Snowbound

Eight

Cain sat on the far edge of the pulpit, spine curved to the outer organ casing, forearms resting on his pulled-up knees. It was warm enough inside the church, but his skin crawled with cold-the kind of cold that has nothing to do with temperature.

The dark gunman’s clearly homicidal dementia had prepared him for most any contingency on the ride down from the cabin, yet the magnitude of what was actually taking place in Hidden Valley-recounted to Rebecca Hughes while he had stood listening and ignored on the periphery-had stunned and repulsed him. The concept was monstrous; you could not immediately reconcile your mind to it. Things like this can’t happen, you thought; they can’t happen to you. And then you remembered men like Hitler and Richard Speck and Charles Manson, and that all their victims must have at first experienced the same staggering disbelief, and you understood that such things could and did happen at any time, at any place, to anyone.

Anything can happen, Cain thought now; madness doesn’t have to have a thing to do with it. A man can get drunk to celebrate some great good fortune and run over a child while driving home. A man can send his wife out for a package of cigarettes, and she can be raped and murdered on the way to the corner grocery. Yes, and a man can repair a home appliance and make an unconscious error that causes the death of his entire family…

He raised his head and looked toward the rear, to where Rebecca Hughes sat. Compassion moved through him, as it had minutes earlier. It was bad enough for himself and each of the others, but she had taken a vicious triple blow: the nightmare itself, the death of her husband, the fact that he had been killed during a blatant affair with another woman. Or maybe she had already known about his infidelity, and that was the underlying source of her confessed loneliness; she had almost instantly guessed what they were holding back from her.

Cain’s eyes roamed over the other women, the men, the children. They were strangers to him; none of them seemed even to be aware of his presence at this moment, except for Frank McNeil, who stood but gave the impression of crouching against the near wall, mutely hating him with eyes like water-shiny pebbles. And yet Cain’s involvement with all of them-even McNeil, he could no longer seem to feel animosity toward the man-was the same as if they had been relatives or friends of long standing. He cared whether they lived or died, as he had realized at last that he cared intrinsically whether he lived or died.

At the upper edge of his vision he saw one of the stained-glass windows, and centered his gaze on it, and thought then of God. A full year since he had been inside a church, last Christmas with his family; six months since he had denied to himself the existence of a benign Deity. If there was a God, would He allow a gentle wife and mother and two small innocent children to die so cruelly and unnecessarily? Would He allow wars and poverty and racial hatred and the kind of wanton terrorism which had exploded here in Hidden Valley? Rhetorical questions. You believed or you didn’t believe: simple as that. Once Cain had believed; and now, here, he was not sure he had ever really stopped believing.

On impulse he got to his feet and crossed slowly to the altar; looked at the open Bible on the prayer cloth, at the melting votive candles in their silver holders. And standing there, he grew conscious of low but discernible voices coming from inside the vestry, the door to which stood ajar a few feet distant. He recognized them as belonging to John Tribucci and Lew Coopersmith, recalled that he had seen Tribucci say something to the old man a minute or two earlier and then both of them step up onto the pulpit.

“.. got to do something, Lew,” Tribucci was saying. “We can’t accept the word of a lunatic that nothing will happen to us; he’s psycho enough to have carried out this whole fantastic scheme and committed one brutal murder already, and that makes him psycho enough to slaughter us all. He could do it in a rage when he finds out just how little of value there is in the valley or because he knows we can identify him or even because he gets some kind of warped thrill out of killing. And I can’t believe those two partners of his would be able to stop him; for all we know he may be planning to kill them, too, he may have done it already.” Beat. “Mass murder isn’t the only threat, either; there’s a good possibility he intends to take hostages anyway when he leaves, to make sure we don’t sound the alarm right away. Kids, women — Ellen, or Judy, or Rebecca… or for God’s sake, even Ann. He wouldn’t hesitate to shoot them when he had no more use for them, you know he wouldn’t.”

Coopersmith said, “Don’t you think all of that’s been preying on my mind, same as yours? But what can we do, Johnny, trapped like we are?”

“There’s one thing we can do,” Tribucci said, “one thing he overlooked: a way out of here.”

“What? What way?”

“Through the belfry up there. Go up the ladder and break out one of the windows; then cut the bell rope-I managed to hold out my penknife when they were collecting our belongings-and tie the rope around a bell support and climb out and down the rear wall.”

“And you’re thinking of going after help, is that it? Johnny, even if you could get away from the church without being seen, how would you get out of the valley? Snowmobile, the way they’re planning to? What are the odds of you reaching one undetected? Of getting it out of the village undetected? Of making it clear to Coldville in the middle of a stormy night with the temperature at zero or below? And suppose you did manage all that-the county couldn’t get men back here before morning, except by helicopter, and if the storm holds, a chopper wouldn’t be able to get off the ground at all.”

“Lew, listen to me-”

“Suppose you didn’t make it out of the village in the first place? Or suppose you did and the psycho discovered one of the mobiles missing? What do you think he’d do then?”

With deceptive calm Tribucci said, “I’m not talking about trying to go for help, Lew.”

Nothing from Coopersmith.

“That was the first thing I thought of when I remembered the belfry,” Tribucci said, “and I rejected the idea for the same reasons you just gave. The idea I didn’t reject involves me and one or two others, and we don’t leave the valley once we get out of here.”

Cain, listening, knew all at once what Tribucci was getting at; he realized he was breathing heavily, if silently, through parted lips.

Coopersmith-knew it too, now. He said, “Go after weapons and try to take them head to head.”

“That’s it, Lew.”

“You realize what that would mean?”

“It’s kill or be killed, and you can’t argue with that morally or otherwise-not with all the lives at stake. I’m not a killer, any more than an eighteen-year-old soldier forced to fight in an alien jungle is a killer, but I can do what that kid has to do for some of the same reasons and for some that are a lot better.”

“Maybe you can,” Coopersmith said. “And I can too, because I’ve spent my life in the kind of job that requires a man to be ready to kill other men if he has to; but I’m sixty-six years old, I’m an old man-it’s taken me a long time to admit that to myself but I’m admitting it now; I’m an old man with slow reflexes and brittle bones and if I tried climbing out of the belfry I’d probably break a leg, if not my neck. Who else is there, Johnny? Vince, maybe, only I don’t have to tell you how poor his eyesight is. Joe Garvey? He’s been hurt already, and while he’s got the courage, he hasn’t got the caution or the patience; he’d be a bull in a china shop. Martin Donnelly? He can’t kill a fly without flinching. Dave Nedlick? Greg Novak? Walt Halliday? Doc Edwards? There’s nobody but you and me, and that means there’s nobody but you.”

“Then I’ll go alone.”

“Against three professional hard cases, against a madman? What chance do you think you’d really have?”

“A better chance than we’ve got sitting in here waiting to be slaughtered.” Thick, desperate rage surrounded Tribucci’s words. “I’ve got to try it, Lew, don’t you see that? Somebody has to do something, and that somebody is me.”

“What about all the others? Some of them-McNeil, for instance-would vote to do nothing, wait it out, take the psycho’s word. Have you got the right to make a decision for seventy-five people? Because if you do go, you’re going to have to do it without telling anybody else; you’re going to have to make that decision.”

“You know the answer to that as well as I do, Lew: if my going can mean saving the lives of everyone in the valley-my family’s lives-then yes, yes, I’ve got the right…”

Cain had heard enough. He moved away from the altar and stopped by the organ. Tribucci’s right, he thought, one look at that dark one’s eyes is enough to tell anybody he’s right; it has to be done, one way or another. Anger stirred inside him again, began to burn with increasing candescence. His eyes wandered the oppressively silent room, located Rebecca Hughes again, rested on her bloodless face-and she reminded him of Angie; she did not resemble Angie in any way, but she might have been Angie. The children, too, the huddling children were little boys who might have been Steve and little girls who might have been Lindy. And what if it was them sitting out there? What if they were alive and they were here now, the way Tribucci’s family was here now?

Sweat formed a thin beaded mosaic on Cain’s forehead, trickled down along his cheeks. No, he thought then. No, no.

Yes, the other half of him said.

No I’d freeze up, I’d panic, I’d We’d do what has to be done.

Before he quite realized what he was doing, he had turned and taken two steps in the direction of the vestry door. And when his foot lifted for the third step, the back of his neck prickled and a tingling sensation washed down through his groin. His mind opened, like a blossom, in epiphany.

Forward, he thought, walking forward. I’ve been walking backward for six months, and I’ve just taken my first forward steps in all that time.

Yes! the other half of him said again, and the two halves remerged spiritually at last and made a bonded whole. Without hesitation, he kept on walking forward.