'What're you standing around here for? You can see the whole town's going to go up!'
Jack Coleclaw was the first of them to speak. 'Let it burn,' he said.
'Ashes to ashes,' Penrose said.
'For Christ's sake, it's liable to spread to some of your homes-'
'That won't happen,' Ella Bloom said. 'There's no wind tonight.'
Somebody else said, 'Besides, we dug firebreaks.'
'You dug firebreaks-that's terrific. Goddamn it, look at me! Can't you see I was in one of those burning buildings? Didn't any of you think of that possibility?'
'We didn't see your car anywhere,' Thatcher said. 'We thought you'd left town.'
'Yeah, sure.'
'What were you doing in one of the ghosts? You start the fire, maybe?'
'No, I didn't start it. But somebody sure as hell did.'
'Is that so?'
'He was trying to kill me, the same way he killed Allan Randall in Redding. He damned near broke my head with a board and then he locked me in a room he used in the hotel and took my car and hid it somewhere. When he came back he torched the building.'
Coleclaw said in a flat, hard voice, 'Who you talking about, mister?'
'The only person who isn't here right now, Mr. Coleclaw, that's who I'm talking about. Your son Gary.'
The words seemed to have no impact on him. Or on any of the others. They all kept right on staring at me through their mummers' masks. And none of them made a sound until Coleclaw said, 'Gary didn't do any of those things. He didn't.'
'He did them, all right.'
'Why? Why would he?'
'You know the answer to that. You all hate the Munroe Corporation, so he hates them too. And he decided to do something about it.'
'Gary's slow, mister. You understand that?'
'I understand it. But being retarded doesn't excuse him setting fires and committing murder and attempted murder. Where is he? Why isn't he here with the rest of you?'
He didn't answer me.
'All right,' I said, 'have it your way. But I'm going to the county sheriff as soon as I find my car. You'll have to turn Gary over to him.'
'No,' Coleclaw said.
'You don't have a choice-'
'The law won't take him away from me,' a thin, harried-looking woman said shrilly. Coleclaw's wife. 'I won't let them. None of us will, you hear?'
And that was when I understood the rest of it, the whole truth-the source of the bad vibes I had gotten earlier, the source of all the hostility. It was not any sudden insight, or even what Mrs. Coleclaw had just said; it was something in her face, and in her husband's, and in each of the other faces. Something I had been too distraught to see until now.
'You knew all along,' I said to the pack of them. 'All of you. You knew Gary set those fires; you knew he killed Randall. A cover-up, a conspiracy of silence-that's why none of you would talk to me.'
'It was an accident,' Mrs. Coleclaw said. 'Gary didn't mean to hurt anybody-'
'Hush up, Clara,' her husband told her in a sharp voice. Thatcher said, 'No matter what happened to Randall, he had it coming. That's the way we look at it. The bastard had it coming.'
'How about me?' I said. The rage was thick in my throat; I had to struggle to keep from shouting the words. 'Did I have it coming too? You don't know me, you don't know anything about me. But you were going to let him kill me the way he killed Randall.'
'That's not true,' Coleclaw said. 'We didn't know you were still here. I told you, we thought you'd left town.'
'Even if you didn't know, you could have guessed it. You could have come looking to make sure.'
Silence.
'Why?' I asked them. 'I can understand the Coleclaws doing it, but why the rest of you?'
'Outsiders like you don't care about us,' Ella Bloom said. 'But we care about each other; we watch out for our own.'
'More than neighbors, more than friends,' Penrose said. 'Family. No one here lies to me. No one here thinks I'm ugly.'
I looked at him, at the rest of them, and the skin along my back began to crawl. Thatcher had lifted his shovel, so that he was holding it in both hands in front of him; one of the men I didn't know had done the same thing. Coleclaw's big hands were knotted into fists. All of their faces were different now in the firelight, and what I felt coming off them was something primitive and deadly, a faint gathering aura of violence.
The same aura a lynch mob generates.
Some of the fear I had known at the hotel came back, diluting my anger. I felt suddenly that if I moved, if I tried to pass through them or around them, they would attack me in the same witless, savage fashion a lynch mob attacks its victims. With shovels, with fists-out of control. If that happened, I could not fight all of them; and by the time they came to their senses and realized what they'd done, I would be a dead man.
I had never run away from anything or anyone in my life, but I had an impulse now to turn and flee. I controlled it, telling myself to stay calm, use reason. Telling myself I was wrong about them, they were just average citizens with misplaced loyalties caught up in a foolish crusade-not criminals, not a mob; that they would not do anything to me as long as I did nothing to provoke them.
Time seemed to grind to a halt. Behind me, I could hear the heavy crackling rhythm of the fire. There was sweat on my body, cold and clammy. But I kept my expression blank, so they wouldn't see my fear, and I groped for words to say to them that would let me get out of this.
I was still groping when headlights appeared on the road to the south, coming down out of the pass between the cliffs.
The tension in me seemed to let go, like a rubber band snapping. I said, 'Somebody's coming!' and threw my arm up and pointed. Coleclaw and two or three of the others swiveled their heads. And then the tension in them seemed to break, too; somebody said, 'God!' and they all began to move at once. Shuffling their feet, turning their bodies-the mob starting to come apart like something fragile and clotted splitting into fragments.
The headlights probed straight down the road at a good clip. When they neared the bunch of us in the meadow Thatcher threw down his shovel and walked away, jerkily, through the grass. The others went after him, in ragged little groups of two and three. I was the only one standing still when the car slid to a stop twenty feet away on the road.
It was Kerry. And Raymond Treacle. They piled out and came hurrying my way. Her step faltered when she got a good look at me. 'My God, are you all right?'
'Yeah,' I said. 'Yeah, I'm all right.'
'What happened here? That fire…you look as though you…'
'I'm okay. It's over now.'
'You didn't come back,' she said. 'I got worried, I asked Ray to drive me here to find out…For heaven's sake, what happened?'
I looked back at the raging fire; then I looked up at the line of people trudging slowly toward Coleclaw's mercantile. 'Cooperville just died,' I said.
8
W ithin five minutes, Treacle was driving us back to Weaverville. I did not want to stay there among the ghosts old and new even long enough to hunt for my car.
The burns on my back and legs, the lacerations on my hands, were not serious enough to require medical
