The Lighthouse: A Novel of Terror (29 page)

“Somebody’s got to do something,” Bonner said. “He’s crazy, that Ryerson. I told you all along, didn’t I? Didn’t I?”

“Cops,” Adam said, and spat on the ground. “What the hell good are they?”

“No good, that’s what. No damn good at all.”

Mitch was barely listening to them. His head hurt now; he wished he had a drink, and not just a Henry’s either. You can only take so much, he was thinking. Goddamn it, a man can only take so much!

He was on his way across the yard to the pumphouse to see what he could do about purifying the well when the loneliness overcame him.

It was cold—a raw misty afternoon, with the wind blade-edged and cutting against his bare skin. He wasn’t thinking about anything at first. Just walking slowly, hunched over against the pull of the wind. And then the random thought came that the only people he’d talked to since Alix left two days ago were the man at the supply house in Coos Bay who’d taken his telephone order for the chemicals, and the truck driver who’d delivered them this morning. That thought gave birth to another: He’d expected the homicide inspector, Sinclair, to come back with more questions, but Sinclair hadn’t come. Why? It must be because he really did believe in the innocence of Jan Ryerson, believed that a man like Jan Ryerson could never, never hurt two young girls no matter what sort of state he was in. Alix believed it, didn’t she? And Jan Ryerson did too.

I couldn’t, I didn’t . . .

Could I? Did I?

No, I couldn’t.

No, I didn’t.

And then he thought: I’m going to be blind pretty soon. And the loneliness struck him—a wave of it sudden and fierce, making him feel almost agoraphobic. All at once the sky and the sea seemed immense, the sense of desolation greater than he’d ever imagined it, the voices of the wheeling gulls like shrieks of despair. Cape Despair. A place of lost hopes and hollow desires. The edge of nowhere. One short step from the abyss, the consuming darkness.

He turned, feeling dizzy, and went back to the house, sat down in the living room. His head ached, but it was not another of the bulging headaches—he hadn’t had another of those. But he’d had more frequent spells of failing vision, distortion of the form and size of objects, a narrowing of his visual field. Happening fast now. How much time did he have left?

Fear gnawed at him, but it was a different kind of fear than the one he’d been living with the past two days, even the past few months. Not fear of the unknown—fear of the alone. This lighthouse, the stand he’d made against Mitch Novotny and the other people of Hilliard . . . none of that meant anything, really, not even as a symbol. Staying here like this was not only foolish, it was meaningless. Polishing the lenses, rebuilding the diaphone, painting the catwalk, trying to do something about the well, all the frantic activity of the past couple of days . . . meaningless.

The room, the entire lighthouse, felt strange to him now—a vast echoing chamber of loneliness. Why had he sent Alix away? Why had he thought he needed some time alone? Being alone was the thing that frightened him most, the thing that had kept him from confiding in her. The ordeal of telling her the truth, facing the consequences, couldn’t be any greater than the ordeal of the past two days, the past two weeks.

You can’t put it off any longer, he thought, and he was standing beside the phone, reaching down for the receiver, when he realized that he didn’t
want
to put it off; that no matter what Alix’s response, the truth was something he could no longer deal with alone.

The afternoon was thick with fog—not the unleavened gray mist that often hung over the coastline, but an opaque white curtain that shifted and billowed before a strong Pacific wind. The offshore rocks were shrouded, as were the hills to the east. The broken lines centering Highway 1 seemed to leap up suddenly, giving little or no warning of curves, and the edges of the pavement bled off into nothingness. When she came to the first exit for Hilliard she turned automatically, even though the route would take her through the village; it was shorter than continuing down the highway and then doubling back on the county road, and she was eager to get to the lighthouse, to see Jan and hear what it was he had to say to her.

The trailer park on its little hill to her left as she entered Hilliard was a blurred scattering of lonely ill-assorted shapes. It made her feel cold in spite of the warmth inside the station wagon. She thought of how depressing life must be inside one of those boxes, with only the thin walls as protection against the elements. And then, with a twinge of pain, she thought of the Bametts, Della and Hod and their other children, alone with their loss; and of Mandy, who would never return to even that poor shelter.

The cannery loomed on her right, pinpoints of light shining along the clumsy line of its roof. Then the road curved, and she was on the main street. The fluorescent interior of the marine supply glowed through the fog, making the windows look like giant TV screens. The green neon sign of the Seafood Grotto was muted and hazed. The street was empty of pedestrians, and most of the buildings had a closed-up, deserted look.

Just past the general store, however, a line of cars was moving slowly, some of their taillights flashing left-turn signals onto the sidestreet that climbed the hillside toward the church. Alix put her foot on the brake to keep from overtaking them. The lead car made the turn across the road, its headlamps probing the mist and quickly becoming dissipated in whiteness. It was a large boxy vehicle, black with ornate chrome trim; shirred white curtains masked the windows of its elongated rear compartment.

It was a hearse. She’d come up behind Mandy Barnett’s funeral cortege.

Other cars followed the hearse, their headlights making the same slow arc: a ten-year-old Cadillac sedan, presumably belonging to the undertaker and containing the bereaved family; a beat-up Volkswagen van; an equally battered pickup truck; three old cars of nondescript make. It was a poor showing, undoubtedly a poor funeral—as poor as the brief life of Mandy Barnett. Again Alix felt a wrench of pity for the girl, and blinked at the wetness that came to her eyes.

She remembered the day Mandy had come to the light with her “business proposition,” the way she’d spoken of Hilliard: “I
hate
it! It’s ugly and cold, and everybody’s poor.” And the way she’d spoken of California: “Nobody goes to Hollywood and gets rich and famous anymore; that’s a lot of shit. But I figure I could get by down there, and at least it’s sunny and warm.” Mandy hadn’t had much in life; hadn’t wanted all that much, either. And this bleak good-bye was to be all she ever got.

Alix wondered if Mandy had even owned a decent dress to be buried in. Probably not. Perhaps they had laid her out in her bright blue-and-white poncho. In a way, she hoped so: it and the matching beaded headband seemed to have been the girl’s favorite outfit.

Once more she pictured Mandy—that day in the laundromat, angry at her mother and stamping her foot, her red curls bouncing and the beaded ends of the headband clicking together. And then—unbidden and unwelcome—came the image of the girl’s body lying broken on the pine-needled ground, her blood-flecked eyes hideously staring. . . .

She shuddered, trying to banish the ugly vision. For a moment, as the last car ahead made the turn and began climbing the hill, she contemplated following and paying her last respects. But she knew it would be a self-indulgent gesture, perhaps even a dangerous one; the Barnetts and their friends would be certain to resent her presence—an outsider, the wife of the man some of them were saying was Mandy’s murderer. No, there was no place for her at the cemetery beside the run-down little village church.

She watched the taillights as they wound up the road, disappearing into the wall of mist. Then she drove on to Cape Despair, the lighthouse, and Jan.

The funeral was a blur: Della crying, the boys crying, Reverend Olsen up on his pulpit saying Mandy was a good girl and God in His mercy had already welcomed her into His Kingdom for all eternity (What mercy? Hod remembered thinking. What kind of mercy is this?), then all of them leaving the church, entering the fog-wrapped graveyard, and the pallbearers—Mitch and Adam and Barney Nevers and Les Cummins and Seth Bonner and Mike Carstairs—lowering her coffin into the hole in the ground, clods of earth falling on it, “ashes to ashes and dust to dust,” and Della on her knees wailing, “My baby, my baby!” and him just standing there because he couldn’t do anything else, couldn’t even cry.

The ride home and the funeral supper was a blur too. All the people telling him how sorry they were, Lillian Hilliard saying, “If you need anything, Hod, you just let me know, your credit’s good with me from now on,” as if he gave a damn about groceries at a time like this, and Della all of a sudden red-faced and smiling, acting like they were having a party, running around with plates of food and saying, “Have something more to eat, won’t you have something more to eat?” He couldn’t stand it after a while, too many people and too much noise, and he went out and walked around, he didn’t even remember where, and then he was back at the trailer and Mitch put a drink in his hand—whiskey and some ice—and he drank it, didn’t taste it, drank it like it was water, and Mitch gave him another one, and he drank that, and pretty soon he knew he was drunk but he didn’t feel drunk. Somebody tried to get him to go back inside, eat something, but he couldn’t make himself do it. Then Adam said, “Let’s go up to my trailer, I got another bottle up there,” and he went. Anything to get away from all those people, all that noise.

Mitch and Seth Bonner went, too. And they sat around and drank more whiskey. And then he cried. It came over him all at once, like something breaking, spilling over inside him. He put his head down on the table and cried and cried for his dead daughter until there weren’t any more tears in him. Then he sat up and wiped his face, and he was all right. For the first time in three days he could feel again. For the first time since they’d walked into Adam’s trailer he could pay attention to what was being said, take part in the conversation.

Mitch poured him another drink. The bottle was almost empty.

The interior of the watch house was cold and drafty, despite the fire in the woodstove. Outside the wind gusted and whistled, and gray fingers of fog trailed past the windows. She sat on the couch clutching a snifter of brandy. Jan was on the chair across from her, peering down into his glass and swirling the liquor around its convex sides. He looked tired, a little haggard, a little drained—the same way she felt.

She had waited a long time for this conversation, and she knew she should now be patient, should allow him to find his words and tell it in his own way. But instead she was filled with a prickly irritation; every flick of his wrist as he sloshed the brandy nettled her, every moment that he didn’t speak set her nerves on edge. There was something familiar about the scene—something nostalgic yet vaguely unpleasant that she couldn’t place and which nagged at her and increased her annoyance.

She was about to take a sip of brandy, hoping it would steady her, when the wind gusted strongly, baffling around the tower, and then increased to a maniacal shriek. She sat up straighter, a
frisson
rippling along her spine.

The sound brought it all back to her: that night in Boston, in Jan’s old apartment in the condemned building on Beacon Hill. The night he’d told her about the murder in Madison during his college years. With the memory came a strong sense of
déjà vu.
It was as if they were reenacting that scene in Boston. The cold, the wind, the brandy, even their positions relative to each other, not touching, formal . . . it was all the same.

Convulsively she raised her glass and took a long swallow. As if it were a signal, Jan stirred and looked at her and then said, “Alix, this isn’t easy for me.” He paused, rolling the brandy snifter between his palms. This, too, called up an image of a younger Jan making a similar gesture before he confessed to the loneliness and emotional poverty of his life. “I’d better start at the beginning,” he went on. “With the headaches I’ve been having.”

The headaches. His health. It was what she’d expected, and something she could cope with.

“When I told you Dave Sanderson didn’t know what caused them, it was only a half-truth. They—the doctors; I’ve seen several specialists—they
do
know what is causing them. It’s a degenerative disease that affects the optic nerve. Both optic nerves, in my case.”

The word “degenerative” seemed to hang in the air between them. She felt a coldness spreading outward to her limbs.

“What they don’t know,” Jan said, “is exactly what causes the disease. Some kind of virus, maybe; they’re just not sure because it’s rare.” He drew a deep breath. His fingertips, pressed tight around the snifter, were white. “They also don’t know how to treat it, to stop or even slow down the degeneration. They’ve had some success with drugs, cortisone and some others, but . . . a few patients respond, most don’t. If they don’t, the disease progresses and . . . eventually they lose their sight.”

Numb now, she sat very still, waiting.

“The drugs haven’t worked on me, Alix. The pain and other symptoms are getting worse. There’s nothing they can do. In a year or two, I’ll be blind.”