Lightfall (15 page)

The first one pranced up next to the druggist and cut him with a chop—the side of the hand to the throat. He crumpled before his smile quite faded, and she brought a knee to the bridge of his nose, driving it straight to his brain. All of them had these Oriental skills, wonderfully perfected. The Italian restaurateur drew the 5 iron like a saber out of his bag. He waved it over the two girls nearest to him and made as if to bring it down on the dark one's head. She did a quick twirl, and with an eerie sweep of her hands, snatched the club from the air. Her right foot smashed his kneecap so he fell, and she was on him.

The Buick dealer and the realtor turned and ran, abandoning their weekend friends. The two remaining women crouched and sprang in a standing leap, rising limb for limb like a mirror image. They connected with the men, smack between the shoulder blades. The men pitched forward on their faces. Now all four were down—stunned, unconscious, bleeding from the ears. One looked awfully dead, in fact. The chanting never stopped, not even for the drawing of a breath.

Out of nowhere, a knife was produced. The thinnest of the women held it up, and a sweet melodic sigh went rippling through the droning noise. The flash of the silvery blade in the sun seemed to seize them with a marvelous idea. As if to undo a favor, each began to tear at the trousers of her golfer. Belt and button and fly, they fumbled and ripped with a wild impatience. Only when the genitals stood revealed, all four, did an instant's pink of shyness pass among them. The druggist's girl almost seemed to titter. Then, just as suddenly, they each took hold of their proper victims, gripping each one like a chicken's neck as they waited their turn with the weapon.

The thin one cut the realtor through in a single swipe and flung aside the offending member as if it were diseased. She reached the knife across to her near companion. The sleeve of her robe was doused with blood and her hand was a horrible red, but already she seemed to forget what the whole thing had been for. She rose and drifted down the lawn, back the way she came.

The second one was not so swift. She had no strength for the task at hand, and the Buick dealer's tool was tough as gristle. Then something in the man came shivering awake, and a whinny of a scream bubbled from his throat. She had to clutch the knife like a dagger and plunge it into his heart. Again. Again. Finally he was still, but by then she'd clearly had enough. She leaped to her feet and traipsed away, trying to laugh it all off. The knife stood poised in his breastbone.

They couldn't do anything right. The third girl drew the knife like a quill pen out of an inkwell. Then with an idle hand she etched a cross on the pale of the druggist's abdomen. The fourth girl had to yank it from her and cut the last two phalluses herself. Chopping them off at the root, first one and then the other, like stalks in a dead-end garden. She flung the knife aside. Then she set the two organs back in place, each against its bloody stump.

She turned and grabbed her friend, who was eating the last of the doughnuts. They fled off the tee, down the long sward of the fairway toward the others, already lost in the trees. And not a moment too soon: a foursome was on its way up from the thirteenth hole, ribbing each other about the par five dogleg just ahead. The sun was smoked with morning fog. The hills were the vaguest blue.

Six hundred miles to the north-northwest, it had already snowed in Highland Park. Everything wore an ice skin. The light gleamed liquid across the yards. At six
A.M.
there were people up, but not that many. These were white-collar types, with bankers' hours. Their dogs were ridden with gout, from a diet of table scraps. All their children were off at school, getting A's in higher values. Were it not for the snow, it might not even have been Chicago that was forty minutes south. Seattle, Atlanta, San Diego—they all had a Highland Park. In a word, it was upper. The zoning did not countenance exceptions.

Yet, in spite of all the codes, you had a problem like the Bartletts. They lived in the requisite fieldstone house, on Cheever Circle, the corner lot. They had a copse of dogwood, a Country Squire, a milkman who still delivered and a split-rail fence all round. Number 86. Their oldest two were normal, but the baby, Dean, was a source of constant shame. In his senior year at Northwestern—with a seven-ninety on his law boards and a three-eight in history—he had dropped out cold. He attached himself to the band of crazies at the Revelation Covenant and severed all communications, family or otherwise. A pall of failure hung about the house on Cheever Circle. After twenty years of things getting better every day, the lights had all stopped turning green.

The Chicago branch of the church, housed in a bankrupt junior college, was powered by a mix of Valium and Eskatrol. As a consequence, the cultists here were so skinny they looked like they had a tapeworm. Luckily, the Dexadrine edge of the Eskatrol had them laughing all day long, speeding around to do God's work wherever they turned it up. They sifted the city dumps for salvage. They picked the lice from one another's scalps. The lower the work, the louder they sang. Their violent thinness befit the saintly plainness of their lives. The Valium, all ground up in their nightly juice, laid them to rest like a little death and let them rise the morning after as if they'd gone to heaven.

Just now they were being audited for illegal collection of welfare funds. About two hundred weekly checks were issued to their address, mostly to people who didn't exist except as names on the Covenant rolls. Which is where the Bartlett boy came in. With his marvelous head for figures, he was sat in a swivel chair in the office and ordered to doctor the books. His Eskatrol was doubled, his Valium cut in half. He didn't sleep for weeks. He chewed through pencils like a termite. His heart beat fast as a hummingbird's.

After a while, the columns of figures dancing down the page took on a chesslike inwardness. He felt he was on the brink of stating some universal truth, in the form of a simple number pure as the name of God.

No wonder he got it into his head to go home: he needed a bit of vacation. He walked the whole way, five solid hours. Arriving at Cheever Circle about ten minutes after six, he strode past block after block of manicured houses. His robe billowed behind him as if he were a prophet. He held the perfect integer in his head. Either the millennium was at hand, or he had a burning wish to tell it to his mother. He carried no weapon. He wore no shoes.

Still, they would have kissed him like a prodigal. They would have had a party if he'd let them. Ray and Irene, his father and mother, had waited seven months for any word at all. So when he turned and strode up the driveway, it was strange that they didn't come running out. When he walked up the steps and flung the door wide, they should have been dancing for joy in the hall.

“Your eggs are ready,” called a woman's voice from the kitchen.

He lumbered up the stairs, crazy to get to his room. At the top, he collided with a man in a tie who was rounding the corner to go and eat before his eggs got cold. His father, he thought—except he'd gotten younger.

“What the—” sputtered the older man. “Who the hell are
you?
”

Dean Bartlett did not wait to say. He pushed past and crossed the hall and threw open his bedroom door. Two little girls in bunk beds, wakened by the noise, sat up in terror. They had never seen him before in their lives. No more than their father had, who shouted down the stairs for his wife to call the cops. They had only lived in this house since August. They had scarcely met their neighbors—at number 86.

For this was the house next door. The Bartlett boy wasn't home at all. His brain was that far off, from three weeks on the ceiling. He had two sisters himself, in fact—twenty-four and thirty—and he somehow got it into his head that they'd all gone back in time and left him. It made him feel quite murderous. His sisters had stolen his room, before he was even born. This strange and violent man who beat him about the head, demanding that he leave, was the father who would not ever hold him. He thought: if he could only stop these people here, he would never have to come into this world at all.

So he started to rip the place apart. While the terrified man in the tie carried his daughters out as if his house was burning, Dean Bartlett tore the mirror off the wall. He cracked it across the nightstand, flung it down on the floor, and drummed his frostbitten feet till the surface was crazed all over. Then he snatched up a half-scale rocking chair and smashed the dormer window. Frantically picking things up, he heaved out onto the lawn their toys, their dolls, their stupid little dresses. He grunted like an animal. Dean Bartlett was past the point of feeling danger.

So oblivious was he that the man he had trespassed against had all the time in the world to get his gun.

It was over before the first siren sounded. With the .38 he had promised his wife he would never use, he advanced to meet the darkness. The raving boy in the orange robe was tumbling the bedclothes out the window. He shot him point-blank in the back of the head. It was simple self-defense. The body fell like a sack of goods, the folds of the garment swirling about him. The blood bloomed like a halo around his head.

Across the side lawn, at number 86, the bedroom shades went up. Ray and Irene pressed against the window, trying to see what it was without getting involved. The neighbors, it seemed, had troubles of their own. A thief perhaps, or the wife was faithless. Look at the crap all over their lawn. Like pigs. Then the cops drew up, and the Bartletts' shades came rattling down.

In Pittsburgh, it was a former medical student. He sneaked into County General and went on a rampage, pulling the tubes in Intensive Care. In Buffalo, it was a baby's funeral. Two bald cultists stood and sang songs till a gravedigger beat them back with a shovel. In Fort Lauderdale, a naked one with long red hair threw herself into an open brazier where a spit of chickens was slowly turning.

It wasn't so much the body count. For the most part, the cultists themselves were the ones who were maimed and strangled. In every case, you could track down a culprit and toss him in jail till he rotted. The problem lay in the madness. No one knew what to call it, or dared to guess what it boded. It was as if death itself were making the whole thing up as he went along. Picking them off in a reckless pout, like petals off a daisy.

As she followed the cliffside path in the red-gray light, Iris could see she was growing more accustomed to the place. The darkened tower stood stark and still on the promontory. There was no clue in the grassy field—its few poor blasted firs like sentries—that the village had just gone through a sea change. She walked to the end of the land with a healthy stride, as if she meant to merely whet the appetite. The lighthouse door stood open, and she went right in. She mounted the old stone steps in a circle, like a sea wife going up to make a brief appearance at her widow's walk. She stepped out onto a rough-beamed platform that circled a center column of lenses and foot-thick crystals. A few feet away was the keeper's desk, littered with paperback thrillers and pipe-ash. Roy sat back in the chair with his feet up on the windowsill.

“There's been a light here for a thousand years,” he said with a pedagogical air.

How do you know, Iris nearly asked, annoyed at his endless smugness. She gave him a cold-blooded look, as if to agree to the terms of a duel. Then she sat on the corner of the desk, saying nothing. She waited for him to start over.

“What are your powers?” he asked her suddenly.

Iris laughed. “I have none,” she said.

“Well, we're up shit creek then,” Roy replied with a cocky sneer, “because
he
can do what he likes. He can break us all in two if he wants.” He was acting nasty, and his jaw began to twitch, like he wanted to fight dirty. It was clearly all her fault. “I was going to leave. I told you—this isn't to do with me.”

“Look,” she snapped at him, “I didn't arrange this affair. Stop whining at me.” He looked away at the bitter blue morning sea. “Please—what is it you're supposed to tell me?”

“So anyway,” Roy continued, “everyone comes from somewhere else, but somehow they end up here. I always like to ask them what they used to do. Mostly, they were good solid citizens. Clerks and bankers and Little League coaches. No wonder they run this town like a ship.”

“What do you want, Roy?”

He turned and gave her a sorrowful look. Either no one had ever asked him before, or he didn't believe they meant it. She almost thought he would cry, but he swallowed and cleared his throat instead. “Me, I'd just like to survive,” he said quietly.

“That's all?”

He nodded, without any hope. Iris felt she had a right to much, much more. To survive it, yes, but then to go back to all she'd had without so much as a memory's trace—as if nothing had ever intruded. Just to survive, it appeared as if Roy was willing to go with the sound of screaming in his ears. Not she. There were certain standards life would have to meet in order for her to go forward. Otherwise, she thought, she was better off dead and buried up behind the church. All or nothing.

Roy stood up, as if he heard her question only now. He brushed past her and led the way downstairs. If they were leaving, Iris thought, then their meeting here in the tower was nothing but a scene. She'd got his number the night before: how he liked to play things out. But he reached the foot of the stairs and, instead of exiting into the park, pulled the door closed and barred it. A flutter of panic shook her stomach as he hunched down in the shadows.

He creaked a lever back, and a trapdoor opened in. It swung back and forth on old strap hinges, with a well of dark below. A set of steps went spiraling down into the cliff. It was all so simple. Yet she had the feeling, following Roy, that she'd crossed some final line and entered the cavern of dreams. Now she could not rely on even the marginal real of the world outside the tower. The stairs bit deeper and deeper in; got colder and colder. She put a hand out to his shoulder as she walked behind, in a blackness without end.