“Come on out, Ryerson!” Adam yelled.
“He’s not coming out,” Mitch said. His face was wet with mist; he wiped it off on the back of his hand. “He’ll never come out, not with his wife in there with him.”
“Then we’ll go in and drag him out.”
“That’s it,” Bonner said. He clapped his hands like a kid. “Drag him out, make him confess. How do we do it, Mitch? How do we go in and get him?”
Mitch didn’t say nothing. He was staring again, wiping his face, fidgeting.
Why, hell, Adam thought suddenly, he’s scared. He couldn’t figure it at first. He’d always looked up to Mitch, always figured him to be tough and strong, the leader type. But now . . . well, you had to believe your eyes. Mitch was scared, backing-down scared—there was no question about it. And Bonner’s crazy, he thought, and Hod’s drunk and that leaves just me, don’t it?
He squeezed off another shot, blew out an upstairs window this time. Bonner whooped. Mitch stared and fidgeted.
I’m in charge now, Adam thought. Yes, sir, I’m the real leader here. Give the orders, do things any way I want. Any way I want. Bust in there, drag Ryerson out, make him confess . . . even kill him if I want. Shoot him down like a dog if I want. And her? What about her? Nobody’s said anything about her, but she’s as bad as he is, helping him, protecting him, and all the time with her nose in the air like her shit don’t stink—what about her? Do anything I want to her, too, when the time comes.
Do what I should of done to that bitch up in Lake Oswego. Put this baby’s muzzle up against her head, let her feel cold steel against her head, make her beg a little . . . any damn thing I want!
Jan
He heard the second bullet whine and smash into the outside wall before he heard the shot boom. Riding the echoes of the shot was Alix’s voice: “What’s happening, what’s going on?” Her face was white, the folds of the red shirt she clutched like splashes of blood against her breasts.
Jan grasped her hard by the shoulders, pushed her down to her knees. “Stay down!” He dropped down beside her, crawled quickly to the front door, raised up to throw the bolt lock. Then he swung back toward the window in the side wall. He was more angry than anything else at this moment, but the anger was muted by an almost detached calm. The emotional scene with Alix earlier had left him drained, incapable for the time being of fear or any other strong feeling.
Outside the voices were loud, excited, the words indistinguishable now. Jan reached for the lamp cord, yanked it out of the socket in the side wall, yanked the room into darkness. Under its protective cover, he pushed himself up into a standing crouch. Behind him he could hear Alix’s breathing coming fast and ragged: she was on her knees alongside the couch.
He groped his way across the room. Alix heard him moving and said, “Where are you going?” Her voice shook but she sounded in control.
“Kitchen window. See who’s out there.”
He made his way into the kitchen. Light filtering through the window made a diffused wedge across the sink and the linoleum floor. He ducked under the sill of the window, came up on the far side, and leaned up over the drainboard to look past one comer of the curtain.
The sixty yards or so between the house and the parked station wagon were illuminated by the nightlight. Details close to the building—clumps of grass, the gravel of the path—stood out in sharp relief. Farther back, where the four men moved around in a ragged group, the shadows were longer and details were blurry, so that the figures had a kind of surreal, two-dimensional look.
Novotny was one of them. And Hod Barnett. And . . . Bonner? Yes, Seth Bonner, jumping around, letting out war whoops—drunk. All of them lynch-mob drunk. The fourth man was half-turned away from the window, but after a moment he shouted something and pivoted, and Jan recognized the village handyman, Adam Reese. There was a long-barreled rifle in Reese’s hands, cradled across his chest military-fashion. Light gleamed off its metal surfaces. It was the only weapon Jan could see, but that didn’t mean the rest of them weren’t armed with handguns.
Then Reese swung the weapon up, aimed it at the house, aimed it straight at the kitchen window as if he knew Jan was there watching. Jan was already falling away, throwing his hands up over his head, when Reese fired. Glass burst above him and the bullet slashed through, screeched and thudded into the metal door of the refrigerator. Shards rained down, one of the sharp edges opening a stinging cut on the back of his left hand.
In the living room Alix was shrieking, “Jan! Jan!”
“I’m all right, stay there. Get on the phone—call the sheriff. Hurry!”
His glasses were askew; he pushed them back into place and scuttled away from the sink, cutting knees and palms on the broken glass, ignoring the pain. The pantry door . . . was it locked? He couldn’t remember. Locked doors wouldn’t keep them out, not for long, but just a few minutes might mean everything to Alix and him. On his feet again, he stumbled over the big carton of pots and pans and dishes she’d left on the floor, almost fell, regained his footing again.
One of the upstairs windows burst, the breaking-glass sounds lost in another echoing report from Adam Reese’s rifle.
Jan’s mouth was full of thick brassy-tasting saliva as he stumbled down the steps into the cloakroom. He got the pantry door open, groped his way across to the outside door, grasped the knob. Locked. But the fact brought only a small, fleeting relief. He pivoted away from the door, staggered back into the kitchen.
“Jan!”
In a crouch he moved over into the doorway, saw the shape of Alix come out of the darkness, felt her hands clutch at his arms.
“What is it? What happened?”
“The phone . . . it doesn’t work. It’s dead, Jan, the line is dead!”
Alix
“What are we going to do?”
The sound of her own voice frightened her even more than she already was: it trembled, wobbled, verged on a slow-building scream. Her chest was constricted, felt as though it might burst. Fear pounded a frantic rhythm in the hollow of her throat.
“Don’t panic, for God’s sake.”
“They must have cut the telephone wires. . . . ”
“If we panic, it’s all over. You know that as well as I do. Stay calm.”
She took several deep breaths with her mouth open wide; the last thing she needed now was to start hyperventilating. Outside she could hear shouts, whoops, lunatic laughter; she shut her ears against the sounds. And some of the constriction left her chest, the rising terror checked and then began to abate. The wild moment was over. She had her control back again.
“I’m okay,” she said, and her voice no longer trembled on the edge of a shriek. “Better now. How many of them are there?”
“Four. Novotny, Barnett, Reese, and Seth Bonner. All of them drunk.”
“Have they all got guns?”
“Reese has a rifle; he’s the one who’s been shooting. I couldn’t tell about the others.”
Reese . . . that evil, smirking little man. She suppressed a shiver, heard herself say, “We’ve got to protect ourselves.”
“With what?”
“Knives. Butcher knives.”
“Knives won’t be much good against four armed men.”
“They might not all be armed. Jan, we’ve got to have some kind of weapons. . . . ”
“Okay. You’re right.”
He put his arm around her, turned her into the kitchen, bent her low under the sill of the window. Most of the glass had been ripped out of it by the rifle bullet, she saw; only a few shards, like broken snaggleteeth, remained in the frame. Fog blew in through the opening in gray wisps. Fog, and the icy wind, and the loud drunken voices of the four men out there.
“Did you pack the knives?” Jan said against her ear.
“Yes. In the carton with the pots and pans.”
They found the carton, squatted beside it, began to rummage inside. Alix found the elongated newspaper-wrapped bundle that contained the butch
er and carving knives. She pulled it from the carton, started to unwrap it.
Outside, Reese’s rifle cracked again. Almost instantaneously there was a violent whooshing explosion—a thunderous roar that seemed to rock the house. And a mushrooming flash of light and flame turned the night beyond the broken window as bright as noon.
Mitch Novotny
Adam had blown up the Ryersons’ station wagon. Drawn a bead on it with that 30.06 of his, put a bullet in the gas tank, and blown it sky-high.
They’d all backed off when they saw what he was going to do, Mitch dragging Hod by one arm. But the heat of the explosion had seared him anyway, driven him farther back; he could still feel it hot and pulsing against his face, still hear the thudding echo of the blast. The fireball had rolled up fifty feet or more, boiling through the fog, staining it bright orange, bright red at the edges like blood. The fire was still burning hot; in the center of it, the car was nothing but a black cinder shape. The flames hadn’t reached any of the buildings yet, but the garage and the pumphouse were close by, and the wind was already swirling sparks like pinwheels through the darkness and the mist. The outbuildings could torch off any minute. The lighthouse too . . . with Ryerson and his wife in there.
Adam and Bonner were watching the car burn, Adam hopping from one foot to the other, Bonner letting out whoops like a goddamn Indian. Bonner was tetched in the head, they should never have brought him along, but Adam . . . it was like he’d gone crazy, too. All the shooting he’d done, blowing up the car like that, and now he was laughing, head thrown back and the laughter bubbling out of him like this was fun. like it was a party or something.
Christ, Mitch thought, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Come out here, get Ryerson, force him to talk, take him to Coos Bay—do what the fucking sheriff and state troopers wouldn’t do. But this . . . all this . . . this wasn’t the way it was supposed to be.
His head hurt; he felt woozy, sick to his stomach. Shouldn’t have drunk all that whiskey. Shouldn’t have come out here at all. But it seemed like the right thing to do . . . nobody else was doing anything, were they? Poor Mandy lying dead in her coffin . . . what Ryerson had done to the other girl . . . and Red, too . . . it was the thing to do, goddamn it. Ryerson was an animal, a mad dog. They had every right to be here, doing this. Every right. . . .
“Ryerson! We’re coming in, Ryerson! You can’t hide, you can’t get away!”
It was Adam doing the yelling, just like before. Why? What was the sense in that? Don’t talk about it, just do it.
“Don’t talk about it, Adam,” he called over the thrumming beat of the fire, “let’s just do it.”
“Damn right we’re gonna do it.”
“Bust down the door,” Bonner yelled. “That’s it, that’s what we’ll do, ain’t it, Adam? Bust down the door.”
“The door or one of the windows. Mitch, run back to the van, get that big six-cell of mine. They ain’t got guns but maybe they got something else, knives or something. We don’t want him coming out of the dark at us.”
Mitch hesitated. “Let Seth get it.”
“No, you got steadier hands. Hurry it up, Mitch, come on.”
Who’re you to give me orders? Mitch thought. But he didn’t say it, didn’t argue. The hell with arguing, just get it over with. He turned, ran back to where Adam’s van was parked outside the lighthouse gate. He found the six-cell flashlight in the rear. Thought about looking for the bottle—he needed another drink, bad—and remembered they’d finished it on the way out here. He slammed the rear door, viciously, and ran back uphill with the flashlight.
Hod was down on one knee, puking into the grass. Mitch veered over to him, squatted, put his hand on Hod’s shoulder. “Hod? You all right, buddy?”
“Sick,” Hod muttered. “Jesus, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” Mitch said. And he realized that he didn’t, not anymore. He didn’t know what the hell was going on.
“Mitch! Bring that six-cell!”
He didn’t want to leave Hod, didn’t want to break into the lighthouse after Ryerson, didn’t want to do any of this anymore. But he had to. He couldn’t stop himself now, it was too late. Just get it over with. He straightened, moved ahead to where Adam and Bonner were waiting, firelight dancing over their faces, making them look odd and unreal. Like strangers, men he’d never seen before.
The wind had kicked up, was blowing sparks in swirls and showers like some kind of crazy Fourth of July show. One corner of the garage was already starting to burn.
Jan
They were in the kitchen, backed up against the wall next to the cloakroom, Alix clinging to his arm. Through the broken window, he could see the four men moving around, backlit by the flames of the burning station wagon. The pulsing glow of the fire made the fog look like luminescent smoke, made it seem as if the very fabric of the night were burning.
“Jan, we can’t just stay here—waiting.”
Fear in her voice, tension, but no panic. She was good in a crisis, always had been. She wouldn’t come apart. And him? What about him?
His fingers moved spasmodically around the blade of the butcher knife. He wanted to let go of it; it felt alien in his hand, no longer a tool, not even a weapon—more a symbol of menace that crackled as loudly as the fire out there. “We can’t fight them,” he said grimly. “Four against two. And they’ve got guns.”
“We could go up in the tower . . . the lantern. That trapdoor is made of solid oak.”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing. But not you, just me. You’ve got to get out of here before it’s too late.”
“Get out? There’s no way. . . . ”
“Yes there is.”
“How?”
“By hiding down here while I make them think we’ve both gone up into the tower. They’ll chase me, and when they do you get out through the pantry, run for help.”
“Jan, I can’t leave you here alone—”
“You’ve got to!” The urgency in his voice made it shrill. “Look at them out there. Listen to them. They’re drunk, half crazy—capable of anything. Rape, and worse.”
He felt her shudder. “Where can I hide that they wouldn’t find me? One of them might look around down here. . . . ”
He told her where. Felt her shudder again.
“No,” she said, “I can’t.”
“You can and you will. It’s our only chance.”
“Can’t we both hide?”
“No. They’d search, and if they searched long enough they’d find us.”
“I still say we can both go up into the lantern. Someone will see the fire, someone will come. . . . ”
“Not likely, not with the fog, not all the way in Hilliard. Besides, they blew up the car. What’s to stop them from setting fire to the lighthouse?”
They were coming toward the house now, three of them in a tight little group, Reese with his rifle and Bonner with an ax handle he’d found somewhere and Novotny with a heavy-duty flashlight. They passed out of his line of vision—and then there was a sudden, savage banging on the front door. One of them began yelling obscenities. The door was solid-core, it might not yield, but then all they had to do was break out the glass in one of the windows and come in that way. If they weren’t drunk they’d have thought of that already.
He swung Alix around to face him, kissed her hard on the mouth, pushed her away from him. “Hurry! Before it’s too late!”
“Oh God, Jan, I love you. . . . ”
“I love you too. Hurry!”
Hod Barnett
Bad dream. That was what it was, the worst kind of bad dream.
He kept backing away from the lighthouse, the fire, Mitch and Adam and Seth Bonner over at the door, pounding on the door, yelling and whooping. He was sick, confused. All that whiskey he’d drunk . . . the shooting . . . the explosion . . . His head was spinning, it wouldn’t stop spinning.
He had to puke again. Went to one knee, emptied his stomach. It didn’t help; he fe
lt worse when he was done, weak and shaky. And they were still pounding, still yelling over there—Mitch and Adam and Bonner, his friends. What were they doing? It didn’t make sense what they were doing.
He killed Mandy, Hod.
We got to go after him, Hod.
No, it was crazy. Crazy. He shouldn’t be here, why was he here? Mandy in her grave a few hours, and here he was hog drunk, sick, the Ryersons’ car all blown up and burning, garage burning, night full of fire and noise and crazy images . . . he couldn’t stand it anymore, he had to shut it out, it was all just a bad dream.
He lurched away from the fence, stumbled out through the gate, ran until he got to Adam’s van. Yanked open the door, threw himself across the seat inside. Lay on his belly with his hands over his ears to shut out the noise, his eyes squeezed tight to shut out all the swirling images.
Bad dream, whiskey dream. Sleep it off, wake up and find out none of it happened, Mandy was still alive, everything was like it had always been, nothing had happened, none of it had happened!
Bad, bad dream . . .
Alix
The trapdoor banged shut above her and the darkness in the abandoned well was total.
She clung to the corroded iron rungs on the wall, her heart pounding wildly. She was afraid of losing her grip, of falling; afraid of what might be hidden below. Her arm brushed against the rough concrete and something slimy smeared off on it. Gooseflesh rippled; she gasped, sucking in dank, evil-smelling air that seemed to catch in her throat. She gasped again; her chest heaved but still she felt she was suffocating.
Then, from somewhere above, she heard a muffled crashing and splintering noise, male voices yelling in bloated triumph. They were inside the house. . . .
The Lighthouse: A Novel of Terror Page 23