The Lighthouse

by Bill Pronzini

  Run, Mitch! it kept shrieking in his ears. Run, run, run!

  Alix

  She scrambled into the ditch beside the cape road, some fifty yards from its junction with the county road. Knelt there in the tall wet grass to catch her breath. When she could breathe without gasping she crawled back up to where she could look around. The county road, hazed in fog, was deserted in both directions: no help there. But nothing moved, either, back the way she’d come. She must have lost him. Where or when or how she wasn’t sure. One minute he’d been behind her as she’d fled, skirting high clumps of gorse; the next he’d been gone. But the realization brought no release of tension. He could reappear again any second-closer than he’d been before, close enough to use that rifle he was carrying.

  She was sure it was Adam Reese who was after her. Back at the light, the handyman had been the one with the rifle; and twice during her flight she’d seen it cradled across her pursuer’s chest. He moved, too, in Reese’s peculiar, hopping gait. She would have been less terrified if it had been Novotny or one of the others. There was something evil about the little man. If he caught her…

  But he wasn’t going to. He mustn’t.

  Several hundred yards to the south was the rest area and telephone booth. But the booth was out in the open, and even if she managed to complete an emergency call, she didn’t want to risk hiding there in the dark woods to wait for the authorities. Much better, much safer was Cassie Lang’s. It was the closest house, not more than a fifth of a mile from where she was. The ditch extended to within thirty yards or so of the junction, then angled to the north to roughly parallel the county road into Hilliard. If she heard or saw a car, she could jump out and hail it… no, there was no telling who might be behind the wheel, it could be one of Novotny or Reese’s friends… better to just go on to Cassie’s, call the sheriff and the state police from there.

  She moved along the ditch, in a crouch where the banks were high, on her hands and knees where they were low. There was standing water in its bottom, but her numbed limbs barely registered the cold. Now and then she caught for balance at the sparse vegetation that grew there; nettles and sawgrass cut into her hands. She barely felt that, either.

  From time to time she stopped, held herself still and listened. It was very quiet, eerily so. She couldn’t take reassurance from the silence; Reese could be anywhere close by. Finally, after what seemed an interminable time, she judged she had gone far enough and crawled up the east bank and risked another look around.

  Cassie’s house was still two hundred yards away, tall and dark, forbidding in its garlands of fog. The gallery and garage squatted nearby, also devoid of light. The branches of the cypress windbreak between the house and garage cast twisted shadows across the driveway.

  The best place to leave the ditch and make her run for the house, she decided, would be at the edge of the gallery parking area. She slid back down to the bottom of the ditch and continued her walk-and-crawl through the damp vegetation. The next time she checked her position, she found she was only a few yards from where she wanted to be.

  She studied the layout of the three buildings carefully. In one short sprint she could be out of sight in the shadows alongside the gallery. And from there it was only thirty yards or so to Cassie’s front porch.

  She moved ahead a short ways. Listened again, but heard nothing. And scrambled up the side of the ditch, ran in a crouch to the edge of the parking area, then across that seemingly endless open space to the gallery. In its shelter, she leaned against the wall, panting, listening again.

  The wind in the trees, nothing more.

  She eased along the wall, peered around the comer toward the house. All the windows were dark. Was Cassie asleep this early? Or out somewhere for the evening? God, if she wasn’t home…

  No use speculating. She looked back the way she’d come, out across the headland. Nothing moved there or anywhere else, except for trees or bushes under the bluster of the wind. Still, the coppery taste of fear remained sharp in her mouth. She studied the wide expanse of lawn again, stared intently at the front of the house and the cypress windbreak beyond. Then, taking a breath, she ran across the empty space and into the concealing shrubbery along the front porch.

  The leaves of the thick bushes were wet. They dripped moisture on her as she slipped through them to the steps, half crawled onto the porch, and leaned up to press the doorbell. Chimes rang inside the house. She waited tensely, casting furtive looks over her shoulder.

  No response.

  She tried the bell again. Again. The echo was hollow, as if the house were empty not only of people but of furniture. Cassie must be out. God, now what?

  She tried the doorknob. Locked. And the door itself was solid oak, hung on heavy iron hinges. She glanced to the left, where a big curtained window overlooked the porch. She could smash it, climb inside, use the phone No. The sound of shattering glass was loud and would carry a good distance. Besides, it would take time to remove enough glass to get inside without badly cutting herself. And she had no idea where Cassie kept her phone, how the house was laid out; she would have to turn on a light to find out. And if the shattering glass didn’t alert Reese, the light probably would.

  Do something! she told herself. You can’t keep crouching here on the porch. Go out on the road, run for the next house? No. The nearest house was another fifth of a mile away and she would be exposed out on the road, with no place to hide. Where then?

  The garage? she thought. Was it possible there was a telephone in Cassie’s garage? Not likely; but some people kept phones in garages. Or spare keys to the house. Or maybe she’d gone out with somebody else and her car was there…

  Alix hurried down the steps, ran to the cypress windbreak. Beyond, the sagging roofline of the garage stood outlined against the gray-black sky. The garage had big double doors, but they were exposed, and even if they were unlocked they might make noise when she tried to open them. But on one side… was that a regular door? Yes; and it hung partway open.

  She dashed from the shelter of the trees, not chancing another look around. Ran through the narrow opening of the door and stumbled, catching for balance at the frame. It was unrelievedly black inside the garage, and the air was musty-redolent of dry rot, motor oil, and something organic like fertilizer. She stood with her hand against the splintery frame, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the deeper black. And when they did, she made out the humpbacked shape of Cassie’s old car.

  She rushed toward it, bumping against what felt like a pile of cordwood, dislodging one of the pieces so that it clattered dully on the floor-a sound that wouldn’t carry much beyond the confines of the garage. When she yanked open the driver’s door, the dome light came on. That allowed her to see that the ignition was empty. But she’d expected that; what she had to look for was one of those little magnetic spare-key boxes that people kept under dashes or inside tire wells or behind bumpers.

  She crawled in behind the wheel, bent forward to search beneath the dash. As she did so, something on the floor caught her eye-a flash of bright color against the worn rubber floor mat. Then the color registered as electric-blue, and she stared at the object, identified it as a long piece of leather tipped with beads.

  Her skin prickled with sudden cold. She reached down, felt under the seat, unhooked the leather from where it was jammed on the height-adjustment lever. Held it up to the pale dome light.

  An Indian headband.

  Mandy Barnett’s headband, missing from the wildly disheveled red curls when she had found the girl’s body.

  She felt her lips part, form the word “Oh,” but heard no sound. She raised her eyes, stared out at the hood of the car. She couldn’t tell the color in the gloom, but she remembered it was an olive color. Dark-green. And Sinclair had told her it was a dark-green car that had run Mandy and her bicycle off the road…

  The silence in the garage seemed to hum around her. She could hear her own breath coming in short, swift intakes. Her hand, clutchi
ng the headband, grew moist.

  There was no way the headband could have come to be there unless it had been carried in by Mandy’s murderer. Carried unwittingly, no doubt, caught in a pocket or a trouser cuff or on some other article of clothing. And it had lain unnoticed for days-until now.

  “Cassie?” she said aloud. “Dear Lord, Cassie?”

  And yet the evidence in her hand seemed irrefutable-one nightmare piled on top of another.

  It was Cassie Lang who had strangled Mandy Barnett.

  Adam Reese

  He saw her crossing from the trees alongside the Lang woman’s house to the garage nearby.

  The sight of her moving silhouette brought him up short, flattened his lips against his teeth. He was back in the trees maybe a hundred yards away, just about to come out of them, frustrated as hell because it seemed she’d got clean away after he’d chased her all that distance from the lighthouse-on foot, in the van once he’d pulled Hod out of it, on foot again, seeing her, losing her in the trees and fog, seeing her, losing her… Christ! Scared, too, by then, because what if she got to a phone or woke somebody up and told them?

  But now… now he’d seen her again, knew right where she was: inside that garage, went right inside that garage. Hadn’t roused nobody at the house; it was still dark. Nobody home. Nobody around anywhere. Went into the garage to hide, maybe. Or look for a weapon or the Lang woman’s car. Well, she wouldn’t find nothing in there, least of all a place to hide. All she’d find, pretty soon, was him.

  He left the woods, moving slow, watching the side door, thinking about what he was going to do when he got in there with her, feeling the excitement build again down low in his belly. Oh, he wanted her bad, real bad. And the queer thing was, he knew the Springfield did too, like it was telling him so, like it was something alive and hungry in his hands.

  Jan

  He was ready-the air hose connected to both the diaphone and the compressor, the cotton in one hand, the pillows and blankets in the other. All that remained was to swaddle and insulate himself against the noise and vibration, lie on the floor, reach out a hand to open the air valve on the compressor. He was ready.

  And he couldn’t do it. No matter what happened here, he couldn’t do it. Not because of what it might do to him; because of what it would surely do to the light, the Fresnel lens.

  A hell of a thing to be worrying about at a time like this, and yet the thought of destroying all those carefully cut and polished prisms and bull’s-eyes had been like a canker all along, paining him, filling him with revulsion. It would be like willfully destroying a rare painting or sculpture, something old and beautiful and virtually irreplaceable. In a fundamental way it would reduce him to the level of those animals down below. Fighting them, hurting them, wasn’t worth the price of the Fresnel, and it wasn’t worth the price of his own humanity. There had to be another way.

  He threw the bedding down, turned to the window glass again. The pain behind his eyes was worsening, not to the critical point yet but not far from it either. He pressed his forehead against the chilled glass, squinting, blinking, trying to bring the grounds and the terrain beyond into focus.

  Somebody was running on the road.

  Not toward the lighthouse; away from it. A man. One of the invaders? He couldn’t tell, couldn’t see clearly enough. Running… why?

  His vision cleared completely for a few seconds, the way it did at intervals, and he realized the van was gone. Reese’s van, the one they’d all come in. It had been parked out there beyond the fence; he’d seen it earlier. Now it was gone.

  And the man was running… running away, was that it? One drunken vigilante giving up his act of terrorism?

  Or was he running after something, someone?

  Alix, he thought.

  He peered harder through the glass. Couldn’t see anything in the distance; the clarity was gone as suddenly as it had come and the distance was just a blur. The running man had become part of the blur: gone.

  Jan struggled to think logically. Alix had been gone at least half an hour, more like an hour; the running man couldn’t be chasing her, not after all this time. But the van… how long had it been gone? He didn’t know, couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen it.

  Maybe they’re not up to something, he thought. Maybe the running man is running because he’s running away.

  The words chased themselves around inside his mind like a nonsense jingle. But they weren’t nonsense; they were a statement of fact. He wouldn’t let himself believe otherwise. The running man is running because he’s running away.

  And somebody else drove the van away.

  And there had only been four of them to begin with.

  How many are still here?

  He pushed away from the glass, went to the edge of the stairs. Bonner was still shouting obscenities below the trap, still pounding on it-but not so loudly or so often now, as if he were winding down. Jan listened. Bonner’s was the only voice, had been for some time. Hadn’t it? Yes, he was sure it had.

  Just Bonner left, then? Or was somebody with him, somebody who didn’t make noise?

  If it’s Bonner alone, he thought, I can handle him. There’s a way

  … there’s a way. Have to do it quickly, though, before the pain and my vision get any worse. No time to waste-make a decision!

  It’s just Bonner, he thought, and started quietly down the stairs.

  Alix

  Her mouth was dry now. When she tried to swallow her throat spasmed and she felt as if she were choking.

  Why? she thought. What earthly reason would Cassie have had to kill Mandy Barnett? Or that other girl, that hitchhiker… she must have been responsible for that murder, too, because of the similarities of the crimes Never mind that now. Jan, think of Jan. You’ve got to get help for him.

  Hastily, she felt under the dash for a spare-key case, found none, and tried the glove compartment. Nothing there, either. She backed out of the car, started to shut the door.

  Something made a sound behind her-a shuffling movement.

  She whirled, saw someone move in through the shadows from the open side door. Her pulse accelerated; a cry rose still-bom in her throat.

  It’s Reese, he’s found me!

  But it wasn’t Adam Reese. The figure stepped to one side just as Alix threw the door shut to cut off the dome light, and before she could move away from the car, find a place to hide, a single naked ceiling bulb burst into light. And she was facing the tall wiry figure of Cassie Lang.

  The gallery owner stood flat-footed, wrapped in a dark bathrobe, a look of surprise and dismay on her face. In her right hand she was holding a long-barreled pistol. “Alix! What on earth…”

  Then, as Alix flattened back against the cold metal of the car, Cassie saw the beaded headband that was still clutched in her hand. The surprise vanished and a different look, one of grim despair, replaced it. She raised the pistol, pointed it at Alix, bringing her left hand up to steady the weapon.

  “So you know,” she said.

  Alix licked at papery lips, tried to speak. But no sound came out.

  Cassie stared at her along the barrel of the gun. Her stance was that of someone familiar with handguns, the “good shot” she’d once claimed to be-feet apart, weight evenly balanced, hands and arms and weapon steady. But her eyes… they were like windows in a house where neither lights nor fire burned. No one lived there anymore. No one to appeal to for mercy.

  But Alix wouldn’t beg for her life, not even if begging would save her. She’d fight, she’d use the only weapon she had now: words. She swallowed, made herself speak, willed her voice to be steady as she did so. “You don’t want to shoot me, Cassie. We’re friends… I thought we were friends.”

  No response, not even a headshake.

  “You must have had a good reason for… for what you did. I’m your friend, I can help you—”

  “No one can help me anymore.” Flat voice, emotionless. “I have no friends.”

&n
bsp; “Not among the villagers, no. I know how those people are, they despise me too just because I’m an outsider—”

  “Outsider. Yes, that’s right, that’s what I am.”

  Keep her talking, Alix thought, try to get her to put the gun down. Or distract her, try to take it away from her.

  Cassie said, “You’re afraid.”

  “Of course I’m afraid. You’re pointing that gun at me. You’re the second person who’s done that tonight.”

  “Second person?”

  “The other one is Adam Reese. He’s outside somewhere, not far from here, and he has a rifle. That’s why I came in here, Cassie. I was afraid he’d shoot me.”

  Cassie was frowning. “Do you expect me to believe that?”

  “It’s the truth! He and Mitch Notovny and Hod Barnett and Seth Bonner showed up at the lighthouse tonight, crazy drunk. Reese shot out the windows, blew up our car, broke in—”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Why would I lie? They tried to kill us, Cassie, I swear it to you. I got out, ran for help, but my husband’s still trapped out there. I’ve got to call the state police. Won’t you let me do that?”

  “No!”

  The gun wavered, and for a sickening instant Alix thought Cassie would fire. Then the woman’s head jerked slightly to one side, as if she might have heard something outside. She listened for only a moment, but when she again gave her full attention to Alix, the critical moment had passed.

  “I don’t believe you,” she repeated. “You think you can put me off my guard. Why would those men do things like that?”

  “They’ve been harassing us for a week, trying to force us to leave the lighthouse-all sorts of ugly tricks. Now… I think they believe it was my husband who killed Mandy.”