It was dusk when they got to the Home Depot, and after nine o’clock when they arrived back at the Indian Motel (observed by Jack Hoskins, once more peering through the drapes in his room and rubbing obsessively at the back of his neck).
They carried their purchases into Ralph’s room and laid them out on the bed: five short-barreled UV flashlights (with extra batteries) and five yellow hardhats.
Howie picked up one of the flashlights and winced at the bright purple glare. “This thing will really pick up his trail? His spoor?”
“It will if it’s there,” Holly said.
“Huh.” Howie dropped the flashlight back on the bed, put on one of the hardhats, and went to the mirror over the dresser to inspect himself. “I look ridiculous,” he said.
No one disagreed.
“We’re really going to do this? Try to, at least? That’s not a rhetorical question, by the way. It’s me trying to get my head around it as an actual fact.”
“I think we’d have a hard job convincing the Texas Highway Patrol to pitch in,” Alec said mildly. “What exactly would we tell them? That we think there’s a monster hiding in the Marysville Hole?”
“If we don’t do it,” Holly said, “he’ll kill more children. It’s how he lives.”
Howie turned to her, almost accusingly. “How are we going to get in? The old lady said it’s buttoned up tighter than a nun’s underwear. And even if we do, where’s the rope? Doesn’t Home Depot sell rope? They must sell rope.”
“We shouldn’t need any,” she said quietly. “If he’s in there—and I’m almost sure he is—he won’t have gone deep. For one thing, he’d be afraid of getting lost himself, or of being caught in a cave-in. For another, I think he’s weak. He should be in the hibernation part of his cycle, but instead he’s been exerting himself.”
“By projecting?” Ralph asked. “That’s what you believe.”
“Yes. What Grace Maitland saw, what your wife saw . . . I believe those were projections. I think a small part of his physical self was there, that’s why there were traces in your living room, why he could move the chair and turn on the stove light, but not even enough to leave impressions on the new carpet. Doing that has to tire him out. I think he might have shown up wholly in the flesh only a single time, at the courthouse on the day Terry Maitland was shot. Because he was hungry, and knew there would be a lot to eat.”
“He was there in the flesh but didn’t show up on any of the TV videotape?” Howie asked. “Like a vampire who doesn’t cast a reflection in mirrors?”
He spoke as if expecting her to deny this, but she didn’t. “Exactly.”
“Then you think he’s supernatural. A supernatural being.”
“I don’t know what he is.”
Howie took off the hardhat and tossed it onto the bed. “Guesswork. That’s all you’ve got.”
Holly looked wounded by this, and at a loss for how to reply. Nor did she seem to realize what Ralph saw, and was sure Alec saw, as well: Howard Gold was frightened. If this thing went sideways, there was no judge to whom he could object. He could not ask for a mistrial.
Ralph said, “It’s still hard for me to accept all this stuff about El Cuco or shape-shifters, but there was an outsider, that I do accept now. Because of the Ohio connection, and because Terry Maitland simply couldn’t have been in two places at the same time.”
“The outsider screwed up there,” Alec said. “He didn’t know Terry was going to be at that convention in Cap City. Most of his chosen scapegoats would be like Heath Holmes, with alibis like cheesecloth.”
“That doesn’t follow,” Ralph said.
Alec raised his eyebrows.
“If he got Terry’s . . . I don’t know how to say it. Memories, sure, but not just memories. A sort of . . .”
“A sort of terrain map of his consciousness,” Holly said quietly.
“Okay, call it that,” Ralph said. “I can accept that there’s stuff he could have missed, the way speed readers miss stuff while they’re zipping along, but that convention would have been a big deal to Terry.”
“Then why would the cuco still—” Alec began.
“Maybe he had to.” Holly had picked up one of the UV flashlights and was shining it on the wall, where it picked up a ghostly handprint from some previous resident. It was a thing Ralph could have done without seeing. “Maybe he was too hungry to wait for a better time.”
“Or maybe he didn’t care,” Ralph said. “Serials often get to that point, usually just before they get caught. Bundy, Speck, Gacy . . . eventually they all started to believe they were a law unto themselves. Godlike. They got arrogant and overreached. And this outsider didn’t overreach by all that much, did he? Think about it. We were going to arraign Terry and see him put on trial for the murder of Frank Peterson in spite of everything we knew. We were sure his alibi had to be bogus, no matter how strong it was.”
And part of me still wants to believe that. The alternative turns everything I thought I understood about the world I live in upside down.
He felt feverish and a little sick to his stomach. How could a normal man in the twenty-first century accept a shape-shifting monster? If you believed in Holly Gibney’s outsider, her El Cuco, then everything was on the table. No end to the universe.
“He’s not arrogant anymore,” Holly said quietly. “He’s used to staying in one place for months after he kills and while he makes his change. He only moves on when that change is complete, or nearly complete. That’s what I believe, based on what I’ve read and what I learned in Ohio. But his usual pattern has been disrupted. He had to run from Flint City once that boy discovered he’d been staying in that barn. He knew the police would come. So he came down here early, to be near Claude Bolton, and he found a perfect home.”
“The Marysville Hole,” Alec said.
Holly nodded. “But he doesn’t know we know. That’s our advantage. Claude knows his uncle and cousins are buried there, yes. What Claude doesn’t know is how the outsider hibernates in or near places of the dead, preferably those associated with the bloodline of the person he’s changing into or out of. I’m sure it works that way. It must.”
Because you want it to, Ralph thought. Yet he couldn’t find any holes in her logic. If, that was, you accepted the basic postulate of a supernatural being that had to follow certain rules, possibly out of tradition, possibly out of some unknown imperative none of them would ever be able to understand.
“Can we be sure Lovie won’t tell him?” Alec asked.
“I think so,” Ralph said. “She’ll keep quiet for his own good.”
Howie took one of the flashlights and shone it at the rattling air conditioner, this time picking up a litter of spectrally glowing fingerprints. He snapped it off and said, “What if he has a helper? Tell me that. Count Dracula had that guy Renfield. Dr. Frankenstein had a hunchback guy, Igor—”
Holly said, “That’s a popular misconception. In the original Frankenstein movie, the doctor’s assistant was actually named Fritz, played by Dwight Frye. Later, Bela Lugosi—”
“I stand corrected,” Howie said, “but the question remains: What if our outsider has an accomplice? Somebody with orders to keep tabs on us? Doesn’t that make sense? Even if the outsider doesn’t know we found out about the Marysville Hole, he knows we’re too close for comfort.”
“I see your point, Howie,” Alec said, “but serials are usually loners, and the ones who stay free the longest are drifters. There are exceptions, but I don’t think our guy is one of them. He hopped down to Flint City from Dayton. If you backtrailed him from Ohio, you might find murdered children in Tampa, Florida, or Portland, Maine. There’s an African proverb: he travels fastest who travels alone. And practically speaking, who could he hire for a job like that?”
“A nut,” Howie said.