‘You’re still changing, aren’t you? The projection my wife saw may have looked exactly like Claude, but the real you hasn’t caught up yet. Has it? You’re not quite there.’
He meant these to be the last words the outsider would hear. The protesting groans from the stairs had stopped, which meant Holly was standing high up enough to be safe. He raised the Glock, gripping his right wrist in his left hand.
The outsider lifted his arms to either side, presenting himself. ‘Kill me if you want, Detective, but you’ll be killing yourself and your lady friend, too. I don’t have access to your thoughts, as I do Claude’s, but I have a good idea of what’s in your mind, just the same: you’re thinking that one shot is an acceptable risk. Am I right?’
Ralph said nothing.
‘I’m sure I am, and I must tell you it would be a great risk.’ He raised his voice and shouted, ‘CLAUDE BOLTON IS MY NAME!’
The echoes seemed even louder than the shout. Holly gave a cry of surprise as a piece of stalactite high above, perhaps cracked almost through already, detached from the ceiling and fell like a rock dagger. It posed no danger to any of them, hitting bottom well outside the feeble circle of lamplight, but Ralph took the point.
‘Since you knew enough to find me here, you may already know this,’ the outsider said, lowering his arms, ‘but in case you don’t, two boys were lost in the caves and passages below this one, and when a rescue party tried to find them—’
‘Someone fired a gun and brought down a piece of the roof,’ Holly said from the stairs. ‘Yes, we know.’
‘That happened in the Devil’s Slide passage, where the sound of the gunshot would have been dampened.’ Smiling. ‘Who knows what will happen if Detective Anderson fires his gun in here? Surely a few of the bigger stalactites will come raining down. Even so, you might avoid them. Of course if you don’t, you’ll be crushed. Then there’s the possibility you might cause the entire top of the bluff to collapse, burying us all in a landslide. Want to risk it, Detective? I’m sure you meant to when you came down the stairs, but I have to tell you that the odds would not be in your favor.’
Those stairs creaked briefly as Holly came down another step. Maybe two.
Keep your distance, Ralph thought, but there was no way he could make her do that. This lady had a mind of her own.
‘We also know why you’re here,’ she said. ‘Claude’s uncle and cousins are here. In the ground.’
‘Indeed they are.’ He – it – was smiling more widely now. The gold tooth in that smile was Claude’s, like the letters on his fingers. ‘Along with many others, including the two children they hoped to save. I feel them in the earth. Some are close. Roger Bolton and his sons are over there, not twenty feet below Snake’s Belly.’ He pointed. ‘I feel them the most strongly, not just because they’re close, but because they are the blood I’m becoming.’
‘Not good to eat, though, I guess,’ Ralph said. He was looking at the cot. Barely visible on the stone floor beside it, next to a Styrofoam cooler, was another untidy litter of bones and skin.
‘No, of course not.’ The outsider looked at him impatiently. ‘But their remains give off a glow. A kind of … I don’t know, these are not things I ordinarily talk about … a kind of emanation. Even those foolish boys give off that glow, although it’s faint. They’re very far down. You might say they died exploring uncharted regions of the Marysville Hole.’ At this, his smile reappeared, showing not just the gold tooth but almost all of them. Ralph wondered if he had been smiling like that as he murdered Frank Peterson, eating his flesh and drinking the child’s dying agony along with his blood.
‘A glow like a nightlight?’ Holly asked. She sounded genuinely curious. The stairs squalled as she descended another step or two. Ralph wished mightily that she was going the other way: up and out, back into the hot Texas sunshine.
The outsider only shrugged.
Go back, he thought at Holly. Turn around and go back. When I’m sure you’ve had time enough to make it out the Ahiga back door, I’ll take the shot. Even if it makes my wife a widow and my son fatherless, I’ll take the shot. I owe it to Terry and all the others who came before him.
‘A nightlight,’ she repeated, coming down another step. ‘You know, for comfort. I had one when I was a girl.’
The outsider was looking up at her over Ralph’s shoulder. With his back to the standing lamp and his face in the shadows, Ralph could see a strange shine in those mismatched eyes. Except that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t in them but coming from them, and now Ralph understood what Grace Maitland had meant when she said the thing she’d seen had straws for eyes.
‘Comfort?’ The outsider seemed to consider the word. ‘Yes, I suppose so, although I’ve never thought of it that way. But also information. Even dead, they’re full of Bolton-ness.’
‘Do you mean memories?’ Another step closer. Ralph took his left hand off his wrist and motioned her back, knowing she wouldn’t go.
‘No, not those.’ He looked impatient with her again, but there was something else there, too. A certain eagerness Ralph knew from many interrogation rooms. Not every suspect wanted to talk, but most of them did, because they had been alone in the closed room of their thoughts. And this thing must have been alone with its thoughts for a very long time. Alone, period. You only had to look at him to know it.
‘Then what is it?’ She was still in the same place, and thank God for small blessings, Ralph thought.
‘Bloodline. There’s something in bloodline that goes beyond memory or the physical similarities that are carried down through the generations. It’s a way of being. A way of seeing. It’s not food, but it is strength. Their souls are gone, their ka, but something is left, even in their dead brains and bodies.’
‘A kind of DNA,’ she said. ‘Maybe tribal, maybe racial.’
‘I suppose. If you like.’ He took a step toward Ralph, holding out the hand with MUST written on the fingers. ‘It’s like these tattoos. They aren’t alive, but they hold certain infor—’
‘Stop!’ she shouted, and Ralph thought, Christ, she’s even closer. How could she do that without me hearing?
The echoes rose, seeming to expand, and something else fell. Not a stalactite this time, but a chunk of rock from one of the rough walls.
‘Don’t do that,’ the outsider said. ‘Unless you want to risk bringing the whole thing down on our heads, don’t raise your voice like that.’
When Holly spoke again, her voice was lower but still urgent. ‘Remember what he did to Detective Hoskins, Ralph. His touch is poisonous.’
‘Only when I’m in this transformative state,’ the outsider said mildly. ‘It’s a form of natural protection, and rarely fatal. More like poison ivy than some sort of radiation. Of course, Detective Hoskins was … susceptible, shall we say. And once I’ve touched someone, I can often – not always, but often – get into their minds. Or the minds of their loved ones. I did that with Frank Peterson’s family. Only a little, enough to push them in directions they were already going.’
‘You should stay where you are,’ Ralph said.
The outsider raised his tattooed hands. ‘Certainly. As I’ve said, you’re the man with the gun. But I can’t let you leave. I’m too tired to relocate, you see. I had to make the drive down here far too soon, and I had to buy a few supplies, which drained me even more. It seems we’re at a standoff.’
‘You put yourself in this position,’ Ralph said. ‘I mean, you know that, right?’
The outsider looked at him out of a face that still held the fading remains of Terry Maitland and said nothing.