The Lighthouse

by Bill Pronzini

  Quickly, Alix went to the telephone table, looked up Cassie’s number in the slim county directory, dialed it. It rang eight, nine, ten times. No answer. She let it ring ten more: still no answer. Damn! She checked the number again, redialed. Still no response. Cassie must be one of those people who didn’t like to be awakened by the phone, who unplugged it before going to bed. Either that, or she’d gone out on some early-morning errand.

  Frantic now, Alix tried to think of someone else to call. But no one else in Hilliard would be likely to help her. And the sheriff.. no, she couldn’t call the sheriff. It was either walk to the village or stay here, and she couldn’t stay here.

  Her pea jacket was on a peg next to the door; she put it on, hastily checked her pocket for the keys, and went out. The early-morning air was warmer than she’d expected, and very damp from the fog. The odor of the sea was strong, salt-laden. There was no sound anywhere except for the muffled crash of the surf against the rocks below the cliffs.

  The gate stood open as Jan had left it last night. Instinctively, she tugged it shut behind her; the moisture that saturated the rough whitewashed boards made her shiver. For a moment she stood looking south along the curve of the shoreline, saw the surf roiling over the beach where she’d walked with Cassie-slate-gray water topped with white foam. Ahead of her the terrain was partially obscured by the low-hanging mist. She stifled another shiver, set off at a fast walk along the road.

  On either side of her the mist was pervasive, half obliterating the shapes of scrub vegetation and rocks. It seemed to mute all sound: the waking rustles of birds in the gorse and Oregon grape, the slap of her tennis shoes on the uneven surface of the roadbed. She kept her eyes cast downward, concentrating on where she was walking, trying not to think of what might await her in Hilliard.

  After a mile or so she came on the long stretch where those strange porcupine-like clumps of tule grass grew; the mist made them look more than ever like herds of some alien animal lying in wait. Then she was into the thick copse of fir trees, and the darkness in there made her hurry, so that she was almost running by the time she emerged.

  Past the open fields where sheep huddled together for warmth. Past another stand of trees. And then she was alongside the gully where the body of the strangled hitchhiker had been found… she recognized it with a rippling frisson and quickened her pace again.

  How far to the county road now? Less than a mile, she was certain of that. But she was tiring rapidly, and to keep herself going she played a childlike game with herself: See that cluster of cypress ahead? When you get past that, you’ll be able to see the intersection. And when she reached the cypress, and the county road was still nowhere in sight: See that sharp curve up there? The junction is just past it…

  She was well beyond the curve, passing through another section of sheep graze, when something caught her eye: metal glinting in the weeds in a hollow to the left of the road.

  The metal was silvery, dull in the muted light. Although the grass was high, in the hollow, she could see traces of another color-a bright, electric blue.

  She stopped abruptly, peering down there. What looked to be tire marks gouged the grassy verge, and a section of the fence between the road and the hollow had been knocked down, flattened, as if by something heavy-a car, perhaps. Alix frowned, biting her lip. Then, hesitantly, she moved toward the fence, closer to what lay in the high grass of the hollow. Close enough to identify it.

  A bicycle.

  Mandy Barnett’s bicycle?

  Its front tire was flat, and the handlebars were bent at an odd angle; the spokes of the rear wheel were mangled. And the bike didn’t look as if it had lain there for tong-it wasn’t rusted, and the bright blue paint was relatively new. Bright blue paint that matched the poncho and headband Mandy habitually wore.

  Alix felt a sharpening of both tension and fear. An accident? Was that why Mandy hadn’t shown up at the lighthouse last night? But who would be driving on the cape road late at night, who else but No.

  Maybe the girl was still here somewhere. Unconscious, or too weak or badly hurt to move, to call for help. Alix stood listening. All she heard was the wind, the distant bleat of a sheep.

  “Mandy? Mandy?”

  There was no answer.

  She stepped over the broken-down section of fence, went down into the hollow. The bicycle was all that lay in the high grass there. She moved out on the other side, around a clump of spiky gorse bushes-calling as she went, focusing hard on her surroundings to keep from focusing on her thoughts.

  She had gone fifty yards or so from the hollow, toward a grouping of scrub pine, when she saw something else blue in among the trees. She stopped, peering that way. Couldn’t see it now. Her eyes were gritty and in the mist everything seemed to blur together. Struggling to maintain her footing on the uneven ground, she hurried toward the pines… and saw the blue again… and hurried even more.

  The trees grew in a tight little circle, as if, like the sheep, they were huddling for protection from the elements. Their branches were heavy, low-hanging, and sticky with sap. Alix pushed against them, bent forward at the waist. And there, on a little patch of needled ground, she found Mandy.

  The girl was lying motionless, face down, her blue-and-white poncho grass-stained and torn. The headband was gone; her red curls were spread in a tangled fan across her shoulders. One of her legs was drawn up, bent at the knee, and both arms were outflung.

  Fearfully Alix knelt, touched the girl’s shoulder. “Mandy?” There was no response. No sign that Mandy was even breathing.

  She grasped one of the thin wrists, felt for a pulse, didn’t find one. Unheedful of warnings about moving accident victims, she took hold of Mandy’s shoulder and turned the girl onto her back.

  “Oh dear God!”

  Mandy’s face was a purplish-black hue, the tip of her tongue visible between her lips. Her head was twisted at an odd angle. Across her cheeks and neck were bloodless scratches. And her eyes… her eyes were wide open, bulging, blood-suffused, grotesquely sightless.

  Alix recoiled, fought down a surge of nausea. Scrambled to her feet and batted her way free of the pines and began to run back toward the road. Even in her state of shock, she knew she would never forget those dead staring eyes.

  Strangled… just like the hitchhiker… run down with a car while riding her bike, chased or carried or dragged over here and strangled…

  And Jan took the station wagon… and Jan didn’t come home last night…

  Part Three

  MID-OCTOBER

  Mad or sane, it does not matter, for the end is the same in either case. I fear now that the lighthouse will shatter and fall. I am already shattered, and must fall with it.

  — EDGAR ALLAN POE AND ROBERT BLOCH, “The Light-House”

  Jan

  He couldn’t remember.

  Last night was a blur, its images as gray and formless as the fog piled up dirtily outside the station wagon’s windshield. He couldn’t even remember waking up; he was just sitting here behind the wheel, shivering from the cold, staring out at the fog, with a sour taste in his mouth like that of sleep and hangover.

  Where was he? He didn’t even know that. The fog obscured his surroundings, except for glimpses now and then of rocks, stunted trees, a flat stretch of stony ground. Some distance away surf made a faint hissing sound, like voices whispering angrily in the mist.

  Another blackout.

  His head hurt; he couldn’t think straight. But it wasn’t the bulging, only vestiges of it-a dull pounding as steady and rhythmic as the sea hammering at the unseen shore. He lifted his hands, pressed the palms against his temples; but he was shaking so badly, they set up a vibration in his head that intensified rather than eased the pain.

  He pulled his hands down, tucked them into his armpits to warm them, and leaned forward with his forehead against the wheel. After a time the worst of the shaking stopped-and he thought of his watch, the time, what was the time? 8:33, he saw when he loo
ked. 8:33 in the morning. Out here all night, he thought.

  Out where all night?

  Impulsively, he opened the door and got out of the car. Moved away from it, away from the sound of the ocean. The grayness parted, broke up into wisps and streaks, ugly, cold, like strips of something diseased sloughing off in the wind. He was on a rocky lookout, he realized; a short access road connected it with a deserted two-lane highway. What highway? Highway 1? The county road that branched off it and led to Hilliard? He couldn’t tell; none of the terrain was familiar.

  He went back to the car, stumbling a little on the uneven surface, his teeth clenched against the pain in his head. The. station wagon, he saw then, was nosed up against a dirt retaining wall at the outer edge of the lookout. Beyond the wall was a steep slope, gouged by the elements into deep fissures, and then the sea hammering, hammering, hammering against a jumble of rocks fifty feet below.

  If that retaining wall wasn’t there I might have driven right over the edge. Better if I had. Better for me, better for Alix Alix.

  And some of last night came back, with a force that drove him sideways against the car. The rats in the pantry, the rat he’d killed

  … the wild rage… the need to do something, fight back, confront Novotny… ignoring Alix’s pleas and driving off in the car like a madman… the road, the dark all around him… and the sudden bulging…

  That was all. There was nothing beyond that-a void, an abyss. Where had he gone? What had he done?

  Was Alix all right?

  Alone at the lighthouse, out there alone all night.

  “God!” He said the word aloud, in a voice that seemed to crack in his ears like glass breaking. He dragged the car door open, got back under the wheel, fumbled at the ignition. The keys were still there. But the engine was cold; it whirred, whirred, whirred again before it finally caught. He backed the car, got it turned around, drove along the access road to the two-lane highway. Which way should he go?

  Left. Try left.

  The fog was so thick at first that his visibility was no more than a few hundred feet in any direction. A pickup trick came hurtling out of it like some kind of phantom, made him swerve in sudden panic, and then disappeared again into the grayness. But then, after a mile or so, the road seemed to angle away from the sea and the mist grew thinner, patchier, letting him see forested hills and sheep graze. Going the right way, he thought. Toward Hilliard, not away from it.

  Another mile, and more of the fog burned off. He passed the sheep ranch; in the distance, then, he had a vague glimpse of the bay, the buildings of the village. The cape road would be coming up pretty soon; he began looking for the big sign that marked it.

  But it wasn’t the sign that caught his attention first, that made him brake so suddenly the station wagon skidded on the damp pavement. It was the telephone booth in the little rest area on this side of the cape road; it was the woman standing next to it, alone, bundled in a familiar blue coat, a familiar scarf and cap.

  Alix.

  He veered across the road, into the rest area. But he pointed the car away from where she stood, some distance to one side: he was suddenly afraid of losing control, of hitting her. He jammed on the emergency brake, got out, ran toward her. And then stopped, because she had run a few steps and then stopped herself. She stood rigidly, arms down at her sides, her face… the expression on her face..

  “Jan, for God’s sake, where have you been?”

  He shook his head; he couldn’t seem to find words. He put a hand out to touch her, but she moved away abruptly-not as if she were rejecting him; as if something had drawn her away.

  It was the car. She half ran to it, around to the front, and bent and looked at the grille, the bumper. Thinks maybe I hit something else last night, he thought dully. Then he thought, much more sharply: Did I? He went there himself, looked himself-looked for dents, scrapes, broken headlights, broken signal lights. Looked for blood.

  Nothing. There was nothing to see.

  Alix faced him again, and some of the rigidity had left her; but the look on her face and in her eyes was still the same. Fear, and something else, something darker, primitive. She put both hands on his arms, as if re-establishing contact between them.

  “Where were you all night?”

  He found words this time, forced them out of the rusty cavern of his throat. “Down the road a few miles. A lookout… I spent the night there.”

  “Another bad headache?”

  “Yes. Alix, why are you here? How did you—?”

  “I walked. I was worried about you.”

  “This morning?”

  “Yes. Jan, listen to me—”

  “Nothing else happened at the light?”

  “Not there, no. On the cape road, a mile or so from here.”

  Something began to crawl inside him-a thin worm of dread. “What do you mean? What happened?”

  “There’s been another murder. Mandy Barnett. Somebody ran her and her bicycle off the road last night and then strangled her.”

  He couldn’t comprehend it at first; refused to comprehend it. All he said was, “No.”

  “It’s true, I found the body. I’ve already called the state police. ”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said again.

  “Now you listen to me,” she said. She gripped his arms more tightly; he could feel the bite of her nails through his coat. “I want you to go out to the lighthouse. Right now, before the authorities come, before anybody sees you here.”

  “And leave you alone? Why?”

  “The way you look, that’s why. The way you’re acting. I don’t want them to see you like this.”

  It was seeping into him now, the full awareness of what she had told him and what she was getting at. A sudden chill wracked him. “You don’t think that I—?”

  “I don’t think anything.” She said it urgently, in a tone of voice he had never heard her use before. She kept looking out toward the empty highway, her head cocked to one side, listening. “I don’t want them to think anything either. I don’t want them to see you like this and I don’t want them to know you weren’t home last night.”

  “You mean… lie to them?”

  “That’s just what I mean. I’ll say you were at the lighthouse all night and you say the same thing. You were with me the whole time. Now go, hurry!”

  She was pushing him toward the car as she spoke. He wanted to resist and yet he didn’t, he couldn’t. He opened the door, bent his body in under the wheel.

  “Wash your face and change your clothes when you get there,” she said. “Try to get a grip on yourself.”

  “I’m all right now. Alix, I didn’t, I couldn’t…”

  “I know. Just go, go!”

  She slammed the door, and he started the engine and drove away from her, out onto the still-deserted highway. In the rearview mirror he watched her grow smaller, less distinct in the mist; it was as if pieces of her were being consumed by it, so that only diminishing fragments-part of her face, one blue-coated arm, the lower halves of her legs-remained. And then they, too, were gone, and he was turning past the sign that said CAP DES PERES LIGHTHOUSE, 3 MILES, CLOSED TO THE PUB-Llc, jouncing along the rutted cape road, alone again in the darkening gray.

  I didn’t, I couldn’t…

  Could I? he thought.

  Did I?

  Alix

  She watched Jan closely as they talked with the state homicide detective, Frank Sinclair. He was sitting in the single chair near the woodstove, his head backlit by the side window. The comparative darkness of the room accentuated the paleness of the skin around his beard, made his cheekbones seem more prominent. His face was immobile as Sinclair posed his questions; only his eyes gave any hint of his inner upheaval.

  She wanted to believe that Sinclair saw Jan’s agitation as nothing more than the normal reaction of a man who has been awakened from a supposedly sound sleep to the unsettling news of another murder. Jan was adept at hiding his true feelings behind his p
rofessorial facade-from others, at least. What she saw in his eyes were emotions much more complex than simple shock. And one of them was fear.

  “Mrs. Ryerson?”

  She blinked at Sinclair, realizing she’d lost the thread of his questioning. He was a chubby man dressed in a gray tweed jacket and gray slacks; his mustache was the only distinctive feature in an otherwise bland face, and that only because it grew more fully on the right side than on the left. He seemed sensitive to the defect, because periodically he stroked the sparser side-as if it were a defenseless animal in need of comforting. To the casual observer, his appearance might have been deceptively reassuring, but her artist’s eye picked out the determined ridges of muscle around his mouth, the sharp intelligence concealed beneath the bland exterior and thick dark-rimmed glasses. When he’d questioned them after the murder of the hitchhiker, she had recognized and been made wary by those qualities. After close to an hour with him this morning, she had come to regard him as a man who would be a dangerous adversary.

  She cleared her throat and said, “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I didn’t hear what you said.”

  His mouth twitched reprovingly; he patted the left side of his mustache as if it were responsible for the twitch and he wanted to calm it. “I said that I’d like to go over the chronology of events another time, to make sure I have everything straight.”

  “All right.”

  Sinclair looked down at the notepad he’d been writing on. “Now, Mrs. Ryerson, you say you couldn’t sleep, so you got up early and went for a walk?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Was there any particular reason for your sleeplessness?”

  “No. I was just… restless. Things on my mind.”