Chapter 15 The Descent

Elias decided, on the morning after the lights appeared in the depth, that he would go down. It was not a decision made in a moment of courage, and it was not a decision made in a moment of despair. It was a decision made in the way a keeper makes the decision to service a mechanism that is running oddly: because the mechanism was his, because the running would not explain itself, and because he could not keep it properly until he had looked at the part of it that was below the access hatch. The sealed ocean had obliged him at every step of his short study. It had shown him what it wanted him to see from above. And below the island, where the lights stood in the dark, there was a part of the instrument that could only be examined from within. He prepared as though for a descent into a flooded shaft. He took the storm lantern, filled with the good paraffin, a coil of new line, his notebook in its waxed cover, and the hand-bearing compass, and he left a note on the kitchen table, in the flat procedural voice, addressed to the authority, recording the date and the time and the weather, and stating that the keeper had gone to inspect the lower station and would return before nightfall. He did not believe the words even as he set them down; he set them down anyway, because the shape of them was steady, and steadiness was the only currency he had left. He considered, briefly and without conclusion, whether he ought to transmit a distress call before he went. The radio worked, when the static allowed; the authority would answer a distress call in due course, and a rescue boat would come in some number of days, and he would be taken off an island that was no longer where the charts placed it, and the lamp would go out, and the aperture would close, and the deep would wait again. He had been shown the price of closed apertures, and he had been shown his own place in the keeping of them, and between the distress call and the descent there was no real choice; there was only the difference between a man who closes his eyes and a man who goes down to look. He left the radio on the desk, tuned to the emergency frequency, in case the island should require someone after him. Then he took up the lantern and went to the stairs. He descended the spiral staircase with the lantern in one hand. The steps were dry to the level where the tower met the foundation, and below that level they were damp, and below the damp they were wet, and below the wet the stone gave way to a darkness that was not the darkness of a building's cellar. It was the darkness of a very deep place, and the air carried the smell of the sealed water — the mineral smell of deep earth, cold and heavy and unchanged since before the island had a name. The tower had never had a cellar. He knew the plan of the lighthouse as a man knows the plan of his own hand; there was masonry below the foundation, and below the masonry the basalt. But the staircase continued past the level where the foundation should have ended, and the steps below that level were not the steps of the lighthouse. They were older, worn smooth in the center by a traffic that had not been human, and the stone of them was the black stone of deep water, and they descended into a space that the blueprint of the station did not contain. He went down. The lantern lit a circle of wet stone; the dark pressed in around it. The staircase turned, and turned again, and the turns became longer, and the sound of the air changed to the sound of a large, still space, and the water began to arrive at his boots. He began to count the steps, because the counting gave the descent a shape. Forty, fifty, sixty. He had walked this staircase a thousand times and knew its arithmetic by heart; the tower's service stair had one hundred and nine treads from the walkway to the lantern room. He passed one hundred and nine, and the stair continued, and he did not stop counting, because stopping the count would mean laying down the last honest instrument he carried. At two hundred and ten he gave it up. The new steps below the foundation were worn too deep in their centers for the count to mean anything; whatever the tower's original mason had cut, he had cut for a purpose, and the flight beneath him was serving that purpose now, in the dark. It did not rise as he descended. He expected floodwater, the slow climb of a rising level down a stairwell, and that did not happen. Instead the water thinned. It became a mist, and then it became something that was not mist and not air, a medium that filled his lungs without effort and possessed a temperature that was not cold and not warm, and he understood that he had passed through a boundary that had nothing to do with water and air as the surface world arranged them. He was breathing the sealed ocean. It was breathable because it was old, because it had been the only air the under-world had ever known, and because the rules that governed the surface had been left above with the tide. He checked the lantern. The flame burned steadily in the transparent medium, and the light of it gathered into the same sheath and ran downward ahead of him, pointing the way the way a thread of blood in clear water points to a wound. It was cold there, in a way that registered as depth rather than temperature, and the cold had no hostility in it. The sealed ocean was not a hostile place. It was an old place, and it treated him with the neutrality of a large structure treating with a small visitor: it had prepared a stair for him, it had given him air and light where air and light ought logically to have failed, and it was waiting for him to come the rest of the way in. There was no violence in the waiting. There was only the patience, and the patience was total. The last step gave way to a floor that was not stone, and Elias stood in a space that was too large for the island that contained it, and the vibration filled him from the floor up through the soles of his boots and settled in his chest, and before him, at the limit of the lantern's circle, the dark of the sealed ocean began to open. He stepped off the stair. ---