He wanted to faint. To just collapse off the toilet, and if he gave himself a concussion on the tile floor, even fractured his skull, so what? At least he would be out of this. But consciousness stubbornly remained. The shadowy figure in the tub remained. The fingers on the curtain remained: CANT, in fading blue letters.
‘Touch the back of your neck, Jack. If you don’t want me to pull back this curtain and show myself, do it now.’
Hoskins raised a hand and pressed it to the nape of his neck. His body’s reaction was immediate: terrifying bolts of pain which ran up to his temples and down to his shoulders. He looked at his hand and saw it was smeared with blood.
‘You’ve got cancer,’ the figure behind the curtain informed him. ‘It’s in your lymph glands, and your throat, and your sinuses. It’s in your eyes, Jack. It’s eating into your eyes. Soon you’ll be able to see it, little gray knobs of malignant cancer cells swimming around in your vision. Do you know when you got it?’
Of course he knew. When this creature had touched him out there in Canning Township. When it had caressed him.
‘I gave it to you, but I can take it back. Would you like me to take it back?’
‘Yes,’ Jack whispered. He began to cry. ‘Take it back. Please take it back.’
‘Will you do something if I ask you?’
‘Yes.’
‘You won’t hesitate?’
‘No!’
‘I believe you. And you won’t give me any reason not to believe you, will you?’
‘No! No!’
‘Good. Now clean yourself up. You stink.’
The CANT hand withdrew, but the shape behind the shower curtain was still staring at him. Not a man, after all. Something far worse than the worst man who had ever lived. Hoskins reached for the toilet paper, aware as he did so that he was tilting sideways off the seat and that the world was simultaneously dimming and dwindling. And that was good. He fell, but there was no pain. He was unconscious before he hit the floor.
2
Jeannie Anderson woke at four that morning, with her usual wee-hours full bladder. Ordinarily she would have used their bathroom, but Ralph had been sleeping badly ever since Terry Maitland had been shot, and tonight he had been particularly restless. She got out of bed and made her way to the bathroom at the end of the hall, the one past the door to Derek’s room. She considered flushing after relieving herself and decided even that might wake him. It could wait until morning.
Two more hours, Lord, she thought as she left the bathroom. Two more hours of good sleep, that’s all I w—
She stopped halfway down the hall. The downstairs had been dark when she left the bedroom, hadn’t it? She had been more asleep than awake, but surely she would have noticed a light on.
Are you sure of that?
No, not completely, but there certainly was a light on down there now. White light. Muted. The one over the stove.
She went to the stairs and stood at the top, looking down at that light, brow wrinkled, thinking profoundly. Had the burglar alarm been set before they went to bed? Yes. Arming it before bed was a house rule. She set it, and Ralph had double-checked it before they went up. One or the other of them always set the alarm, but the double-checks, like Ralph’s poor sleeping, had only begun since the death of Terry Maitland.
She considered waking Ralph and decided against it. He needed his sleep. She considered going back to get his service revolver, in the box on the high shelf in the closet, but the closet door squeaked and that would surely wake him. And wasn’t that pretty paranoid? The light probably had been on when she went to the bathroom and she just hadn’t noticed. Or maybe it had gone on by itself, a malfunction. She descended the steps quietly, moving to the left on the third step and to the right on the ninth to avoid the creaks, not even thinking about it.
She walked to the kitchen door and peeked around the frame, feeling both stupid and not stupid at all. She sighed, blowing back her bangs. The kitchen was empty. She started across the room to turn off the stove light, then stopped. There were supposed to be four chairs at the kitchen table, three for the family and the one they called the guest chair. But now there were only three.
‘Don’t move,’ someone said. ‘If you move, I’ll kill you. If you scream, I’ll kill you.’
She stopped, pulse hammering, the hair on the back of her neck lifting. If she hadn’t done her business before coming down, urine would be running down her legs and puddling on the floor. The man, the intruder, was sitting on the guest chair in their living room, just far enough back from the archway that she could only see him from the knees down. He was wearing faded jeans and moccasins with no socks. His ankles were riddled with red blotches that might have been psoriasis. His upper body was just a vague silhouette. All she could tell was that his shoulders were broad and a little slumped – not as if he was tired, but as if they were so crammed with workout muscle that he couldn’t square them. It was funny, all you could see at a moment like this. Terror had frozen her brain’s usual sorting ability, and everything flowed in without prejudice. This was the man who had killed Frank Peterson. The man who bit into him like a wild animal and raped him with a tree branch. That man was in her house, and here she stood in her shortie pajamas, with her nipples no doubt sticking out like headlights.
‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘Are you listening?’
‘Yes,’ Jeannie whispered, but she had begun to sway, on the edge of a faint, and she was afraid she might pass out before he could say what he had come to say. If that happened, he would kill her. After that he might leave, or he might go upstairs to kill Ralph. He’d do it before Ralph’s mind cleared enough to know what was going on.
And leave Derek to come home from camp an orphan.
No. No. No.
‘W-What do you want?’
‘Tell your husband it’s done here in Flint City. Tell him he has to stop. Tell him that if he does that, things go back to normal. Tell him if he doesn’t, I’ll kill him. I’ll kill them all.’
His hand emerged from the shadows of the living room and into the dim light cast by the single-bar fluorescent. It was a big hand. He closed it into a fist.
‘What does it say on my fingers? Read it to me.’
She stared at the faded blue letters. She tried to speak and couldn’t. Her tongue was nothing but a lump clinging to the roof of her mouth.
He leaned forward. She saw eyes under a broad shelf of forehead. Black hair, short enough to bristle. Black eyes, not just on her but in her, searching her heart and mind.
‘It says MUST,’ he told her. ‘You see that, don’t you?’
‘Y-Y-Y—’
‘And what you must do is tell him to stop.’ Red lips moving inside a black goatee. ‘Tell him if he or any of them tries to find me, I’ll kill them and leave their guts in the desert for the buzzards. Do you understand me?’
Yes, she tried to tell him, but her tongue wouldn’t move and her knees were unlocking and she put her arms out to break her fall and she didn’t know if she succeeded in that or not because she was gone into darkness before she hit the floor.
3
Jack woke up at seven o’clock with bright summer sun shining through the window and across his bed. Birds were twittering outside. He sat bolt upright, staring wildly around, only faintly aware that his head was throbbing from last night’s vodka.
He got out of bed fast, opened the drawer of his bedside table, and took out the .38 Pathfinder he kept there for home protection. He high-stepped across the bedroom with the gun held beside his right cheek and the short barrel pointing at the ceiling. He kicked his boxers aside, and when he got to the door, which stood open, he paused next to it with his back to the wall. The smell wafting out was fading but familiar; the aftermath of last night’s enchilada adventures. He had gotten up to offload; that much, at least, hadn’t been a dream.