Escaping the Lighthouse

I grew restless, lying there on my back in my rented house in the northern Wilmington, Delaware, fringe and watching the light from the lighthouse in back sweep across my bed through the window, leave me, and then when I almost had gone to sleep, sweep across me again. I’d taken enough Benadryl before going to bed to knock out a horse, but it wasn’t putting me to sleep.

I rose from the bed and went over to the window to pull the curtains closed, only to find the curtains didn’t close; they were just narrow panels at each side of the window. I had rented the place furnished, such as it was. Looking out into the backyard and, beyond that, into the yard behind mine, to the square-cornered concrete lighthouse incongruously located there, I saw him. At least I intuitively assumed it was a “him.”

The door at the base of the lighthouse was open, emitting light from the interior and illuminating the figure of a stocky man. He was just standing there, the only notable feature of him other than his burly figure being the rampant bush of hair on his head. I couldn’t tell what color it was in the darkness of the night, but, again intuitively, I knew it was flaming red. I knew that just as I knew that he was looking at me. He shouldn’t be able to see me, of course, I reasoned. But I knew he could. I knew he was looking straight at me, seeing me, and willing me to come to him.

I was in Edgemoor, in a Wilmington residential area high above the Delaware River, although the river couldn’t be seen from here, which made the presence of a functioning lighthouse eerie. When I’d walked across the backyard of the Brandywine Boulevard house I’d rented to the backyard of the lighthouse on Lighthouse Road, the man was holding out his hand to me. I couldn’t see the features of his face. All I could see was that, indeed, his bushy hair was flaming red. His attire wasn’t of this era. He wore a billowy white cotton shirt, open in front to show a hairy, muscular chest, and britches, with a codpiece, the britches being so tight that the material followed his muscular legs closely to end mid-calf. He was barefoot.

I didn’t seem to be disconcerted that his dress wasn’t of the current era. Everything about this was surreal.

I put my hand in his and he led me into the lighthouse. We took the stairs that wound around two sides of the interior, up and up, concrete stairs, cold concrete walls and floors, empty spaces. Three staircases took us up to a circular room that was furnished for habitation, but stark, bare. The atmosphere was one awash in a reddish glow. An iron ladder went up the wall of this room to the level above. The open hatch to that level was the source of the red light, which pulsated from strong to dimmer, as the lighthouse beacon revolved above our heads.

An iron-frame bed protruded from one wall, and, without prompting, I lay down on the mattress on my back. I raised my arms above my head to let the stocky man with the red, bushy hair tie my wrists to the iron pipe running along the top of the headboard. I had come to him in just my sleeping pants. He pulled those off my legs, and I was naked to him. Standing over me beside the bed, he unlaced his codpiece and freed a thick erection protruding from a red pubic bush. I watched him stroke himself a couple of times. I heard myself moan as if from a distance.

“Yes, inside me,” I heard someone moan as if from a distance, only half realizing that it was me.

Without an answering word from him, he positioned my legs, spreading them and bending them, placing my feet flat on the mattress. I gave him no resistance, just lying there and watching his erection as he swayed beside me.

“Yes, now. Fuck me now,” the familiar voice murmured.

He came up on the bed on his knees, between my spread legs. I sensed as much as felt his hand fondling my balls and then pressing under them, sliding along my taint. I knew when he penetrated me with a finger, although, again, it was something I sensed more than felt. He leaned over, looking down into my face, but his face was still a blur to me. The red bush of his hair, though, was quite distinctive. I sensed each separate strand, just as I had done with the rampant hairs of his bush as he had been manipulating my legs. I intuitively knew his finger was inside me, moving, in and out, in and out, and I moaned—again sounding as if it were from across the room. I rocked my pelvis against the heel of his hand pressed into my taint.

There was no scent from him. I usually tuned into that with a man, searching for a scent of the man’s sex, of his want, his arousal. Now it was all touch and only a slightly detached hint of that.

I sensed the finger being removed and the pressure of the bulb of his cock at my entrance, as he hovered over my chest, placing an arm on either side of me on the bed. I whimpered and arched my back, raising my pelvis to him, clutching his buttocks with my hands, squeezing and pulling him into me. “Now, now. Inside me. Deep,” the voice murmured. This despite also being frightened by having seen how thick he was. I groaned for the thrust I knew was coming. I still couldn’t discern his facial features but I knew, as well as I knew anything, that he would be cruel.

At no time did I think of resisting him. I groaned and gave a little jerk as he penetrated, breaching, violating, thrusting. I knew he was inside me, but that too was more a sense of being stretched and filled than the sensation of a cock moving inside me, a feeling I was not a stranger to. Hovering over me, he rocked back and forth, fucking me, breathing harder, grunting, rocking more rapidly, tensing and jerking, coming inside me. At no time did I think of resisting him. I didn’t even have the sensation that I was fully there.

I had set my hips in motion, going with him, surrendering and submissive to the cock, leveraging the balls of my feet and the muscles of my thighs to push up as he thrust down, his throbbing cock pushing deeper, moving faster, my senses concentrating totally on the shaft possessing me and moving inside me—coming nearly simultaneously with him with a small cry of release and satiation—and a slightly bitter aftertaste of embarrassment and guilt that I had been so easily conquered, had wanted it so badly.

At his climax, clutching his buttocks to me, I had called out “Do it! Take it. Take it!” I released again too, but the satisfaction from the release of the ejaculation deep inside me was tainted by the guilt washing over me that I had given it, that I had fully submitted, had wanted it so much. That I had wanted it from him, knowing full well that this hadn’t been about sex; it had been about control, about submission.

* * * *

I woke with a start, the pass of the lighthouse light blinding me when my eyelids flipped open. I was lying in my bed, soaked in sweat. My pajama pants were on the floor beside the bed. I was hard and had been stroking myself—and had just come.

With a groan, I rolled out of the bed and went to the adjacent bathroom, the window of which overlooked the backyard. I turned on the light, opened the medicine chest above the sink, and took out the packet of Benadryl tablets.

The light from the lighthouse panned across the window, bringing a red glow into the room. I turned to the window, to pull down the shade, but the shade stuck. I looked across the backyard toward the lighthouse in the neighboring yard. The door at the base of the lighthouse was open, allowing the light from the interior to spill out onto the concrete pad outside the door. I looked around for the figure of a man, assuming there should be one there. There wasn’t. But, as I was turning away, I thought I saw the figure in the doorway of the lighthouse. It was just a fleeting sense that someone had been there. When I looked fully back on the scene, no one was there. But now the door was shut and no light shone from the lighthouse except for the incessant revolving red-lit beacon at the top of the square-cornered concrete tower.

I had the bathroom light on, though. If anyone had been out there, he could clearly see me backlit in the bathroom window.

Groaning, in a daze, I tossed two more Benadryl tablets down the hatch, turned off the bathroom light, struggled back to the bedroom, fell into the bed naked, and slept the sleep of the dead.

* * * *

“Bad news, Craig?”

I looked across my desk to Paul Dewitt’s facing desk in the New York Times features section. Yes, it was bad news, but it was balanced by good news. My request for a year’s sabbatical at half salary as long as I provided a feature a week had been granted. The not-so-good news on that was that I hadn’t counted on getting it, had not planned for it, and it started in four weeks. I’d have to have some features ideas to negotiate with the editor before I took off—wherever it was I’d take off to. I knew I couldn’t get my novel finished by staying here in New York. There were too many distractions, most of which involved day-long hangovers.

“Some bad news, yes,” I answered. “The short story I submitted to the New Yorker has been rejected.” Maybe I was shooting too high, but I thought that, being at the Times and in town . . .

“Tough. It happens to us all,” Paul said with a breezy tone.

“Not to everyone,” I answered, a bit gloomily. I’d be on half salary for the sabbatical, but that wouldn’t be enough to live on. I’d have to get some acceptances backed up by checks. It was tough trying to make the transition from newspaper features to literary short stories. But it was a new arrow I wanted to put in my quiver.

“Probably to everyone. It happened to F. Scott Fitzgerald here.” He lifted up the box of manuscripts and letters by the writer that had been bequeathed to the Times and that our editor wanted a feature done on. Paul wasn’t that interested in working on that, but he had been rummaging around in the box.

“It never,” I answered.

“It did,” Paul insisted. “It happened to Fitzgerald too. Here’s a short story he wrote that was rejected by Collier’s back in 1929. He had to fall back on trying to sell short stories after The Great Gatsby didn’t take off and before Zelda started going gaga and gave him the inspiration for Tender Is the Night.”

“A rejection? Never,” I said. “Let me see that.”

“Here. The story was titled ‘In the Lighthouse,’ and here’s his cover letter giving background. He said it was inspired by something that happened where he and Zelda were living when he was really down. Fred seems to think this might be the central nub of a feature somehow.”

I stood and reached across the desks for the manuscript and the two letters. Sure enough, Collier’s had sent him a form letter, saying just about the same thing my rejection letter from the New Yorker said, and with just about the same wording, even though the letters were sent nearly ninety years apart: “Shows promise, with work; not what we’re looking for at this time; feel free to submit something else.” Blah, blah, blah.

The cover letter said that the story was based in real events, concerning the disappearance of young men in Fitzgerald’s neighborhood in the northern, hilly section of Wilmington, Delaware, ten years before the Fitzgeralds lived there. The mystery was connected to a lighthouse being completed in the winter of 1919 above the Delaware River. The contractor for the lighthouse was kidnapping young men, sexually assaulting them in the lighthouse, and murdering them. He was only caught when one of the young men escaped. Until then the authorities had been baffled by the disappearances. A yellowed newspaper article was attached to the letter. The contractor was identified as an Irish immigrant who often appeared in historical pageants in nearby Philadelphia, where he lived. He was in his forties, a loner, and his distinctive features were his stocky build and an unruly head of red hair.

I read the short story. It twisted the facts of the case into a paranormal Halloween-type story that played off the man’s red hair and the costumes he wore in the Philadelphia historical pageants. The writing was quite good, but Fitzgerald seemed to be trying out a Poe-style horror mystery technique that wasn’t at all vintage Fitzgerald and that he probably abandoned altogether, for good reason, after this unsuccessful outing. Still, Fred wanted something done with this treasure trove—something could be researched to be published at the end of 2019, a hundred years after the lighthouse was built. It was interesting news to me—and thus probably to readers as well—that Fitzgerald had ever lived in Wilmington. I needed some features ideas to take to Fred before I went on sabbatical. And Wilmington was not New York but was not that far from New York, and there was no trouble in ginning up interest in F. Scott Fitzgerald among New Yorkers. I thought the proximity to New York meant Wilmington would be a good place to go for my sabbatical.

“Did I hear you tell Fred you weren’t too enthused about working up a feature on Fitzgerald and the stuff in this box?” I asked Paul.

“Nope. I have my heart on writing something about the U.S. Tennis Open and the Flushing Meadows site,” he answered.

“Do you mind if I—?”

“Be my guest, Craig. I’d stand you a drink to jump in on this.”

My first question was where in Wilmington Fitzgerald was when he wrote this. Where was the lighthouse? I went to google. What I found had me going in to see Fred and pitching the story idea. The Fitzgeralds lived on the banks of the Delaware River north of downtown Wilmington from 1927 to 1929 in a stately old mansion in the Edgemoor area called Ellerslie. Fitzgerald was back on the East Coast, licking his wounds at the cool reception The Great Gatsby got when it was published and from not doing well at his first cut at Hollywood. Tragically, the novel didn’t become a candidate for “greatest American novel” until after he died. The house was knocked down in 1973 to make way for a large and ugly DuPont chemical plant. That would be an interesting element of the story and would energize the historical preservationists.

The lighthouse provided an interesting element too. It was still there and it was still beaming its light to ships entering the Delaware River on their way up to Philadelphia. Even more interesting was that it existed as a surprise. The hilly terrain around it, the Edgemoor and Bellefont areas, had built up into a treed suburban area. When you were at the lighthouse, on Lighthouse Road between Lore and Haines Avenues, you would have no idea there was a body of water needing a lighthouse anywhere in the area if you didn’t know the Delaware River was down the hill. The lightkeeper’s two-and-a-half-story red-brick Colonial Revival house was now boarded up and the lighthouse was unmanned. But it was still in operation, beaming its light out over the Wilmington suburbs and down to the Delaware River.

The potentials for this feature were delicious, I thought, with multiple angles to explore.

* * * *

The euphoria from seeing the way ahead clearer led me, perhaps, to be a bit too open and available that night at the gym. The gym was one that gay guys used a lot and I went there with that as a side benefit too, I’ll have to admit, more to be in a comfortable element than to cruise or anything. I was gay and I occasionally did hook up, but I wasn’t actively promiscuous or anything. I just had needs like everyone else.

There was a guy who often was at the gym the same time I was—he was muscular enough that I figured he spent most of his time at a gym. He was in his forties and was compact and hard bodied, built close to the ground but solid, not fat. His face wasn’t anything to write home about but he had a great body that commanded attention. I did look at his body with admiration, which he apparently took as having a sexual interest. That wasn’t what I meant at all, but he buzzed around me when I was at the gym with the apparent understanding we could get it on. There was something about him that made me stand off from him. He had a great body and all, but he had a manner that made me feel he would be controlling—that he would demand total submission.

That night at the gym, I must have been flirting with him more than usual because he was bold enough to suggest that we catch a bite to eat together afterward. My euphoria from getting a sabbatical and picking up a feature’s idea earlier in the day led me to say yes.

The “bite to eat” in a local steak house was OK, but this led to a stop behind an abandoned warehouse short of his promised dropping me off at my Manhattan apartment. I lived full time in Manhattan. I didn’t have a car, although now I’d have to buy one for my sabbatical away from the city. He had a Ford double-cab truck elevated on fat tires.

I was on a happy high and feeling a little randy myself, so I went with the stop and the kissing and a bit of foundling. And then I went with the freeing of cocks and the mutual hand jobbing. I was ready for some mutual getting off. Before I knew it, he had his face in my lap and I was lying back in the passenger seat.

“The lever there, at the side, between the seat and the door. Recline your seat,” he said.

“I don’t know. Maybe just a hand job jack off tonight,” I said, deciding already that this would be the only night. He was a bit scary intense.

“Do it,” he growled.

I did it, and I laid back in the reclined seat, with my hands holding his head, as he gave me head. Every time I indicated, or he sensed, that I was going to come, he backed off, edging me until my balls ached.

When he came up for air, he said, “Turn around in the seat. Move your knees into seat and lean over the seatback. Give me your ass.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You’re pretty thick. I haven’t—” I didn’t sign up to be fucked by this guy. That obviously was where he was heading with this.

“Kneel over the seat. Give me your asshole,” he commanded.

He was getting all master and slave on me. He was kind of a crazy guy anyway, even at the gym, fast to heat up. And he was such a muscular power guy. He could break me in two, if he wanted. And it had been a while since I’d been fucked. I convinced myself I wanted it. And, truth be known and even though it embarrassed me and made me mad at myself, I responded to be ordered about. Being submissive aroused me. Having a guy so aroused by me, wanting to fuck me so bad that he he’d go cave man on me, gave me a high. Usually I saw that trouble coming and avoided it. But here I was in isolation in a commanding guy’s truck sitting high off the ground and having orders growled at me to move into a position I hadn’t been in for a while and, to be honest, wanted to be in.

He sat back up on the driver’s side, pulling a condom packet out from somewhere and crowning his cock, while I turned and rose in the passenger seat, my knees buried in the back edge of the cushion, my arms dangling over the back of the reclined seat, and my butt projecting out. He came over on top of me and penetrated me with a lubed finger, opening me up.

I whimpered and turned my face to his. “You’ll take it slow, won’t you?” I asked. “You’re pretty big.” He, in fact, was. I’d seen him in the showers at the gym. He’d made sure I’d seen him.

“I’ll give it to you good,” he responded.

I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t want to know what that meant. I was in position. I wanted it now.

We kissed while he finger fucked me more open. And then, as I groaned and he grunted, he was stuffing me with his cock and fucking me with strong, rhythmic thrusts. Finding that I could handle him—and wanting to handle him—I went with the fuck, moving my buttocks with him in his thrusting, aroused by being controlled by a strong man, his body closely covering mine and his fists gripping my wrists, holding me enslaved as his thick cock stretched and worked me. It was a good, satisfying fuck—as much for him as for me, if the sounds of an animal in rut he was making and the strength of his jerking and releasing were any indication. He slapped me on the rump and growled, “Nice job, baby,” as he pulled out of me.

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.

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.