end to all the trouble.”
He shook his head in a stubborn way and didn’t say anything.
In the dusk’s stillness I heard the sound of an approaching car, and when I glanced out at the road I saw a Land Rover coming toward us from down by the fork. Hugh Penrose’s, probably, I thought. And it was: it came rattling in on the other side of the pump, and Penrose hopped out and hurried to where Coleclaw and I stood.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” he said to Coleclaw. “I was writing and I lost track of the time.” Then he took a good look at me; recognition put a stain of anger on his tragic face. “You!” he said, and the word was a bitter accusation. “You lied to me the other day, you were just trying to get information out of me. You and that woman you were with. ”
“I’m sorry about that, Mr. Penrose,” I said. “I didn’t intend-”
“Liar. Liar!”
Coleclaw said, “Hugh, why don’t you go on inside. Tell the others I’ll be in directly.”
“The meeting hasn’t started, then?”
“No, not yet. You go on. ”
“All right,” Penrose said. He glared at me again with his mean, unhappy little eyes and then stalked off toward the house.
“Anybody in particular you’re here to see tonight?” Coleclaw asked me.
“No. Nobody in particular.”
“They’re all inside, you were right about that.”
“I’m not here to see anybody,” I said.
“Why’d you come then?”
“If you don’t confide in me, Mr. Coleclaw, why should I confide in you?”
We exchanged silent stares for a time in the fading daylight. Then, abruptly, he turned and went off after Penrose and disappeared around the far corner of the mercantile.
I glanced over at the store entrance. Gary Coleclaw wasn’t there anymore behind the screen. Somewhere out back I could hear a dog yapping-the fat brown-and-white one, no doubt. Otherwise I was standing there in silence, in a ruffly little night wind that had sprung up and that raised a few goosebumps on my bare forearms.
Or maybe it wasn’t the wind at all that had raised the goosebumps. I did not like the feeling that was rustling around inside me. There was too much hostility here, and it was too intense. I thought I finally had a handle on what lay at the root of it, but I needed proof, and getting proof meant staying on for a while now that I was here. But not too long. Do what I’d come to do and get out quick and let the authorities handle the rest of it.
I got back into the car and swung it in a loop past the mercantile’s facade, so I could take another look at Coleclaw’s house. Nobody was visible outside. And if any of them were watching me from inside, the curtained front windows hid them.
When I got to the fork I took the branch that led in among the ghosts. I parked in front of the building that carried the UNION DRUG STORE sign, got my flashlight out of its clip under the dash, and locked the doors. For a moment I stood beside the car, listening. The heavy stillness remained unbroken except for small murmurings and whisperings in the high grasses nearby. The buildings themselves loomed up black and grave-silent-and again I fancied them as waiting things, shades embracing the cloak of night. Then I thought: The hell with that, don’t make it any worse than it is. And I went down a narrow alley between the drug store and the meat market, along the path at the rear.
The back door of the hotel still stood hanging open on one hinge. I walked inside. The place had a murky, eerie feel to it; hardly any of the twilight penetrated through the chinks in the outer walls. I switched on the flashlight, followed its beam across the rough whipsawn floor.
The light picked up the skeletal remains of the sheet-iron stove, the steel safe door, some of the other detritus, then finally found the collapsed pigeonhole shelf and the door in the wall behind it. I depressed the latch and swung the door open. Mica particles and iron pyrites and flecks of gold gleamed in the flash beam when I played it across the tier of shelves and their collection of arrowheads and random chunks of rock.
I moved over there. Some of the rocks had designs in them, just as I remembered. Bryophyte fossils like the ones in the stone cup I’d found.
With my left hand I picked up one that looked to be the same sort of mineral as the cup-travertine, Treacle had called it-and pocketed it. Then I swept the room with the light, looking for something that might confirm the rest of my suspicions. The Coleman lantern, the stacks of National Geographic, the cot with its straw-tick mattress told me nothing. But under the cot I found a small spiral notebook, and when I fished it out I saw that it was all I needed. It had a name in it, and a crudely drawn map, and together they were hard evidence.
Putting the notebook into another pocket, I turned and started out. The light, probing ahead, showed me nothing but the edge of the desk and the pigeonhole shelf and dim shadow-shapes beyond. I took one step through the doorway — and something moved to my right, rearing up out of the gloom behind the desk.
That was the only warning I had, and it wasn’t enough. He came rushing toward me with something upraised in his hand, something that registered on my mind as a length of board, and he swung it at me in a sweeping horizontal arc like a baseball bat. I dropped the flashlight, threw my arm up too late.
The board whacked across the left side of my head, and there was a flash of bright pain, and I went down and out.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I awoke to pain. And to heat and a rushing, crackling noise that seemed to come from somewhere close by. And to the acrid smell of smoke.
Fire!
The word surged through my mind even before I was fully conscious. It drove me up onto one knee, a movement that sent pain through my head and neck; I was aware of a numbness, a swelling along the left side of my skull. I had my eyes open but I couldn’t see anything. It was dark wherever I was-dark and hot and filling up with thickening clouds of smoke.
Panic cut away at me. I fought it instinctively, and some of the grogginess faded out of my mind and let me think and act. I shoved onto my feet, managed to stay upright even though my knees felt as though they had been vulcanized. I still could not see anything except vague outlines in the blackness. But I could hear the thrumming beat of the fire, a frightening sound that seemed to be growing louder, coming closer.
The smoke started me coughing, and that led to several seconds of dry retching before I could get my breathing under control. I took a couple of sliding steps with my hands out in front of me like a blind man; my knee hit something, there was a faint scraping sound as the something yielded and slid away; I almost fell. Bent at the waist, I groped with my hands. The cot, the straw-tick mattress: I was back in the room behind the hotel desk.
Coughing again, fighting the panic, I slid my feet around the cot and kept moving until my fingers brushed against wood, touched rock-the shelving, the collection of junk. I moved crabwise along it to my left, toward where I remembered the door to be. And found it, found the latch Locked.
I threw my weight against the door, a little wildly, half out of control. The wood was old and dry; it gave some, groaning in its frame. I got a grip on myself again and lunged at the door a second time, a third. The wood began to splinter in the middle and around the jamb. The fourth time I slammed into it, the latch gave and so did one of the hinges; the door flew outward and I stumbled through, caught myself against the edge of the hotel desk.
The whole rear wall was on fire. So were parts of the side walls and balcony.
The smoke roiled thickly in the enclosure; each breath I took seared my lungs. There was another smell out here, too-the faint sweetish odor of coal oil. He’d doused the walls with it, all of them probably, so the fire would spread fast and hot…
Coupled with the fear and the pain and the smoke, the combined smells made me dizzy, nauseous. I pushed away from the desk and staggered toward the front entrance; tripped over something and fell, skidding on hands and knees, scraping skin off my palms. Flames licked along the front wall, raced across the floor. As old and
