The Lighthouse

by Bill Pronzini

  Please, God, don’t let them find Alix.

  He ran out onto the landing, trailing bedding, almost tripping on it. He made as much noise as he could running up the stairs and through the open trap, releasing the catch and letting the door slam shut. He knelt to throw the locking bolt, then straightened and pounded up the rest of the way.

  Inside the lantern he dropped the cotton and the bedding, went to the glass side that overlooked the grounds. The station wagon was still burning, though with less intensity now, but the garage had caught fire, a blaze that was spreading rapidly under the lash of the wind. Sparks danced and swirled in the mist. If the wind turned gusty, blew sparks and burning embers this way…

  His head had begun to hurt-not badly yet, thank God. He pressed his thumbs hard against the upper ridges of his eye sockets, then stood staring down toward the pantry door in the side wall. Get out, he thought, come on, get out!

  And the door popped open and Alix stumbled into view, looked around, started to run.

  He watched tensely, but when she reached the gate and nobody else appeared, he felt the first stirrings of relief. And something else, too-a realization that he was no longer afraid.

  So much fear had been stored up inside him the past few months, irrational and unnecessary, growing, festering, coloring his judgment, controlling his thoughts and actions; but now it had been purged, bled out of him by a simple act of confession, a simple acceptance of what should have been self-evident all along. How could he have thought he couldn’t depend on her?

  He leaned against the glass, watching her until she was fifty yards along the road, running into the gray wall of fog-running away but not from him. When he could no longer see her he turned toward the stairs, his hands clenched at his sides. He was ready now.

  For the first time since he’d learned of his coming blindness he was ready to fight.

  Adam Reese

  When Adam came back into the front room the lights were blazing-Mitch or Bonner had found out what was wrong and got them working again-and the two of them were over at a closed door in the inner wall. Mitch was rattling the knob. Bonner was standing there yelling.

  “They’re up in the tower, Adam! They went up in the tower and locked this door behind ’em!”

  “Break it down, then.”

  “Solid-core like the front one,” Mitch said. “We’ll need something heavy.”

  “Couch over there. We’ll use it for a battering ram.”

  They picked up the couch, Adam and Bonner on one side, Mitch on the other, and brought it over and started slamming the end of it against the door. It creaked, groaned, bowed in a little. But it wouldn’t give-bastard wouldn’t give.

  Adam felt wild inside, kind of lightheaded with the need to get up there, get his hands on Ryerson and the woman. Do anything he wanted with them, both of them, if he could just get up there. “Harder!” he yelled at the other two. “Slam it in there! Slam it in there!”

  It took them six more tries, working in a frenzy now, before the wood began to splinter, the lock began to bust loose from the frame. Two more slams and the fucker finally burst inward. Bonner let out one of his whoops. They dropped the couch, shoved it back out of the way, and Adam fought past the other two, got through the doorway first and pounded up the stairs with the Springfield pointed up ahead of him like a hard-on.

  “Ryerson! We’re coming, Ryerson!”

  On the second floor he poked open one door, another. Both rooms were empty. Bonner was on the landing now; he’d taken the six-cell from Mitch and was aiming its beam up the rest of the stairs.

  “Bet they went all the way up, Adam. Into the lantern. That’s what I’d do if I was them.”

  “There a way to lock themselves up there?”

  “Trapdoor. It’s a heavy bugger.”

  “You and Mitch go up and look. I’ll make sure they ain’t hiding around here.”

  Bonner nodded, grinning, and he and Mitch ran on up into the tower. The light was on in one of the rooms-bedroom where they slept, looked tike-and Adam turned in there, heading for the bathroom on the far side. But he stopped before he got there. Came up short next to the window.

  Somebody was moving out there, down past his van, down on the road-running like hell along the road.

  The woman, Mrs. Ryerson.

  He could see her plain as day in the fireglow from the burning car, the burning garage. Hair flying, legs pumping, trying to get away. Trying to get help.

  Adam spun away from the window, his lips pulled flat against his teeth, and ran out onto the landing. Up in the tower Bonner yelled, “Adam? I was right, they’re up there! I can hear ’em-and the trapdoor’s locked tight!”

  “Find a way to bust it in,” Adam yelled back. But he didn’t go up there, and he didn’t hesitate: he ran downstairs instead, across the front room, outside.

  Ryerson could wait. Let the others have Ryerson. It was the woman he wanted.

  Alix

  She ran along the cape road, her tennis shoes slapping against its bumpy surface. The chill air tore at the membranes of her mouth and nose, seemed to pierce her lungs. The pain in her back where she’d hurt it falling in the well was nothing compared to the searing that had started up in her left side.

  A deep rut threw her stride off. She stumbled, went to one knee, felt the rocks scrape through her jeans. Got up, kept running. Her breath came in loud gasps; her lungs ached; blood pounded in her head in counterpoint to the wild beating of her heart. She couldn’t have run more than half a mile, and already she was winded.

  She drew her flailing hands in toward her upper body, the way she’d seen runners do. Help was a long way off; she had to conserve energy, eliminate unnecessary motion. She was in good condition from her aerobics at home. It was just a matter of pacing herself.

  Her feet took up a ragged rhythm. Gradually her breathing came under control. The road cut through a stand of trees, and when she got in among them she couldn’t see anything; she slowed to a walk, bent over, peering at the ground to keep from stepping into a pothole, spraining an ankle or worse.

  When she came out of the trees, fog blew around her like snow. She could see the road surfaces better here, and once more she started to run. Surprisingly, her fear had subsided. Or maybe she was just becoming numb Sound behind her, a deep-throated rumbling.

  Motor sound.

  Car coming from the lighthouse.

  She twisted her upper body, trying to see back along the road without slackening her pace. No headlights were visible, but the trees screened her vision. The growl of the car engine was louder now, coming fast.

  Fear rekindled inside her, flared high. One or more of them must have seen her escape, were coming after her. In a matter of seconds the car would be clear of the trees…

  She veered sharply to her left, plunged off the road, all but flung herself over a wooden fence. Fell, got up. And ran headlong across the open field beyond.

  Mitch Novotny

  Bonner kept yelling, “Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch!” and beating on the trapdoor with that ax handle he’d found. He sounded wild, out of his head. Like Adam. Like all of them.

  Adam… why wasn’t he here? Disappeared all of a sudden, ran downstairs a while ago and never came back. Where was he?

  “Son of a bitch!”

  “Shut up, Seth, will you shut up! Quit beating on that door!”

  Bonner stopped his hammering. From up in the tower, then, Mitch could hear noises-scraping sounds, as if something heavy were being dragged across the floor; hard footfalls on the stairs.

  “Listen to that,” Bonner said. “They’re up to something. We got to get up there, Mitch.”

  “How? That trap’s made of solid oak.”

  “Get a tool, crowbar or something. Might be able to wedge a bar up in there and snap the lock.”

  “We haven’t got a crowbar…”

  “One in Adam’s van,” Bonner said. He was so excited, spit came spraying out with every word. “I seen it
, Mitch. I’ll run down and get it.”

  Adam’s van. Adam. Where the hell was he?

  “No,” Mitch said, “I’ll go. You stay here.”

  Up in the tower, there was a loud thumping. Then a sliding, dragging, slithering sound-something heavy and loose being hauled up the stairs.

  “No telling what them damn people are up to. We got to get up there, Mitch!”

  Mitch turned his body in the cramped space, started down the stairs. He was almost to the bottom when Bonner yelled, “Son of a bitch!” again and beat another tattoo on the trap with that fucking ax handle.

  Alix

  She ran through the night in a haze of terror.

  Staggering, stumbling, losing her balance and falling sometimes because the terrain was rough and there was no light of any kind except for the bloody glow of the flames that stained the fog-streaked sky far behind her. The muscles in her legs were knotted so tightly that each new step brought a slash of pain. Her breath came in ragged, explosive pants; the thunder of blood in her ears obliterated the moaning cry of the wind. She could no longer feel the cold through the bulky sweater she wore, was no longer aware of the numbness in her face and hands. She felt only the terror, was aware only of the need to run and keep on running.

  He was still behind her. Somewhere close behind her.

  On foot now, just as she was; he had left the car some time ago, back when she had started across the long sloping meadow. There had been nowhere else for her to go then, no place to conceal herself: the meadow was barren, treeless. She’d looked back, seen the car skid to a stop, and he’d gotten out and raced toward her. He had almost caught her then. Almost caught her another time, too, when she’d had to climb one of the fences and a leg of her Levi’s had got hung up on a rail splinter.

  If he caught her, she was sure he would kill her.

  She had no idea how long she had been running. Or how far she’d come. Or how far she still had left to go. She had lost all sense of time and place. Everything was unreal, nightmarish, distorted shapes looming around her, ahead of her-all of the night twisted and grotesque and charged with menace.

  She looked over her shoulder again as she ran. She couldn’t see him now; there were trees behind her, tall bushes. Above the trees, the flames licked higher, shone brighter against the dark fabric of the night.

  Trees ahead of her, too, a wide grove of them. She tried to make herself run faster, to get into their thick clotted shadow; something caught at her foot, pitched her forward onto her hands and knees. She barely felt the impact, felt instead a wrenching fear that she might have turned her ankle, hurt herself so that she couldn’t run anymore. Then she was up and moving again, as if nothing had happened to interrupt her night-and then there was a longer period of blankness, of lost time, and the next thing she knew she was in among the trees, dodging around their trunks and through a ground cover of ferns and high grass. Branches seemed to reach for her, to pluck at her clothing and her bare skin like dry, bony hands. She almost blundered into a half-hidden deadfall; veered away in time and stumbled on.

  Her foot came down on a brittle fallen limb, and it made a cracking sound as loud as a pistol shot. A thought swam out of the numbness in her mind: Hide! He’ll catch you once you’re out in the open again. Hide!

  But there was no place safe enough, nowhere that he couldn’t find her. The trees grew wide apart here, and the ground cover was not dense enough for her to burrow under or behind any of it. He would hear her. She could hear him, back there somewhere-or believed she could, even above the voice of the wind and the rasp of her breathing and the stuttering beat of her heart.

  Something snagged her foot again. She almost fell, caught her balance against the bole of a tree. Sweat streamed down into her eyes; she wiped it away, trying to peer ahead. And there was more lost time, and all at once she was clear of the woods and ahead of her lay another meadow, barren, with the cliffs far off on one side and the road winding emptily on the other. Everything out there lay open, naked-no cover of any kind in any direction.

  She had no choice. She plunged ahead without even slowing.

  It was a long time, or what she perceived as a long time, before she looked back. And he was there, just as she had known he would be, relentless and implacable, coming after her like one of the evil creatures in a Grimm’s fairy tale.

  She felt herself staggering erratically, slowing down. Her wind and her strength seemed to be giving out at the same time. I can’t run much farther, she thought, and tasted the terror, and kept running.

  Out of the fear and a sudden overwhelming surge of hopelessness, another thought came to her: How can this be happening? How did it all come to this?

  Dear God, Jan, how did it all come to this?…

  Jan

  At first he thought the air hose wouldn’t be long enough. But then he got it uncoiled and all the way up into the lantern, and he found that it was long enough, by at least a couple of feet. He paused to wipe the sweat from his forehead, and to listen to the shouting and banging below the trap. It seemed to be just one voice now-Seth Bonner’s. Were the others still down there with him? Or were they up to something else?

  I’m going to have to go through with it, he thought.

  He moved sideways to the glass wall, looked out. Two-thirds of the garage was burning now, but so far the wind hadn’t spread it any farther. He scanned the area for some sign of the other men; but his headache was worsening and now his vision had started to kick in and out of focus, especially when he tried to look at anything in the distance. If they were out there, where were they? Up to something, damn it. The thought freshened his sense of urgency, drove him away from the glass and down the stairs again to the lightroom.

  He had anchored the diaphone in the doorway, using the barrel of fire sand to wedge it against the jamb with its flanged mouth pointing downward. He’d loosely connected the air line; now he tightened the connection. Straightening again, he stepped over the diaphone and lifted the heavy bulk of the compressor. Struggled with it up the stairs into the lantern.

  When he set the compressor down he found himself looking at the Fresnel lens. And he felt twinges of both pain and reluctance. The vibration, even using the smallest possible volume of air, would be tremendous-enough to shatter every prism and bull’s-eye in the lens. Shatter all the glass in the lantern walls, too. And the noise, trapped in the confines of the tower… it might burst his eardrums as well as those of the men below. He had the cotton and the pillows and bedclothes for protection, but there was no guarantee he wouldn’t be deafened, or hurt by flying glass or in some other way. And what if all four weren’t inside the lighthouse when he was ready?

  Too dangerous, he thought grimly. Too problematical. Keep waiting

  … do it only if the situation becomes critical.

  But suppose I don’t know it’s critical until too late?

  Goddamn them, what are they up to?

  And he thought again: Sooner or later I’m going to have to go through with it.

  Mitch Novotny

  Adam’s van was gone.

  Mitch saw that as soon as he came out of the lighthouse, into the cold of the wind and the smoky heat of the fires. It made him angry and scared and sick to his stomach, all at the same time. Adam had run out on them, that was plain. But why? He’d been the one who’d shimmied up the pole to cut the telephone wires; he’d been doing all the shooting, giving most of the orders. And then all of a sudden he’d just up and quit on them. It didn’t make sense.

  Mitch’s head was throbbing, and the oily smell of the smoke wasn’t helping it any; he couldn’t think straight. He looked over his shoulder at the lighthouse. One thing he knew-he wasn’t going back in there. Crazy Bonner yelling, pounding with his ax handle… he couldn’t take any more of it, the hell with Bonner, the hell with Ryerson. It was all crazy, none of it made any sense. And now Adam was gone… the hell with him too. And Hod, where was Hod? Gone with Adam?

  I got to get out
of here myself, he thought.

  And all of a sudden the wind was like a hand shoving him, prodding him into a fast walk, a trot, a run-away from the lighthouse, through the gate, onto the road. He ran past the spot where Adam’s van had been, the wind pushing him into a stagger, and when he regained his balance he saw the dark shape in the grass, somebody lying there in the grass. He slowed, fighting the wind and his fear, and veered over there. He still had the six-cell flashlight in his hand, he realized then; he switched it on, shined it down.

  It was Hod. Lying in the grass like a bundle of something that had been thrown away. At first, Mitch thought he was dead. But he wasn’t dead-just dead-drunk, passed out. He moaned when Mitch pulled him up by one arm, slapped his face.

  “Hod, you hear me? Hod?”

  No answer, just another groan.

  “Come on, Hod, wake up, get on your feet. We got to get out of here!”

  Hod just lay there, groaning, his eyes shut tight and his head rolling on his neck like it was busted. There was puke all over the front of him.

  “Hod! I can’t carry you, goddamn it!”

  Mitch slapped him again. Again. Again. It didn’t do any good. Hod wasn’t going to wake up, wouldn’t be able to walk if he did. He didn’t even know who he was.

  Can’t just leave him here like this, Mitch thought. He’s my friend, been my friend a lot of years. Can’t leave him like Adam left me, that fucking Adam…

  But the wind was pushing at him again, harder now, and the next thing it had him on his feet, it had him rushing down the road. Wouldn’t let him stop, wouldn’t let him look back, wouldn’t even let him think anymore.