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the coldness and darkness and deepness in the world in a word like that."
"What'll we do?"
"Do? We got our job, we can't leave. Besides, we're safer here than in any boat
trying to get to land. That thing's as big as a destroyer and almost as swift."
"But here, why does it come here?"
The next moment I had my answer.
The Fog Horn blew.
And the monster answered.
A cry came across a million years of water and mist. A cry so anguished and
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alone that it shuddered in my head and my body. The monster cried out at the
tower. The Fog Horn blew. The monster roared again. The Fog Horn blew. The
monster opened its great toothed mouth and the sound that came from it was the
sound of the Fog Horn itself. Lonely and vast and far away. The sound of
isolation, a viewless sea, a cold night, apartness. That was the sound.
"Now," whispered McDunn, "do you know why it comes here?"
I nodded.
"All year long, Johnny, that poor monster there lying far out, a thousand miles
at sea, and twenty miles deep maybe, biding its time, perhaps it s a million
years old, this one creature. Think of it, waiting a million years; could you
wait that long? Maybe it's the last of its kind. I sort of think that's true.
Anyway, here come men on land and build this lighthouse, five years ago. And set
up their Fog Horn and sound it and sound it out towards the place where you bury
yourself in sleep and sea memories of a world where there were thousands like
yourself, but now you're alone, all alone in a world not made for you, a world
where you have to hide."
"But the sound of the Fog Horn comes and goes, comes and goes, and you stir from
the muddy bottom of the Deeps, and your eyes open like the lenses of two-foot
cameras and you move, slow, slow, for you have the ocean sea on your shoulders,
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heavy. But that Fog Horn comes through a thousand miles of water, faint and
familiar, and the furnace in your belly stokes up, and you begin to rise, slow,
slow. You feed yourself on great slakes of cod and minnow, on rivers of
jellyfish, and you rise slow through the autumn months, through September when
the fogs started, through October with more fog and the horn still calling you
on, and then, late in November, after pressurizing yourself day by day, a few
feet higher every hour, you are near the surface and still alive, You've got to
go slow; if you surfaced all at once you'd explode. So it takes you all of three
months to surface, and then a number of days to swim through the cold waters to
the lighthouse. And there you are, out there, in the night, Johnny, the biggest
damn monster in creation. And here's the lighthouse calling to you, with a long
neck like your neck sticking way up out of the water, and a body like your body,
and, most important of all, a voice like your voice. Do you understand now,
Johnny, do you understand?"
The Fog Horn blew.
The monster answered.
I saw it all, I knew it all--the million years of waiting alone, for someone to
come back who never came back. The million years of isolation at the bottom of
the sea, the insanity of time there, while the skies cleared of reptile-birds,
the swamps dried on the continental lands, the sloths and sabre-tooths had their
day and sank in tar pits, and men ran like white ants upon the hills.
The Fog Horn blew.
"Last year," said McDunn, "that creature swam round and round, round and round,
all night. Not coming too near, puzzled, I'd say. Afraid, maybe. And a bit angry
after coming all this way. But the next day, unexpectedly, the fog lifted, the
sun came out fresh, the sky was as blue as a painting. And the monster swam off
away from the heat and the silence and didn't come back. I suppose it's been
brooding on it for a year now, thinking it over from every which way."
The monster was only a hundred yards off now, it and the Fog Horn crying at each
other. As the lights hit them, the monster's eyes were fire and ice, fire and
ice.
"That's life for you," said McDunn. "Someone always waiting for someone who
never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves
them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't
hurt you no more."
The monster was rushing at the lighthouse.
The Fog Horn blew.
"Let's see what happens," said McDunn.
He switched the Fog Horn off.
The ensuing minute of silence was so intense that we could hear our hearts
pounding in the glassed area of the tower, could hear the slow greased turn of
the light.
The monster stopped and froze. Its great lantern eyes blinked. Its mouth gaped.
It gave a sort of rumble, like a volcano. It twitched its head this way and
that, as if to seek the sounds now dwindled off into the fog. It peered at the
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lighthouse. It rumbled again. Then its eyes caught fire. It reared up, threshed
the water, and rushed at the tower, its eyes filled with angry torment.
"McDunn!" I cried. "Switch on the horn!"
McDunn fumbled with the switch. But even as he flicked it on, the monster was
rearing up. I had a glimpse of its gigantic paws, fish-skin glittering in webs
between the finger-like projections, clawing at the tower. The huge eye on the
right side of its anguished head glittered before me like a cauldron into which
I might drop, screaming. The tower shook. The Fog Horn cried; the monster cried.
It seized the tower and gnashed at the glass, which shattered in upon us.
McDunn seized my arm. "Downstairs!"
The tower rocked, trembled, and started to give. The Fog Horn and the monster
roared. We stumbled and half fell down the stairs. "Quick!"
We reached the bottom as the tower buckled down towards us. We ducked under the
stairs into the small stone cellar. There were a thousand concussions as the
rocks rained down; the Fog Horn stopped abruptly. The monster crashed upon the
tower. The tower fell. We knelt together, McDunn and I, holding tight, while our
world exploded.
Then it was over, and there was nothing but darkness and the wash of the sea on
the raw stones.
That and the other sound.
"Listen," said McDunn quietly. "Listen."
We waited a moment. And then I began to hear it. First a great vacuumed sucking
of air, and then the lament, the bewilderment, the loneliness of the great
monster, folded over and upon us, above us, so that the sickening reek of its
body filled the air, a stone's thickness away from our cellar. The monster
gasped and cried. The tower was gone. The light was gone. The thing that had
called to it across a million years was gone. And the monster was opening its
mouth and sending out great sounds. The sounds of a Fog Horn, again and again.
And ships far at sea, not finding the light, not seeing anything, but passing
and hearing late that night, must've thought: There it is, the lonely sound, the
Lonesome Bay horn. All's well. We've rounded the cape.
And so it went for the rest of that night.
The sun was hot and yellow the next afternoon when the rescuers came out to dig
us from our stoned-under cellar.
"It fell apart, is all," said Mr. McDunn gravely. "We had a few bad knocks from
the waves and it just crumbled." He pinched my arm.
There was nothing to see. The ocean was calm, the sky blue. The only thing was a
great algaic stink from the green matter that covered the fallen tower stones
and the shore rocks. Flies buzzed about. The ocean washed empty on the shore.
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