The Lighthouse: A Novel of Terror

by Bill Pronzini, Marcia Muller

  Headlights, blinding, gone.

  Town of Myrtle Point. Splashes of neon against the dark. Gone.

  The Animals. “House of the Rising Sun.”

  Twisting, turning.

  Hurting.

  How far now? Almost to Coquille. Forty miles.

  Hang on.

  The Beatles. “Paperback Writer.”

  Coquille. 42-S. Twisting and turning, turning and twisting. Dark, no lights anywhere. Dark.

  Eyes burning so bad they were leaking water.

  “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” The Teddy Bears. My God. The Teddy Bears, what kind of name was that . . . ?

  Headlights, blinding, gone.

  Shouldn’t keep driving, headache getting worse, vision starting to blur a little. The dog, Novotny’s dog—don’t want anything like that to happen again. Can’t risk another blackout, another accident.

  Was it an accident?

  Almost to Bandon. Not much farther. Twenty miles—

  “Twenty-Six Miles Across the Sea.”

  So dark out there . . .

  Somebody up ahead, walking along the road.

  Out here at this time of night? Another hitchhiker? Mindless. Don’t they realize how dangerous it is?

  This fucking pain-

  Don’t they realize—

  Bulging.

  Oh God, better pull over—

  Bulging.

  Bulging.

  Dark.

  Alix

  It had been almost three A.M. when Jan finally got home.

  She had been frantic by then, still up and debating whether or not to call the state troopers, and when she’d heard the car she had rushed outside to meet him. Was he all right? Where had he been? He hadn’t had another accident, had he?

  He had seemed exhausted, a little disoriented; but he’d answered her questions, at least, given her some measure of relief. No, he hadn’t had an accident, it was nothing like that. One of his headaches had come on suddenly outside Bandon. He’d pulled off on the side of the road, taken a codeine tablet for the pain, and the next thing he knew it had been two A.M. The codeine must have knocked him out. The headache had been gone when he’d awakened and he’d driven the rest of the way without incident.

  Well, what about the headaches? she’d asked him. What had the specialist said?

  Nothing more than what Dave Sanderson had already told him, Jan said. He was to avoid stress, take codeine when necessary. According to the doctor, it wasn’t a serious problem.

  Then he had gone straight up to bed, and by the time she’d put out the lights and followed him, he’d fallen asleep. But there had been very little sleep for her—just a couple of hours of fitful dozing near dawn. Most of the time she’d lain awake, staring into the darkness.

  And now that she was up and dressed and in desperate need of a cup of coffee, she’d discovered that they were out of coffee. She stood in the kitchen peering into the big ceramic jar where they kept the beans, wondering how she could have forgotten to replenish them. Was there any instant in the pantry? Yes, but she didn’t want instant, she wanted real coffee. She had hardly slept all night, she felt like hell, she deserved real coffee. At the very least.

  What time did the Hilliard General Store open? Eight, wasn’t it? Earlier than most of its type, but then Hilliard was a fishing village and fishermen and their families got up early.

  She rummaged in the drawer under the drainboard and found the pad she kept there for grocery lists. No sense going all the way into the village just for coffee. They were out or almost out of other things as well. Orange juice, Ry-Krisp, beer. Was there any margarine left? No. Low on mustard, tuna, cheese . . . anything else? Eggs, better get some eggs. Now what about dinner tonight? Chicken? Fish? Hamburgers?

  She realized her hand was shaking and set the pencil down. The house was silent, almost hushed—at least to her ears. Jan would sleep for hours; she knew his sleeping habits well enough to predict that. Best to keep busy with mundane chores like shopping until she could talk to him again about last night.

  She gripped the pencil again. Make it hamburger for tonight. And fresh vegetables. They could use some milk, too, and Diet Pepsi for her. . . .

  Five minutes later she scribbled a note to Jan, on the chance he might awaken before she got back, and left it on the kitchen table. Then she bundled herself into scarf, cap, and pea jacket, and left the lighthouse. The fine weather of the past few days was gone, replaced by a heavy, lowering overcast that promised rain before midday. As she walked to the car she glanced up at the menacing gray-black clouds—and shivered. Better hurry. It looked like a full-fledged storm was brewing, and she didn’t want to get caught in it when it broke.

  The station wagon was angled in near the garage, even though Jan had insisted after the shooting incident that it always be put inside. When she reached it she hesitated, then went around to the front and examined the bumper, grill, headlights, fenders. He had had the previous damage repaired in Portland; there was no new damage, not even a scratch. That made her feel better. It wasn’t that she doubted his word; it was just that he had been so disoriented when he came home, so strange....

  She got into the Ford, started the engine, sat there waiting for it to warm up. Had Jan always acted strangely when he was suffering one of his headaches? When he was mired in one of his depressions? A few days ago her answer would have been an unqualified no, but now she wasn’t so sure. When you lived in a given situation you tended to normalize it no matter how odd it might seem to an outsider. And the illusion of normalcy was easy to sustain when you were in familiar surroundings, going about your day-to-day business. But if you removed yourself from those surroundings, set yourself down somewhere totally different, you saw things from another perspective. What she was seeing now was more than a little unsettling.

  The engine was warm. She reminded herself of her earlier resolve: stick to mundane chores—and mundane thoughts—for the time being. She let out a sigh, put the car in gear, turned it around, and drove down through the open gate onto the cape road.

  The ominous clouds followed her, putting intermittent drops of rain on the windshield—more a mist, really, that didn’t require the use of the wipers yet. To the south the barren rocks and beaches looked cold, forbidding; the rough sea made her think of the shipwrecks off Cape Despair, and of all the lives that had been lost off the perilous coast. She entered a dark copse of fir trees, with its thick ferny groundcover, and thought of the evil forests of Grimm’s fairy tales. Not a good morning for her to be out. Not a good morning for her to be alone at all.

  In the open fields beyond, the sheep seemed to huddle together in little flocks; even their thick coats were not enough protection against the icy wind. If it hadn’t been for the sheep, she could have imagined herself alone in a wilderness hundreds of miles from the nearest human being. It was that desolate out, that empty.

  But it was only an illusion, and it was shattered moments later when she came around a bend in the road past another stand of trees. A hundred yards ahead, near a gully flanked by clumps of prickly broom that cut a jagged line through the south-side sheep graze, several vehicles were drawn up along the road and a small knot of men stood near a flattened section of fence. Alix braked automatically, frowning in surprise and bewilderment. The vehicles were two state police cars, a Curry County sheriffs cruiser, a farm truck, and an ambulance. Most of the men wore uniforms of one kind or another.

  They all looked her way as she approached, and one of them—dressed in the state troopers’ smoke-gray outfit and broad-brimmed hat—detached himself from the rest and moved onto the road, holding up his gloved hand for her to stop. She obeyed. Rolled down the window as he came ahead to her side of the car. The wind that blew in was cold and misty and smelled of ozone.

  The trooper bent down to look at her and glance around the car. She asked him, “What’s the trouble, officer?”

  “May I see your identification, please?”

  She reached
for her purse, handed him her driver’s license. He studied it solemnly.

  “California,” he said. “Mind telling me what you’re doing out here?”

  “I live at the lighthouse.”

  “That so? Your license gives your address as Palo Alto.”

  “Yes. But we’re staying here for a year.”

  “We?”

  “My husband and I. He’s writing a book on lighthouses. Officer, what—?”

  “Did you travel this road last night?”

  “No. ”

  “Did your husband?”

  “I . . . well, yes, he did, he was up in Portland—”

  “Where is he now?”

  “At the lighthouse. He’s sleeping, he didn’t get home until late.”

  “How late?”

  “Around three o’clock.”

  “I see. And you were at the lighthouse alone until then?”

  “Yes.”

  “No visitors?”

  “No.”

  “Did you happen to notice anything out of the ordinary?”

  “No, nothing.” She was alarmed now; fear, like a small wormlike thing, crawled through her. “Officer, can’t you please tell me what’s happened?”

  He didn’t answer for a moment. He had averted his face and was watching two white-uniformed men carry something black over the flattened section of fence and into the gully. Something that looked like a black plastic bag. When he returned his attention to her his face had set into grim lines.

  “Young girl—apparently a hitchhiker—was murdered last night. Strangled and her body dumped here.” Beneath the wide brim of his hat, his eyes were hard and angry. “Looks like the work of a psycho,” he said.

  Part Two

  Early October

  Where there is much light, the shadows are deepest.

  —GOETHE

  Alix

  When she was stressed and preoccupied, she often experienced two totally contradictory moods: she would become indifferent to her surroundings, all thought focused inward on whatever bothered her; but at the same time she would have vivid flashes of clarity, and whatever she was looking at would stand out in almost painful detail. It was the way she felt when she was beginning one of her design projects: at first groping her way, uncertain how to start, then in an instant it would all become clear—how to approach it, how to convey what she wanted others to see. But when it happened in connection with her work, she felt good, elated. Her current preoccupation called up no good feelings at all.

  It was during one of those flashes, three days after the murdered girl’s body had been found, that she caught herself studying the Hilliard General Store with intense concentration. Half an hour earlier she’d left the lighthouse for the first time since that tragic morning, driven out by a lack of food and even instant coffee. The intervening days had had an unreal quality. A state police detective named Sinclair had questioned her and Jan on two separate occasions about what they’d seen and done the night of the murder; he seemed to find something suspicious about Jan’s account of his return from Portland, about the headache that had forced him to pull off the road and spend the night in the car. As a result Jan had retreated further and further into a moody silence. At first she had tried to draw him out of it, but when that hadn’t succeeded she had felt the same sort of brooding silence descend on herself, and found it difficult to cope with more than the basic details of living.

  She hadn’t been able to work in such a state. When she tried, her sketches came out looking like mechanical drawings, lifeless and stiff. An attempt to break the impasse by doing sketches of the interior and exterior of the lighthouse and of the cape itself, with the idea of sending them to her family, had also failed; those, too, had the quality of being mere exercises in technique, and eventually she’d thrown them out. Finally she’d given up and read instead, but her concentration was poor: she found herself rereading the same pages over and over again.

  This morning she’d taken herself in hand, added to the grocery list she’d made three days ago, and driven into town. But now she felt a strange lethargy that prevented her from getting out of the station wagon. She sat behind the wheel, hands gripping its familiar surface, staring at the store. Scoured gray wood siding. Dirty plate glass window with the name inscribed in cracked black letters. Sagging shingle roof with rusted gutters. It all stood out in such minute detail.

  A gull was perched on one of the utility lines that ran in under the eaves. She watched until it spread its wings and lifted off into the bleak sky. Then she shook her head, reached for her purse, and pushed herself out onto the graveled roadside.

  The sense of clarity was still with her when she entered the store. Boxes of detergent, cans of vegetables, bottles of pop all stood out in red, blue, and yellow relief against the drab brown of the shelves. The cracks and worn spots on the black-and-white linoleum floor were sharply visible. Each potato in the big bushel basket near the door seemed to have a uniquely individuated shape. It was only when she moved her eyes to the staring faces of two elderly women at the counter, and then to the impassive countenance of Lillian Hilliard, that she noticed the silence.

  It hung heavy, tangible, like that following a sudden explosion. The three women’s immobility complemented it; they stood frozen, their shabby monochromatic clothing and faded hair reminding Alix of an old photograph. For a moment she froze too, her hand still on the door. Then she let go and it closed with a bang that shattered the stillness and prodded the women into jerky motion. Lillian Hilliard pushed a button on the cash register and counted change into the outstretched palm of the heaviest of the elderly women. The thinner one gathered up two grocery bags, glancing furtively at Alix as she did so. When her companion had placed a handful of dollar bills inside her purse, she picked up the third sack. Then, with another sly glance, their seamed mouths slightly agape, they bustled from the store.

  Alix watched with a curious detachment, one that also permitted her to see herself as she stood there: a slender young woman in a pea jacket, knit cap pulled down over her hair, body held straight and steady, face as blank and calm as that of the storekeeper. She nodded at Mrs. Hilliard, felt a grim pleasure when the older woman’s gaze shifted toward the window.

  She took a basket and started down one of the aisles. The entire time she was filling it she was aware of an undercurrent of activity in front. Lillian Hilliard moving on her stool, casting quick glances Alix’s way. The bell over the door jangling, customers coming in, greeting the storekeeper. Mrs. Hilliard answering in low tones and the voices of the customers lowering to match it. None of those who came in stayed more than a minute, as if they couldn’t bring themselves to do their shopping in the presence of the outsider.

  At last her basket was full. She took it to the counter, set it down, and watched Lillian Hilliard reach for it with motions that were brusque, uncourteous. Alix thought she detected a glint of malice in the woman’s previously bland eyes, felt a strong stirring of dislike. And out of some perverse desire to annoy the storekeeper, she said, “How are you today, Mrs. Hilliard?”

  Without looking up Lillian Hilliard said, “As well as I deserve to be,” and went on ringing up the groceries as if there had been no interruption.

  Alix watched the woman’s stubby fingers as they moved over the cash register keys, mentally calculating along with the machine. Coffee, $4.55—higher than at home. Chicken breasts, $1.79 a pound—about the same. Soup mix, 89¢. The lettuce didn’t look very good, not at 59¢ a head. And the cheese . . . hadn’t Jan said there was a good cheese factory in Bandon?

  Mrs. Hilliard finished and silently handed Alix the register receipt. While she put the groceries in bags, Alix studied the column of figures. The coffee was the third item, after the laundry soap and box of kitchen matches—she was sure she had remembered the order correctly—but the price was $5.55, a dollar higher than the one stamped on the can. The price of the soup mix had been entered as $1.89. At least half of the other items were
higher, too. All in all, the bill had been padded by more than twenty percent.

  “Something wrong?” Mrs. Hilliard. asked. She had bagged the last of the groceries and was watching Alix with a faint smile tugging at the edges of her mouth.

  Alix didn’t answer immediately; she was afraid the anger building in her might make her voice shake or crack. She drew a deep breath before she said, “Yes, something’s wrong.”

  “Well?”

  “These prices . . . they’re too high.”

  Lillian Hilliard shrugged. “This is a small store, a small town. Prices are bound to be high. We can’t give you the kind of deals your big-city California stores do.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it.” Alix held out the receipt. “I’m not stupid, Mrs. Hilliard—I know what your prices are and I remember the order you rang things up in. ”

  “You don’t like what I charge, you can shop someplace else.”

  “I don’t like being cheated—”

  “Lord knows I don’t want your kind in here anyway.”

  “I said I don’t like being cheated. Do you pad all your customers’ bills, or only those of outsiders like my husband and me?”

  “Now hold on a minute—”

  “No, you hold on a minute! I didn’t say anything before when you were unfriendly to us. Or later, when you made accusations against my husband without bothering to listen to his side of the story. But when it comes to outright dishonesty—”

  “What I do ain’t nothing compared to murder.”

  “Murder?” Alix stared at her. “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Lots of murderers down in California,” Lillian Hilliard said. “All kinds of crazies running around loose. Pick up the paper and read about it every day. One could be living right next door to you and you’d never know it until he gets caught. One could even be living in your house, maybe.”