Bill Pronzini: The Lighthouse

Alix.

It was Alix!

The last of the tension went out of him with such suddenness that he stumbled, almost fell. Some of the pressure behind his eyes seemed to abate as well, so that all at once he was thinking and seeing with an intense clarity. He found his voice, shouted her name, but she had recognized him too and she was already coming down off the porch, running toward him-the last running either of them would have to do on this long, bad night.

Alix waited by the rented van while Jan brought their suitcases from the lighthouse, then went back for the last of the boxes. The day was clear, with only a few high-piled clouds; the wind blew sharp and cold. The headland was bathed in the pale yellow light of late fall; by comparison the burnt-out hulk of the station wagon and blackened remains of the garage looked grotesque-reminders of evil.

But they were not the only ones. Everywhere were signs of the assault of two nights before: smokestains curled up the round whitewashed tower, seemed to be clutching it like the fingers of a dirty hand; the broken windows were like dead eye sockets; the bulletand club-scarred front of the house was like a face pocked by some disease.

There were reminders in the village, too, she thought-more subtle but nevertheless present. When they’d passed through on their way from Bandon to pick up their belongings, Hilliard’s streets had been deserted. Behind the walls of the stores and houses, life might go on; but for most of the residents it would be forever altered by the knowledge of what four of their own had become, and of the price those four had paid for their mischief. Adam Reese: dead. Seth Bonner: in a Coos Bay hospital in serious condition with a broken leg, broken ribs, internal injuries. Mitch Novotny and Hod Barnett: home with their families, but only because the Ryersons had declined to press charges against them; free physically, but not in spirit, forced to live the rest of their lives with the memory of what they had done-and what they had almost done-on a night when they had unleashed the animal that lurks beneath the civilized surface of man.

That was the primary reason, Alix supposed, that she and Jan felt no lingering hostility, no grudge toward them or the village itself: none had escaped punishment, and the sentences the survivors would serve would be long ones. All they felt now was pity-for Hod Barnett, who had lost his daughter; for Barnett and Novotny, who had lost a semblance of their humanity; for the little dying town of Hilliard that had lost its self-respect. Pity, and a deep, ineradicable sorrow.

She was glad that she and Jan had been in agreement on not pressing charges; the last thing she would have wanted was to return to the area for a trial. Her fondest hope was never to see Hilliard or Cape Despair again.

There would be no need for them to attend or testify at Cassie Lang’s trial, either. Cassie had confessed, as fully and compulsively to the authorities as she had tried to do to Alix in the garage. Intellectually, Alix knew she should feel some sort of sympathy for the woman; Cassie had been ill-equipped to handle her own passions or the pressures of an unkind world, just as Mitch Novotny and Hod Barnett had been unable to. But her only feeling when she thought of the woman she had once considered her friend was one of revulsion-and an occasional sparking of the terror she had experienced in the confines of that dark garage.

Jan returned with two boxes balanced one on top of the other. “That’s the last of it,” he said. “You want to check around inside, see if we’ve forgotten anything?”

She was about to say yes, but a vague sense of unease, a tightening in her throat kept the word back. She said instead, “If we’ve left anything, it’s probably not important.”

He nodded in understanding. “I’ll lock up then.”

She turned her back on the lighthouse, climbed in behind the wheel of the van. Tonight they would drive as far as Crescent City, and tomorrow they’d be home. And the day after that, Jan would check into the medical center for further tests to determine the cause of his blackouts. It was her opinion-and Jan’s, too, now-that they were not organic in origin, but rather a byproduct of his eye disease brought on by intense stress; if that was the case, it seemed reasonable to assume they wouldn’t recur if precautions were taken to avoid stressful situations.

Once the tests were finished, they would make plans for the future, for the alterations in the patterns of their existence that would become necessary if Jan did in fact lose his sight. But it was possible for them to do that now, to start over from a whole new basis and with a unified strength. Months ago she wouldn’t have thought so, wouldn’t have thought herself-or Jan-capable of such courage. But when you have survived an ordeal so much worse than any you could have imagined, no crisis seems quite so awesome or insurmountable anymore.

Jan slid into the passenger seat and shut the door. His wan smile held the same relief she had started to feel. For him the light was no longer a sanctuary, a place he refused to be driven out of; like its name, it had become a symbol of his despair, a place that had finally been driven out of him.

She drove them out of the yard and along the pot-holed road, not once glancing up at the rearview mirror. But then, after they’d gone about a mile and reached the rise from which she had first seen the lighthouse, she slowed on impulse, pulled over, and stopped. Looked back.

The headland lay barren and lonely, looking much, she thought, as it had when the pair of Basque sheepherders had first come to it more than a century ago. Beyond its scalloped reaches the harsh waves beat against the cliffs as they had when ships foundered there and Cap Des Peres became known as Cape Despair. And above it all was the ancient light, a severe white column piercing the sky.

From here she could see none of the smoke damage, nor the broken windows, nor the scarred walls. It looked as it had on that first day: a thing of beauty, guardian of the night, comfort and hope to the lost and the frightened.

For perhaps a minute she and Jan looked at it in silence. Then she released the brake and drove on, her eyes on the road, her mind on the future-neither lost nor afraid.