The sixty yards or so between the house and the parked station wagon were illuminated by the nightlight. Details close to the building-clumps of grass, the gravel of the path-stood out in sharp relief. Farther back, where the four men moved around in a ragged group, the shadows were longer and details were blurry, so that the figures had a kind of surreal, two-dimensional look.
Novotny was one of them. And Hod Barnett. And… Bonner? Yes, Seth Bonner, jumping around, letting out war whoops-drunk. All of them lynch-mob drunk. The fourth man was half-turned away from the window, but after a moment he shouted something and pivoted, and Jan recognized the village handyman, Adam Reese. There was a long-barreled rifle in Reese’s hands, cradled across his chest military-fashion. Light gleamed off its metal surfaces. It was the only weapon Jan could see, but that didn’t mean the rest of them weren’t armed with handguns.
Then Reese swung the weapon up, aimed it at the house, aimed it straight at the kitchen window as if he knew Jan was there watching. Jan was already falling away, throwing his hands up over his head, when Reese fired. Glass burst above him and the bullet slashed through, screeched and thudded into the metal door of the refrigerator. Shards rained down, one of the sharp edges opening a stinging cut on the back of his left hand.
In the living room Alix was shrieking, “Jan! Jan!”
“I’m all right, stay there. Get on the phone-call the sheriff. Hurry!”
His glasses were askew; he pushed them back into place and scuttled away from the sink, cutting knees and palms on the broken glass, ignoring the pain. The pantry door… was it locked? He couldn’t remember. Locked doors wouldn’t keep them out, not for long, but just a few minutes might mean everything to Alix and him. On his feet again, he stumbled over the big carton of pots and pans and dishes she’d left on the floor, almost fell, regained his footing again.
One of the upstairs windows burst, the breaking-glass sounds lost in another echoing report from Adam Reese’s rifle.
Jan’s mouth was full of thick brassy-tasting saliva as he stumbled down the steps into the cloakroom. He got the pantry door open, groped his way across to the outside door, grasped the knob. Locked. But the fact brought only a small, fleeting relief. He pivoted away from the door, staggered back into the kitchen.
“Jan!”
In a crouch he moved over into the doorway, saw the shape of Alix come out of the darkness, felt her hands clutch at his arms.
“What is it? What happened?”
“The phone… it doesn’t work. It’s dead, Jan, the line is dead!”
Alix
“What are we going to do?”
The sound of her own voice frightened her even more than she already was: it trembled, wobbled, verged on a slow-building scream. Her chest was constricted, felt as though it might burst. Fear pounded a frantic rhythm in the hollow of her throat.
“Don’t panic, for God’s sake.”
“They must have cut the telephone wires…”
“If we panic, it’s all over. You know that as well as I do. Stay calm.”
She took several deep breaths with her mouth open wide; the last thing she needed now was to start hyperventilating. Outside she could hear shouts, whoops, lunatic laughter; she shut her ears against the sounds. And some of the constriction left her chest, the rising terror checked and then began to abate. The wild moment was over. She had her control back again.
“I’m okay,” she said, and her voice no longer trembled on the edge of a shriek. “Better now. How many of them are there?”
“Four. Novotny, Barnett, Reese, and Seth Bonner. All of them drunk.”
“Have they all got guns?”
“Reese has a rifle; he’s the one who’s been shooting. I couldn’t tell about the others.”
Reese… that evil, smirking little man. She suppressed a shiver, heard herself say, “We’ve got to protect ourselves.”
“With what?”
“Knives. Butcher knives.”
“Knives won’t be much good against four armed men.”
“They might not all be armed. Jan, we’ve got to have some kind of weapons…”
“Okay. You’re right.”
He put his arm around her, turned her into the kitchen, bent her low under the sill of the window. Most of the glass had been ripped out of it by the rifle bullet, she saw; only a few shards, like broken snaggleteeth, remained in the frame. Fog blew in through the opening in gray wisps. Fog, and the icy wind, and the loud drunken voices of the four men out there.
“Did you pack the knives?” Jan said against her ear.
“Yes. In the carton with the pots and pans.”
They found the carton, squatted beside it, began to rummage inside. Alix found the elongated newspaper-wrapped bundle that contained the butcher and carving knives. She pulled it from the carton, started to unwrap it.
Outside, Reese’s rifle cracked again. Almost instantaneously there was a violent whooshing explosion-a thunderous roar that seemed to rock the house. And a mushrooming flash of light and flame turned the night beyond the broken window as bright as noon.
Mitch Novotny
Adam had blown up the Ryersons’ station wagon. Drawn a bead on it with that 30.06 of his, put a bullet in the gas tank, and blown it sky-high.
They’d all backed off when they saw what he was going to do, Mitch dragging Hod by one arm. But the heat of the explosion had seared him anyway, driven him farther back; he could still feel it hot and pulsing against his face, still hear the thudding echo of the blast. The fireball had rolled up fifty feet or more, boiling through the fog, staining it bright orange, bright red at the edges like blood. The fire was still burning hot; in the center of it, the car was nothing but a black cinder shape. The flames hadn’t reached any of the buildings yet, but the garage and the pumphouse were close by, and the wind was already swirling sparks like pinwheels through the darkness and the mist. The outbuildings could torch off any minute. The lighthouse too… with Ryerson and his wife in there.
Adam and Bonner were watching the car burn, Adam hopping from one foot to the other, Bonner letting out whoops like a goddamn Indian. Bonner was tetched in the head, they should never have brought him along, but Adam… it was like he’d gone crazy, too. All the shooting he’d done, blowing up the car like that, and now he was laughing, head thrown back and the laughter bubbling out of him like this was fun. like it was a party or something.
Christ, Mitch thought, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Come out here, get Ryerson, force him to talk, take him to Coos Bay-do what the fucking sheriff and state troopers wouldn’t do. But this… all this… this wasn’t the way it was supposed to be.
His head hurt; he felt woozy, sick to his stomach. Shouldn’t have drunk all that whiskey. Shouldn’t have come out here at all. But it seemed like the right thing to do… nobody else was doing anything, were they? Poor Mandy lying dead in her coffin… what Ryerson had done to the other girl… and Red, too… it was the thing to do, goddamn it. Ryerson was an animal, a mad dog. They had every right to be here, doing this. Every right…
“Ryerson! We’re coming in, Ryerson! You can’t hide, you can’t get away!”
It was Adam doing the yelling, just like before. Why? What was the sense in that? Don’t talk about it, just do it.
“Don’t talk about it, Adam,” he called over the thrumming beat of the fire, “let’s just do it.”
“Damn right we’re gonna do it.”
“Bust down the door,” Bonner yelled. “That’s it, that’s what we’ll do, ain’t it, Adam? Bust down the door.”
“The door or one of the windows. Mitch, run back to the van, get that big six-cell of mine. They ain’t got guns but maybe they got something else, knives or something. We don’t want him coming out of the dark at us.”