She kept moving, groping along the pegboard. A broom hung there, and a mop. A row of smaller toots-pliers, screwdrivers. She took the largest of the screwdrivers, tucked it into the back pocket of her jeans. Hardly adequate, but at least it was something sharp.
Behind her Cassie had begun to whine. “I didn’t want any of this to happen! I just wanted to be left alone!”
Alix’s fingers touched something more sharply pointed than the screwdriver-hedge clippers, heavy iron with solid wood handles. She felt for the hook, timing her movements to Cassie’s now-loud rantings. Took the clippers, slid them upward and out The metal hook slipped from the pegboard, fell to the concrete floor with a ringing metallic noise. Alix caught her breath. Lowered the clippers, brought them up in front of her.
Cassie had stopped speaking and was coming her way quickly. But she misjudged the distance and crashed into the pegboard a couple of feet away. Tools rattled, something else clattered to the floor. Cassie gave a dismayed cry; Alix felt the woman’s arms flail, lashing out at the air around her.
Gripping the hedge clippers by their handles, she reeled backward, her feet slipping on an oil slick. In the next instant she slammed into the double doors. Over by the wall, Cassie was grunting and thrashing about. Alix turned, threw her weight against the doors, felt them buckle outward but not come open. She heard someone else grunting and realized it was herself.
She lunged at the doors again, and again they bowed but held. Through the foot-wide crack that appeared between them, she could see moving wisps of fog-a glimpse of freedom.
Now Cassie was on her feet. Coming toward her. She tried to dodge, but the woman collided with her; Alix felt the gun in her hand, smashed at her wrist, but didn’t have enough leverage to dislodge the weapon. Cassie had no leverage, either, when she tried to use the pistol as a club. Instead, she managed to loop an arm around Alix’s neck, began squeezing.
Alix’s breath came shorter; the pressure caused blackness to swirl behind her eyes. She dropped the clippers, clawed at Cassie’s arm. The gallery owner’s grip was steel-hard. Alix’s legs broke at the knees and she sagged against Cassie, and they fell together against the doors.
Weakened by the previous battering, whatever had held the doors together now broke with a snapping sound and they flew apart. Cassie’s arm pulled free of Alix’s neck as they both toppled onto the gravel outside. Alix rolled away, pawing at her throat, gasping. When she came up she saw Cassie trying to scramble to her knees; the woman seemed dazed, but the gun was still clutched in her hand.
The raw edge of panic cut at Alix again. She tried to get to her feet-and saw the hedge clippers lying in the doorway. Without thinking, she crawled to them on hands and knees, snatched them up. At the same time she gained her feet and turned, Cassie pushed onto her knees, lifted the pistol, and took wobbly aim at Alix’s body.
Alix lunged forward with the clippers upraised. Brought them slashing down in a desperate chop at Cassie’s head just as the gallery owner pulled the trigger.
Jan
He didn’t remember running the two miles from the abandoned van to the junction, or turning off the cape road onto the county road. But the county road was where he was now, heading toward the village, his legs cramped, his breath coming in little wheezing pants, a band of pain across the bridge of his nose. Another blackout…
He couldn’t see very well, and at first he thought it was the too-familiar distortion of his vision; but then he realized it was only that his glasses were coated with mist. He took them off, squinting into the darkness ahead. Where was Alix? Where were the authorities? Why hadn’t he met someone in all this time?
Ahead of him, he realized then, were the gallery and house that belonged to Alix’s artist friend, Cassie Lang. Alix’s friend… that must have been where she had gone for help. The house was ablaze with light-and as he drew closer, he saw someone on the porch, standing there as if waiting, looking his way. A woman… Cassie Lang?
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.
Epilogue
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
