The Lighthouse: A Novel of Terror

by Bill Pronzini, Marcia Muller

  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.”

  “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.”

  Cassie was silent.

  Alix said softly, “Why, Cassie? Why did you do it?”

  “Why? She wanted too much, that’s why. The first time she came here and said she knew about Miranda, I gave her the five hundred dollars she asked for. She said she’d go away, but she didn’t. She came back for more.”

  Miranda, Alix thought. According to the newspaper stories, that had been the name of the murdered hitchhiker—Miranda Collins. Then she remembered another fact from the news stories: Miranda had been a student at the University of Oregon. The university located in Eugene, Cassie’s former home. The university where her former husband had taught.

  “Mandy knew you’d killed Miranda,” Alix said. “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s why she tried to blackmail you.”

  “She saw me put Miranda’s body out on the cape that night. God knows why she was out there. Wild little thing. She should have known better.”

  Yes, Alix thought, she should have known better. But Mandy had wanted so desperately to get out of Hilliard, and her attempt to extort money from Alix—the information she’d wanted to sell must have been nothing more than things she’d overheard Novotny and her father and the others plotting to do against the outsiders at the lighthouse. How foolish she’d been. And how dearly she’d paid for her foolishness.

  Alix said, “How much more did Mandy want?”

  “A thousand dollars. I don’t have that much money. I told her that when she came here the other night, while I was working late at the gallery. But she didn’t believe me, oh no. She pranced around in there, saying I must have money, look at all the expensive artwork for sale, and then she started batting the windchimes, tossing one of the big driftwood birds in the air, and she dropped the bird and it broke one of my nice chambered nautiluses. I couldn’t let her get away with that. I took her by the throat, I slapped her, I told her I’d kill her if she didn’t leave me alone. It scared her. She pulled away and went running out of the shop.”

  It must have been immediately afterward that the girl had called the lighthouse, probably from the phone booth at the rest area down the road. By then she’d realized she had mixed herself up in something she couldn’t handle. She’d been afraid to talk to her parents about what she’d done; she couldn’t call the police because it would have meant confessing to blackmail. So in her panic she’d called the one person she thought might help her, might perhaps give her the extra money she felt she needed to leave Hilliard—the woman who hadn’t turned her in for attempted extortion, Alix Ryerson.

  “You didn’t go after her right away?”

  “I didn’t go after her at all,” Cassie said. “No, I just wanted to get out for a while, go for a drive, try to think. But there she was, pedaling along the cape road; I could see the reflector lights on her bicycle. Even then I didn’t follow her, not for a while. Then I thought, why not go out there and talk to her, try to reason with her again about the extra thousand dollars. So I did. I didn’t intend to hurt her. It just happened, that’s all, like it did with Miranda.”

  The woman’s expression was distracted now, her gaze jumpy. But the pistol was still steady in her two hands. Alix desperately wondered how far she could push her. And yet she had to keep trying, had to find some way to either make her surrender the weapon or try to take it away from her. Jan’s life as well as her own might depend on it.

  “Did Miranda want money too?” she asked. “Is that why you killed her?”

  The question seemed to surprise Cassie. “Money? Oh, I suppose it would have come to that. What she claimed she wanted when she showed up
here was advice. Advice, help, succor, sympathy. She wanted to keep the baby, she wanted Ron to pay child support. She thought I might be able to give her some . . . what did she call it? Insight. Some insight into how to get him to acknowledge her—that was the word she used, acknowledge her and the baby.”

  Now Alix remembered two more seemingly unrelated facts. Miranda Collins had been four months pregnant when she died. And Cassie’s ex-husband, the anthropology professor who had a weakness for coeds, was named Ron.

  “She’d been sleeping with Ron for two years, the little bitch,” Cassie said. “All very secret, of course, because he was such a fine, upstanding faculty member. Very secret from everybody except me. The wife always knows.”

  “But why did she come to you?”

  “Who knows? I don’t understand these young people; their morals aren’t like ours. Maybe she thought that since I was another woman Ron had treated badly, I’d understand her plight and we’d form a united front against him. But how could I do that, after what she’d done to me? She was the one who put an end to my marriage; she was the one who’d conceived the child I could never have with Ron.”

  Cassie was breathing raggedly now. Alix clenched her fists, watching the woman’s jumpy, frightening eyes. Cassie wasn’t going to relinquish that pistol without a fight, that was clear now; and in her worked-up state, she might decide to pull the trigger at any moment. If Alix hoped to survive, she would have to make some kind of move against her and would have to do it very soon. Maybe she could drop down, throw herself at Cassie’s feet . . . but not from where she stood now, there was too much distance between them. Move away from the car, then, one slow step at a time. And keep Cassie talking while she did it. . . .

  “But you didn’t mean to kill Miranda,” she said, and eased one foot out in front of her. “Isn’t that what you said?”

  “Oh no. It just happened. I don’t even remember doing it. Funny, though—afterward, the next day, I knew Ron would realize I’d done it, even though he didn’t know she’d come down here to see me. Because of where her body was found, so close to here. I should have taken her a long way from Hilliard, a long, long way, but I was so scared that night, I just wanted to get rid of her. But Ron never said a thing to the police. I kept waiting for him to call and accuse me and he didn’t do that, either.”

  Alix had moved one full step away from the car and was about to take another. But when Cassie paused, she stood very still. She would need at least two more steps before she was close enough to hurl herself at the woman’s feet—

  “Well, now I know the reason,” Cassie said. “I should have known it right from the first. He couldn’t risk his affair being found out. Oh, I can picture him mouthing platitudes to his colleagues: ‘How could such a terrible thing happen to such a lovely girl?’ He didn’t care about Miranda any more than he cared about any of the others. Or me. But he should have cared about that baby. He—”

  Cassie broke off again, and again cocked her head to listen. Alix heard nothing except the wind in the trees outside . . . and then she did, she heard movement at the open door to Cassie’s right. And she saw someone come in, a shadow at first, then the shape of a man—

  Adam Reese, holding his rifle at an angle in front of him, his clothing damp and disheveled and his eyes bright, hot, flashing a fragmented blue-and-white as they sought Alix, found her, pinned her. His lips were pulled back in a feral grimace, spittle flecking them at the comers. Then he saw Cassie and stopped moving; a look of amazement crossed his features, as if he hadn’t heard them talking from outside, as if he’d expected to find Alix there alone. His body dipped into a crouch and he started to swing the rifle’s muzzle toward Cassie.

  But Cassie was quicker. She pivoted in an absurdly graceful motion, like a ballerina doll in a music box, and the pistol bucked in her hand. The sound of the shot was deafening in the confined space. Reese jerked, lost his unfired rifle, staggered with his hands coming up to his chest. Cassie fired a second bullet into him, and Alix heard but didn’t see him fall.

  She had already moved by then. She was down on her stomach slithering frantically under the car.

  Jan

  At the doorway to the lightroom he rolled the barrel of fire sand out of the way, then unhooked the air hose and pulled the diaphone over until it was balanced on the edge of the sill. He went back up to the lantern, unhooked the hose from the compressor, hefted the unit in his arms, and brought it back down to the lightroom, where he set it in the doorway next to the diaphone.

  The noise he made doing this seemed to have refueled Bonner’s rage: the obscenities and the pounding increased to another fever pitch. Bonner was still ranting when Jan descended to the trap, but stopped while he was still two risers above it. Jan came to a standstill, breathing through his mouth, listening, as Bonner must have been on the other side. He pushed up his glasses, rubbed at his stinging eyes, squeezed them shut against the gathering pain.

  God, he thought, let me get through the next few minutes. Just these next few minutes.

  “Ryerson! What you doing up there, you murdering son of a bitch!”

  And the pounding started again, savage, rhythmic—one driving thud against the bottom of the trap every two or three seconds.

  Quickly, Jan moved down the remaining steps, bent, and threw the locking bolt free of its ring, timing it so that the sound the bolt made releasing was lost in the hollow thud of wood on wood. He was turning, starting back up to the lightroom, when the next blow came. This time the door rose an inch or so in its frame, fell back with an audible bumping sound. There were no more blows—just a heavy silence that lasted five seconds, ten, while Bonner’s slow wits took in the fact that the trap was now unlocked. If he thought that his pounding had somehow broken the lock, if he didn’t suspect a trap above the trap...

  The door lifted again, slowly—one inch, two. Jan tensed. And then Bonner shoved up fast and hard, threw the trap back against its hinge stops. His head and shoulders appeared in the opening, eyes wide and wild and gleaming in the weak light.

  With his foot Jan shoved the diaphone off the sill, sent it plunging downward. It hit one of the steps with a ringing metallic clatter, bounced straight at Bonner, who threw his arms up in front of his face and started to cry out. The diaphone struck him on one forearm and the side of his head, knocked him backward out of sight. His cry changed into a strangled shriek that was lost, cut off, in the echoing, thumping noise of the heavy instrument and Bonner’s body tumbling down the stairs. When the sounds finally stopped, the silence that filled the tower seemed riddled with ghostly echoes just beyond the range of hearing.

  Jan was out on the stairs by then, peering downward, trying to bring the gloom at the bottom of the stairs into focus. He was ready to dislodge the compressor, send that hurtling downward, too, if necessary—but it wasn’t necessary. Bonner lay twisted below, unmoving, the diaphone canted across his legs so that only his upper body and his feet were visible.

  The sudden release of tension made Jan’s own legs feel weak, rubbery, as he descended. Bonner’s weapon, an ax handle, lay on one of the steps partway down; Jan bent to claim it before he went the rest of the way. When he got to where Bonner lay, the silence that had built around him was thick, no longer echoing, broken only by the faint thrumming duet of the wind and the fire outside.

  He bent to look more closely at Bonner, afraid that he’d killed the man; the last thing he needed right now was a death on his conscience, even the death of a tormentor. But Bonner wasn’t dead. There was a bloody gash on the side of his head where the diaphone had struck him, and one of his legs was bent at an angle that could only mean a bone had shattered; but his mouth was open and he was breathing in ragged, painful gasps.

  Jan swallowed against the taste of bile, stepped over him and out into the wreckage of the living room. Holding the ax handle cocked at his shoulder, he looked into Alix’s studio, then hurried through the kitchen, cloakroom, pantry. All of them were empty. He went thro
ugh the pantry door, around to the front yard. Stood for a moment to let the icy breath of the wind clear his head, dry the sweat on his body.

  The station wagon was a blackened hulk inside a dying ring of fire. Beyond it, the garage was sheeted by flame, burning hot and smoky from the paint and oil and chemicals stored inside. If the wind had been strong, gusty, there would have been a danger of the fire spreading to the lighthouse. But it had died down, changed direction—capricious wind. What sparks and embers blew free were being carried away to the southwest, out to sea.

  In the fireglow he could see that the grounds were as deserted as the house. Outside the fence, the road—as much of it as his narrowing vision could make out—also appeared to be empty. Nobody here now, just Bonner and him. Just him.

  But he couldn’t stay here, couldn’t just wait, because he couldn’t be absolutely sure Alix had made it safely to a telephone. He’d been right about Bonner—but what if he’d been wrong about the others?

  He began to run.

  It was a hard run at first, but he couldn’t keep up the pace. He was out of shape, and exhausted from the tension and exertion of the past two hours, and his head ached, throbbed with every step. He was worried that the fresh exertion would bring on the bulging, or worse, one of the blackout periods. Or that he would drop from sheer fatigue.

  He slowed to a trot, then to a fast walk, and when he had his wind back he began to trot again. The night was black around him, streaked with fog. Anything more than a few feet away appeared to him as smears and blobs. He kept swiping at his eyes, poking and pinching at them in a vain effort to widen his field of vision.

  He had gone a mile or so—he had no real sense of distance, nor of passing time—when he came around a bend in the road and one of the larger blobs ahead of him materialized into Reese’s van. He came to an abrupt halt when he recognized it, then warily moved closer. It was angled off on the side of the road, lightless, the driver’s door yawning open.