“I won’t stop you.”
“You won’t shoot us.”
“No. Of course not.”
“You won’t call out or make trouble of any kind.”
Thurston shook his head: no.
“When we leave here,” Sam said, “you’ll go back to the lilac bush. You’ll forget that we ever came out of the house. Is that clear?”
“Yes. ”
“I want you to forget that we’ve had this little talk. When the four of us leave here, I want you to forget every word that’s been spoken between us. Can you do that, Harry?”
“Sure. I’ll forget that we talked, that I saw any of you just now, all of it, like you said.”
For a human robot, for an honest-to-God zombie, Paul thought, he seemed damned relaxed.
“You’ll think we’re still inside,” Sam said.
Thurston stared at the back of the general store.
“You’ll guard the place exactly as you were doing a few minutes ago,” Sam said.
“Guard it… That’s what Bob told me to do.”
“Then do it,” Sam said. “And forget you’ve seen us.”
Obediently, Harry Thurston returned to the man-size niche in the wall of lilac bushes. He stood with his feet apart. He held the shotgun in both hands, parallel to the ground, prepared to raise it and fire within a second if faced with a sudden threat.
“Incredible,” Jenny said.
“Looks like a storm trooper,” Sam said wearily. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
Jenny followed him.
Paul took hold of Rya’s icy hand.
Her face drawn, a haunted look in her eyes, she squeezed his hand and said, “Will it be all right again?”
“Sure. Everything will be fine before much longer,” he told her, not certain if that was the truth or another lie.
They went west, across the rear lawns of the neighboring houses, walking fast and hoping they wouldn’t be seen.
With every step Paul expected someone to shout at them. And in spite of the manner in which Harry Thurston had behaved, he also expected to hear a shotgun blast close behind him, much too close behind him, inches from his shoulder blades: one sudden apocalyptic roar and then an endless silence.
Halfway down the block they came to the back of St. Lukes, the town’s all-denominational church. It was a freshly painted, neatly kept rectangular white frame structure on a brick-faced foundation. There was a five-story-high bell tower at the front of the building, out on the Main Street side.
Sam tried the rear door and found it unlocked. They slipped inside, one at a time.
For two or three minutes they stood in the narrow, musty, windowless foyer, and waited to see if Harry Thurston or anyone else would follow them.
No one did.
“Small blessings,” Jenny said.
Sam led them into the chamber behind the altar. That room was even darker than the foyer. They accidentally knocked over a rack full of choir gowns — and stood very still until the echo of the crash had faded away, until they were certain that they hadn’t revealed themselves.
Holding hands, forming a human chain, they stumbled out of that room and onto the altar platform. Because the storm clouds filtered the day into twilight before it was filtered again by the leaded stained-glass windows, the church proper was only marginally brighter than the room behind it. Nevertheless, there was sufficient light to allow them to break the chain; and they followed Sam along the center aisle, between the two ranks of pews, without having to feel their way as if they were blind people in a strange house.
At the rear of the nave, on the left-hand side, Sam pulled open a door. Beyond lay an enclosed spiral staircase. Sam went first; Jenny went next, then Rya.
Paul stood on the bottom step, staring out at the shadowy church for a minute or two. His revolver was ready in his right hand. When the big room remained silent and deserted, he closed the stairwell door and went up to join the others.
The top of the bell tower was a nine-foot-square platform. The bell — one yard wide at the mouth — was at the center of the platform, of course, suspended from the highest point of the arched ceiling. A chain was welded to the rim of the bell and trailed through a small hole in the floor, down to the base of the tower where the toller could tug on it. The walls were only four feet high, open from there to the ceiling. A white pillar rose at each corner, supporting the peaked, slate-shingled roof. Because the roof overhung the walls by four feet on all sides, the rain hadn’t come in through the open spaces; and the belfry platform was dry.
When he reached the head of the stairs, Paul got on his hands and knees. People seldom looked up as they hurried about their business, especially when they were in a familiar place; however, there was no reason to risk being seen. He crawled around the bell to the opposite side of the platform.
Jenny and Rya were sitting on the floor, their backs to the half-wall. The.22 rifle lay at Jenny’s side. She was talking to the girl in a low voice, telling her a joke or a story, trying to help her ease her tensions and overcome some of her grief. Jenny glanced at Paul, smiled, but kept her attention focused on Rya.
That should be my job, Paul thought. Helping Rya. Reassuring her and comforting her, being with her.
And then he thought, No. For the time being, your job is to prepare yourself to kill at least one man. Maybe two or three. Maybe as many as half a dozen.
Suddenly he wondered how the violence past and the violence yet to come would affect his relationship with his daughter. Knowing he had killed several men, would Rya fear him as she now feared Bob Thorp? Knowing he was capable of the ultimate brutal act, would she ever be at ease with him again? Death had taken his wife and his son. Would alienation take his daughter from him?
Sam was on his knees, peering over the belfry wall.
Deeply disturbed but aware that this wasn’t the time to worry about more than a few hours of the future, easing in beside Sam, Paul looked eastward, to his left. He could see Edison’s General Store half a block away. Karkov’s service station and garage. The houses in the last section of town. The baseball diamond on the meadow near the river. At the end of the valley, near the bend in the highway, a police car was angled across both lanes.
“Roadblock. ”
Sam said, “I’ve seen it.”
“Salsbury does have us penned up.”
“And right now he’s probably wondering why the hell we haven’t tried to call the cops or leave Black River.”
To Paul’s right was the main part of town. The square. Ultman’s Cafe with its pair of enormous black oak trees. The municipal building. Beyond the square, more lovely houses: brick houses and stone houses and white gingerbread Gothic houses and trim little bungalows. A couple of shops with striped awnings out in front. The telephone company office. St. Margaret Mary’s. The cemetery. The Union Theater with its old-fashioned marquee. And then the road to the mill. The entire panorama, so recently scrubbed by the storm, looked crisp and bright and quaint — and too innocent to contain the evil that he knew it harbored.
“You still think Salsbury’s holed up in the municipal building?” Paul asked.
“Where else?”
“I guess so.”
“The chief’s office is the logical command center.”
Paul looked at his watch. “A quarter past five.”
“We’ll wait here until dark,” Sam said. “Nine o’clock or thereabouts. Then we’ll sneak across the street, get past his guards with the code phrase, and reach him before he’s seen us coming.”
“It sounds so easy.”
“It will be,” Sam said.
Lightning flashed like a fuse and thunder exploded and rain like shrapnel clattered on the tower roof and on the streets below.