Escaping the Lighthouse

It was over in just a few minutes and he was back behind the wheel; I'd turned, pulled the seat back up, and sunk into the seat; and we were both folding our cocks back in our trousers. I didn't complain. He was good at the fuck and my body had wanted it, even if my mind hadn't thought ahead that that's what I wanted from Dennis that night. That was his name, Dennis. I hadn't remembered his last name. I hadn't thought it important to know it.

The truck was in gear and moving and I told him again where he could let me off. I hadn't been specific about where I lived. I'd told him to drop me off a couple of blocks from there. I'd always been a bit leery of Dennis. He'd always seemed to be a little "off" and intense to me and I didn't want him to know where I lived.

He didn't head back into Manhattan, though. He was driving toward Brooklyn.

"I live in the other direction, Denny," I said.

"I thought we'd go to my place. I'm not finished with you. That was nice. On the bed will be nicer."

"Yeah, that was good," I said. "But I've got an early morning. I'd better go home now."

"I think we'll go to my place." He was being a master and I was a submissive. So, I didn't dispute him any further at that point.

His place was a small bungalow with a neglected postage-stamp-sized front yard and a crumbling asphalt drive leading around the house to a detached garage in back. He cursed when his automatic garage opener didn't do the trick. When he got out of the truck to open the garage door manually, I quietly got out of the truck too and slipped into the shadows, took a circuitous route out to a main road, and grabbed the first bus going back to Manhattan that I could flag down.

It was a good fuck, but Denny was a little scary—more than a little scary. I had fears about how rough he could get. That was one reason I'd been looking forward to getting out of the city for my sabbatical. Everyone in the big city seemed so intense. I shuddered to think how it would have gone with Denny in his house that night.

That was the first night I wasn't able to get sleep. The next night was mostly sleepless too. The night after that was when I started to take Benadryl to help me get to sleep. I couldn't stop thinking what I'd done—and I couldn't say I hadn't consented to it or that one aspect of me had wanted to go into Dennis's bungalow with him and let him do whatever he wanted to do with me.

* * * *

Four weeks later, I had taken a short-term lease on a one-story stone house that had once been some sort of Masonic-type lodge on Brandywine Boulevard in Edgemoor, Wilmington. I rented it because it sat on the lot directly behind the Lighthouse Road lot where what was formally named the Marcus Hook Rear Range Lighthouse was located. I had been cleared to work on the unpublished Fitzgerald story about the lighthouse.

I also still was suffering sleepless nights, having trouble getting back into the writing of my novel and getting the runaround on finding someone who would give me a tour of the lighthouse property. There was someone there, living in the lighthouse, I knew, because I'd seen signs of occupation, but everyone in authority I approached told me both that the lighthouse wasn't manned and that they didn't have the foggiest notion who would have a key to it. The problem I found was that two states were involved. I had first tried the Delaware bureaucracy. Wilmington is in Delaware. Then I tried the Pennsylvania equivalent when someone got around to telling me that the lighthouse complex came under Pennsylvania authority rather than Delaware, because the whole lighthouse system along that coast was administered out of Pennsylvania. Everyone I talked to in either state agreed that there wouldn't be anyone living in the lighthouse—that it wasn't habitable, for starters.

Somebody must have a key to it, I reasoned. The light was still functioning—it was keeping me awake at night so that I was popping Benadryl capsules like they were M&Ms. And I'd seen signs that someone was living in the lighthouse.

"There are no living facilities in the lighthouse," invariably was the reply. "And the lighthouse keeper's house is boarded up."

The mystery was egging me on to get a feature written for the Times and it was giving me sleepless nights until I could zone myself out on sleeping pills.

* * * *

He was on top of me, covering me. The bushy hair was there. I couldn't tell if it was red because it was night, but I'm sure it was—and, yes, as the light from the beacon on the lighthouse swept by, it caught the flash of red. I was bound to the headboard now—it wasn't even the bed in the lighthouse. I was in my own bed, in my own room, the red-lit beacon sweeping across me rhythmically through my bedroom window.

There apparently was no real need to bind me, as I was fully into the fuck. I had totally surrendered to him. He was on top of me. He was inside me. He was moving against me and I was moving with him. I knew he was inside me, but I was numb. I sensed what was happening; I didn't feel what was happening. I sensed I was being stretched. I wasn't an innocent to men. I bottomed for men. I knew we were fucking, and I knew I was going with it.

And I knew he was big—and good.

I just didn't seem to be fully here. It was like I was observing myself from the ceiling—observing the muscular, compact body of the man on top of me, moving—up, down, up, down—on top of me and me moving my pelvis with him.

There was a pungent odor enveloping my face.

* * * *

I opened my eyes and it was daylight. I was lying on my bed. I turned my head and looked at the alarm clock on my nightstand. I'd come to bed eight hours earlier. I'd taken a handful of Benadryl capsules and I must have gone to sleep quickly. But I didn't feel like I'd slept eight hours. I rarely got more than six hours a night, so I frequently took a short "head-down-on-the-desk" nap in the afternoon. What I felt like was . . . fucked. I hadn't been fucked in more than a month—not since the guy from the gym, Dennis, had fucked me in his high-rise truck—so the feeling of the rare event of being fucked was there.

But I was in my bed, alone, in the light of day. I couldn't remember if I'd dreamt or not—it seemed like I had. And it seemed like the dream was something I should remember—that I'd want to remember—but I just couldn't quite grasp it.

I rolled out of bed, sore—sore in places where I usually was sore when I'd been with a man. But I hadn't been with a man. Surely I would remember that. I sniffed the air, picking up a slightly pungent odor, like I was in an operating room.

Stretching, I padded out to the living area, in the center of the house, which once must have been a club meeting room. The room had since been marked off for living, dining, and kitchen zones, really one big, open space. It suited me. Going over to the kitchen area, I came close to the French doors out onto the back terrace. The doors were ajar.

Strange. I always closed up at night. I'm sure I closed those. But when I went to do so, I found that the door wouldn't latch. It had been jimmied. Strange. I walked around the room but couldn't see that anything was missing or displaced. There wasn't really much of anything in the house. There was nothing worth stealing in here except my computer, and that was still there, on the dining table. I hadn't brought any furniture. The place had come with minimal furnishings, which had been fine with me. I walked back to the French doors and looked out, across the backyard, over toward the lighthouse tower. The door to the lighthouse was open and I thought I saw a figure just inside.

I felt myself go hard. Strange, I thought. Then, stranger still, I noticed for the first time that I was naked. I'd gone to bed with pajama bottoms on. Hadn't I? I didn't know, I felt hazy, like I was swimming under water. I stumbled back to bed, seeing that my pajama bottoms were on the floor next to the bed.

I fell on the bed, and the next I knew I was waking up again, two hours later than I thought I had this morning. And I discovered the open and jimmied French doors all over again several minutes later too.

Plot points for my novel were floating up into my brain, though, so I was anxious to get back to the computer. I'd think about the problem of the doors—and whatever else was niggling in my mind—later.

The ideas for the novel flowed freely that day. The doors didn't arise in my mind again until I was locking up that night, and then all I thought about them was that I needed to get a locksmith in the next day. I moved a kitchen stool in front of them, deciding that if anyone tried to come through the doors in the night, they'd knock the stool over and wake me. That was the best I could think of. I was weary, but not sleepy.

I went into the bathroom and downed a handful of Benadryl capsules. I zonked out immediately on the bed. If the stool had been knocked over that night, it had gotten set up again and certainly didn't wake me.

The next day the confusion of the day before and the vivid dream of a couple of days before that started to haunt me. The dream I couldn't forget flowed out of my research on the 1919 assault and murder case I was researching for the Times feature on Fitzgerald's residency here—the red bushy hair image had come straight out of the newspaper clipping, as had the colonial dress. The previous night, though, was more disturbing in that I remembered less of the dream and there were physical signs that something had happened.

Working hard at it, I rationalized away the physical evidence, but not with full conviction. I had a dildo in the nightstand. I had used it on occasion when I was randy and didn't have a man handy—and I hadn't had a man handy for several weeks—other than the guy from the gym. I could have worked my own channel in a half-conscious stupor of need and randiness and just not been able to remember it. And I could have been so zonked that I jimmied the French doors myself in some sort of sleep-walking episode. But that left something that was causing confusion and extreme activity while not fully conscious.

I needed to consult a doctor about this. I added "make a doctor's appointment" to the "get door fixed" on the notepad I kept on the nightstand.

* * * *

"What are you taking for the insomnia?" the doctor asked.

"Benadryl," I answered.

"How much? How often?"

I could see the doctor blanch when I answered that. "And these dreams . . . these vivid dreams . . . you've been having. Do they relate to something that's happening in your life?"

I told him honestly about that. I wasn't honest about the sexual nature of the dreams, though. He was just a Wilmington doctor I picked up from a referral service who would give me a near-term appointment. "I'm a writer—on the staff of the New York Times. I'm writing about this lighthouse in Edgemoor—"

"Ah, yes, the Edgemoor Lighthouse," the doctor said. "Strange to have a lighthouse there . . . and still working, I take it."

"Yes, which is part of my problem. The sweep of the light keeps me awake."

"You need to close the blinds at night."

"I need to have blinds to close. It's a furnished rental, and it's an old house with nonstandard-sized windows. I'd have to pay a small fortune to cover windows in a place I don't intend to be in long. But, yes, I can take care of that part with cheap heavy drapes. Anyway, the dreams seem to be picking up on the research I'm doing about an old murder case at the lighthouse."

"They may not be dreams," the doctor said.

"You mean, what's happening might be real?" I asked. I almost said that I was afraid it was—or, worst, that I hoped it was real. I was that much on the edge of believing that it was more than dreams.

"Not real, but more than dreams—realistically experienced hallucinations. Benadryl can give hallucinations to some, even the most vivid of hallucinations. Taking as much as you have done could easily be the cause of what you're experiencing. Hallucinations go beyond dreams."

"You think the Benadryl is causing it?" I asked. I wanted to believe him. "But I have to do something for the insomnia, doctor. Is there something else I can take? Maybe something stronger than Benadryl? Something you can prescribe?"

"It's possible. Most such sleeping drugs can cause hallucinations, though, and if Benadryl does that for you . . ." He let that lie there, but then he added. "If it comes to that, we can try something else, but first I'd like you to try the natural remedies that fight insomnia and encourage sleep."

"Natural remedies?"

"Yes, first. Get some heavy curtains for the windows or sleep on the side of the house away from the lighthouse beacon. Go to bed in complete darkness. And have a regular routine. Go to bed at about the same time every night. There are activities, foods, and drinks to avoid hours before going to bed and, conversely, ones to try. There are breathing exercises. There are herbs that help some people. I will have the nurse give you booklets that will give you guidance and options. Shall we try that first? If Benadryl gives you hallucinations, chances are good that other sleep medicines will do the same."

"OK," I answered. I was just relieved that he thought it was the effect of taking Benadryl.

"And, for a start, do get some blinds for your bedroom and change where you are sleeping—and have a comfortable mattress and pillows. Don't have anything that irritates you in bed with you."

Like a muscular man with bushy red hair, no face, and a thick cock on top of me, I thought. Gotcha, Doc. "OK," I said.

I made it back to my Brandywine Boulevard rental house in time to walk through the backyard to Lighthouse Street and meet the woman from Pennsylvania's Delaware River Port Authority who, after I had my New York Times editor make the call to verify my credentials, had agreed to meet me on a Friday afternoon to give me a walk-through of the boarded-up lighthouse keeper's house. The calls had gotten garbled, because it was the lighthouse itself I was interested in seeing and she hadn't brought the key for that.

"I'm on my way home for the weekend. This is on my way," she said. "I don't have much time, though."

"Then there's no need to look at the house," I said. "let's just go to the lighthouse."

"The lighthouse? I don't have the key for that. It's been closed for years. There are no living facilities there. I don't have a key to the garage either."

"Garage?" I asked. And then I saw it, tucked at the side and back of the lighthouse keeper's house, on the other side of the house from the lighthouse. It was a one-car detached garage that looked like it would either fall down or burn down soon. I couldn't have seen it from my house because there were a couple of trees merging in with tall bushes at the back of the structure.

"I don't need to see inside the garage, either," I said. "But the lighthouse is occupied. The door at the base been open several times when I've looked out here. I live on the lot right behind it. And there have been lights on."

"That's impossible. The beacon's operated remotely. I don't think anyone's been in there for years except to climb up to the light."

I was walking to the lighthouse, though, and she followed along behind me. We got to the door, which had been jimmied—she could see that as clearly as I could—and I pushed it open.

"This can't be open," she said. "The lighthouse is closed up."

"Apparently not," I said, starting to climb the staircase winding around the interior walls. She followed me.

At the fourth level, the one just below the beacon light, I stopped, looking around. The familiarity of it made me nauseous. The hatch to the light above was open and a red glow invaded the room, although it was dissipated by daylight coming in from two windows high on the walls on opposite sides of the tower. At night the only light would be from above. The red cast to the atmosphere would be more pervasive than during the day—just like it had been in my dream, or hallucination, or whatever it was. But I'd never been here before. Had I?

The bed was there—and a table, with a few plates, glasses, and utensils. There was a kitchenette and an enclosure that probably screened off a rudimentary bathroom. The signs of habitation were sparse, but they were there.

"This can't be," the woman said. "The lighthouse wasn't set up for habitation." She seemed to have a habit of saying things couldn't be that clearly were "being" in front of her face.

"This isn't recent construction," I said. "The lighthouse has been here nearly a hundred years. Someone put this in at some point."

"It's not the descriptions we have. I'll report this to the Authority," she added.

My eyes were fixated on the nightstand beside the bed, upon which a ball of red fur—a wig?—was resting on top of a blank, flesh-colored face mask. I backed a few steps back down the stairs, almost running into the woman.

"I think we'd better leave," I said, trying to keep my voice under control.

"I'll report this to the Authority," the woman repeated as we descended the stairs. "This lighthouse is supposed to be closed up. No one is allowed in here."

I was experiencing a mix of sensations—fear, confusion, revelation, questions—and, above all confusion. What I should have been thinking was that it was Friday afternoon, this woman was on her way home from the office, and she wasn't going to report this until Monday morning at the earliest.

* * * *

I was jittery, not knowing what to do, what to think, after the woman from the Delaware River Port Authority left. I went back to my house, across the backyards. I almost fell into a large hole that had been dug on the property line under the sweep of the branches of an unruly brambles bush. I hadn't remembered seeing that before, but I just marked it in passing—my mind was too taken up with everything else that was happening to focus on that.

I roamed around the house, listening for the sound of the police or someone at the back of my lot. But it was all quiet back there. I gave no thought to the reality that the woman didn't see this as the emergency or threat or quandary, or the whatever, that I did. She, of course, hadn't seen the wig and the mask. She wouldn't have thought twice about it if she had. Of course, I hadn't told her anything about the hallucinations I'd been having—if that's what they had been. In truth, I didn't know what to think about any of this either. None of it made sense. What was hallucination and what was reality? And why?

I kept going to the windows at the back of the house, but nothing was happening over at the lighthouse. No lights were coming on either. The door remained pulled to. There was just the monotonous swiveling of the red light at the top.

I was shot through with adrenaline. Eventually, as it was moving toward dusk, I couldn't stay in the house anymore. Nothing was happening back at the lighthouse. I tried to go to the computer to work on something—my novel, the lighthouse feature, anything—but nothing was coming. It was like everything was in suspension, that the next words I put to either the feature story or my novel, into which a sinister character with red hair had intruded, depended on something happening in real life.

I pulled on a jock strap, athletic shorts, and running shoes and headed out on a run around the neighborhood. I found myself running in squares around the lighthouse—North on Brandywine, east on South Road, down to River Road, south on River to Haines, west up to Brandywine again. I was still in high gear running past my house on Brandywine and then east on Lore again—to Lighthouse Road. I stopped, winded, in front of the boarded-up lighthouse keeper's house.

Enough of this. I'd cut through the lot to my house, shower and dress, go into Bellefont for dinner, and then come back, pack, and go someplace for the weekend—someplace where I could get my shit together.