I picked up one that looked to be the same sort of mineral-travertine, Treacle had called it-as the stone cup, and put it into my pocket. Then I swept the rest of the room with the light, looking for something that might confirm my suspicion as to who it was who spent time here. The Coleman lantern, the stacks of National Geographic, the cot with its straw-tick mattress told me nothing. But under the cot I found a small spiral notebook, and the notebook had a name on it, and that was all I needed.
I put the notebook into the same pocket with the fossil rock. As I started out the light, probing ahead, showed me nothing but the edge of the desk and the pigeonhole shelf and dim shadow shapes beyond. I took one step through the doorway
Something moved to my right, behind the desk.
That was the only warning I had, and it wasn't enough. He came rushing toward me out of the gloom with something upraised in his hand, something that registered on my mind as a length of board. He swung it at me in a flat horizontal arc like a baseball bat. I dropped the flashlight, threw my arm up too late.
The board whacked across the left side of my face and head, and there was a flash of bright pain, and I went down and out.
7
I awoke to pain. And to heat and a whooshing, crackling noise that seemed to come from somewhere close by. And to the acrid smell of smoke.
Fire!
The word surged through my mind even before I was fully conscious. It drove me up onto one knee, a movement that sent shooting pain through my head and neck; I was aware that the whole left side of my face was half numb and felt swollen. I had my eyes open, but I couldn't see anything. It was dark wherever I was-dark and hot and filling up with thin clouds of smoke.
Panic cut away at me; I fought it instinctively, shoved onto my feet, and managed to stay upright even though my knees felt as though they were made of rubber. I still could not see anything except vague outlines in the blackness. But I could hear the thrumming beat of the fire, a frightening sound that seemed to be growing louder, coming closer.
The smoke started me coughing. That led to several seconds of dry-retching before I could get my breathing under control. I took a couple of sliding steps with my hands out in front of me like a blind man; my knee hit something, there was a faint scraping sound as the something yielded, and I almost fell. I bent at the waist, groping with my hands. The cot, the straw-tick mattress: I was still in the room behind the hotel desk.
Coughing again, fighting the panic, I slid my feet around the cot and kept moving until my fingers brushed against wood, touched rock. The shelving, the collection of junk. I went sideways along it to my left, toward where I remembered the door to be. Found it, found the latch.
Locked.
I threw my weight against the door, a little wildly. The wood was old and dry; it gave some, groaning in its frame. I got a grip on myself again and lunged at the door a second time, a third. The wood began to splinter in the middle and around the jamb. The fourth time I slammed into it, the latch gave and so did one of the hinges; the door flew outward and I stumbled through, caught myself against the edge of the hotel desk.
The whole rear wall and part of the side walls and balcony were sheeted with flame.
The smoke was so thick in there that each breath I took seared my lungs, made me dizzy and nauseous. I pushed away from the desk, staggered toward the front entrance; tripped over something and fell skidding on hands and knees, scraping skin off my palms. Flames licked along the front wall, raced over the floor. As old and decayed as it was, the place was a tinderbox. It would be only a matter of minutes before the entire building went up.
In the hellish, pulsing glow I could see the boarded-up door and windows in the front wall. I scrambled to my feet again and ran to the window on the left; a gap was visible between two of the boards nailed across it. I got my fingers in the gap and wrenched one of the boards loose, flung it down, and went after another one. The fire was so close that I could feel the hair on my head starting to singe.
Sparks were falling around me; two of them landed on my shirt, on the back and on one shoulder, but I was only half-conscious of the burns as I tore the second board loose, hammered at a third with my fist where it was already splintered in the middle.
When I broke the two pieces outward, the opening was almost wide enough for me to get through. But not quite-Christ, not quite. I clawed frantically at another board, twisting my head and shoulders through the window and out of the choking billows of smoke. More sparks fell on the legs of my trousers, brought stinging pain in four or five places as if someone was jabbing me with needles. I sucked in heaving lungsful of the night air; I could hear myself making noises that were half gasps and half broken sobs.
The oxygen gave me the strength I needed to yank one end of the board loose, and when I wrenched it out of the way I was able to wiggle my hips up onto the sill and through the opening. In the next second I was toppling over backwards, then jarring into hard earth on my shoulders and upper back-outside, free.
I rolled over twice in the grass, away from the burning building; got up somehow and staggered ten or twelve steps into the middle of the road before I fell down again. Now that I was clear of the fire, I could smell my singed hair, the smoldering cloth of my pants and shirt. The smells made me gag, vomit up the beer I'd drunk earlier in Weaverville.
But I was all right then. My head had cleared, the fear and the wildness were gone; inside me was a thin, sharp rage. I got to my feet again, shakily. Pawed at my smoke-stung eyes and squinted over at the hotel.
My car was gone.
The rage got thinner and sharper. He took it away somewhere, I thought. Took my keys after he slugged me and drove it away and hid it somewhere.
But there was no time now to think about either him or the car. The hotel was coated with flame, like a massive torch, and the fire had spread to the adjacent buildings, was beginning to race across their roofs to the ones beyond. Part of the starlit sky was obscured by dense coagulations of smoke. Soon enough, that whole creekside row would be ablaze.
I ran along the far edge of the road, back toward the fork. Most of my attention was on the fire behind me, so I did not become aware of the cluster of people until I was abreast of the last of the south-side buildings, where the road jogged in that direction.
They were standing in the meadow up there-more than a dozen of them, the whole damned town. Just standing there, watching me run toward them, watching the ghosts of Ragged-Ass Gulch burn as though in some final rite of exorcism.
No one moved even when I stopped within a few feet of them and stood swaying a little, panting. All they did was stare at me. Paul Thatcher, holding a shovel in one hand. Jack Coleclaw, with his arms folded across his fat paunch. Ella Bloom, her mouth twisted into a witch's grimace. Hugh Penrose, shaking his ugly head and making odd little sounds as though he was trying to control a spasm of laughter. Their faces, and those of the others, had an unnatural look in the fireglow, like mummers' masks stained red-orange and sooty black.
"What's the matter with you people?" I yelled at them.
"What're you standing around here for? You can see the whole town's going to go up!"
Jack Coleclaw was the first of them to speak. "Let it burn," he said.
"Ashes to ashes," Penrose said.
"For Christ's sake, it's liable to spread to some of your homes-"
"That won't happen," Ella Bloom said. "There's no wind tonight."
Somebody else said, "Besides, we dug firebreaks."
"You dug firebreaks-that's terrific. Goddamn it, look at me! Can't you see I was in one of those burning buildings? Didn't any of you think of that possibility?"
"We didn't see your car anywhere," Thatcher said. "We thought you'd left town."
"Yeah, sure."
"What were you doing in one of the ghosts? You start the fire, maybe?"
"No, I didn't start it. But somebody sure as hell did."
"Is that so?"
"He was trying to kill
me, the same way he killed Allan Randall in Redding. He damned near broke my head with a board and then he locked me in a room he used in the hotel and took my car and hid it somewhere. When he came back he torched the building."
Coleclaw said in a flat, hard voice, "Who you talking about, mister?"
"The only person who isn't here right now, Mr. Coleclaw, that's who I'm talking about. Your son Gary."
The words seemed to have no impact on him. Or on any of the others. They all kept right on staring at me through their mummers' masks. And none of them made a sound until Coleclaw said, "Gary didn't do any of those things. He didn't."
"He did them, all right."
"Why? Why would he?"
"You know the answer to that. You all hate the Munroe Corporation, so he hates them too. And he decided to do something about it."
"Gary's slow, mister. You understand that?"
"I understand it. But being retarded doesn't excuse him setting fires and committing murder and attempted murder. Where is he? Why isn't he here with the rest of you?"
He didn't answer me.
"All right," I said, "have it your way. But I'm going to the county sheriff as soon as I find my car. You'll have to turn Gary over to him."
"No," Coleclaw said.
"You don't have a choice-"
"The law won't take him away from me," a thin, harried-looking woman said shrilly. Coleclaw's wife. "I won't let them. None of us will, you hear?"
And that was when I understood the rest of it, the whole truth-the source of the bad vibes I had gotten earlier, the source of all the hostility. It was not any sudden insight, or even what Mrs. Coleclaw had just said; it was something in her face, and in her husband's, and in each of the other faces. Something I had been too distraught to see until now.
"You knew all along," I said to the pack of them. "All of you. You knew Gary set those fires; you knew he killed Randall. A cover-up, a conspiracy of silence-that's why none of you would talk to me."
"It was an accident," Mrs. Coleclaw said. "Gary didn't mean to hurt anybody-"
"Hush up, Clara," her husband told her in a sharp voice. Thatcher said, "No matter what happened to Randall, he had it coming. That's the way we look at it. The bastard had it coming."
"How about me?" I said. The rage was thick in my throat; I had to struggle to keep from shouting the words. "Did I have it coming too? You don't know me, you don't know anything about me. But you were going to let him kill me the way he killed Randall."
"That's not true," Coleclaw said. "We didn't know you were still here. I told you, we thought you'd left town."
"Even if you didn't know, you could have guessed it. You could have come looking to make sure."
Silence.
"Why?" I asked them. "I can understand the Coleclaws doing it, but why the rest of you?"
"Outsiders like you don't care about us," Ella Bloom said. "But we care about each other; we watch out for our own."
"More than neighbors, more than friends," Penrose said. "Family. No one here lies to me. No one here thinks I'm ugly."
I looked at him, at the rest of them, and the skin along my back began to crawl. Thatcher had lifted his shovel, so that he was holding it in both hands in front of him; one of the men I didn't know had done the same thing. Coleclaw's big hands were knotted into fists. All of their faces were different now in the firelight, and what I felt coming off them was something primitive and deadly, a faint gathering aura of violence.
The same aura a lynch mob generates.
Some of the fear I had known at the hotel came back, diluting my anger. I felt suddenly that if I moved, if I tried to pass through them or around them, they would attack me in the same witless, savage fashion a lynch mob attacks its victims. With shovels, with fists-out of control. If that happened, I could not fight all of them; and by the time they came to their senses and realized what they'd done, I would be a dead man.
I had never run away from anything or anyone in my life, but I had an impulse now to turn and flee. I controlled it, telling myself to stay calm, use reason. Telling myself I was wrong about them, they were just average citizens with misplaced loyalties caught up in a foolish crusade-not criminals, not a mob; that they would not do anything to me as long as I did nothing to provoke them.
Time seemed to grind to a halt. Behind me, I could hear the heavy crackling rhythm of the fire. There was sweat on my body, cold and clammy. But I kept my expression blank, so they wouldn't see my fear, and I groped for words to say to them that would let me get out of this.
I was still groping when headlights appeared on the road to the south, coming down out of the pass between the cliffs.
The tension in me seemed to let go, like a rubber band snapping. I said, "Somebody's coming!" and threw my arm up and pointed. Coleclaw and two or three of the others swiveled their heads. And then the tension in them seemed to break, too; somebody said, "God!" and they all began to move at once. Shuffling their feet, turning their bodies-the mob starting to come apart like something fragile and clotted splitting into fragments.
The headlights probed straight down the road at a good clip. When they neared the bunch of us in the meadow Thatcher threw down his shovel and walked away, jerkily, through the grass. The others went after him, in ragged little groups of two and three. I was the only one standing still when the car slid to a stop twenty feet away on the road.
It was Kerry. And Raymond Treacle. They piled out and came hurrying my way. Her step faltered when she got a good look at me. "My God, are you all right?"
"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, I'm all right."
"What happened here? That fire…you look as though you…"
"I'm okay. It's over now."
"You didn't come back," she said. "I got worried, I asked Ray to drive me here to find out…For heaven's sake, what happened?"
I looked back at the raging fire; then I looked up at the line of people trudging slowly toward Coleclaw's mercantile. "Cooperville just died," I said.
8
W ithin five minutes, Treacle was driving us back to Weaverville. I did not want to stay there among the ghosts old and new even long enough to hunt for my car.
The burns on my back and legs, the lacerations on my hands, were not serious enough to require medical attention, so we went straight to the sheriff's department. I gave the cop in charge a full account of what had happened on my two visits to Cooperville, of how Gary Coleclaw had tried to kill me and how the whole town had been covering up his guilt in the death of Allan Randall. I also told him what it was that had put me onto Gary: The stone cup with the wax residue inside. The room in the hotel with the pieces of rock on the shelves. Penrose's comments to Kerry and me that Gary was a "poor young fool, poor lost lad" and that he had "rocks in his head." A pun, Penrose had said after the latter remark. He'd meant that Gary had rocks in his head not because he was retarded but because he was a collector of unusual stones-arrowheads and fossils and the like. And Treacle telling me the stone cup contained bryophytes, reminding me of those rocks in the hotel room, making me think that the room might have been outfitted by someone with the mind of a child who used it as a kind of clubhouse where he kept the treasures he'd collected.
Gary Coleclaw was not taken into custody that night. He was gone from what was left of Cooperville when the police got there; so were his father and mother. The cops put out a pick-up order on the family, but it wasn't until three days later that a police officer spotted the three of them at a diner in eastern Oregon, and arrested them without incident.
Kerry and I were long gone from Trinity County by then, comfortably holed up in a private cabin near Shasta Lake. The sheriff's men had found my car hidden in the woods near Paul Thatcher's home and returned it to me, and we were allowed to leave as soon as I signed a formal statement. Raymond Treacle's promise of a Munroe Corporation check in the amount of five thousand dollars had gone with us.
I hadn't told the police-or Kerry or anyone else-of my fear of mob violenc
e. I could not be certain I'd been right about what I felt that night; it could have been my imagination, a product of the darkness and the fire and the brush I'd had with death. And no matter what the residents of Cooperville might have done to me in the heat of their passion, I felt no more anger toward them. When I thought of the Coleclaws and Ella Bloom and Hugh Penrose, I felt only sadness and pity.
Still. Still, I couldn't help wondering: Would they have attacked me, maybe even killed me, if Kerry and Treacle hadn't shown up when they did? It was a question that would trouble my sleep for a long time, because there was no way now that I would ever know the answer.
Cat's-Paw
There are two places that are ordinary enough during the daylight hours but that become downright eerie after dark, particularly if you go wandering around in them by yourself. One is a graveyard; the other is a public zoo. And that goes double for San Francisco's Fleishhacker Zoological Gardens on a blustery winter night when the fog comes swirling in and makes everything look like capering phantoms or two-dimensional cutouts.
Fleishhacker Zoo was where I was on this foggy winter night-alone, for the most part-and I wished I was somewhere else instead. Anywhere else, as long as it had a heater or a log fire and offered something hot to drink.
I was on my third tour of the grounds, headed past the sea lion tank to make another check of the aviary, when I paused to squint at the luminous dial of my watch. Eleven forty-five. Less than three hours down and better than six left to go. I was already half frozen, even though I was wearing long johns, two sweaters, two pairs of socks, heavy gloves, a woolen cap, and a long fur-lined overcoat. The ocean was only a thousand yards away, and the icy wind that blew in off of it sliced through you to the marrow. If I got through this job without contracting either frostbite or pneumonia, I would consider myself lucky.
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