by Stephen King
Mary Catherine's face appeared behind salt-bleared glass, then vanished quickly, as if she'd seen Taja.
When the Woman in Black started toward the lighthouse, she walked slowly and stiffly, head lowered against the blasts of wind. She held her right side as if she'd been thrown around and injured while bringing the boat in through rough seas. Watching her, Ransome felt neither pity not regret. She was just a blight on his soul, as he had tried to explain to Mary Catherine. The time had come to remove it.
He put the binoculars down on his desk and unlocked a drawer. He kept an S&W police model .38
there. Hadn't fired the revolver in years but the bore was clean When he checked it.
Afterward a couple of phone calls and everything would be taken care of for him. As it always was. No messy publicity.
He felt deep empathy for Mary Catherine. It was unfortunate she had to be a part of the cleansing. But he would take care of her afterward, as he had all of the Ransome women. He had never used his genius as an excuse for poor behavior. When her own god failed her—as He would tonight—John Ransome would provide.
He was putting on his coat when he heard, above the wind, a helicopter fly low over the house.
"Peter, it's Taja!" Silkie yelled.
He saw the Woman in Black, looking up at the helicopter a hundred yards away. She had opened the door at the base of the lighthouse.
The studio lights were blinking again. Then Echo rushed to the windows, frantically signaling the helicopter.
"Who is that?" Silkie said.
"It's Echo," Peter said happily. Then, as Taja entered the lighthouse his momentary elation vanished.
"Put us down!" he said to Lola.
"Not here! Maybe in the cove, on the dock!"
"How far's that?"
"Three miles south., I think."
"No! Can you drop me off here? Next to the lighthouse?"
"What are you doing?" Silkie asked anxiously.
"I can't maintain a hover more than three-four seconds," Lola advised him. "And not closer than ten feet off the ground!"
"Close enough!" Peter said. "Silkie! Go back with Lola. There's an APB out on Taja. Call the state cops, tell them she's on Kincairn!"
He opened the door on his side, looked at the rocks below in the undercarriage floodlight. The danger of it chilled him more than the wind in his face. If he landed wrong, a ten-foot jump onto frozen stony ground was going to feel like fifty.
In John Ransome's studio, Echo saw Taja get off the small elevator outside. They looked at each other for a few moments until Echo turned to the windows, seeing the helicopter fly away.
When she turned again Taja had unlocked the glass door and walked inside.
With the door open Echo's only thought was to get the hell out of there. But she couldn't get past Taja, who was quick and strong. An image of the PR boy in the subway repeated in Echo's mind as she was caught by one arm and pushed back. All the way to the easel that still held Ransome's beginning nude study of her. The portrait seemed to distract Taja as Echo struggled in her grip, swearing, swinging a wild left hand at the Woman in Black.
Taja's free hand came away from her side. The glove was sticky with blood. She groped behind her on the worktable. Her fingers closed on the handle of the knife that Ransome honed daily before trimming his brushes.
And Echo screamed.
Peter was halfway up the circular iron stairs, hobbling on a sprained ankle, when he heard the scream.
Knew what it meant. But he was too slow and far from Echo to do her any good.
Taja struck once at Echo, slashing her across the heel of the hand Echo flung up to protect her face.
Then, instead of a lethal follow-up, Taja took the time to drive the knife into the canvas on the easel, ripping it in a gesture of fury.
Taja's body was momentarily at an angle to Echo, and vulnerable. Echo braced herself against the worktable and drove a knee high to the rib cage where Silkie had shot her in the Cambridge apartment.
Taja went down with a hoarse scream, dropped the knife. She was groping for it when Peter barreled into the studio and lunged at her.
"No, goddamn it, no!"
He grabbed her knife hand as she tried to come up off the floor at him. His free hand went to Taja's face, street-fighter style. He missed her eyes, tried to get a grip as she jerked her head aside.
Part of her flesh seemed to come loose in his hand. But it was only latex.
The face beneath her second skin was pocked with random, circular scars, as if from a dozen cigarette burns.
They were both hurt but Peter couldn't hold her. He knew the knife was coming. Then Echo got an armlock on Taja's neck and pulled her back; Peter stepped in with a short hook to Taja's jaw that dropped her in-stantly. He wrenched the knife away and pulled her back onto her feet. She wasn't unconscious but her eyes were crossing, no fight left in her.
"Let her go, Peter," John Ransome said behind them. "It's finished."
Peter shot a look behind him. "Not yet!" He looked again into Taja's eyes. "Tell me one thing! Was it Ransome? Did he send you after those women? Tell me!"
"Peter, she can't talk!" Echo said.
Taja still wasn't focusing. There was a trickle of blood at one corner of her mouth.
"Find a way to talk to me! I want to know!"
"Peter," John Ransome said, "please let her go." His tone weary. "It's up to me to deal with Taja. She's my—"
"Was it Ransome!" Peter screamed in Taja's face, as she blinked, stared at him.
She nodded. Her eyes closed. A second later Ransome shot her. Blood and bits of bone from the hole in her forehead splattered Peter's face. She hung in his grip as Echo screamed. Still holding Taja up, Peter turned to Ransome, speechless with rage.
Ransome lowered his .38, taking a deep breath. "My responsibility. Sorry. Now will you put her down?"
Peter let Taja fall and went for his own gun, brought it up in both hands inches from Ransome's face.
"Drop your piece! So help me God I'll cap you right here!"
"Peter, no—!"
Ransome took another breath, his gun hand moving slowly toward the worktable, his finger off the trigger. "It's all right." He sounded eerily calm. I'm putting the gun down. Just don't let your emotions get the best of you. No accidents, Peter." The .38 was on the table. He lifted his hand slowly away from it, looked at Taja's body between them. Peter moved him at gunpoint back from the table.
'You're under arrest for murder! You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to be represented by an attorney. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. Do you understand what I've just said to you?"
Ransome nodded. "Peter, it was self-defense."
"Shut up, damn you! You don't get away with that!"
'You're out of your jurisdiction here. One more thing. I own this island."
"On your knees, hands behind your head."
"I think we need to talk when you're in a more rational—"
Peter took his finger off the trigger of the 9mm Colt and bounced it off the top of Ransome's head.
Ransome staggered and dropped to one knee. He slowly raised his hands.
Peter glanced at Echo, who had pulled the sleeve of her sweater down over the hand that Taja had slashed. She'd made a fist to try to stop the bleeding. She shook from fear.
"Oh Peter, oh God! What are you going to do?"
'You own the island?" Peter said to Ransome. "Who cares? This is where we get off."
FIFTEEN
The boat Taja had used getting back and forth was a twenty-eight-foot Rockport-built island cruiser. Peter had John Ransome in the wheelhouse attached to a safety line with his hands lashed together in front of him. Echo was trying to hold the muzzle of the Colt 9mm on him while Peter battled wind gusts up to fifty knots and heavy seas once they left the shelter of Kincairn cove. In addition to the safety lines they all wore life vests. They were bucked all over the place. Peter found he c
ould get only about eighteen knots from the Volvo diesel, and that it was nearly impossible to keep the wind on his stern unless he wanted to sail to Portugal. The wind chill was near zero. They were shipping a lot of water with a temperature of only a few degrees above freezing. The pounding went on without letup. Under reasonably good conditions it was thirty minutes to the mainland. Peter wasn't at all sure he had half an hour before hypothermia rendered him helpless.
John Ransome knew it. Watching Peter try to steer with one good hand, seeing Echo shaking with vomit on the front of her life vest, he said, "We won't make it. Breathe through your nose, Mary Catherine, or you'll freeze your lungs. You know I don't want you to die like this! Talk sense to Peter! Best of times it's like threading a needle through all the little islands. In a blow you can lose your boat on the rocks."
"Peter's s-sailed b-boats all his life!"
Ransome shook his head. "Not under these conditions."
A vicious gust heeled them to port; the bow was buried in a cornering wave. Water cascaded off the back of the overhead as the cruiser righted itself sluggishly.
"Peter!"
"We're okay!" he yelled, leaning on the helm.
Ransome smiled in sympathy with Echo's terror.
"We're not okay." He turned to Peter. "There is a way out of this dilemma, Peter! If you'd only give me a chance to make things right for all of us! But you must turn back now!"
"I told you, I don't have dilemmas! Echo, keep that gun on him!"
Ransome said, his eyes on the shivering girl, "I don't think Peter knows you as well as I've come to know you, Mary Catherine! You couldn't shoot me. No matter what you think I've done."
Echo, her eyes red from salt, raised the muzzle of the Colt unsteadily as she tried to keep from slipping off the bench opposite Ransome.
"Which one—are you tonight?" she said bitterly. "The g-god who creates, or the god who destroys?"
They were taking on water faster than the pump could empty the boat. The cruiser wallowed, nearly directionless.
"Remember the rogue wave, Mary Catherine? You saved me then. Am I worth saving now?"
"Don't listen to him!" Peter rubbed his eyes, trying to focus through the spume on the wheelhouse window. What he saw momentarily and some distance away were the running lights of a large yacht or even a cutter. Because of the cold he had only limited use of his left hand. His wrist had begun bleeding again during his fight with Taja at the lighthouse. With numbed fingers he was able to open a locker in front of him. "Echo, this guy has fucked up every life he ever touched!"
"There's no truth in that! It was Taja, no matter what she wanted you to believe. Her revenge on me.
And I was the only one who ever cared about her! Mary Catherine, last night I tried to stop her from going after Silkie MacKenzie! You know what happened. But the story of Taja and myself is not easy to explain.
You understand, though, don't you?"
'You should have seen what I've seen the last forty-eight hours, Echo! The faces of Ransome's women.
Slashed, burned, broken! Two that I know of are dead! Nan McLaren OD'd, Ransome—you hear about that?"
'Yes. Poor Nan—but I—"
"Last night Valerie Angelus went off the roof of her building! You set her up for that, you son of a bitch!"
Ransome lifted his head.
"But you could've stopped her. A year, two years ago, it wouldn't have been too late for Valerie! You didn't want her. Don't talk about caring, it makes me sick!"
Ransome lunged off his bench toward Echo and easily took the automatic from her half-frozen hands.
He turned toward Peter with it but lost his footing. Peter abandoned the helm, kicked the Colt into the stern of the boat, then pointed a Kilgore flare pistol, loaded with a twenty-thousand-candlepower parachute flare, at Ransome's head.
"I think the Coast Guard's out there to starboard," Peter said. "If you make a big enough bonfire they'll see it."
"The flare will only destroy my face," Ransome said calmly. "I suppose you would consider that to be justice." On his knees, Ransome held up his bound hands suppliantly. "We could have settled this among ourselves. Now it's too late." He looked at Echo. "Is it too late, Mary Catherine?"
She was sitting in a foot of water on the deck, exhausted, just trying to hold on as the, boat rolled violently. She looked at him, and looked away. "Oh God, John."
Ransome struggled to his feet. "Take the helm, Peter, or she'll roll over! And the two of you may still have a life together."
"Just shut up, Ransome!"
He smiled. 'You're both very young. Some day I hope you will learn that the greater part of wisdom is . .
. forgiveness."
He unclipped his safety line from the vest as the bow of the cruiser rose, letting the motion carry him backwards to the transom railing. Where he threw himself overboard, vanishing into the pitch-dark water.
Echo cried out, a wail of despair, then sobbed. Peter felt nothing other than a cold indifference to the fate the artist had chosen. He raised the flare pistol and fired it, then returned to the helm as the flare shed its light upon the water, bringing nearby islands into jagged relief. A few moments later they heard a siren through the low scream of wind; a searchlight probed the darkness and found them. Peter closed his eyes in the glare and leaned against the helm with Echo laid against his back, arms around him.
Below decks of the Coast Guard cutter as it returned to the station on Mount Desert Island with the cruiser in tow, a change in pitch in the cutter's engine and a shudder that ran through the vessel caused Echo to wake up in a cocoon of blankets. She jerked violently-
"Easy," Peter said. He was sitting beside her on the sick bay rack, holding her hand.
"Where are we?"
"Coming in, I guess. You okay?"
She licked her chapped lips. "I think so. Peter, are we in trouble?"
"No. I mean, there's gonna be a hell of an inquiry. We'll take what comes and say what is. Want coffee?"
"No. Just want to sleep."
"Echo, I have to know—"
"Can't talk now," she protested wanly
"Maybe we should. Get it out of the way, you know? Just say what is. Either way, I promise I can deal with it."
She blinked, looked at him with ghostly eyes, raised her other hand to gently touch his face.
"I posed for him—well, you saw the work Taja took a knife to."
"Yeah."
She took a deep breath. Peter was like stone.
"I didn't sleep with him, Peter."
After a few moments he shrugged. "Okay."
"But—no—I want to tell you all of it. Peter, I was getting ready to. Another couple of days, a week—it would've happened."
"Oh, Jesus."
"I just needed to be with him. But I didn't love him. It's something I—I don't think I'll ever understand about myself. I'm sorry."
Peter shook his head, perplexed, dismayed. She waited tensely for the anger. Instead he put his arms around her.
'You don't have to be sorry. I know what he was. And I know what I saw—in the eyes of those other women. I don't see it in your eyes." He kissed her. "He's gone. And that's all I care about."
A second kiss, and her glum face lost its anxiety, she began to lighten up.
"I do love you. Infinity."
"Infinity," he repeated solemnly. "Echo?"
"Yes?"
"I looked at a sublet before I left the city a few days ago. Fully furnished loft in Williamsburg. Probably still available. Fifteen hundred a month. We can move in by Christmas."
"Hey. Fifteen? We can swing that." She smiled slightly, teasing. "Live in sin for a little while, that what you mean?"
"Just live," he said.
On a Sunday in mid-April, four weeks before their wedding, Peter and Echo, enjoying each other's company and one of life's minor enchantments, which was to laze with no purpose, heard the elevator in their building start up.
"Company?" Peter said. He wa
s watching the Knicks on TV.
"Mom and Julia aren't coming until four," Echo said. She was doing tai chi exercises on a floor mat, barefoot, wearing only gym shorts. The weather in Brooklyn was unseasonably warm.
"Then it's nobody," Peter said. "But maybe you should pull on a top anyhow."
He walked across the painted floor of the loft they shared and watched the elevator rising toward them.
In the dimness of the shaft he couldn't make out anyone in the cage.
When it stopped he pulled up the gate and looked inside. A wrapped package leaned against one side of the elevator. About three feet by five. Brown paper, tape, twine.
"Hey, Echo?"
She wriggled into a halter top and came over to look. Her lips parted in astonishment.
"It's a painting. Omigod!"
"What?"
"Get it! Open it!"
Peter lugged the wrapped painting, which seemed to be framed, to the table in their kitchen. Echo followed with scissors and cut the twine.
"But it can't be! There's no way—! No, be careful, let me do this!"
She removed the thick paper and laid the painting flat on the table.
"Oh no," Peter groaned. "I don't believe this. He's back."
The painting was John Ransome's self-portrait that had been hanging in the artist's library on Kincairn when Echo had last seen it.
Echo turned it over. On the back Ransome had inscribed, "Given to Mary Catherine Halloran as a remembrance of our friendship." It was signed and dated two days before Ransome's disappearance.
She turned suddenly, shoving Peter aside, and ran to the loft windows that overlooked a cobbled mews and afforded a partial view of the Brooklyn Bridge, with lower Manhattan beyond.
"Peterrrr!"
He caught up to her, looked over her shoulder and down at the mews. There were kids playing, a couple of women with strollers. And a man in a black topcoat getting into a cab on the corner where the fruit and vegetable stand was doing brisk business. The man had shoulder-length gray hair and wore dark glasses.
That was all they could see of him.
Peter looked at Echo as the cab drove away. Touched her shoulder until she focused on him, on the here and now.
"He drowned, Echo."
She turned with a broad gesture in the direction of the portrait. "But—"
