The Lighthouse

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.”