The fire was low. Shadows consumed the corners, trying to possess the room as the flames dwindled. Feet shuffled around in the kitchen. Heavy, soft feet, as though someone were wearing rubber soles.
The third crash was the deep freeze being upended and spilling frozen meats. Helder shouted, “Hey!”
The sounds stopped. The intruder was listening.
Helder ran into his office, opened the standing gun cabinet, and took out his rifle. As he walked rapidly to the kitchen, he heard the service-entrance door screech from hinges which pinged onto the floor.
He banged open the swinging doors and beheld pure savagery. The wind whistled through the splintered doorway over a glutinous freezing mess of eggs, lettuce, milk, steaks, all the varied foods for varied appetites he had stocked for the week, scattered across the floor in an indescribable scramble. Steak blood was smeared across the walls. The sinks had been pulled from their pipes and water sloshed over congealing bread and salad dressing.
Helder ran to the doorway, slipping across the floor. He caught his balance against the jamb and cut on the parking-
apron floodlights. No one—or nothing—was there.
“Hey, goddammit!” he screamed into the wind. “Come back here!”
A shadow lengthened from behind his car. Helder put a bullet through the windshield. He was hiding out there, him and his goddamned egg-sucking buddies.
A rock rebounded off the doorjamb, next to his fingers. Helder fired two shots in the direction from which it had come. “Come on, kids, out of there! I mean it!”
Another rock arced up to a floodlight on the east corner and exploded it. Helder fired again. One by one the lights in the parking lot were killed by rocks, plunging the area deeper and deeper into wind-blown darkness, in which he made out a scurrying form at each end of the lot.
He fired at the one headed down the road and ran out of bullets. There were only two of them, but that was more than enough. He turned to see people crowding into the kitchen, dressed in all manner of nightgowns and pajamas. They had been attracted by the shooting.
“Look at this! Just look what they did!” he screeched, kicking at a balled-up wad of hamburger. “That’s a week’s supply of food. They hit everything, the lockers, the cutting table, the stove . . . Look at this. Little bastards!”
Jason and Martha stepped through the service-entrance door. Jason held his revolver. He saw a rock lying in egg yolk and picked it up. “Did you see them, Mr. Helder?”
“Of course I saw them. They hid behind the cars out there.”
“What did they look like?”
“How do I know what they looked like!” Helder shouted with immaculate illogic. He lifted a shoe and examined the muck mixed with eggshell. What in hell was the man toting a pistol around for anyhow! “It’s . . . it’s . . . just barbaric! Why would anybody do something like this, for Jesus—” He flushed red. He froze. His voice dropped. “Decoy. Diversion.”
“What?” asked Martha.
“The bungalows! Was anybody robbed? Maybe it’s a diversion.”
Panic-stricken, the people pushed and shoved their way out of the kitchen, down the gallery hall toward the bungalows, leaving Jason and Martha alone.
Jason thoughtfully tossed the rock up and down in his hand. He was smiling. Martha was frightened. She searched out the sink-pipe water valve and shut it off.
“That answers our question,” said Jason.
“Why would they do this?”
“Because they want the valley back. That means drive Helder out. They’ve been watching everything down here. I guess they figure if Helder goes, nobody will come back.”
“I’m going to call Drake,” said Martha. She ran out of the kitchen toward Helder’s office. Jason was wiping the mess from his boots when she ran back in again, her somber eyes ignited with barely suppressed fear. “Raymond?”
“Yes?”
“The phones are dead.”
Jason checked his watch. It was three thirty in the morning. Daylight would come in two hours. They could not check for any further damage until it was light. He decided he would stay awake until sunrise.
Morning dawned with Helder’s lodge being pelted by flying branches, bark, and leaves blown from the woods by gale-force winds. Helder had not slept either. He remained in the bar, slowly sobering up and looking out the window as the morning light outlined the ruins of his ski trails.
By seven in the morning he had driven into Garrison and returned with three state policemen.
You found kids like that everywhere, Helder reflected bitterly as he stood by the ski-lift machinery, watching the wind scour the artificial snow into razor-sharp crests.
Helder’s ski machinery had been ruined. Not just broken into or vandalized, but destroyed. The snow guns had been toppled from their supports; the chair cables were a broken jumble scattered down the slope; the shed had been cracked open, the wooden walls torn to pieces and the machinery inside rendered into an unsymmetric, overturned pile of cables, wires, toppled stanchions, and gear wheels.
One of the policemen came out, his gloves coated with grease. “What I don’t understand is how they got up here, Mr. Helder.” That was a neat trick all right. The slope had been plowed into a thirty-degree angle. Because of the wind and frozen fake snow, climbing it would have been quite an undertaking even for a mountain goat.
“What I don’t understand is why,” said Helder, looking up the slope to the mountain summit lost among trees bending under the wind.
The policeman was sympathetic. “I guess somebody just doesn’t like you.”
Fifteen of Helder’s forty guests canceled immediately and arranged schedules with the van driver. Several of those who had driven themselves up—the weekenders, whose business Helder desperately wanted—also headed for home. The rest seemed undecided. They returned to their rooms or to the game room. Helder told Delbert to drive into Garrison that morning and return with a load of hamburger for the afternoon and tonight. What they would do about feeding people tomorrow, at the height of the storm, was something Helder could not face that morning.
12
Lit by bronzed fire reflected off the fireplace hearth, the huge lips moved. The Indian pressed his hands against them, trying to stop the word from creeping out between his child’s fingers.
He tossed on the bungalow bed, trying not to wake up. He was ripsawed between his faith and the growing press of his grandfather speaking to him. He fervently wished the doctors were here with their calming needles. He tried to shut his mind to his grandfather’s voice, lest he say something that would destroy him.
Someone rapped on the door. “Mr. Moon? Mr. Helder sent me. You’re late.”
The Indian groaned at the suffocating weight of reality. The wind blew fiercely, shrieking past roof eaves and through branches. The Indian’s feet slid to the floor, and piece by piece he got himself to a standing position, from which he lurched across the room. “Yeah, I’m awake,” he said, tugging the knob.
The pistol butt came straight for his forehead. The Indian’s head turned an infinitesimal fraction of an inch, enough to divert the full force of it. He awoke fully on his way to the floor, blood flowing from his scalp. His eyes were closed, but his ears were attuned to the stranger stepping in and closing the door behind him. The Indian waited for his chance.
Jason had struck quickly but not accurately, and he
hoped not too hard. The Indian’s chest rose and fell in
steady rhythm, his eyeballs rolled under his lids, but otherwise there was not a twitch from him.
The room stank of meat gone bad. Gun in hand,