Chapter 1, Private Lives: Part IV

IV.

"Tired of the every day routine?” the announcer asked, in a suddenly deep voice that caught Tracy's attention. What a marvelous voice, and what a transition from his ordinary speaking voice that he had used previously.

The announcer continued in that same deep voice:  “Ever dream of a life of romantic adventure? Want to get away from it all? We offer you... Escape! Escape. Designed to free you from the four walls of today for a half hour of high adventure. Tonight, we escape to a lonely lighthouse off the steaming jungle coast of French Guiana and the nightmare world of terror and violence as we bring you "Three Skeleton Key" starring Nick Belfour.”

From somewhere, organ music played, drowned out by the sound of clapping as the announcer walked off stage.

The three men rose quietly and approached the microphones, holding their scripts. The spots dimmed on all but Nick. The special effects man was twisting some kind of device, and a metallic humming and periodic clicking noise started. 

“Picture this place,” began Nick, using a slightly higher voice than his normal register, as he was playing a young man, someone in his twenties.

 “A gray, tapering cylinder welded by iron rods and concrete to the key itself: a bare black rock, one hundred fifty feet long, maybe forty wide. That's at low tide. At high tide, just the lighthouse, rising a hundred ten feet straight up out of the ocean, and all about it the churning water -- gray-green, scum dappled, warm as soup, and swarming with gigantic bat-like, devil fish, great violet schools of Portuguese man-of-war, and yes, sharks, the big ones, the fifteen-footers. And as if this weren't enough, there was a hot, dank, rotten-smelling wind that came at us day and night off the jungle swamps of the mainland. A wind that smelled like death. A wind that had smelled the slow and frightful death that came one night to this bare black rock. Set in the base of the light was a watertight bronze door...”

There was the sound of an iron door slamming shut, and then footsteps going up a set of stairs.

Tracy felt a bit puzzled. She had half-expected a bright beam of light to be shown on the scrim, in imitation of a light house light. Or at least a projection of a light house could have been used. After all...why was the scrim there, if not to help provide atmosphere. "Shut up and pay attention," she told herself sternly. "This is radio, not theatre. I guess they don't feel the need for visual effects."

“And in you went,” continued Nick. “And up. Yes, up and up and 'round and 'round, past the tanks of oil and the coils of rope, casks of wicks and racks of lanterns, sacks of spuds, and cartons and cans and up and up and up, 'round and 'round. Over the light storeroom was the food storeroom. And over the food storeroom was the bunk room where the three of us slept. And over the bunk room was the living and cooking room. And over the living and cooking room …was the light.”

The sound of the humming and clicking grew louder for a few seconds. Nick spoke lovingly.

“She was a beauty. Big steel and bronze baby with the sun gleaming through the glass walls all about, bouncing blinding little beams off the big shiny reflectors, glittering and refracting through her lenses. The whole gigantic bulk of her balanced like a ballerina on the glistening steel axle of her rotary mechanism. She was a sweetheart of a light.

And at night, you'd lie there on the stone deck of the gallery with her revolving smoothly and quietly over your head, easing her bright white eye three hundred sixty degrees around the horizon. You'd lie there watching to see that the feeders kept working, that everything ran right. And it wouldn't be bad. The other two fellows snoring in their sacks two levels down. You'd smoke your pipe to kill the stink of the wind and it wouldn't be bad. ...

About those other two. Louis and Auguste. What a pair. Louis, he was head man, was a big fellow from the Basque country. Black beard, little hard black eyes and a pair of arms that -- I tell you, those arms were as big around as my legs. Yes, head man he was and what word he let go was law. A silent fellow. And although I spent my first two weeks trying to strike up a real conversation, the most I could ever get out of him was...”

The spotlight on Scott Audley brightened, and he said in a gruff voice, “Jean, I took up this profession because I don't like people…”

He finished his introductory lines and let his voice fade away as Nick continued, “That was Louis. When he accused me of becoming like Auguste, I quieted down because Auguste was the talkingest man I'd ever met. The talkingest and the ugliest! He was hunchbacked, stood four feet high, had red hair and big blue eyes. It seems he'd been an actor in Paris.

The spotlight on James Conrad came up. When he'd walked onto the stage he’d been a slim man, about 5 ft 7, but as Nick had described him he bent down and twisted his back and spoke in a high, shrill voice into the lower microphone:

“Yes, yes, indeed! Played in over two hundred different productions, dear boy. At the Grand Guignol. Oh, but it was monstrous, horrible, the way we used to scare the audiences!  I-I was hated! Yes, yes! They used to throw things, and hiss, and bare their teeth at me! Finally, it got too bad. I couldn't stand it any longer. I gave up the theatre. My nerves, you understand. Yes, gave it up completely, I really did. Couldn't stand it any longer...”

His voice faded away, and Nick continued his narration. He told of seeing a sailing ship, heading for the reefs, on which the lighthouse stood.

Nick, as the neophyte lighthouse keeper Jean, continued to watch the ship throughout the night – visible each time the great lamp of the lighthouse shone upon it. In the daylight the lamp was switched off and the keepers could see the ship plainly now. It hadn’t hit a reef yet, and they wondered where the crew was. But as they looked at it through binoculars (binoculars of the mind, Tracy noted) – they saw that the ship was crewed…by thousands and thousands of rats.

The ship then did hit the reef, and begin to sink, and all the rats began to swim ashore. To the lighthouse.

Such panic, thought Tracy, as the three men in the lighthouse struggled to seal up the windows and doors against the army of invading rats. Nick continued his narration, interspersed between the panicked dialog from the other two keepers, and his voice trembled as he fought the panic threatening to engulf him as they ran and ran up to the top of the lighthouse (accompanied by the sound of boots on iron as performed by Douglas Smith), as the rats managed to gnaw through the wood they’d used to block the portholes, finally slamming the steel door of the top deck down on the ravenous creatures.

Nick does such good fear, Tracy thought appreciatively, as she watched Nick and the two other actors, imagining that they were  alone in the light room, surrounded by thick panes of glass, and outside the glass, a carpet of rats that blocked out the sun.

The cherk, cherk of the rats, as made by Douglas Smith, was certainly unnerving, especially since the room had speakers running up the entire length of the walls, so the audience also felt that they were surrounded by the rats.

The episode wound down to its conclusion. In their frantic flight up the stairs to the light room, the big, brave headman Louis had been bitten by a rat, and now all he did was lie on his side in the room, mewling like a baby. Auguste, on the other hand, had gone insane, and began performing plays from the Grand Guignol for his audience, the rats.

The keepers, trapped in their light room, could do nothing but wait. First the food ran out, and the water ran out, and then the lamp oil ran out…and then the light went out.

Nick as Jean heard the sound of a French horn, and saw a ship approaching through the light of the full moon. Without the aid of the lighthouse light, they ran aground. And then, the army of rats departed from the lighthouse, and attacked the ship (thank goodness with no screams, Tracy thought with a shudder). Just the melancholy sound of the French horn continuing to play…and then suddenly…stopping.

The next day, there wasn’t a rat on the island, and the tide had floated the ship free, so that it sailed back out into the ocean with its new crew.

Nick finished the story, with his final lines: “And if you'll excuse me now, I must go set my traps.” He chuckled. “No, no. Mouse traps. No rats in this lighthouse, I should say not. Life in the lights isn't bad. But sometimes when I see a strange vessel approaching I get a little nervous, sure. Somewhere on the seas, there's a little banana boat without a crew. That is,” his voice dropped dramatically, “without a human crew.”

The theme music came up, and the houselights came up. The audience rose to its feet also. Nick extended his hands so that the two other actors grabbed them, and they bowed as one to the audience. 

Nick clearly didn’t want the star’s reward, clapping for each of the lesser actors as they took their curtain call, and then louder cheers and perhaps a standing ovation for the star. It had been an ensemble piece and he wanted the applause to reflect that.

Tracy booed loudly.