‘Heath Holmes, okay. The others before Holmes, also okay. But Maitland was a mistake.’
‘I suppose that’s so.’ The outsider looked puzzled, but still complacent. ‘Yet I’ve taken others who had strong alibis and immaculate reputations. With evidence and eyewitness testimony, the alibis and reputations make no difference. People are blind to explanations that lie outside their perception of reality. You should never have come looking for me. You never should have even sensed me, no matter how strong his alibi was. Yet you did. Was it because I came to the courthouse?’
Ralph said nothing. Holly had come down the last step and was now standing beside him.
The outsider sighed. ‘That was a mistake, I should have thought more seriously about the presence of TV cameras, but I was still hungry. Yet I could have stayed away. I was gluttonous.’
‘Add overconfident, while you’re at it,’ Ralph said. ‘And overconfidence breeds carelessness. Cops see a lot of that.’
‘Well, perhaps I was all three. But I think I might have gotten away even with that.’ He was looking speculatively at the pale, gray-haired woman next to Ralph. ‘It is you I have to thank for being in this current situation, isn’t it? Holly. Claude says your name is Holly. What made you able to believe? How were you able to convince a party of modern men who probably don’t believe in anything beyond the range of their five senses to come down here? Have you seen another one like me somewhere?’ The eagerness in his voice was unmistakable.
‘We didn’t come here to answer your questions,’ Holly said. One of her hands was stuffed into the pocket of her wrinkled suit jacket. In the other, she held the UV flashlight, which was not turned on at the moment; the only light came from the standing lamp. ‘We came here to kill you.’
‘I’m not sure how you hope to do that … Holly. Your friend might chance firing his gun if it was just the two of us, but I don’t think he wants to risk your life, as well. And while one or both of you might try to attack me physically, I think you’d find me surprisingly strong as well as a bit poisonous. Yes, even in my current depleted state.’
‘It’s a standoff for now,’ Ralph said, ‘but not for long. Hoskins wounded State Police Lieutenant Yunel Sablo but didn’t kill him. By now he will have called this in.’
‘A good try, but not out here,’ the outsider said. ‘There is no cell reception for six miles going east and a dozen going west. Did you think I wouldn’t check?’
Ralph had been hoping for just that, but it had been a thin hope. As it happened, however, he had another card in his hand. ‘Hoskins also blew up the vehicle we came in. There’s smoke. Plenty of it.’
For the first time he saw real alarm in the outsider’s face.
‘That changes things. I’ll have to run. In my current state, that will be difficult and painful. If you wanted to make me angry, Detective, you’ve succeed—’
‘You asked me if I’d seen one of your kind before,’ Holly interrupted. ‘I haven’t – well, not exactly – but I’m sure Ralph has. Strip away the shape-changing, the memory-sucking, and the glowing eyes, and you’re just a sexual sadist and common pedophile.’
The outsider recoiled as if she had struck him. For a moment he seemed to forget all about the burning SUV sending up smoke signals from the abandoned parking lot. ‘That’s offensive, ridiculous, and untrue. I eat to live, that’s all. Your kind does the same thing when you slaughter pigs and cows. That’s all you are to me – cattle.’
‘You’re lying.’ Holly took a step forward, and when Ralph tried to take her by the arm, she shook him off. Red roses had begun to bloom in her pale cheeks. ‘Your ability to look like someone you’re not – something you’re not – guarantees trust. You could have taken any of Mr Maitland’s friends. You could have taken his wife. But instead of that, you took a child. You always take children.’
‘They’re the strongest, sweetest food! Have you never eaten veal? Or calves’ liver?’
‘You don’t just eat them, you ejaculate on them.’ Her mouth twisted in disgust. ‘You splooge on them. Oough!’
‘To leave DNA!’ he shouted.
‘You could leave it other ways!’ she shouted back, and something else fell from the eggshell ceiling above them. ‘But you don’t put your thing in, do you? Is it because you’re impotent?’ She raised a finger, then let it curl. ‘Is it is it is it?’
‘Shut up!’
‘You take children because you’re a child rapist who can’t even do it with his penis, you have to use a—’
He ran at her, his face twisting into an expression of hate that had nothing of Claude Bolton or Terry Maitland in it; this was its own thing, as black and awful as the lower depths where the Jamieson twins had finally surrendered their lives. Ralph raised his gun, but Holly stepped into his line of fire before he could get off a round.
‘Don’t shoot, Ralph, don’t shoot!’
Something else fell, this time something big, smashing the outsider’s cot and cooler and sending shards of mineral-sparkling stones spinning across the polished floor.
Holly pulled something from a pocket of her suit coat on the side that always sagged. The thing was long and white and stretched, as if it contained something heavy. At the same time, she turned on the UV flashlight and shined it full in the outsider’s face. He winced, made a snarling sound, and turned his head, still reaching for her with Claude Bolton’s tattooed hands. She drew the white thing cross-body above her small breasts, all the way to her shoulder, and swung it with all her strength. The loaded end connected with the outsider’s head just below the hairline, at the temple.
What Ralph saw then would haunt his dreams for years to come. The left half of the outsider’s head caved in as if it had been made of papier-maché rather than bone. The brown eye jumped in its socket. The thing went to its knees, and its face seemed to liquefy. Ralph saw a hundred features slide across it in mere seconds, there and gone: high foreheads followed low ones, bushy eyebrows and ones so blond they were hardly there, deepset eyes and ones that bulged, lips both wide and thin. Buck teeth protruded, then disappeared; chins jutted and sank. Yet the last face, the one that lingered longest, almost certainly the outsider’s true face, was utterly nondescript. It was the face of anyone you might pass on the street, seen at one moment and forgotten the next.
Holly swung again, striking the cheekbone this time and driving the forgettable face into a hideous crescent. It looked like something out of an insane children’s book.
In the end, it’s nothing, Ralph thought. Nobody. What looked like Claude, what looked like Terry, what looked like Heath Holmes … nothing. Only false fronts. Only stage dressing.
Reddish wormlike things began to pour from the hole in the outsider’s head, from its nose, from the cramped teardrop which was all that remained of its unsteady mouth. The worms fell to the stone floor of the Chamber of Sound in a squirming flood. Claude Bolton’s body first began to tremble, then to buck, then to shrivel inside its clothes.
Holly dropped the flashlight and raised the white thing over her head (it was a sock, Ralph saw, a man’s long white athletic sock), now holding it in both hands. She brought it down one final time, crashing it into the top of the thing’s head. Its face split down the middle like a rotted gourd. There was no brain in the cavity thus revealed, only a writhing nest of those worms, inescapably reminding Ralph of the maggots he had discovered in that long-ago cantaloupe. Those already released were squirming across the floor toward Holly’s feet.
She backed away from them, ran into Ralph, then buckled at the knees. He grabbed her and held her up. All the color had left her face. Tears spilled down her cheeks.
‘Drop the sock,’ he said in her ear.
She looked at him, dazed.