Nightshades nd-12

by Bill Pronzini

  I got back into the car and swung it in a loop past the mercantile’s facade, so I could take another look at Coleclaw’s house. Nobody was visible outside. And if any of them were watching me from inside, the curtained front windows hid them.

  When I got to the fork I took the branch that led in among the ghosts. I parked in front of the building that carried the UNION DRUG STORE sign, got my flashlight out of its clip under the dash, and locked the doors. For a moment I stood beside the car, listening. The heavy stillness remained unbroken except for small murmurings and whisperings in the high grasses nearby. The buildings themselves loomed up black and grave-silent-and again I fancied them as waiting things, shades embracing the cloak of night. Then I thought: The hell with that, don’t make it any worse than it is. And I went down a narrow alley between the drug store and the meat market, along the path at the rear.

  The back door of the hotel still stood hanging open on one hinge. I walked inside. The place had a murky, eerie feel to it; hardly any of the twilight penetrated through the chinks in the outer walls. I switched on the flashlight, followed its beam across the rough whipsawn floor.

  The light picked up the skeletal remains of the sheet-iron stove, the steel safe door, some of the other detritus, then finally found the collapsed pigeonhole shelf and the door in the wall behind it. I depressed the latch and swung the door open. Mica particles and iron pyrites and flecks of gold gleamed in the flash beam when I played it across the tier of shelves and their collection of arrowheads and random chunks of rock.

  I moved over there. Some of the rocks had designs in them, just as I remembered. Bryophyte fossils like the ones in the stone cup I’d found.

  With my left hand I picked up one that looked to be the same sort of mineral as the cup-travertine, Treacle had called it-and pocketed it. Then I swept the room with the light, looking for something that might confirm the rest of my suspicions. 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 when I fished it out I saw that it was all I needed. It had a name in it, and a crudely drawn map, and together they were hard evidence.

  Putting the notebook into another pocket, I turned and 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 — and something moved to my right, rearing up out of the gloom behind the desk.

  That was the only warning I had, and it wasn’t enough. He came rushing toward me with something upraised in his hand, something that registered on my mind as a length of board, and he swung it at me in a sweeping 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 head, and there was a flash of bright pain, and I went down and out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I awoke to pain. And to heat and a rushing, 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 pain through my head and neck; I was aware of a numbness, a swelling along the left side of my skull. I had my eyes open but I couldn’t see anything. It was dark wherever I was-dark and hot and filling up with thickening clouds of smoke.

  Panic cut away at me. I fought it instinctively, and some of the grogginess faded out of my mind and let me think and act. I shoved onto my feet, managed to stay upright even though my knees felt as though they had been vulcanized. 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, and 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 slid away; I almost fell. Bent at the waist, I groped with my hands. The cot, the straw-tick mattress: I was back 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 moved crabwise along it to my left, toward where I remembered the door to be. And found it, found the latch Locked.

  I threw my weight against the door, a little wildly, half out of control. 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 was on fire. So were parts of the side walls and balcony.

  The smoke roiled thickly in the enclosure; each breath I took seared my lungs. There was another smell out here, too-the faint sweetish odor of coal oil. He’d doused the walls with it, all of them probably, so the fire would spread fast and hot…

  Coupled with the fear and the pain and the smoke, the combined smells made me dizzy, nauseous. I pushed away from the desk and 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 across the floor. As old and decayed as it was, the place was a tinderbox: the blaze, fueled by the coal oil, was spreading with amazing speed. All I had were minutes before the entire building became an inferno.

  In the hellish, pulsing glow I could see the boarded-up door and windows in the front wall. I got my feet under me again and ran to the window on the left, because a gap was visible between two of the boards nailed across it. The heat was savage here; the burns on my face throbbed, gave off waves of pain-as if all my skin were bubbling up into one huge blister.

  I wedged the fingers of my right hand into the gap between the boards and wrenched one of the planks loose; flung it down and went after the other one. The flames were close now, so close that I could feel the hair on my head starting to singe. The smoke was dense, swirling, smothering. I couldn’t see anything at all now, could barely breathe; most of the oxygen had gone to feed the fire.

  Sparks and fiery embers-little pieces of the room-had begun to fall around me, burning on my hands and clothing. A madman’s bellow erupted from my throat: Let me out of here! 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, not quite, and I clawed at another board, at the same time twisting my head and shoulders into the open space, out of the strangling billows of smoke. Pain erupted in my bad left shoulder; the arm cramped up so that I had trouble moving it. More sparks and embers fell on my shirt and pants, stinging, as if someone was jabbing me with needles. I sucked in heaving lungsful of the night air. I could hear myself making noises, now, that were a mixture of gasps and broken little sobs.

  The oxygen gave me the strength I needed to yank one end of the board loose. When I wrenched it out of the way I tried to heave my body up onto the sill — but that wasn’t the way, wiggle and squirm, that was the way, up onto the sill, through the opening — and in the next second I was toppling over backwards, then jarring into the hard earth on my stiffened left shoulder and elbow-out of there.

  I rolled over twice in the grass, away from the burning building. Got up and staggered ten or twelve paces into the middle of the road before I fell down again. I lay on my back, with the night wind fanning across my face, cooling it. But I didn’t lie there for long. Now that I was clear of the fire I could smell my singed hair, the smouldering cloth of my pants and shirt. The smells made me gag, and I had just enough time to ro
ll over and pull back onto my knees before I vomited up the beer I’d drunk earlier in Redding.

  But I was all right then. My head cleared, the fear and the wildness were gone; in their place was a thin rage, hot and glowing like the fire, fed and kept that way by the pain in my shoulder and in my head where I’d been clubbed. I got to my feet again, shakily, and pawed at my smoke-stung eyes and squinted over at the hotel.

  It was coated with flame, and the fire had spread to the adjacent buildings, was beginning to race across their roofs to the ones beyond. Part of the cloudy sky was obscured by dense coagulations of smoke. Within minutes, that whole creekside row would be ablaze.

  I swung my head around, to look up along the road to where I had parked my car. It wasn’t there any more.

  The rage got thinner, hotter. He took it away somewhere, I thought. Took my keys after he slugged me and drove the car somewhere and hid it.

  I started to run painfully along the far edge of the road, back toward the fork. I kept glancing back over my shoulder, keeping track of the fire, so I did not see 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 like a bunch of frigging stumps, watching me run toward them, watching the ghosts of Ragged-Ass Gulch burn as though in some final rite of exorcism.

  None of them moved, not even when I stopped within a few feet of them and stood swaying a little, panting, rubbing my bad arm. All they did was stare at me. Paul Robideaux, 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 misshapen head and making odd little sounds as though trying to control a spasm of laughter. Their faces, and those of the others, had an unnatural look in the fireglow, like mummer’s masks stained red-orange and sooty black.

  “What’s the matter with you people?” I shouted at them. My voice was hoarse, my throat hot and raw from the smoke. “What’re you standing around here for? The whole camp’s burning, you can see that!”

  Jack Coleclaw was the first of them to speak. “Let it burn,” he said.

  “Ashes to ashes,” Penrose said, “dust to dust.”

  “For Christ’s sake, it’s liable to spread to some of your homes-”

  “No, that won’t happen,” Ella Bloom said. “There’s hardly any wind tonight.”

  Somebody else said, “Besides, there’re firebreaks.”

  “There’re 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,” Robideaux said. “We figured you’d left town.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “What were you doing in one of the ghosts? You start the fire, maybe?”

  “No. But somebody sure as hell did.”

  “Is that so?”

  “He was trying to kill me, the same way he killed Munroe Randall last week. He damned near broke my head with a board and then he locked me in a room in the old hotel and took my car and hid it somewhere. When he came back he sloshed coal oil around the place and set fire to it.”

  Coleclaw said in a low, tense voice, “Who are you talking about, mister?”

  “You know who I’m talking about. The only person who isn’t here right now-your son Gary.”

  The words seemed to have no impact on him. Or on any of the others. They all kept on staring at me through their mummer’s masks. None of them made a sound until Coleclaw said, “Gary didn’t do any of them things. You hear? He didn’t.”

  “He did them, all right.”

  “Why would he?”

  “You know the answer to that too. You all hate the men who own Northern Development, so he hates them just as hard. Harder. And he decided to do something about it.”

  “You can’t prove that-”

  “I can prove it, Mr. Coleclaw.”

  “How? How come you’re so sure he set them fires?”

  The reasons flickered across my mind. The stone cup with the bryophite fossils and the wax residue inside; the room in the hotel with the same kind of fossilized rocks on its shelves, a room that resembled nothing so much as a private clubhouse, a room where a child-or a child-man-could keep the treasures he’d collected. 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, meaning that Gary had rocks in his head not because he was retarded but because he was a collector of unusual stones. The way Coleclaw had been acting when I’d run into him outside the sheriff’s department yesterday; he hadn’t been worried for himself, he’d been worried that Gary had killed O’Daniel too and that the authorities would find out the truth. That was why he’d made a point of telling me he’d been with his son on the nights both men died: he wasn’t trying to alibi himself, he was trying to alibi Gary.

  But I did not say any of these things to Coleclaw and the others; it was testimony better left unspoken now. And I didn’t want them to know about the notebook in my pocket, the notebook with Gary Coleclaw’s name in it and the crudely drawn map of Munroe Randall’s street and property in Redding.

  I said, “Where’s Gary? Why isn’t he here with the rest of you?”

  No answer.

  “All right,” I said, “have it your way. But I’m going to the sheriff as soon as I find my car. You’ll have to turn Gary over to the law, if not to me.”

  “Not,” Coleclaw said.

  “You don’t have any choice-”

  “The law won’t take him away from us,” a thin, harried-looking woman said shrilly. Coleclaw’s wife. “I won’t let them. None of us will, you hear?”

  I looked at her, at the others-and I understood the rest of it then, the whole truth, the source of all the hostility I’d encountered. It was not any sudden insight, or even what Mrs. Coleclaw had just said; it was something that was there in her face, and in her husband’s, and in each of the other faces. Something I’d been too shaken 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, you were afraid he’d killed O’Daniel too-”

  “No!” Mrs. Coleclaw said. “He never killed O’Daniel, he never did that!”

  “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 Randall, he didn’t know Randall was home-”

  “Hush up, Clara,” her husband told her sharply.

  Robideaux said, “No matter what happened to Randall, he had it coming. That’s the way we look at it. The bastard had it coming.”

  He’d known all along, I realized, about Helen O’Daniel’s affair with Randall. Sure he was glad Randall had died. Sure he was willing to be a party to the cover-up. Sure.

  I said, “So Randall had it coming. But how about me?” The rage was thick in my throat, like a buildup of phlegm; 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 Gary kill me the way he killed Randall.”

  “That’s not true,” Coleclaw said. “We didn’t know you were still here. We thought you’d left the valley.”

  “Even if you didn’t know, you could’ve guessed. Come looking to make sure.”

  Silence.

  “Why?” I asked them. “I can understand the Coleclaws doing it, and Robideaux, but why the rest of you?”

  “Outsiders 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 agreed. “Family. No one here lies to me. No one here thinks I’m repulsive.”

&n
bsp; More silence. And as I studied them now, the skin along my back began to crawl. Robideaux had lifted his shovel, so that he was holding it in both hands across his chest; 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 in the firelight, and what I felt coming off them was something primitive and deadly, a vague gathering aura of violence-the kind of aura a lynch mob generates.

  Some of the fear I’d felt during the fire came back, diluting my anger. I had a sudden premonition 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 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, good people with misplaced loyalties caught up in a foolish crusade-not criminals, not a mob. Telling myself they wouldn’t 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 the headlights appeared on the road to the south, coming down out of the pass between the cliffs.

  The tension had been like a silent scream; I felt it end, felt it let go of me, and I said, “Somebody’s coming!” in a clogged-up voice and threw my right arm out and pointed. Coleclaw and two or three of the others swiveled their heads. And the tension in them seemed to break too; somebody said, “God!” 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.