Bill Pronzini - The Lighthouse

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…

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 looked. 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.