The Lighthouse

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!”

Alix

“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.”