‘Is anybody in there? If so, answer up. I’m armed and I will shoot.’
Nothing. Jack took a deep breath and pivoted around the doorframe, going low, sweeping the room from side to side with the barrel of the .38. He saw the toilet with the lid up and the ring down. He saw the newspaper on the floor, turned to the comics. He saw the tub, with its translucent flowered curtain pulled across. He saw shapes behind it, but those were the shower head, the grab handle, the back-scrubber.
Are you sure?
Before he could lose his nerve, he took a step forward, slid on the bathmat, and grabbed the shower curtain to keep from going ass over teapot. It pulled loose from the rings and covered his face. He screamed, clawed it aside, and pointed the .38 into the tub at nothing. No one there. No boogeyman. He peered at the bottom of the tub. He wasn’t exactly conscientious about keeping it clean, and if someone had been standing in there, he would have left footprints. But the dried scum of soap and shampoo was unmarked by tracks. It had all been a dream. A particularly vivid nightmare.
Still, he checked the bathroom window and all three doors leading outside. Everything was buttoned up.
Okay, then. Time to relax. Or almost. He went back to the bathroom for one more look, this time checking the towel cabinet (nothing) and toeing at the fallen shower curtain with disgust. Time to replace that sucker. He’d swing by Home Depot today.
He reached absently to rub the back of his neck, and hissed with pain as soon as his fingers made contact. He went to the sink and turned around, but trying to see the back of your neck by looking over your shoulder was worse than useless. He opened the top drawer under the sink and found nothing but shaving stuff, combs, an unraveling Ace bandage, and the world’s oldest tube of Monistat: another little souvenir from the Age of Greta. Like the stupid shower curtain.
In the bottom drawer he found what he was looking for, a mirror with a broken handle. He rubbed the dust from its reflective surface, backed up until his butt was touching the lip of the sink, and held up the mirror. The back of his neck was flaming red, and he could see little seed-pearl blisters forming. How was that possible, when he slathered himself with sunblock as a matter of course, and didn’t have a sunburn anywhere else?
That’s not a sunburn, Jack.
Hoskins made a little whimpering sound. Surely no one had been in his tub early this morning, no creepy weirdo with CANT tattooed on his fingers – surely not – but one thing was certain: skin cancer ran in his family. His mother and one of his uncles had died of it. It goes with the red hair, his father had said, after he himself had had skin tags removed from his driver’s side arm, pre-cancerous moles from his calves, and a basal cell carcinoma from the back of his neck.
Jack remembered a huge black mole (growing, always growing) on his uncle Jim’s cheek; he remembered the raw sores on his mother’s breastbone and eating into her left arm. Your skin was the largest organ in your body, and when it went haywire, the results were not pretty.
Would you like me to take it back? the man behind the curtain had asked.
‘That was a dream,’ Hoskins said. ‘I got a scare out in Canning, and last night I ate a shitload of bad Mexican food, so I had a nightmare. That’s all, end of story.’
That didn’t stop him from feeling for lumps in his armpits, under the angles of his jaw, inside his nose. Nothing. Only a little too much sun on the back of his neck. Except he had no sunburn anywhere else. Just that single throbbing stripe. It wasn’t actually bleeding – which sort of proved his early morning encounter had only been a bad dream – but it was already growing that crop of blisters. He should probably see a doctor about it, and he would … after he gave it a few days to get better on its own, that was.
Will you do something if I ask you? You won’t hesitate?
No one would, Jack thought, looking at the back of his neck in the mirror. If the alternative was getting eaten from the outside in – eaten alive – no one would.
4
Jeannie woke up staring at the bedroom ceiling, at first not able to understand why her mouth was filled with the coppery taste of panic, as if she had narrowly avoided a bad fall, or why her hands were raised, palms splayed out in a warding-off gesture. Then she saw the empty half of the bed on her left, heard the sound of Ralph splashing in the shower, and thought, It was a dream. The most vivid damn nightmare of all time for sure, but that’s all it was.
Only there was no sense of relief, because she didn’t believe that. It wasn’t fading as dreams usually did on waking, even the worst ones. She remembered everything, from seeing the light on downstairs to the man sitting in the guest chair just beyond the living room archway. She remembered the hand emerging into the dim light, and closing into a fist so she could read the fading letters tattooed between the knuckles: MUST.
What you must do is tell him to stop.
She threw back the covers and left the room, not quite running. In the kitchen, the light over the stove was off, and all four chairs were in their accustomed places at the table where they ate most of their meals. It should have made a difference.
It didn’t.
5
When Ralph came down, tucking his shirt into his jeans with one hand and holding his sneakers in the other, he found his wife sitting at the kitchen table. There was no morning cup of coffee in front of her, no juice, no cereal. He asked her if she was okay.
‘No. There was a man here last night.’
He stopped where he was, one side of his shirt squared away, the other hanging down over his belt. He dropped his sneakers. ‘Say what?’
‘A man. The one who killed Frank Peterson.’
He looked around, suddenly wide awake. ‘When? What are you talking about?’
‘Last night. He’s gone now, but he had a message for you. Sit down, Ralph.’
He did, and she told him what had happened. He listened without saying a word, looking into her eyes. He saw nothing in them but absolute conviction. When she was done, he got up to check the burglar alarm console by the back door.
‘It’s armed, Jeannie. And the door’s locked. At least this one is.’
‘I know it’s armed. And they’re all locked. I checked. The windows are, too.’
‘Then how—’
‘I don’t know, but he was here.’
‘Sitting right there.’ He pointed to the archway.
‘Yes. As if he didn’t want to get too far into the light.’
‘And he was big, you say?’
‘Yes. Maybe not as big as you – I couldn’t tell his height because he was sitting down – but he had broad shoulders and lots of muscle. Like a guy who spends three hours a day in a gym. Or lifting weights in a prison yard.’
He left the table and got down on his knees where the kitchen’s wooden floor met the living room carpet. She knew what he was looking for, and knew he wouldn’t find it. She had checked this, too, and it didn’t change her mind. If you weren’t crazy, you knew the difference between dreams and reality, even when the reality was far outside the boundaries of normal life. Once she might have doubted that (as she knew Ralph was doubting now), but no more. Now she knew better.
He got up. ‘That’s a new carpet, honey. If a man had sat there, even for a short while, the feet of the chair would have left marks in the nap. There aren’t any.’
She nodded. ‘I know. But he was there.’
‘What are you saying? That he was a ghost?’
‘I don’t know what he was, but I know he was right. You have to stop. If you don’t, something bad is going to happen.’ She went to him, tilting her head up to look him full in the face. ‘Something terrible.’
He took her hands. ‘This has been a stressful time, Jeannie. For you as much as for m—’
She pulled away. ‘Don’t go there, Ralph. Don’t. He was here.’