The Ridge by Michael Koryta Page A

electricalpanel. He didn’t want to leave the busted light with live current going to it. Last thing he needed was a fire. He snapped the main breaker off, plunging the room into darkness.
    He turned his flashlight on, checking for last precautions before locking this place up, and around him the old pictures picked up the glow, dozens of dead eyes watching him. He paced with the flashlight held at shoulder level, taking them all in. With only a few exceptions, they were turn-of-the-century photographs. A few, such as Jacqueline’s, had names, but most were tagged simply with the word
NO
. What did that mean?
    Kimble slipped on a pair of plastic gloves, then moved around the room, carefully removing every photograph and every map.
    It was a suicide, nothing else to it. No call for investigation. Still…
    If there are two things I’d hope you might continue to grant me in the future, it is your time and respect.
    “Why did you do it, Wyatt?” Kimble whispered. “And what is all
this
shit about?”
    There was no suicide note, no explanation or farewell. Beyond the maps and photographs, there was nothing except a handwritten sheet of paper taped to the electrical panel above Wyatt’s bunk. Behind that panel existed everything that the man seemed to care about—the circuits that controlled his lights, the power that fed them—and Kimble leaned over the bed to read it more carefully. Lyrics to some poem or song titled “Lantern.”
    It’s a hungry world out there
    Even the wind will take a bite
    I can feel the world circling
    Sniffing round me in the night
    And the lost sheep grow teeth
    Forsake the lambs and lie with the lions
     
    The story of the song, which seemed to be a defiance of human darkness, of an evil world, and the significance it might have had to Wyatt French, became vividly clear by the end:
    So if you got a light, hold it high for me
    I need it bad tonight, hold it high for me
    ’Cause I’m face-to-face, hold it high for me
    In that lonesome place, hold it high for me
    With all the hurt that I’ve done, hold it high for me
    That can’t be undone, hold it high for me
    Light and guide me through, hold it high for me
    And I’ll do the same for you, hold it high for me
     
    I’ll hold it high for you, ’cause I know you’ve got
    I’ll hold it high for you, your own valley to walk
    I’ll hold it high for you, though it’s dark as death…
     
    Kimble stopped reading, saddened, and turned away. Wyatt had certainly held a light high, but for what? Kimble thought of him living up here in total isolation, listening to the wind work over the ridge and watching from behind the glass as his lighthouse illuminated the night woods. What had it meant to him? These words, that light? He felt the weight of sorrow on him as he always did soon enough with suicides, a hard tug of personal connection that he’d never dare put into words.
I want out, too
. A person was more than twice as likely to kill himself as to be killed by another, and yet people feared murderers far more than what lurked within themselves.
    “Poor bastard,” Kimble said, and then he turned away. As some odd temple of loneliness the lighthouse made sense to Kimble, almost perfect sense—
You’re right, Wyatt, it’s too dark too often here—
but the maps seemed to suggest something more than that.He had been a lonely man, certainly, but there was more than loneliness here, and perhaps Kimble should be grateful that he’d not harmed anyone else. Another year or two of living in this place and brooding over whatever the hell he brooded over and he might have picked up the same gun and ventured out. It happened sometimes. Chief Deputy Kevin Kimble had been around long enough to know that terrible things happened sometimes, strange things, things that you couldn’t even say out loud…
    With every passing minute the place felt smaller and colder, and Kimble found himself thinking of the infrared illuminators, that ring of lights below