The Lighthouse: A Novel of Terror (31 page)

He felt like jumping up and down; hell, he was jumping up and down, he couldn’t stand still. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this excited. Goddamn, this was something. Goddamn, they should of come out here a long time ago.

Old Seth kept whooping and cackling like he was about to lay an egg. “Shoot out one of the windows, Adam! Shoot out one of the windows!” But Mitch and Hod, they weren’t into it yet. He could understand about Hod—poor bugger was still all tore up about Mandy, and so damn drunk he was wandering back and forth like he didn’t even know where he was. Well, they were all drunk—all except Adam. He hadn’t drunk as much whiskey as the others. He didn’t need no Dutch courage to prime
his
pump. No, sir. He’d been ready for this for a long time.

It was Mitch he couldn’t figure. Mitch had been ready for a long time, too, hadn’t he? His idea they come out here tonight and get Ryerson, make him confess, make a citizen’s arrest and haul him in to Coos Bay and dump him in that cop Sinclair’s lap. But now that they were here, into it, he wasn’t saying much, was just hanging back kind of nervous, watching. It wasn’t that he was shitfaced, no, he wasn’t much worse off than Adam was. It was like he was having second thoughts or something, like he figured maybe they’d bit off more than they could chew.

But they hadn’t bit off anything yet. Not yet.

“Bust one of the windows, Adam!” Bonner yelled.

He threw the Springfield up to his shoulder, sighted at the kitchen window, fired. Glass shattered, sprayed; the curtain inside flapped, blew out in the wind. Bonner let out another whoop and danced a little jig. Mitch stood there staring, fidgeting.

“Come on out, Ryerson!” Adam yelled.

“He’s not coming out,” Mitch said. His face was wet with mist; he wiped it off on the back of his hand. “He’ll never come out, not with his wife in there with him.”

“Then we’ll go in and drag him out.”

“That’s it,” Bonner said. He clapped his hands like a kid. “Drag him out, make him confess. How do we do it, Mitch? How do we go in and get him?”

Mitch didn’t say nothing. He was staring again, wiping his face, fidgeting.

Why, hell, Adam thought suddenly, he’s
scared.
He couldn’t figure it at first. He’d always looked up to Mitch, always figured him to be tough and strong, the leader type. But now . . . well, you had to believe your eyes. Mitch was scared, backing-down scared—there was no question about it. And Bonner’s crazy, he thought, and Hod’s drunk and that leaves just me, don’t it?

He squeezed off another shot, blew out an upstairs window this time. Bonner whooped. Mitch stared and fidgeted.

I’m in charge now, Adam thought. Yes, sir, I’m the real leader here. Give the orders, do things any way I want. Any way I want. Bust in there, drag Ryerson out, make him confess . . . even kill him if I want. Shoot him down like a dog if I want. And her? What about her? Nobody’s said anything about her, but she’s as bad as he is, helping him, protecting him, and all the time with her nose in the air like her shit don’t stink—what about her? Do anything I want to
her,
too, when the time comes.

Do what I should of done to that bitch up in Lake Oswego. Put this baby’s muzzle up against her head, let her feel cold steel against her head, make her beg a little . . . any damn thing I want!

He heard the second bullet whine and smash into the outside wall before he heard the shot boom. Riding the echoes of the shot was Alix’s voice: “What’s happening, what’s going on?” Her face was white, the folds of the red shirt she clutched like splashes of blood against her breasts.

Jan grasped her hard by the shoulders, pushed her down to her knees. “Stay down!” He dropped down beside her, crawled quickly to the front door, raised up to throw the bolt lock. Then he swung back toward the window in the side wall. He was more angry than anything else at this moment, but the anger was muted by an almost detached calm. The emotional scene with Alix earlier had left him drained, incapable for the time being of fear or any other strong feeling.

Outside the voices were loud, excited, the words indistinguishable now. Jan reached for the lamp cord, yanked it out of the socket in the side wall, yanked the room into darkness. Under its protective cover, he pushed himself up into a standing crouch. Behind him he could hear Alix’s breathing coming fast and ragged: she was on her knees alongside the couch.

He groped his way across the room. Alix heard him moving and said, “Where are you going?” Her voice shook but she sounded in control.

“Kitchen window. See who’s out there.”

He made his way into the kitchen. Light filtering through the window made a diffused wedge across the sink and the linoleum floor. He ducked under the sill of the window, came up on the far side, and leaned up over the drainboard to look past one comer of the curtain.

The sixty yards or so between the house and the parked station wagon were illuminated by the nightlight. Details close to the building—clumps of grass, the gravel of the path—stood out in sharp relief. Farther back, where the four men moved around in a ragged group, the shadows were longer and details were blurry, so that the figures had a kind of surreal, two-dimensional look.

Novotny was one of them. And Hod Barnett. And . . . Bonner? Yes, Seth Bonner, jumping around, letting out war whoops—drunk. All of them lynch-mob drunk. The fourth man was half-turned away from the window, but after a moment he shouted something and pivoted, and Jan recognized the village handyman, Adam Reese. There was a long-barreled rifle in Reese’s hands, cradled across his chest military-fashion. Light gleamed off its metal surfaces. It was the only weapon Jan could see, but that didn’t mean the rest of them weren’t armed with handguns.

Then Reese swung the weapon up, aimed it at the house, aimed it straight at the kitchen window as if he knew Jan was there watching. Jan was already falling away, throwing his hands up over his head, when Reese fired. Glass burst above him and the bullet slashed through, screeched and thudded into the metal door of the refrigerator. Shards rained down, one of the sharp edges opening a stinging cut on the back of his left hand.

In the living room Alix was shrieking, “Jan!
Jan!”

“I’m all right, stay there. Get on the phone—call the sheriff. Hurry!”

His glasses were askew; he pushed them back into place and scuttled away from the sink, cutting knees and palms on the broken glass, ignoring the pain. The pantry door . . . was it locked? He couldn’t remember. Locked doors wouldn’t keep them out, not for long, but just a few minutes might mean everything to Alix and him. On his feet again, he stumbled over the big carton of pots and pans and dishes she’d left on the floor, almost fell, regained his footing again.

One of the upstairs windows burst, the breaking-glass sounds lost in another echoing report from Adam Reese’s rifle.

Jan’s mouth was full of thick brassy-tasting saliva as he stumbled down the steps into the cloakroom. He got the pantry door open, groped his way across to the outside door, grasped the knob. Locked. But the fact brought only a small, fleeting relief. He pivoted away from the door, staggered back into the kitchen.

“Jan!”

In a crouch he moved over into the doorway, saw the shape of Alix come out of the darkness, felt her hands clutch at his arms.

“What is it? What happened?”

“The phone . . . it doesn’t work. It’s dead, Jan, the line is dead!”

“What are we going to do?”

The sound of her own voice frightened her even more than she already was: it trembled, wobbled, verged on a slow-building scream. Her chest was constricted, felt as though it might burst. Fear pounded a frantic rhythm in the hollow of her throat.

“Don’t panic, for God’s sake.”

“They must have cut the telephone wires. . . . ”

“If we panic, it’s all over. You know that as well as I do. Stay calm.”

She took several deep breaths with her mouth open wide; the last thing she needed now was to start hyperventilating. Outside she could hear shouts, whoops, lunatic laughter; she shut her ears against the sounds. And some of the constriction left her chest, the rising terror checked and then began to abate. The wild moment was over. She had her control back again.

“I’m okay,” she said, and her voice no longer trembled on the edge of a shriek. “Better now. How many of them are there?”

“Four. Novotny, Barnett, Reese, and Seth Bonner. All of them drunk.”

“Have they all got guns?”

“Reese has a rifle; he’s the one who’s been shooting. I couldn’t tell about the others.”

Reese . . . that evil, smirking little man. She suppressed a shiver, heard herself say, “We’ve got to protect ourselves.”

“With what?”

“Knives. Butcher knives.”

“Knives won’t be much good against four armed men.”

“They might not all be armed. Jan, we’ve got to have some kind of weapons. . . . ”

“Okay. You’re right.”

He put his arm around her, turned her into the kitchen, bent her low under the sill of the window. Most of the glass had been ripped out of it by the rifle bullet, she saw; only a few shards, like broken snaggleteeth, remained in the frame. Fog blew in through the opening in gray wisps. Fog, and the icy wind, and the loud drunken voices of the four men out there.

“Did you pack the knives?” Jan said against her ear.

“Yes. In the carton with the pots and pans.”

They found the carton, squatted beside it, began to rummage inside. Alix found the elongated newspaper-wrapped bundle that contained the butcher and carving knives. She pulled it from the carton, started to unwrap it.

Outside, Reese’s rifle cracked again. Almost instantaneously there was a violent whooshing explosion—a thunderous roar that seemed to rock the house. And a mushrooming flash of light and flame turned the night beyond the broken window as bright as noon.

Adam had blown up the Ryersons’ station wagon. Drawn a bead on it with that 30.06 of his, put a bullet in the gas tank, and blown it sky-high.

They’d all backed off when they saw what he was going to do, Mitch dragging Hod by one arm. But the heat of the explosion had seared him anyway, driven him farther back; he could still feel it hot and pulsing against his face, still hear the thudding echo of the blast. The fireball had rolled up fifty feet or more, boiling through the fog, staining it bright orange, bright red at the edges like blood. The fire was still burning hot; in the center of it, the car was nothing but a black cinder shape. The flames hadn’t reached any of the buildings yet, but the garage and the pumphouse were close by, and the wind was already swirling sparks like pinwheels through the darkness and the mist. The outbuildings could torch off any minute. The lighthouse too . . . with Ryerson and his wife in there.

Adam and Bonner were watching the car burn, Adam hopping from one foot to the other, Bonner letting out whoops like a goddamn Indian. Bonner was tetched in the head, they should never have brought him along, but Adam . . . it was like he’d gone crazy, too. All the shooting he’d done, blowing up the car like that, and now he was laughing, head thrown back and the laughter bubbling out of him like this was
fun.
like it was a party or something.

Christ, Mitch thought, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Come out here, get Ryerson, force him to talk, take him to Coos Bay—do what the fucking sheriff and state troopers wouldn’t do. But this . . . all this . . . this wasn’t the way it was supposed to be.

His head hurt; he felt woozy, sick to his stomach. Shouldn’t have drunk all that whiskey. Shouldn’t have come out here at all. But it seemed like the right thing to do . . . nobody else was doing anything, were they? Poor Mandy lying dead in her coffin . . . what Ryerson had done to the other girl . . . and Red, too . . . it was the thing to do, goddamn it. Ryerson was an animal, a mad dog. They had every right to be here, doing this. Every right. . . .

“Ryerson! We’re coming in, Ryerson! You can’t hide, you can’t get away!”

It was Adam doing the yelling, just like before. Why? What was the sense in that? Don’t talk about it, just do it.

“Don’t talk about it, Adam,” he called over the thrumming beat of the fire, “let’s just do it.”

“Damn right we’re gonna do it.”

“Bust down the door,” Bonner yelled. “That’s it, that’s what we’ll do, ain’t it, Adam? Bust down the door.”

“The door or one of the windows. Mitch, run back to the van, get that big six-cell of mine. They ain’t got guns but maybe they got something else, knives or something. We don’t want him coming out of the dark at us.”

Mitch hesitated. “Let Seth get it.”

“No, you got steadier hands. Hurry it up, Mitch, come on.”

Who’re you to give me orders? Mitch thought. But he didn’t say it, didn’t argue. The hell with arguing, just get it over with. He turned, ran back to where Adam’s van was parked outside the lighthouse gate. He found the six-cell flashlight in the rear. Thought about looking for the bottle—he needed another drink, bad—and remembered they’d finished it on the way out here. He slammed the rear door, viciously, and ran back uphill with the flashlight.