I looked at him, at the rest of them, and the skin along my back began to crawl. Thatcher had lifted his shovel, so that he was holding it in both hands in front of him; one of the men I didn't know had done the same thing. Coleclaw's big hands were knotted into fists. All of their faces were different now in the firelight, and what I felt coming off them was something primitive and deadly, a faint gathering aura of violence.
The same aura a lynch mob generates.
Some of the fear I had known at the hotel came back, diluting my anger. I felt suddenly that if I moved, if I tried to pass through them or around them, they would attack me in the same witless, savage fashion a lynch mob attacks its victims. With shovels, with fists-out of control. If that happened, I could not fight all of them; and by the time they came to their senses and realized what they'd done, I would be a dead man.
I had never run away from anything or anyone in my life, but I had an impulse now to turn and flee. I controlled it, telling myself to stay calm, use reason. Telling myself I was wrong about them, they were just average citizens with misplaced loyalties caught up in a foolish crusade-not criminals, not a mob; that they would not do anything to me as long as I did nothing to provoke them.
Time seemed to grind to a halt. Behind me, I could hear the heavy crackling rhythm of the fire. There was sweat on my body, cold and clammy. But I kept my expression blank, so they wouldn't see my fear, and I groped for words to say to them that would let me get out of this.
I was still groping when headlights appeared on the road to the south, coming down out of the pass between the cliffs.
The tension in me seemed to let go, like a rubber band snapping. I said, "Somebody's coming!" and threw my arm up and pointed. Coleclaw and two or three of the others swiveled their heads. And then the tension in them seemed to break, too; somebody said, "God!" and they all began to move at once. Shuffling their feet, turning their bodies-the mob starting to come apart like something fragile and clotted splitting into fragments.
The headlights probed straight down the road at a good clip. When they neared the bunch of us in the meadow Thatcher threw down his shovel and walked away, jerkily, through the grass. The others went after him, in ragged little groups of two and three. I was the only one standing still when the car slid to a stop twenty feet away on the road.
It was Kerry. And Raymond Treacle. They piled out and came hurrying my way. Her step faltered when she got a good look at me. "My God, are you all right?"
"Yeah," I said. "Yeah, I'm all right."
"What happened here? That fire…you look as though you…"
"I'm okay. It's over now."
"You didn't come back," she said. "I got worried, I asked Ray to drive me here to find out…For heaven's sake, what happened?"
I looked back at the raging fire; then I looked up at the line of people trudging slowly toward Coleclaw's mercantile. "Cooperville just died," I said.
8
W ithin five minutes, Treacle was driving us back to Weaverville. I did not want to stay there among the ghosts old and new even long enough to hunt for my car.
The burns on my back and legs, the lacerations on my hands, were not serious enough to require medical attention, so we went straight to the sheriff's department. I gave the cop in charge a full account of what had happened on my two visits to Cooperville, of how Gary Coleclaw had tried to kill me and how the whole town had been covering up his guilt in the death of Allan Randall. I also told him what it was that had put me onto Gary: The stone cup with the wax residue inside. The room in the hotel with the pieces of rock on the shelves. Penrose's comments to Kerry and me that Gary was a "poor young fool, poor lost lad" and that he had "rocks in his head." A pun, Penrose had said after the latter remark. He'd meant that Gary had rocks in his head not because he was retarded but because he was a collector of unusual stones-arrowheads and fossils and the like. And Treacle telling me the stone cup contained bryophytes, reminding me of those rocks in the hotel room, making me think that the room might have been outfitted by someone with the mind of a child who used it as a kind of clubhouse where he kept the treasures he'd collected.
Gary Coleclaw was not taken into custody that night. He was gone from what was left of Cooperville when the police got there; so were his father and mother. The cops put out a pick-up order on the family, but it wasn't until three days later that a police officer spotted the three of them at a diner in eastern Oregon, and arrested them without incident.
Kerry and I were long gone from Trinity County by then, comfortably holed up in a private cabin near Shasta Lake. The sheriff's men had found my car hidden in the woods near Paul Thatcher's home and returned it to me, and we were allowed to leave as soon as I signed a formal statement. Raymond Treacle's promise of a Munroe Corporation check in the amount of five thousand dollars had gone with us.
I hadn't told the police-or Kerry or anyone else-of my fear of mob violence. I could not be certain I'd been right about what I felt that night; it could have been my imagination, a product of the darkness and the fire and the brush I'd had with death. And no matter what the residents of Cooperville might have done to me in the heat of their passion, I felt no more anger toward them. When I thought of the Coleclaws and Ella Bloom and Hugh Penrose, I felt only sadness and pity.
Still. Still, I couldn't help wondering: Would they have attacked me, maybe even killed me, if Kerry and Treacle hadn't shown up when they did? It was a question that would trouble my sleep for a long time, because there was no way now that I would ever know the answer.
Cat's-Paw
There are two places that are ordinary enough during the daylight hours but that become downright eerie after dark, particularly if you go wandering around in them by yourself. One is a graveyard; the other is a public zoo. And that goes double for San Francisco's Fleishhacker Zoological Gardens on a blustery winter night when the fog comes swirling in and makes everything look like capering phantoms or two-dimensional cutouts.
Fleishhacker Zoo was where I was on this foggy winter night-alone, for the most part-and I wished I was somewhere else instead. Anywhere else, as long as it had a heater or a log fire and offered something hot to drink.
I was on my third tour of the grounds, headed past the sea lion tank to make another check of the aviary, when I paused to squint at the luminous dial of my watch. Eleven forty-five. Less than three hours down and better than six left to go. I was already half frozen, even though I was wearing long johns, two sweaters, two pairs of socks, heavy gloves, a woolen cap, and a long fur-lined overcoat. The ocean was only a thousand yards away, and the icy wind that blew in off of it sliced through you to the marrow. If I got through this job without contracting either frostbite or pneumonia, I would consider myself lucky.
Somewhere in the fog, one of the animals made a sudden roaring noise; I couldn't tell what kind of animal or where the noise came from. The first time that sort of thing had happened, two nights ago, I'd jumped a little. Now I was used to it, or as used to it as I would ever get. How guys like Dettlinger and Hammond could work here night after night, month after month, was beyond my simple comprehension.
I went ahead toward the aviary. The big, wind-sculpted cypress trees that grew on my left made looming, swaying shadows, like giant black dancers with rustling headdresses wreathed in mist. Back beyond them, fuzzy yellow blobs of light marked the location of the zoo's cafe. More nightlights burned on the aviary, although the massive fenced-in wing on the near side was dark.
Most of the birds were asleep or nesting or whatever the hell it is birds do at night. But you could hear some of them stirring around, making noise. There were a couple of dozen different varieties in there, including such esoteric types as the crested screamer, the purple gallinule, and the black crake. One esoteric type that used to be in there but wasn't any longer was something called a bunting, a brilliantly colored migratory bird. Three of them had been swiped four days ago, the latest in a rash of thefts the zoological gardens had suffered.