The Lighthouse: A Novel of Terror (6 page)

“Hey,” Mitch said angrily. “What the hell’s the idea?”

Jan had leaned a hand against the Ford’s roof. He looked up, said blankly, “What?”

“I said, what’s the idea, kicking my dog?”

“It was biting me . . . ”

“Red don’t bite. Nips a little, that’s all.”

“How was I supposed to know that?”

Mitch tossed his cigarette onto the gravel and took a step forward, his jaw set in tight lines. Hod Barnett looked uneasy now. Alix felt an uneasiness of her own, one that deepened her concern for Jan. Out of the comer of her eye, she saw that a pair of women who had been approaching the store had stopped to watch.

“You can’t just kick a man’s dog, mister.”

Jan straightened, frowning. “I told you, I had no way of knowing the dog was harmless.” He made the mistake of enunciating each word, as if speaking to one of his slower students. “Why don’t you keep him on a leash?”

“That dog never hurt nobody,” Mitch said.

There was belligerence in his voice, and Alix’s fingers tightened on the carton she was carrying. God, he seemed to want to fight! That was the
last
thing they needed as newcomers to Hilliard. And Jan, never a physical person, was in no shape to take on these two; he wouldn’t back down—he wasn’t a coward—and that meant he might get hurt.

She hurried to the car, set her carton down, caught hold of Jan’s arm. “Come on,” she said, “let’s get the rest of the groceries.”

“All right.”

But he hesitated, because Red was back near his master, circling again, his tail sawing the air, and both Mitch and the dog were between the station wagon and the store. Another man had joined the two women, Alix saw, drawn from Bob’s Barber Shop next door. She also saw Lillian Hilliard watching through the front window of the general store. The woman had been firm with the two fishermen earlier; why didn’t
she
do something to defuse this?

Mitch sat on his heels, put one hand on the dog’s collar. But his eyes were still on Jan. “You hurt my dog, damn you.”

“No I didn’t. Look at him. Does he act as if he’s hurt?”

Surprisingly, as if he felt as Alix did about avoiding a fight, Hod Barnett said, “He’s right, Mitch. Hell, Red’s not hurt.”

Mitch was silent, glaring. His hand moved protectively over the animal’s somewhat shabby coat. Alix watched him tensely—they were all watching him that way.

The frozen tableau lasted another three or four seconds. Then Mitch let go of the dog and stood up in slow movements. Some of his anger, Alix saw with relief, seemed to have dissipated.

“Yeah, all right,” he said to Jan. “But you listen, mister. Maybe where you come from it’s all right to kick another man’s dog, but not here, not in Hilliard. Don’t ever do it again, hear?”

Jan said without inflection, “I hear.”

Mitch turned abruptly and went across the street toward the Sea Breeze Tavern; Hod Barnett and the dog followed, Red now nipping at his master’s heels. The other three locals also stayed where they were, their expressions watchful, cold—accusing. Lillian Hilliard had vanished from the window of the store.

Alix let go of Jan’s arm. He bent over the tailgate and pushed the cartons inside with agitated movements that belied his calm exterior. Then he said, “I’ll get the other things,” and walked off to the store in a stiff, jerky stride.

Alix went around to the driver’s side. The three watchers moved then, too; the man returned to Bob’s Barber Shop and the women continued on to the store, their glances sweeping over the imitation-wood-paneled length of the new Ford. When they were past, one of them pointed at the rear license plate and said in a voice obviously intended to carry, “Califomians.”

Everything was said in that one contemptuous word. Some Oregonians, Alix knew, resented their neighbors to the south, looking scornfully upon the Golden State with its urban sprawl, its fast-paced and often eccentric lifestyles, its prosperity. It had never bothered her before; even the rash of bumper stickers a few years back-DON’T CALIFORMCATE OREGON-had amused her more than anything else. But this was different. This was personal.

When Jan returned with more cartons she slipped in behind the wheel, sat huddled inside her pea jacket. The overcast sky seemed even bleaker now, the village’s shabby buildings more uninviting—part of a foreign and incomprehensible landscape. And the wind, gusting in across the bay, was a bitter, icy cold.

No. Too flat, too pedantic. The Pharos must have been awesome; it deserved better than this. Sparkle. Flair. Make the student—excuse me, the
reader
—see the sun on the white marble, the smoke from its open fire, the glow radiating out to the Mediterranean sailor in his galley.

Jan ripped the sheet of paper from his old Underwood portable, crumpled it, chucked it at the cardboard carton he was using as a waste receptacle, and inserted a fresh sheet. His fingers felt cramped; he flexed them. He still wasn’t used to working on a manual typewriter—any kind of typewriter, for that matter. He had a secretary at school; she transcribed his dictated tapes on an IBM word processor.

All right. Try it again.

For God’s sake, no! Childish. Like a bad freshman composition. No one would publish this sort of drivel.

The pain intensified behind his eyes.

It was no longer sharp; it had modulated into that bulging ache again, as if the pressure might pop his eyes right out, roll them down his cheeks like sunstruck white marbles. Wait it out, that was all he could do. Just when he felt he could suffer it no longer, it would subside and he would begin to feel normal again for a few days. Then it would come back, as it had tonight, after a full week of relative peace, to remind him of what the future held. Sharp and pulsing. Dull and pulsing. Savage. Nagging. Bulging. That was the worst, the
bulging
—

Damn you! he thought suddenly, savagely, and drove the heels of his hands against his eyes. His vision blurred, shifted; he endured a panicky moment until it cleared again. Calm, he thought. Calm. He reached for his pipe, loaded it with McBaren’s, set fire to the tobacco.

On one comer of the table that served as his desk, the stack of finished manuscript pages caught his attention. He picked it up. Nineteen pages so far. Not bad, really, considering how much time in the week they’d been here he’d spent on housekeeping matters, on preparations for work on the light, on organizing his notes and research material. Introductory remarks, a prologue comprised of an edited-down version of Anderson’s taped reminiscences about his days as keeper of Washington’s Destruction Island Light, and a scant beginning for the general-history chapter. And now he could not seem to get past the Pharos of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

The title page seemed to stare back at him, mockingly.

He replaced the stack, got to his feet, and paced the room. The smoke from his pipe formed an undulant line, like marshy vapor, just below the low ceiling. He felt restless now, disinclined to work, disinclined to do anything and yet in need of movement, activity. After a time he stopped pacing and began to rummage manically through the file boxes of research materials he had brought from home. Photostats of old newspaper, magazine, and book articles. Books and pamphlets of utilitarian value, some of them quite rare—A. B. Johnson’s
The Modern Lighthouse Service,
for one, published by the U.S. Government in 1890. Annual reports of the U.S. Coast Guard. Departments of Treasury and Commerce lists of Lights and Fog-signals, 1900-1954. Lighthouse Service Bulletins, 1866-1939, and Lighthouse Board Reports, 1920-1939. Transcriptions of taped interviews with four men who had worked as lighthouse keepers in various parts of the country—one of them Anderson—and two others who had worked under George R. Putnam, U.S. Commissioner of Lighthouses in the 1930s. Copies of the
Journal of American History,
the New
England Historical Quarterly,
the
Oregon Historical Quarterly, National Geo
graphic, and several other publications—all with articles by him on various lighthouses and aspects of lighthouse history that he planned to incorporate into
Guardians of the Night
. An extra copy (why had be brought an extra copy?) of the small-press edition of his Ph.D. dissertation,
Lighthouses of the Upper New England Seaboard,
which in revised form would comprise from one-quarter to one-third of
Guardians.

He thumbed through some of the material, but the words seemed to blur together like ink under a stream of water. He paced some more. He sat down, pulled the sheet of paper out of the Underwood’s platen, rolled in another.

Bulging. Bulging.

On his feet again, pacing the room. It seemed to have contracted, the walls to have bent sharply inward. Claustrophobia—a byproduct of the pain, the tension, the restlessness. He had experienced it before; there was no use fighting it. Open space was what he needed. Fresh air, cold air.

He went out along the hall to the staircase, down into the living room. The place was still: Alix was in her studio with the door shut, working on the first of her illustrations for
Guardians
—the Pharos, her conception of what it must have been like. She had shown him the preliminary sketch earlier, after supper. Good, very good. So much better than the crap he’d written tonight.

In the middle of the living room, he hesitated. Alix. He felt a sudden need to go to her, talk to her, tell her what was happening to him. It was a need that came over him more and more often lately, and yet one that he could never quite act upon. In the past few years she’d changed so much. Not that he hadn’t been pleased about that. When he’d met her she had been at loose ends, not sure of who she was or what she wanted to do—needing someone like him to help give her life direction. She didn’t need him anymore; her decision to buy into the graphic arts firm next year proved that. What if she couldn’t or wouldn’t stay with a man who was totally dependent upon her?

He was afraid, and being afraid angered him and drove him deeper inside himself. He had always been self-reliant, had had to be. Wisconsin farm kids learned early on about the harsh realities of life. The early loss of his mother, the later truth about her disappearance, had taught him about pain; his father’s death while he was still at the university had left him completely on his own. He could deal with any sort of crisis alone. Even now. Especially now.

He went to the door, got it open, felt the cold sting of the wind as he walked out into the darkness. He had forgotten to put on his coat, he realized, but he did not want to go back inside yet. He moved away from the watch house, steered by the wind—across the grassy area on its inland side, around past the shed that housed the well, across humped, barren ground toward the cliffs on the north side of the headland, Wind-twisted cypress trees grew along the edge, half a dozen of them; he stopped alongside one, took hold of a low branch to steady himself against the pull of the wind.

Choppy sea, angry-looking in the dark. No lights anywhere, not even starlight. He looked down. The cliffs weren’t sheer there; the land fell away in a series of rolls and declivities to the boiling surf and the rocks fifty or sixty yards below. One of the declivities was clogged with driftwood, a whitish mass in the blackness. Bones of old ships, lost off Cape Despair. Old mariners too, perhaps. Dead things. Piles of old bones.