I have to stop drinking so much, he thought. Seeing shit that’s not there is a pretty clear signal. You could even call it a warning.
He had no aloe vera ointment, so he slathered the burn with some arnica gel. That stung, but the pain soon went away (or at least subsided to a dull throb). That was good, right? He took a hand towel to drape over his pillow so it wouldn’t get all stained, lay down, and turned out the light. But the dark was no good. It seemed he could feel the pain more in the dark, and it was all too easy to imagine something in the room with him. The something that had been behind him out there at that abandoned barn.
The only thing out there was my imagination. The way that black skin was my imagination. And the cracks. And the pus.
All true, but it was also true that when he turned on the bedside lamp, he felt better. His final thought was that a good night’s sleep would put everything right.
8
“Do you want me to dim the lights a bit more?” Howie asked.
“No,” Holly said. “This is information, not entertainment, and although the movie is short—only eighty-seven minutes—we won’t need to watch all of it, or even most of it.” She wasn’t as nervous as she had feared she would be. At least not so far. “But before I show it to you, I need to make something very clear, something I think you all must know by now, although you may not be quite ready to admit the truth into your conscious minds.”
They looked at her, silent. All those eyes. She could hardly believe she was doing this—surely not Holly Gibney, the mouse who had sat at the back of all her classrooms, who never raised her hand, who wore her gym clothes under her skirts and blouses on phys ed days. Holly Gibney who even in her twenties hadn’t dared speak back to her mother. Holly Gibney who had actually lost her mind on two occasions.
But all that was before Bill. He trusted me to be better, and for him I was. And I will be now, for these people.
“Terry Maitland didn’t murder Frank Peterson and Heath Holmes didn’t murder the Howard girls. Those murders were committed by an outsider. He uses our modern science—our modern forensics—against us, but his real weapon is our refusal to believe. We’re trained to follow the facts, and sometimes we scent him when the facts are conflicting, but we refuse to follow that scent. He knows it. He uses it.”
“Ms. Gibney,” Jeannie Anderson said, “are you saying the murders were committed by a supernatural creature? Something like a vampire?”
Holly considered the question, biting at her lips. At last she said, “I don’t want to answer that. Not yet. I want to show you some of the movie I brought first. It’s a Mexican film, dubbed in English and released as part of drive-in double features in this country fifty years ago. The English title is Mexican Wrestling Women Meet the Monster, but in Spanish—”
“Oh, come on,” Ralph said. “This is ridiculous.”
“Shut up,” Jeannie said. She kept her voice low, but they all heard the anger in it. “Give her a chance.”
“But—”
“You weren’t there last night. I was. You need to give this a chance.”
Ralph crossed his arms over his chest, just as Samuels had. It was a gesture Holly knew well. A warding-off gesture. An I won’t listen gesture. She pushed on.
“The Mexican title is Rosita Luchadora e Amigas Conocen El Cuco. In Spanish it means—”
“That’s it!” Yune shouted, making them all jump. “That’s the name I couldn’t get when we were eating at that restaurant on Saturday! Do you remember the story, Ralph? The one my wife’s abuela told her when she was just pequeña?”
“How could I forget?” Ralph said. “The guy with the black bag who kills little kids and rubs their fat . . .” He stopped, thinking—in spite of himself—of Frank Peterson and the Howard girls.
“Does what?” Marcy Maitland asked.
“Drinks their blood and rubs their fat on him,” Yune said. “It supposedly keeps him young. El Cuco.”
“Yes,” Holly said. “He’s known in Spain as El Hombre con Saco. The Man with the Sack. In Portugal he’s Pumpkinhead. When American children carve pumpkins for Halloween, they’re carving the likeness of El Cuco, just as children did hundreds of years ago in Iberia.”
“There was a rhyme about El Cuco,” Yune said. “Abuela used to sing it sometimes, at night. Duérmete, niño, duérmete ya . . . can’t remember the rest.”
“Sleep, child, sleep,” Holly said. “El Cuco’s on the ceiling, he’s come to eat you.”
“Good bedtime rhyme,” Alec commented. “Must have given the kids sweet dreams.”
“Jesus,” Marcy whispered. “You think something like that was in our house? Sitting on my daughter’s bed?”
“Yes and no,” Holly said. “Let me put on the movie. The first ten minutes or so should be enough.”
9
Jack dreamed he was driving a deserted two-lane highway with nothing but empty on both sides and a thousand miles of blue sky above. He was at the wheel of a big truck, maybe a tanker, because he could smell gasoline. Sitting beside him was a man with short black hair and a goatee. Tattoos covered his arms. Hoskins knew him, because Jack visited Gentlemen, Please frequently (although rarely in his official capacity), and had had many pleasant conversations with Claude Bolton, who had a record but was not a bad fellow at all since he’d cleaned up his act. Except this version of Claude was a very bad fellow. It was this Claude who had pulled back the shower curtain enough for Hoskins to be able to read the word on his fingers: CANT.
The truck passed a sign reading MARYSVILLE, POP. 1280.
“That cancer’s spreading fast,” Claude said, and yes, it was the voice that had come from behind the shower curtain. “Look at your hands, Jack.”
He looked down. His hands on the wheel had turned black. As he stared at them, they fell off. The tanker truck ran off the road, tilted, started to go over. Jack understood that it was going to explode, and he hauled himself out of the dream before that could happen, gasping for breath and staring up at the ceiling.
“Jesus,” he whispered, checking to make sure his hands were still there. They were, and so was his watch. He had been asleep less than an hour. “Jesus Chri—”
Someone moved on his left. For a moment he wondered if he had brought the pretty bartender with the long legs home with him, but no, he’d been alone. A fine young woman like that wouldn’t want to have anything to do with him, anyway. To her he would just be an overweight, fortysomething drunk who was losing his h—
He looked around. The woman in bed with him was his mother. He only knew it was her because of the tortoiseshell clip dangling from the few remaining strings of her hair. She had been wearing that clip at her funeral. Her face had been made up by the mortician, kind of waxy and doll-like, but on the whole not too bad. This face was mostly gone, the flesh putrefying off the bone. Her nightgown clung to her because it was drenched with pus. There was the stench of rotting meat. He tried to scream, couldn’t.
“This cancer is waiting for you, Jack,” she said. He could see her teeth clacking, because her lips were gone. “It’s eating into you. He can take it back now, but soon it will be too late even for him. Will you do what he wants?”