and there was no trouble in ginning up interest in F. Scott Fitzgerald among New Yorkers. I thought the proximity to New York meant Wilmington would be a good place to go for my sabbatical.

"Did I hear you tell Fred you weren't too enthused about working up a feature on Fitzgerald and the stuff in this box?" I asked Paul.

"Nope. I have my heart on writing something about the U.S. Tennis Open and the Flushing Meadows site," he answered.

"Do you mind if I—?"

"Be my guest, Craig. I'd stand you a drink to jump in on this."

My first question was where in Wilmington Fitzgerald was when he wrote this. Where was the lighthouse? I went to google. What I found had me going in to see Fred and pitching the story idea. The Fitzgeralds lived on the banks of the Delaware River north of downtown Wilmington from 1927 to 1929 in a stately old mansion in the Edgemoor area called Ellerslie. Fitzgerald was back on the East Coast, licking his wounds at the cool reception The Great Gatsby got when it was published and from not doing well at his first cut at Hollywood. Tragically, the novel didn't become a candidate for "greatest American novel" until after he died. The house was knocked down in 1973 to make way for a large and ugly DuPont chemical plant. That would be an interesting element of the story and would energize the historical preservationists.

The lighthouse provided an interesting element too. It was still there and it was still beaming its light to ships entering the Delaware River on their way up to Philadelphia. Even more interesting was that it existed as a surprise. The hilly terrain around it, the Edgemoor and Bellefont areas, had built up into a treed suburban area. When you were at the lighthouse, on Lighthouse Road between Lore and Haines Avenues, you would have no idea there was a body of water needing a lighthouse anywhere in the area if you didn't know the Delaware River was down the hill. The lightkeeper's two-and-a-half-story red-brick Colonial Revival house was now boarded up and the lighthouse was unmanned. But it was still in operation, beaming its light out over the Wilmington suburbs and down to the Delaware River.

The potentials for this feature were delicious, I thought, with multiple angles to explore.

* * * *

The euphoria from seeing the way ahead clearer led me, perhaps, to be a bit too open and available that night at the gym. The gym was one that gay guys used a lot and I went there with that as a side benefit too, I'll have to admit, more to be in a comfortable element than to cruise or anything. I was gay and I occasionally did hook up, but I wasn't actively promiscuous or anything. I just had needs like everyone else.

There was a guy who often was at the gym the same time I was—he was muscular enough that I figured he spent most of his time at a gym. He was in his forties and was compact and hard bodied, built close to the ground but solid, not fat. His face wasn't anything to write home about but he had a great body that commanded attention. I did look at his body with admiration, which he apparently took as having a sexual interest. That wasn't what I meant at all, but he buzzed around me when I was at the gym with the apparent understanding we could get it on. There was something about him that made me stand off from him. He had a great body and all, but he had a manner that made me feel he would be controlling—that he would demand total submission.

That night at the gym, I must have been flirting with him more than usual because he was bold enough to suggest that we catch a bite to eat together afterward. My euphoria from getting a sabbatical and picking up a feature's idea earlier in the day led me to say yes.

The "bite to eat" in a local steak house was OK, but this led to a stop behind an abandoned warehouse short of his promised dropping me off at my Manhattan apartment. I lived full time in Manhattan. I didn't have a car, although now I'd have to buy one for my sabbatical away from the city. He had a Ford double-cab truck elevated on fat tires.

I was on a happy high and feeling a little randy myself, so I went with the stop and the kissing and a bit of foundling. And then I went with the freeing of cocks and the mutual hand jobbing. I was ready for some mutual getting off. Before I knew it, he had his face in my lap and I was lying back in the passenger seat.

"The lever there, at the side, between the seat and the door. Recline your seat," he said.

"I don't know. Maybe just a hand job jack-off tonight," I said, deciding already that this would be the only night. He was a bit scary intense.

"Do it," he growled.

I did it, and I laid back in the reclined seat, with my hands holding his head, as he gave me head. Every time I indicated, or he sensed, that I was going to come, he backed off, edging me until my balls ached.

When he came up for air, he said, "Turn around in the seat. Move your knees into seat and lean over the seatback. Give me your ass."

"I don't know," I said. "You're pretty thick. I haven't—" I didn't sign up to be fucked by this guy. That obviously was where he was heading with this.

"Kneel over the seat. Give me your asshole," he commanded.

He was getting all master and slave on me. He was kind of a crazy guy anyway, even at the gym, fast to heat up. And he was such a muscular power guy. He could break me in two, if he wanted. And it had been a while since I'd been fucked. I convinced myself I wanted it. And, truth be known and even though it embarrassed me and made me mad at myself, I responded to be ordered about. Being submissive aroused me. Having a guy so aroused by me, wanting to fuck me so bad that he he'd go cave man on me, gave me a high. Usually I saw that trouble coming and avoided it. But here I was in isolation in a commanding guy's truck sitting high off the ground and having orders growled at me to move into a position I hadn't been in for a while and, to be honest, wanted to be in.

He sat back up on the driver's side, pulling a condom packet out from somewhere and crowning his cock, while I turned and rose in the passenger seat, my knees buried in the back edge of the cushion, my arms dangling over the back of the reclined seat, and my butt projecting out. He came over on top of me and penetrated me with a lubed finger, opening me up.

I whimpered and turned my face to his. "You'll take it slow, won't you?" I asked. "You're pretty big." He, in fact, was. I'd seen him in the showers at the gym. He'd made sure I'd seen him.

"I'll give it to you good," he responded.

I didn't know what that meant. I didn't want to know what that meant. I was in position. I wanted it now.

We kissed while he finger fucked me more open. And then, as I groaned and he grunted, he was stuffing me with his cock and fucking me with strong, rhythmic thrusts. Finding that I could handle him—and wanting to handle him—I went with the fuck, moving my buttocks with him in his thrusting, aroused by being controlled by a strong man, his body closely covering mine and his fists gripping my wrists, holding me enslaved as his thick cock stretched and worked me. It was a good, satisfying fuck—as much for him as for me, if the sounds of an animal in rut he was making and the strength of his jerking and releasing were any indication. He slapped me on the rump and growled, "Nice job, baby," as he pulled out of me.