Escaping the Lighthouse

As I rounded the corner of the lighthouse, strong arms reached out and grabbed me. A handkerchief was slapped over my nose and mouth—the pungent smell again. Chloroform? Ether?

Everything went black.

* * * *

It was the first dream I'd had when coming here—or hallucination, or whatever. The bed was the same, the concrete walls, floor and ceiling were the same. And the pulsing red light permeating the room from the open hatch in the ceiling, up into the light chamber was the same.

The man on top of me was nearly the same. My wrists were tied to the iron bedframe overhead just as they'd been in the dream and my legs were spread and bent just like then. And the man—stocky and muscular, powerful and controlling, was kneeling between my thighs, his knees pushed under my buttocks, his hands grasping my waist, his thick cock inside me, thrusting and thrusting. Pumping in a strong, fast rhythm. Even my reaction of half wanting him inside me, doing what he was doing, was the same.

I had a ball gag in my mouth, but strangely enough, embarrassingly, when I regained consciousness, I found I was going with the fuck. I was rocking against him, taking him deep, fucking him back, the muscles of my channel walls undulating over the throbbing cock, pulling it deeper inside me.

Everything was the same—except it wasn't. I had no sense of shaggy hair or a featureless face. In this light and with everything that was racing through my brain, I didn't concentrate on his face, but if I had I could have seen his features. He—no, we—came too near the end of the fuck. He tensed and jerked and I felt him release deep inside me. I didn't feel the release of cum; he was wearing a condom. I lifted my head to try to get a good look at his face in the confusing glow of the pulsating red light.

And then I saw and recognized him. Dennis. Dennis Dawson. The guy I'd walked away from nearly five weeks earlier in Brooklyn when he was getting all crazy and pushy with me. I almost laughed—in hysterics—that now I remembered his last name. I hadn't remembered that before; I'd forgotten it almost as quickly as I'd first heard it. The crazy guy from the gym. Crazy indeed.

How had he known? How did he know that I had left New York and come here, to Delaware, and about the lighthouse and about the murder case with the stocky man with the unruly red hair and who liked to dress up for colonial-era pageants in Philadelphia? Of course. That night. The first thing we'd done was go to dinner, where now I realized I babbled all about the coming sabbatical and the feature I'd be working on—and the murder case and the newspaper clipping.

And later that night I'd pissed him off. He'd thought I'd come under his spell and would go home with him and let him fuck me all night—and who knows what else. And I pissed him off by walking away from him.

And he was crazier than a loon.

All of the recognition flew by in a second, because when I lifted my head and took a look at his face and he realized I recognized him, he popped me in the mouth. And then again. I fell back and played unconscious. I had that much control over myself. He hadn't bothered to wear the wig and the mask; they were still on top of the nightstand next to the bed. He didn't care if I recognized him. That didn't matter to him. Suddenly the memory of the new hole in the yard at the lot line, nearly covered over by the bramble bush, flipped into my mind.

I wasn't meant to survive this.

I went limp, as he untied my wrists and pulled me off the bed. I realized that I was bruised and covered with scrapes. Had he beaten me while I was out? Most likely it hadn't been easy for him to carry me up three flights of rough concrete steps. I felt pain on the back of my head when he moved me and I was in a daze—from more than just being popped in the mouth twice.

He dragged me over to the bathroom enclosure and turned on the shower, pushing me onto the shallow tin trough the water was splashing into. He was soaping me up and sponging me off all over. With horror I realized that what he was doing was scrubbing himself—traces of himself—off me. Again, I realized I wouldn't survive this if I didn't do something to fight it. I didn't try anything when he untied me because my head was still spinning. I was recovering from that now, though. But I still played zoned out.

He must have heard a noise from below because he dropped me into a lump on the floor and left the bathroom and I heard him padding down the stairs. I had remained limp, supposedly still unconscious, and let my head bang against the tiles when he dropped me.

It took me another couple of seconds to recover from that head bang, but then I was up like a jack rabbit, albeit a drunken rabbit, pulling on my jock, shorts, and running shoes that had been dumped next to the bed. I grabbed an iron skillet off the small stove in the kitchenette unit and cautiously started working my way down the stairs, holding the skillet high over my head.

He'd left the door open and a stray dog had come inside. That's what had caused the noise that drew Dennis downstairs. He turned as he heard me steal down the stairs to the ground level. I struck at his head with skillet. It was only a glancing blow, but it put him down long enough for me to run out of the door, with the dog running at my heels and yapping. I made for the bushes on the property line and the next house on Lighthouse toward Haines Avenue. The dog lost interest when I reached Haines.

Dennis had been naked. He must have taken the extra couple of minutes to pull on some clothes before he came after me. Luckily, he was a hotrodder and his Ford truck not only had been made into a high-riser, but the muffler had been tuned to be loud enough and distinct enough in sound to be barely legal—if it was. I was turning onto Brandywine, toward the front of my house from Haines, when I heard the sound of his truck behind me.

His truck? Why hadn't I seen that before. Of course. He'd kept it in the garage. If I'd at least looked into the garage earlier that day, I might have seen it—if he hadn't been off in it. If I'd recognized it and whose it was, none of this would have happened. But would I have made the connection? It wasn't the only high-riser Ford truck in the world.

No use thinking about that now. I needed to think about disappearing and surviving. I dove across Brandywine and moved through the backyards of the houses across the street from mine. When the Ford came onto Brandywine, he stopped and idled in front of my house.

Of course. It would have been natural for me to run back home. How stupid of me. That probably was what I had been doing when I heard the truck.

He didn't remain there long, though. He continued on down Brandywine and turned right, downhill, onto Lore Avenue. I went farther west, to the busier Philadelphia Pike, where some businesses were located. Nothing was open, though. Then I remembered that there was a firehouse on Brandywine, in Bellefont, five blocks north of my house. That had been another sleep disturber for me. When I wasn't nodding awake from the sweep of the lighthouse beacon I was being jerked awake by the firehouse siren as they went out on call—at all hours of the day and night.

At all hours, 24/7.

If they weren't out on call, there would be a crew on duty at the Bellefont firehouse. There should be someone there anyway to maintain communications. I came back to a street parallel to the pike that wasn't as conspicuous and made for—and safely reached—the firehouse.

Luckily, I had my wallet with me, with both my press card and a contact number in it for the Delaware River Port Authority woman who had said she'd call about someone illegally occupying the lighthouse. I also knew the color of the Ford truck that was rumbling around with a New York tag, and the name of the guy inside it who was looking for me.

I told them about the loud muffler, and after that it was a piece of cake for the cops to drag Dennis down.

Life was pretty tame after that. I bought drapes for the bedroom windows and stayed put in the Brandywine Avenue rental house to complete the writing of the Times feature—which didn't include all of the exciting story elements it could have. I kept myself out of it. Being rough fucked and enjoying it even as it was dawning on me that I wasn't supposed to survive it wasn't quite what my editor looked for in New York Times feature articles.

The first thing I did after I stopped shaking from the experience was to go into my developing novel manuscript in the computer and write out the character with the bushy red hair.