by Stephen King
“What was your dream?” Holly asked. “Can you remember?”
“Somebody under the bed, lying there and looking up. That’s all I can remember.”
She nodded for him to go on.
“Before I locked the front door, I stepped out on the porch to have a look around, and I noticed all the coyotes had stopped howling. Usually they howl like everything, once the moon’s up in the sky.”
“They do unless someone’s around,” Alec said. “Then they stop. Like the crickets.”
“Come to think of it, I couldn’t hear them, either. And Ma’s garden out back is usually full of em. I went back to bed, but couldn’t sleep. I remembered I hadn’t locked the windows and got up to do that. The catches squeak, and that woke Ma up. She asked me what I was doing, and I told her to go on back to sleep. I climbed into bed and almost drifted off myself—by then it had to be going on three—when I remembered I hadn’t locked the window in the bathroom, the one over the tub. I got the idea that someone was climbing in through it, so I got out of bed and ran to see. I know it sounds stupid now, but . . .”
He looked at them and saw none of them smiling or looking skeptical.
“All right. All right. I guess if you’ve come all the way down here, you probably don’t think it sounds stupid. Anyway, I tripped over Ma’s damn hassock, and that time she did get up. She asked me if someone was trying to get in the house, and I said no, but for her to stay in her room.”
“I didn’t, though,” Lovie said complacently. “I never minded any man except my husband, and he’s been gone a long time.”
“There was no one in the bathroom or trying to get in there through the window, but I had a feeling—I can’t tell you how strong it was—that he was still out there, hiding and waiting for his chance.”
“Not under your bed?” Ralph asked.
“No, I checked under there first thing. Crazy, sure, but . . .” He paused. “I didn’t go to sleep until daybreak. Ma woke me up and said we had to go to the airport so we could meet you.”
“Let him sleep as long as I could,” Lovie said. “That’s why I never made any sammitches. The bread’s on top of the fridge, and if I try to reach up there, I lose my breath.”
“And how do you feel now?” Holly asked Claude.
He sighed, and when he ran a hand up the side of his face, they could hear the rasp of his beard. “Not right. I stopped believing in the boogeyman right around the same time I stopped believing in Santa Claus, but I feel all upset and paranoid, the way I did when I was on the coke. Is this guy after me? Do you really believe that?”
He looked from face to face. It was Holly who answered him. “I do,” she said.
6
They were silent for a bit, thinking. Then Lovie spoke up. “El Cuco, you called him,” she said to Holly.
“Yes.”
The old woman nodded, tapping her arthritis-swollen fingers on her oxygen bottle. “When I was a little girl, the Mex kids called him Cucuy and the Anglos called him Kookie, or Chookie, or just the Chook. I even had a pitcher book about that sucker.”
“I bet I had the same one,” Yune said. “My abuela gave it to me. A giant with one big red ear?”
“Sí, mi amigo.” Lovie took out her cigarettes and lit one. She chuffed out smoke, coughed, and went on. “In the story, there were three sisters. The youngest one cooked and cleaned and did all the other chores. The two older girls were lazy and made fun of her. El Cucuy came. The house was locked, but he looked like their papi, so they let him in. He took the bad sisters to teach them a lesson. He left the good one who worked so hard for the daddy who was raising the girls on his own. Do you remember?”
“Sure,” Yune said. “You don’t forget the stories you hear when you’re just a kid. That storybook version of El Cucuy was supposed to be a good guy, but all I remember is how scared I was when he dragged the girls up the mountain to his cave. Las niñas lloraban y le rogaban que las soltara. The little girls cried and begged him to let them go.”
“Yes,” Lovie said. “And in the end, he did and those bad girls changed their ways. That’s the storybook version. But the real cucuy don’t let the children go, no matter how much they cry and beg. You all know that, don’t you? You’ve seen his work.”
“So you believe it, too,” Howie said.
Lovie shrugged. “Like they say, quien sabe? Did I ever believe in el chupacabra? What the old los indios call the goat-sucker?” She snorted. “No more than I believe in bigfoot. But there are strange things, just the same. Once—it was on Good Friday, at Blessed Sacrament on Galveston Street—I saw a statue of the Virgin Mary cry tears of blood. We all saw it. Later, Father Joaquim said it was just wet rust from under the eaves running down her face, but we all knew better. Father did, too. You could see it in his eyes.” She swung her gaze back to Holly. “You said you’d seen things yourself.”
“Yes,” Holly said quietly. “I believe there’s something. It may not be the traditional El Cuco, but is it the thing the legends are based on? I think so.”
“The boy and those girls you told about, he drank their blood and ate their flesh? This outsider?”
“He might have,” Alec said. “Based on the crime scenes, it’s possible.”
“And now he’s me,” Bolton said. “That’s what you think. All he needed was some of my blood. Did he drink it?”
No one answered him, but Ralph could actually see the thing that looked like Terry Maitland doing just that. He could see it with dreadful clarity. That was how far this insanity had gotten into his head.
“Was that him here last night, skulking around?”
“Maybe not physically here,” Holly said, “and he may not be you just yet. He might still be becoming you.”
“Maybe he was checking the place out,” Yune said.
Maybe he was trying to find out about us, Ralph thought. And if he was, he did. Claude knew we were coming.
“So what is going to happen now?” Lovie demanded. “Is he gonna kill another kid or two in Plainville or in Austin, and try to get my boy blamed for it?”
“I don’t think so,” Holly said. “I doubt if he’s strong enough yet. It was months between Heath Holmes and Terry Maitland. And he’s been . . . active.”
“There’s something else, too,” Yune said. “A practical aspect. This part of the country’s gotten hot for him. If he’s smart—and he must be, to have survived this long—he’ll want to move on.”
That felt right. Ralph could see Holly’s outsider putting his Claude Bolton face and muscular Claude Bolton body on a bus or a train in Austin and heading into the golden west. Las Vegas, maybe. Or Los Angeles. Where there might be another accidental encounter with a man (or even a woman—who knew), and a little more blood spilled. Another link in the chain.
The opening bars of Selena’s “Baila Esta Cumbia” came from Yune’s breast pocket. He looked startled.
Claude grinned. “Oh yeah. We got coverage even out here. Twenty-first century, man.”
Yune took out his phone, looked at the screen, and said, “Montgomery County PD. I better answer this. Excuse me.”
Holly looked startled, even alarmed, as he took the call and walked out on the porch with “Hello, this is Lieutenant Sablo” trailing after him. Holly excused herself as well, and followed him.
Howie said, “Maybe it’s about—”
Ralph shook his head without knowing why. At least not on the surface of his mind.
“Where’s Montgomery County?” Claude asked.
“Arizona,” Ralph said, before either Howie or Alec could reply. “Another matter. Nothing to do with this.”
“What exactly are we going to do about this?” Lovie asked. “Do you have any idea how to catch this fella? My son is all I got, you know.”
Holly came back in. She went to Lovie, bent, whispered in her ear. When Claude leaned over to eavesdrop, Lovie made a shooing gesture. “Go on in the kitchen, son, and bring back those chocolate pinwheel cookies, if
they ain’t melted in the heat.”
Claude, obviously trained to mind, went out to the kitchen. Holly continued to whisper, and Lovie’s eyes widened. She nodded. Claude came back with the bag of cookies at the same time Yune came in from the porch, stowing his phone back in his pocket.
“That was—” he began, then stopped. Holly had turned slightly, so her back was to Claude. She raised a finger to her lips and shook her head.
“That was nothing,” he said. “They picked up a guy, but not the one we’ve been looking for.”
Claude put the cookies (which did look sadly melted in their cellophane bag) on the table and glanced around suspiciously. “I don’t think that’s what you started to say. What’s going on here?”
Ralph thought that was a good question. Outside on the rural route, a pickup truck trundled by, the lockbox in the bed reflecting bright spears of sun that made him wince.
“Son,” Lovie said, “I want you to get in your car and drive to Tippit and get us some chicken dinners at Highway Heaven. That’s a pretty good place. We’ll feed these folks, then they can go back t’other way and spend the night at the Indian. It ain’t much, but it’s a roof.”
“Tippit’s forty miles!” Claude protested. “Dinners for seven people will cost a fortune, and be dead cold when I get back!”
“I’ll heat everything up on the stove,” she said calmly, “and those dinners’ll be good as new. Go on, now.”
Ralph liked the way Claude put his hands on his hips and looked at her with humor and exasperation. “You’re tryin to get rid of me!”
“That’s it,” she agreed, butting her cigarette in a tin ashtray heaped with dead soldiers. “Because if Miss Holly here is right, what you know, he knows. Maybe that don’t matter, maybe all the cats are out of the bag, but maybe it does. So you be a good son and go get those dinners.”
Howie took out his wallet. “Allow me to pay, Claude.”
“That’s all right,” Claude said, a trifle sullenly. “I can pay. I ain’t broke.”
Howie smiled his big lawyer’s smile. “But I insist!”
Claude took the money and tucked it into the wallet chained to his belt. He looked around at his guests, still trying to be sullen, but then he laughed. “My ma usually gets what she wants,” he said. “I guess you figured that out by now.”
7
The Boltons’ byroad, Rural Star Route 2, eventually led to an actual highway: 190 out of Austin. Before it got that far, a dirt road—four lanes wide but now falling into disrepair—branched off to the right. It was marked by a billboard which was also falling into disrepair. It depicted a happy family descending a spiral staircase. They were holding up gas lanterns that showed their expressions of awe as they peered at the stalactites suspended high above them. The come-on line below the family read VISIT THE MARYSVILLE HOLE, ONE OF NATURE’S GREATEST WONDERS. Claude knew what it said from the old days, when he’d been a restless teenager stuck in Marysville, but in these new days all you could read was VISIT THE MARYSV and ATEST WONDERS. A wide strip, reading CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE (itself faded), had been pasted over the rest.
A feeling of lightheadedness came over him as he drove by what local kids called (with knowing sniggers) the Road to the Hole, but it passed when he kicked the AC up a notch. Although he had protested, he was actually glad to be out of the house. That sense of being watched had faded away. He turned on the radio, tuned to Outlaw Country, got Waylon Jennings (the best!), and began to sing along.
Chicken dinners from Highway Heaven was maybe not such a bad idea. He could have a whole order of onion rings to himself, eating them on the way home while they were still hot and greasy.
8
Jack waited in his room at the Indian Motel, peering out between the drawn drapes, until he saw a van with a handicap plate pulling out onto the road. That had to be the old bag’s ride. A blue SUV followed it, undoubtedly full of the meddlers down from Flint City.
When they were out of sight, Jack went up to the café, where he ate a meal and then inspected the items for sale. There was no aloe cream, and no sunblock, either, so he bought two bottles of water and a couple of outrageously overpriced bandannas. They wouldn’t be much protection from the hot Texas sun, but better than nothing. He got in his truck and drove southwest, in the direction the meddlers had gone, until he came to the billboard and the road leading to the Marysville Hole. Here he turned in.
About four miles up, he came to a weather-worn little cabin standing in the middle of the road. It must have been a ticket booth when the Hole was a going concern, he supposed. The paint, once bright red, was now the faded pink of blood diluted in water. On the front was a sign reading ATTRACTION CLOSED, TURN BACK HERE. The road had been chained off beyond the ticket booth. Jack went around the chain, jouncing along the dirt hardpan, crunching tumbleweeds, swerving around sagebrush. The truck took a final bounce and then he was back on the road . . . if you could call it that. On this side of the chain it was your basic mess of weed-choked potholes and washouts that had never been filled in. His Ram—high-sprung and equipped with four-wheel drive—took the washouts easily, spitting dirt and stones from beneath its oversized tires.
Two slow miles and ten minutes later, he came to an acre or so of empty parking lot, the yellow lines of the spaces faded to ghosts, the asphalt cracked and heaved into plates. To the left, backed up against a steep brush-covered hill, was an abandoned gift shop with a fallen sign he had to read upside down: SOUVENIRS AND AUTHENTIC INDIAN CRAFTS. Straight ahead was the ruin of a wide cement walk leading to an opening in the hill. Well, once upon a time it had been an opening; now it was boarded over and plastered with signs reading KEEP OUT, NO TRESPASSING, PRIVATE PROPERTY, and COUNTY SHERIFF PATROLS THIS AREA.
Right, Jack thought. They maybe take a swing-through once every February 29th.
Another crumbling road led away from the parking lot, past the gift shop. It went up one side of a slope and down the other. It took him first to a bunch of decrepit tourist cabins (also boarded up) and then on to some kind of service shed, where company vehicles and equipment had probably once been stored. There were more KEEP OUT signs on this, plus a cheery one that read WATCH FOR RATTLESNAKES.
Jack parked his truck in the scant shade of this building. Before getting out, he tied one of the bandannas over his head (giving him a weird resemblance to the man Ralph had seen at the courthouse on the day Terry Maitland was shot). The other he fluffed around his neck to keep that fucking burn from getting worse. He keyed open the lockbox in the truckbed and reverently lifted out the gun case that contained his pride and joy: a Winchester .300 bolt-action, the same gun Chris Kyle had used to shoot all those ragheads (Jack had seen American Sniper eight times). With the Leupold VX-1 riflescope, he could hit a target at two thousand yards. Well, four out of six tries on a good day, and with no wind, and he didn’t expect to be shooting at anywhere near that distance when the time came. If it came.
He spotted a few forgotten tools lying in the weeds, and appropriated a rusty pitchfork in case of rattlers. Behind the building, a path led up the back of the hill in which the entrance to the Hole was located. This side was rockier, not really a hill at all but an eroded bluff. There were a few beercans along the way, and several rocks had been tagged with things like SPANKY 11 and DOODAD WAS HERE.
Halfway up, another path split off, apparently circling back to the defunct gift shop and the parking lot. Here was a weather-worn, bullet-pocked wooden sign showing an Indian chief in full headdress. Below him was an arrow, the accompanying message so faded it was barely legible: BEST PICTOGRAPHS THIS WAY. More recently, some wit had drawn a Magic Marker word balloon coming from the big chief’s mouth. It read CAROLYN ALLEN SUCKS MY REDSKIN COCK.
This path was broader, but Jack had not come here to admire Native American art, so he continued upward. The climb was not particularly dangerous, but Jack’s exercise over the last few years had mostly consisted of bending his elbow in various bars. By the time
he was three-quarters of the way up, he was short of breath. His shirt and both bandannas were dark with sweat. He set the gun case and pitchfork down, then bent and gripped his knees until the dark specks dancing in front of his eyes disappeared and his heart rate returned to something like normal. He had come here to avoid a terrible death from the sort of ravenous, skin-eating cancer that had taken his mother. Dying of a myocardial infarction while trying to do that would be a bitter joke.
He started to straighten up, then paused, squinting. In the shade beneath an overhanging ledge, safe from the worst of the elements, there was more graffiti. But if these had been left by kids, they were long dead, and for many hundreds of years. One showed stick men with stick spears surrounding what might have been an antelope—something with horns, anyway. In another, stick men were standing in front of what looked like a tepee. In a third—almost too faded to make out—a stick man was standing over the prone body of another stick man, his spear raised in triumph.
Pictographs, Jack thought, and not even the best ones, according to the big chief back there. Kindergarten kids could do better, but they’ll be here long after I’m gone. Especially if the cancer gets me.
The idea made him angry. He picked up a chunk of sharp rock and hammered at the pictographs until they were obliterated.
There, he thought. There, you dead fuckers. You’re gone and I win.
It occurred to him that he might be going crazy . . . or had already gone. He pushed that away and resumed his climb. When he reached the top of the bluff, he found he had a fine view of the parking lot, the gift shop, and the boarded-up entrance to the Marysville Hole. His visitor with the tats on his fingers wasn’t sure the meddlers would come here, but if they did, Jack was to handle them. Which he could do with the Winchester, he had no doubt of that. If they didn’t come—if they just returned to Flint City after talking to the man they’d come to talk to—Jack’s work would be done. Either way, the visitor assured him, Jack would be as good as new. No cancer.