The Lighthouse: A Novel of Terror (16 page)

He began to drive again. Radio blaring rock music, all dissonance and shrieks that scraped like a file across his nerve ends. He spun the knob, found a station that was playing excerpts from old comedy albums. One of Shelley Berman’s routines, the one about fear of flying. Bill Cosby telling a Fat Albert story. Newhart on merchandising the Wright Brothers. Jonathan Winters spoofing old horror movies. He laughed a couple of times; most of the material was still funny and it felt good to laugh. The codeine had muted the pressure behind his eyes.

The road climbed up over Camas Mountain, down through the village of Camas Valley. Not much traffic; dark night—cloudy again, no moon. Mort Sahl clip on the radio now; he had never liked Mort Sahl. Sharp twists and turns in the road, climbing again into the Klamath Mountains. Concentrate on the white line. Headlights coming at him, blinding for an instant, gone. Tom Lehrer next, one of his favorites. “They’re Rioting in Africa.” God, how that song brought back memories. His college days. Madison, the protest marches, the parties—

The murder. Sandy Ralston. Ed Finlayson—guilty or innocent? He spun the knob again, quickly. Something loud, something fast and catchy. Static instead. Not many stations coming through up here. Damn, there must be something . . . there. One of those “Golden Oldies” stations. The Beatles doing “Yellow Submarine.” Silly song. Did we really get excited over songs like that?

Headlights coming at him, blinding, gone. Twists and turns, twists and turns. Town of Remote, aptly named. Headlights, blinding, gone. Climbing again, damn switchbacks all through here, right and left, left and right, back and forth. Headlights behind him this time, coming fast, some damn fool tailgating him on the sharp turns. Get off my ass, you fool, what’s the matter with you? And then suddenly swerving around him on a half-blind turn, so that he had to jam on his brakes and veer over; taillights shining bloodily in the dark—and gone. Gone.

But the pain wasn’t gone, it was still there. Worse than before.

Credence Clearwater Revival doing “Lodi.”

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.

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.

Early October

Where there is much light, the shadows are deepest.

—GOETHE

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.