by Stephen King
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.”
“For the sake of argument, say he was. I’ve been threatened before. Any cop worth his salt has been threatened.”
“You’re not the only one being threatened!” She had to struggle not to shout. This was like being caught in one of those ridiculous horror movies where no one believes the heroine when she says Jason or Freddy or Michael Myers has come back yet again. “He was in our house!”
He thought about going over it again: locked doors, locked windows, burglar alarm armed but quiet. He thought about reminding her that she had awakened this morning in her own bed, safe and sound. He could see by her face that none of those things would do any good. And an argument with his wife in her current state was the last thing he wanted.
“Was he burned, Jeannie? Like the man I saw at the courthouse?”
She shook her head.
“You’re sure? Because you said he was in the shadows.”
“He leaned forward at one point, and I saw a little. I saw enough.” She shuddered. “Broad forehead, shelving over his eyes. The eyes themselves were dark, maybe black, maybe brown, maybe deep blue, I couldn’t tell. His hair was short and bristly. Some gray, but most of it still black. He had a goatee. His lips were very red.”
The description struck a chime in his head, but Ralph didn’t trust the feeling; it was probably a false positive caused by her intensity. God knew he wanted to believe her. If there had been one single scrap of empirical evidence . . .
“Wait a minute, his feet! He was wearing moccasins without socks and there were these red blotches all over them. I thought it was psoriasis, but I suppose it could have been burns.”
He started the coffeemaker. “I don’t know what to tell you, Jeannie. You woke up in bed, and there’s just no sign anyone was—”
“Once upon a time you cut open a cantaloupe and it was full of maggots,” she said. “That happened, you know it did. Why can’t you believe this happened?”
“Even if I did, I couldn’t stop. Don’t you see that?”
“What I see is that the man sitting in our living room was right about one thing: it’s over. Frank Peterson is dead. Terry is dead. You’ll get back on active duty, and we . . . we can . . . could . . .”
She trailed off, because what she saw in his face made it clear that going on would be useless. It wasn’t disbelief. It was disappointment that she could possibly believe moving on was an option f
or him. Arresting Terry Maitland at the Estelle Barga ballfield had been the first domino, the one that started a chain reaction of violence and misery. And now he and his wife were having an argument over the man who wasn’t there. All his fault, that’s what he believed.
“If you won’t stop,” she said, “you need to start carrying your gun again. I know I’ll be carrying the little .22 you gave me three years ago. I thought it was a very stupid present at the time, but I guess you were right. Hey, maybe you were clairvoyant.”
“Jeannie—”
“Do you want eggs?”
“I guess so, yeah.” He wasn’t hungry, but if all he could do for her this morning was eat her cooking, then that was what he would do.
She got the eggs out of the fridge and spoke to him without turning around. “I want us to have police protection at night. It doesn’t have to be from dusk to dawn, but I want somebody making regular passes. Can you arrange that?”
Police protection against a ghost won’t do much good, he thought . . . but had been married too long to say. “I believe I can.”
“You should tell Howie Gold and the others, too. Even if it sounds crazy.”
“Honey—”
But she rode over him. “He said you or any of them. He said he’d leave your guts strewn in the desert for the buzzards.”
Ralph thought of reminding her that, while they did see the occasional buzzard wheeling in the sky (especially on garbage day), there wasn’t much in the way of desert around Flint City. That alone was suggestive that the whole encounter had been a dream, but he kept quiet on this, as well. He had no intention of winding things up again just when they seemed to be winding down.
“I will,” he said, and this was a promise he meant to keep. They needed to put it all out on the table. Every bit of the crazy. “You know we’re having the meeting at Howie Gold’s office, right? With the woman Alec Pelley hired to look into Terry’s trip to Dayton.”
“The one who stated categorically that Terry was innocent.”
This time what Ralph thought of and didn’t say (there were oceans of unspoken conversation in long marriages, it seemed) was, Uri Geller stated categorically that he could bend spoons by concentrating on them.
“Yes. She’s flying in. Maybe it will turn out that she’s full of shit, but she worked with a decorated ex-cop in that business of hers, and her procedure seemed sound enough, so maybe she really found something in Dayton. God knows she sounded sure of herself.”
Jeannie began to crack eggs. “You’d go on even if I’d come downstairs and found the burglar alarm had been shorted out, the back door was standing open, and his footprints were on the tile. You’d go on even then.”
“Yes.” She deserved the truth, unvarnished.
She turned to him then, the spatula held high, like a weapon. “May I say that I think you’re being sort of a fool?”
“You can say anything you want, but you need to remember two things, honey. Whether Terry was innocent or guilty, I played a part in getting him killed.”
“You—”
“Hush,” he said, pointing at her. “I’m talking, and you need to understand.”
She hushed.
“And if he was innocent, there’s a child-killer out there, running free.”
“I understand that, but you may be opening the door on things far beyond your ability to understand. Or mine.”
“Supernatural things? Is that what you’re talking about? Because I can’t believe that. I will never believe that.”
“Believe what you want,” she said, turning back to the stove, “but that man was here. I saw his face, and I saw the word on his fingers. MUST. He was . . . dreadful. It’s the only word I can think of. Having you not believe me makes me want to cry, or throw this skillet of eggs at your head, or . . . I don’t know.”
He went to her and encircled her waist. “I believe that you believe. That much is true. And here’s a promise: if nothing comes of this meeting tonight, you’ll find me a lot more open to the idea of letting this go. I understand there are limits. Does that work?”
“I guess it has to, at least for now. I know you made a mistake at the ballfield. I know you’re trying to atone for it. But what if you’re making a worse mistake by keeping on?”
“Suppose it had been Derek in Figgis Park?” he countered. “Would you want me to let it go then?”
She resented the question, considered it a low blow, but had no answer for it. Because if it had been Derek, she would have wanted Ralph to pursue the man who’d done it—or the thing—to the ends of the earth. And she would have been right beside him.
“Okay. You win. But one more thing, and it’s non-negotiable.”
“What?”
“When you go to that meeting tonight, I’m going to be with you. And don’t give me any crap about it being police business, because we both know it’s not. Now eat your eggs.”
6
Jeannie sent Ralph to Kroger with a grocery list, because no matter who had been in the house last night—human, ghost, or just a character in an extraordinarily vivid dream—Mr. and Mrs. Anderson still had to eat. And halfway to the supermarket, things came together for Ralph. There was nothing dramatic about it, because the salient facts had been there all along, literally right in front of his face, in a police department interview room. Had he interviewed Frank Peterson’s real killer as a witness, thanked him for his help, and let him walk free? It seemed impossible, given the wealth of evidence tying Terry to the murder, but . . .
He pulled over and called Yune Sablo.
“I’ll be there tonight, don’t worry,” Yune said. “Wouldn’t miss all the news from the Ohio end of this clusterfuck. And I’m already on Heath Holmes. I don’t have much yet, but by the time we get together, I should have a fair amount.”
“Good, but that’s not why I’m calling. Can you pull Claude Bolton’s rap sheet? He’s the bouncer at Gentlemen, Please. What you’re going to find is possession, mostly, maybe one or two busts for possession with intent to sell, pleaded down.”
“He’s the one who prefers to be called security, right?”
“Yes sir, that’s our Claude.”
“What’s up with him?”
“I’ll tell you tonight, if it comes to anything. For now, all I can say is that there seems to be a chain of events that leads from Holmes to Maitland to Bolton. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am.”
“You’re killin me here, Ralph. Tell!”
“Not yet. Not until I’m sure. And I need something else. Bolton’s a tattoo billboard, and I’m pretty sure he had something on his fingers. I should have noticed, but you know how it is when you’re interviewing, especially if the guy on the other side of the table has a record.”
“You keep your eyes on the face.”
“That’s right. Always on the face. Because when guys like Bolton start lying, they might as well be holding up a sign reading I’m full of shit.”
“You think Bolton was lying when he talked about Maitland coming in to use the phone? Because the taxi driver lady sort of corroborated his story.”
“I didn’t think so at the time, but now I’ve got a little more. See if you can find out what was on his fingers. If anything.”
“What do you think might be on them, ese?”
“Don’t want to say, but if I’m right, it’ll be on his sheet. One other thing. Can you email me a picture?”
“Happy to do it. Give me a few minutes.”
“Thanks, Yune.”
“Any plans to get in touch with Mr. Bolton?”
“Not yet. I don’t want him to know I’m interested in him.”
“And you really are going to explain all this tonight?”
“As much as I can, yes.”
“Will it help?”
“Honest answer? I don’t know. Have you got anything back on the stuff you found on the clothes and hay in that barn?”
“Not yet. Let me see what I can find on Bolton.”<
br />
“Thanks.”
“What are you up to right now?”
“Grocery shopping.”
“Hope you remembered your wife’s coupons.”
Ralph smiled and looked at the rubber-banded stack on the seat beside him. “As if she’d let me forget,” he said.
7
He came out of Kroger with three bags of groceries, stowed them in the trunk, then looked at his phone. Two messages from Yune Sablo. He opened the one with the photo attachment first. In his mug shot, Claude Bolton looked much younger than the man Ralph had interviewed prior to the Maitland arrest. He also looked stoned to the gills: thousand-yard stare, scraped cheek, and something on his chin that might have been egg or puke. Ralph remembered Bolton saying he went to Narcotics Anonymous these days, and that he’d been clean for five or six years. Maybe so, maybe not.
The attachment on Yune’s second email was the arrest record. There were plenty of busts, mostly minor, and plenty of identifying marks. They included a scar on his back, one on his left side below the rib cage, one on his right temple, and about two dozen tattoos. There was an eagle, a knife with a bloody tip, a mermaid, a skull with candles in the eyesockets, and a good many others that didn’t interest Ralph. What did were the words on his fingers: CANT on the right hand, MUST on the left.
The burned man at the courthouse had had tattoos on his fingers, but had they been CANT and MUST? Ralph closed his eyes and tried to see, but got nothing. He knew from experience that finger tattoos weren’t uncommon among men who had spent time in jail; they probably saw it in the movies. LOVE and HATE were popular; so were GOOD and EVIL. He remembered Jack Hoskins telling him about a rat-faced little burglar who’d been sporting FUCK and SUCK on his digits, Jack saying it probably wasn’t the kind of thing that would get the guy girlfriends.