The Lighthouse: A Novel of Terror

by Bill Pronzini, Marcia Muller

  Jan had moved over to one of the west-side windows and was rubbing his eyes—probably because they were strained from the long drive. She hoped he wasn’t having one of his headaches. She stepped up beside him and looked out to where the clouds moved restlessly across the horizon, their underbellies stained the colors of saffron and tarnished gold by the sunset’s afterglow. “Don’t worry, love,” she said, slipping her arm around his waist. “It’ll work out.”

  He was silent for a moment, and she sensed a preoccupation in him. Finally he said, “I hope so.”

  “Meanwhile, there’s your book. Number-one priority, remember?”

  “Our book.”

  That pleased her more than anything else he might have said at the moment, and she sensed he was back with her. She hugged herself closer to him. “Your brilliant prose, my stunning illustrations. How can it miss?”

  He laughed softly and she felt him relax again. He began to massage the small of her back with his knuckles—a caress that never failed to excite her. “Nice up here this time of night,” he said. “Quite a view.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  And it was. The colors were gone now on the horizon; the sky was gray-black where the clouds moved, a deep lavender-black in the clear patches. Far out to sea, the running lights of a small ship glistened in the twilight. Closer in, the offshore rocks, some of them as large as two-story buildings, stood above the dark, heavy sea in ominous silhouette. And down below, some two hundred feet away at the base of the headland, the wind-roiled surf churned against the shoreline rocks and sent up fans and geysers of faintly luminescent spray.

  To the south, the cliffs fell away to narrow driftwood-strewn beaches and a ragged line of breakers that stretched far into the distance. The wooded slopes of the Coast Range rose to the east, like great blotches of India ink spilled in irregular patterns down the lower half of the sky. Inland to the northwest, from this height, Hilliard Bay was visible beyond the inner headland; the lights of the village bloomed in the gathering darkness.

  “Beautiful,” she said again. Then she said, “Don’t stop. I like that, the way you rub my back.”

  “I know.”

  “Mmm, yes, that’s nice.”

  “Any minute now, you’ll start purring.”

  “I’m already purring.”

  He turned her body against his and kissed her. He knew how to kiss, soft-mouthed, urgent and gentle at the same time; she had never known any man who kissed better than Jan. The heat that his rubbing had kindled in her grew and spread. She ran her fingernails along the side of his jaw, rotated her hips provocatively, and said, “Mm,” in her throat when she felt his arousal. It had been almost two weeks since they’d last made love, what with all the preparations for the move. Too long. Much too long.

  At length he broke off the kiss. “Why don’t we go down and christen our new bed?”

  “That’s a fine way to put it,” Alix said, but she took his hand and they moved across to the open trapdoor.

  Downstairs, in the living room, the telephone rang.

  It had a loud bell and the acoustics of the tower allowed them to hear it plainly. Jan said, “Damn. Your father, I’ll bet. He always did have a fine sense of timing.”

  “Could be somebody else.”

  “Your father,” he said. “You’d better go answer it.”

  “All right. Wait for me in the bedroom.”

  “Just don’t be too long. I’m pushing forty, you know; I can’t maintain an erection as long as I used to.”

  “Hah,” she said, and kissed him quickly, and hurried down the three flights of stairs to the living room. She was puffing when she picked up the receiver and said hello.

  Her father’s voice said, “Alix? That you?”

  “Yes, Dad, it’s me.”

  “You okay? You sound out of breath.”

  “I’m fine. We were up in the lantern.”

  “The what?”

  “The lantern. Top of the tower where the light is.”

  “What were you doing up there?”

  “Jan was checking the lens.”

  Matthew Kingsley chuckled. He considered Jan’s enthusiasm for lighthouses—as well as his scholarly vocation—whimsical, on a par with becoming a poet or running off to join a traveling circus. In Matthew’s world, real men didn’t teach—they worked with their hands, built, accomplished tangible tasks. He himself had been a twenty-year career man in the Navy, had flown missions in the Korean War, and then had gone on to make a name—and a small fortune—in the aerospace industry. Now he was a successful politician: congressman from California’s influential Eleventh District for the past eight years, and a strong contender for the next gubernatorial nomination. Matthew seemed genuinely puzzled by his son-in-law’s passion for the classroom and books; but at the same time he was fond of Jan, so what few criticisms he voiced took the form of mild and good-natured kidding.

  “Well,” he was saying, “just as long as you kids are having a good time.”

  “Is that why you called—to see if we’re having fun?”

  “Just wanted to make sure you’d arrived safely and are on your way to getting settled. I have a personal interest in this venture, you know.”

  There was a note of pride in her father’s voice; he’d been remarkably successful in the complicated matter of getting them permission from the Oregon State Parks Department to live in the Cape Despair Light for a year. And he was genuinely pleased to have been of help; Matthew liked using his influence to help others (although he seldom used it in his own behalf).

  He’d have been hurt if he knew her gratitude was mixed, that she feared his help in the matter had been obtained at some cost to her marriage. Years before, when Jan had learned—after the fact—that his father-in-law had been directly responsible for his appointment to the Stanford faculty, he’d been angry and resentful. And once that storm was over, they’d mutually decided they would never again allow Matthew to use his influence on their behalf.

  Why, then, had Jan broken their vow and gone to her father behind her back to ask for this enormous favor? At first she’d thought it had to do with her own plans to enter into partnership in a Los Angeles graphic arts firm next year. Although she would be establishing the Northern California branch of the company, the work would entail a lot of traveling to L.A. She’d asked him if that was his reason, and he’d said of course it was: “You won’t have time for lighthouses after you become a big executive.” But he’d said it so readily that she wondered then if it wasn’t just a convenient excuse, if there was some other explanation for the puzzling urgency of his request to her father. When she’d tried to question Jan further, he’d become closed off and unreachable, unable or unwilling to talk to her about it.

  Her father was saying something. She said, “I’m sorry. Dad, what was that?”

  “I said, everything is all right, isn’t it?”

  She hastened to reassure him it was, gave him a brief description of the lighthouse, and promised to call him and her mother when they were more settled. After the conversation ended, she sat on the lumpy, overstuffed couch that, along with two equally lumpy chairs and a couple of end tables, comprised the living room furniture. It was dark beyond the small windows; she peered out at the night, thinking about her family and her home, about Jan’s drop-everything need to start writing his history of lighthouses that had brought them so many miles from all that was familiar.

  But she didn’t sit there for long; there was nothing to be gained by brooding. Besides, Jan was waiting upstairs. And tonight he was all she really needed.

  Alix

  Late the next morning, they went into Hilliard to buy supplies and propane tank refills.

  It was another cold day, overcast and windy; the daylight had a dull, steel-gray quality. Alix drove, bundled up in her pea jacket, a wool scarf, and a pair of gloves. Even with all that clothing, and the Ford’s heater turned up high, she couldn’t seem to get warm. Last night hadn’t been bad,
cuddled up with Jan in the big old-fashioned four-poster, but this morning . . . God, the watch house living quarters had been like an icebox when they woke up. The heaters did little to dispel the damp chill, and the woodstove in the living room had started smoking as soon as Jan lit the fire. And of course the stove in the kitchen had run out of propane before the coffee was even hot.

  It had not been a good morning for those reasons and because Jan seemed to have lapsed into another of his depressed moods. It was odd, considering how cheerful he’d been yesterday, how exuberantly he’d made love to her last night. The only reason she could find for it was that he was suffering another of his headaches. She knew he was because of the way he moved, the pinched look of his face, the controlled wince she would catch now and then in his expression; but when she had asked him about it, he shrugged it off and refused to talk about it. He hadn’t said twenty words to her, and he sat silently now, slouched against the passenger door, rumpling his beard and wincing whenever one of the tires bounced through a pothole.

  That’s what I get for marrying an academic and semi-genius, she thought, and smiled a little and then sighed. His depressions worried her, as did his headaches. For the past few years he had been seeing their friend Dave Sanderson, a neurologist on the staff at Stanford Hospital, for treatment of them. Dave had prescribed a variety of drugs—ergotamine, propranolol, codeine pain relievers, different kinds of tranquilizers—but the headaches and the depressions continued to recur. When Alix finally suggested he might want to consult somebody else, perhaps even a psychiatrist, Jan’s reaction had been negative. More than once she’d considered going to Dave herself, asking him to explain the problem to her. But Jan. if he had found out, would have considered it a breach of trust. Just as she considered his going to her father behind her back a breach of trust.

  He worried her in other ways as well. While she knew that the dark side of his personality was caused by problems in his past—his mother running off when he was only a baby, the hideous murder in Wisconsin—she couldn’t believe they were the only factors that made him so often silent and unreachable.

  For one thing, he’d come to terms with those problems; they’d talked them out before they were married. But still there was a part of him that he kept hidden; and even though she knew some of the difficulty was in her inability to understand it, it also seemed that he couldn’t or wouldn’t let her see that side of him, even after eleven years of marriage. A part he seemed to retreat into more and more of late, so that she seemed constantly to be reaching and tugging him back out of himself.

  With the silence heavy in the car, she negotiated a turn near the rise where she and Jan had stopped for her first view of the Cape Despair Light. On the other side of the turn, she was surprised to see an old green Chevvy pulled off on the grassy verge. A youth of about twenty in a plaid shirt and jeans and a teenaged girl—no more than sixteen—were leaning against the Chevvy’s hood, staring at the station wagon as it came into view. Then they both seemed to relax and the girl waved casually; she wore a bold-figured blue-and-white Indian poncho, and her thick auburn hair was pulled back with a beaded leather headband.

  Alix returned the wave as she drove past, then caught a glimpse of what the young man was holding in one cupped hand and understood the reason for their initial tension. It was a hand-rolled cigarette—marijuana, no doubt. She smiled wryly, glancing sideways at Jan.

  “Oregon’s not so different from California, is it,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Those kids back there. Smoking dope out in the country just like they do back home.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  The silence resettled between them, remained unbroken all the way to the junction with the county road that looped off Highway 1 eight miles away, became Hilliard’s main street, then looped back out to rejoin Highway I further north. Most of the terrain here was flattish sheep graze, strewn with prickly broom, small stands of trees, and hundreds of placid black-and white-faced woolies. All the sheep, Alix supposed, belonged to the owners of the big ranch a half mile or so to the south, off the county road. There were no ranches out on the cape itself, no private dwellings of any kind; the land that didn’t belong to the one sheep rancher was controlled by the state.

  A weathered metal sign, pocked with dents and holes made by kids (adults, too, for all she knew) out plinking with rifles and handguns, loomed to one side of the intersection. Alix glanced at it again as she turned north onto the country road.

  CAP DES PERES LIGHTHOUSE

  3 Miles

  CLOSED

  TO THE PUBLIC

  NO CAMPING NO PICNICKING NO HUNTING

  Despite the rather forbidding wording, Alix thought it wouldn’t keep adventurous tourists from wandering out there for a look at the lighthouse. Most of them would come in summer, but a few would no doubt show up in the off-season months as well. A few hundred yards to the south of the turnoff was a rest area with public toilets and a pay phone; the lighthouse, clearly visible from there, would attract a fair number of those who stopped. She and Jan would just have to deal as politely as possible with any who grew bold enough to come knocking on the door asking questions.

  The county road was reasonably well paved; it hooked downward toward the bay, past a weathered gray Victorian house and ramshackle garage set on a low promontory and a smaller, squarish building in the foreground near the road. The smaller building bore a sign that said Lang‘s Gallery and Gifts in ornate blue lettering.

  Alix noted the sign with interest. She wondered who Lang was, and what sort of artwork Lang’s Gallery exhibited. When she came into the village alone she would definitely stop in and find out.

  The road dropped down to parallel the shoreline at sea level, and other buildings appeared ahead, some of them flanking the road, others visible among the pines and Douglas fir that wooded the slopes rising above the village to the east. One of the latter, near the road, had a large screened front porch that bore a banner advertising antiques, driftwood, and shells for sale. Antiques, Alix thought wryly, was probably a euphemism for junk. Not that she minded junk; junkshops were a favorite haunt of hers. That was another place she would have to stop in.

  They were into the village proper now—two blocks long and deserted-looking, despite the sign on the outskirts that announced Hilliard’s population at three hundred and eleven. Mike’s Bar & Grill. A launderette. Hazel’s Beauty Salon and Bob’s Barber Shop, two halves of the same building. Hilliard General Store. Sea Breeze Tavern. The Seafood Grotto, a smallish restaurant built out over the bay on pilings. A-1 Marine Supply. A big cannery at the north end of the harbor, with its name painted in faded black on the sloping metal roof: South Coast Fisheries, Inc. They all seemed to be made of colorless native wood and stone, or of clapboard stripped of paint by the elements and scoured to a uniformly dull gray. Even the cannery and the long pier behind it, the boat slips that stood adjacent, and the two dozen or so fishing trawlers moored there, seemed to possess the same shabby, scrubbed gray appearance. The only buildings of much color were on the hillside. One was a whitewashed church, its steeple rising above the trees; the other was what looked to be a good-sized old schoolhouse painted red, with its bell tower intact. Beyond the Sea Breeze Tavern, an unpaved road led up that way; a wooden arrow at the intersection indicated that the two structures were the Hilliard Community Church and the Hilliard Town Hall.

  As she turned onto the gravel parking area in front of A-I Marine, Jan stirred and spoke for the first time in twenty minutes—an occurrence she took as a positive sign. “Not much to it, is there.”

  “No. It looks kind of . . . I don’t know, depressed.”

  “It is. Hard times around here these days.”

  “How come?”

  “Commercial fishing is Hilliard’s life-support,” he said, “and the main catch is salmon. Chinook and coho, the big ones. But the salmon runs have been poor the past three years; the trolling season that ended earlier t
his month was the worst of them.”

  “Why?”

  “Dry winters, dry rivers and streams. Salmon are anadromous, remember? Thousands of them couldn’t get from the sea to their spawning grounds.”

  “Can’t the fishermen go after other species?”

  “They do. Groundfish, mostly, but they don’t fetch the same high price. And their boats have to be re-outfitted for that kind of fishing.”

  “What’re groundfish?”

  “Flounder, perch, lingcod,” Jan said. “They use lines and nets to haul them up off the ocean floor.”

  He opened his door and stepped out into the chill wind; she followed suit. The air had a brackish, fishy smell that was not unpleasant. Gulls wheeled out over the cannery pier and boat slips, shrieking hungrily. A few men moved around out there; a late-arriving trawler was just putting into one of the berths. Across the road, on a flattish strip of raised land, two yelling boys chased each other among six or seven dilapidated trailers—a sort of makeshift trailer park, Alix thought. Otherwise, there was no activity anywhere in the vicinity.