by Stephen King
Holly said, “That’s a popular misconception. In the original Frankenstein movie, the doctor’s assistant was actually named Fritz, played by Dwight Frye. Later, Bela Lugosi—”
“I stand corrected,” Howie said, “but the question remains: What if our outsider has an accomplice? Somebody with orders to keep tabs on us? Doesn’t that make sense? Even if the outsider doesn’t know we found out about the Marysville Hole, he knows we’re too close for comfort.”
“I see your point, Howie,” Alec said, “but serials are usually loners, and the ones who stay free the longest are drifters. There are exceptions, but I don’t think our guy is one of them. He hopped down to Flint City from Dayton. If you backtrailed him from Ohio, you might find murdered children in Tampa, Florida, or Portland, Maine. There’s an African proverb: he travels fastest who travels alone. And practically speaking, who could he hire for a job like that?”
“A nut,” Howie said.
“Okay,” Ralph said, “but from where? Did he just stop by Nuts R Us and pick one up?”
“Fine,” Howie said. “He’s on his own, just cowering in the Marysville Hole and waiting for us to come and get him. Drag him into the sun or put a stake in his heart or both.”
“In Stoker’s novel,” Holly said, “they cut off Dracula’s head when they caught him, and stuffed his mouth full of garlic.”
Howie tossed the flashlight on the bed and threw up his hands. “Also fine. We’ll stop by Shopwell and buy some garlic. Also a meat cleaver, since we neglected to buy a hacksaw while we were in Home Depot.”
Ralph said, “I think a bullet in the head should do the trick nicely.”
They considered this in silence for a moment, and then Howie said he was going to bed. “But before I do, I’d like to know what the plan is for tomorrow.”
Ralph waited for Holly to enlighten Howie on this point, but she looked at Ralph, instead. He was startled and moved by the hollows under her eyes and the lines that had appeared at the corners of her mouth. Ralph himself was tired, he supposed they all were, but Holly Gibney was exhausted, at this point running on nothing but nerves. And given her tightly wrapped persona, he guessed that for her that would be like running on thorns. Or broken glass.
“Nothing before nine o’clock,” Ralph said. “We all need at least eight hours of sleep, more if we can get it. Then we pack up, check out, go to the Boltons’, and pick up Yune. From there to the Marysville Hole.”
“Wrong direction, if we want Claude to think we’re flying home,” Alec said. “He’ll wonder why we aren’t headed back to Plainville.”
“Okay, we tell Claude and Lovie we have to go to Tippit first because . . . mmm, I don’t know, we have some more shopping to do at Home Depot?”
“Pretty thin,” Howie said.
Alec asked, “Who was the state cop who came out to talk to Claude? Do you remember?”
Ralph didn’t offhand, but he had kept case-notes on his iPad. Routine was routine, even when chasing the boogeyman. “His name was Owen Sipe. Corporal Owen Sipe.”
“Okay. You tell Claude and his momma—which is the same thing as telling the outsider, if he really can get inside Claude’s head—that you got a call from Corporal Sipe saying that a man roughly matching Claude’s description is wanted in Tippit for questioning in a robbery or a car theft or maybe a home invasion. Yune can verify that Claude was at home all night—”
“Not if he was out sleeping in the gaze-bo,” Ralph said.
“You’re telling me he wouldn’t have heard Claude start his car? That thing needed a new muffler two years ago.”
Ralph smiled. “Point taken.”
“Okay, so you say we’re going to Tippit to check it out, and if it leads nowhere, we’re going to fly back to Flint City. Sound okay?”
“Sounds fine,” Ralph said. “Just let’s be damn sure Claude doesn’t see the flashlights and hardhats.”
15
As eleven o’clock came and went, Ralph was lying on the swaybacked bed in his room, knowing he should turn out the light and not doing it. He had called Jeannie and gabbed with her for almost half an hour, some of it about the case, some of it about Derek, most of it inconsequential shit. After that he tried the TV, thinking one of Lovie Bolton’s late-night preachers might work as a sleeping pill—or at least quiet the constant rat-run of his thoughts—but all he got when he turned it on was a message saying OUR SATELLITE IS CURRENTLY DOWN, THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE.
He was reaching for the lamp when a light knock came at the door. He crossed the room, reached for the knob, thought better of it, and tried the peephole. It turned out to be useless, clogged with dirt or something.
“Who is it?”
“Me,” Holly said. Her voice was as small as her knock.
He opened the door. Her tee-shirt was untucked and the coat of her suit, which she had put on against the late-night chill, hung down comically on one side. Her short gray hair flew in the rising wind. She was holding her iPad. Ralph suddenly realized he was in his boxers, with the buttonless fly no doubt gaping slightly. He remembered something they used to say when they were kids: Who gave you a license to sell hotdogs?
“I woke you up,” she said.
“You didn’t. Come in.”
She hesitated, then stepped into the room and sat in the single chair while he put on his pants.
“You need to get some sleep, Holly. You look very tired.”
“I am. But sometimes it seems as if the more tired I am, the harder it is to go to sleep. Especially if I’m worried and anxious.”
“Tried Ambien?”
“It’s not recommended for people taking antidepressants.”
“I see.”
“I did some research. Sometimes that puts me to sleep. I started by looking up the newspaper stories concerning the tragedy Claude’s mother told us about. There was a lot of coverage, and a lot of background. I thought you might like to hear.”
“Will it help us?”
“I think it will.”
“Then I want to hear.”
He moved to the bed, and Holly perched on the edge of the chair, knees together.
“All right. Lovie kept talking about the Ahiga side, and she said one of the Jamieson twins dropped a plastic Chief Ahiga out of his pocket.” She opened her iPad. “This was taken in 1888.”
The sepia-toned photograph showed a noble-looking Native American man in profile. He was wearing a headdress that flowed halfway down his back.
“For awhile the chief lived with a small contingent of Navajos on the Tigua reservation near El Paso, then married a Caucasian woman and moved first to Austin, where he was treated badly, and then to Marysville, where he was accepted as a member of the community after cutting his hair and professing his Christian faith. His wife had a little money, and they opened the Marysville Trading Post. Which eventually became the Indian Motel and Café.”
“Home sweet home,” Ralph said, looking around at the shabby room.
“Yes. Here is Chief Ahiga in 1926, two years before he died. By then he’d changed his name to Thomas Higgins.” She showed him a second picture.
“Holy shit!” Ralph exclaimed. “I’d say he went native, but this is more like the opposite.”
It was the same noble profile, but now the cheek facing the camera was deeply scored with wrinkles and the headdress was gone. The former Navajo chieftain was wearing rimless spectacles, a white shirt, and a tie.
Holly said, “In addition to running Marysville’s only successful business, it was Chief Ahiga, aka Thomas Higgins, who discovered the Hole and ran the first tours. They were quite popular.”
“But the cave was named for the town instead of for him,” Ralph said. “Which figures. He may have been a Christian and a successful businessman, but he remained a redskin to the community. Still, I guess the locals treated him better than the Christians in Austin. Got to give them some credit for that. Go on.”
She showed him another picture. This one was of a woo
den sign with a painted version of Chief Ahiga in his headdress, and a legend beneath reading BEST PICTOGRAPHS THIS WAY. She used her fingers to zoom out, and Ralph could see a path leading through the rocks.
“The cave has the town’s name,” she said, “but at least the chief got something—the Ahiga entrance, much less glamorous than the Chamber of Sound, but with a direct connection to it. Ahiga’s where the staff brought in supplies, and it was a way out in case of an emergency.”
“That’s where the rescue parties went in, hoping to find an alternate route that would take them to the kids?”
“Correct.” She leaned forward, eyes shining. “The main entrance isn’t just boarded up, Ralph, it’s cemented over. They didn’t want to lose any more kids. The Ahiga entrance—the back door—was also boarded up, but none of the articles I read said anything about it being plugged with cement.”
“That doesn’t mean it wasn’t.”
She gave her head an impatient toss. “I know, but if it wasn’t . . .”
“Then that’s how he got in. The outsider. That’s what you believe.”
“We should go there first, and if there are signs of a break-in . . .”
“I get it,” he said, “and it sounds like a plan. Good going. You’re a hell of a detective, Holly.”
She thanked him with her eyes lowered, and in the tentative voice of a woman who doesn’t know quite what to do with compliments. “You’re kind to say that.”
“It’s not kindness. You’re better than Betsy Riggins, and much better than the waste of space known as Jack Hoskins. He’ll be retiring soon, and if the job was mine to give, you’d get it.”
Holly shook her head, but she was smiling. “Bail-jumpers, repos, and lost dogs are enough for me. I never want to be part of another murder investigation.”
He stood up. “Time for you to go back to your room and get some shut-eye. If you’re right about any of this, tomorrow’s going to be a John Wayne day.”
“In a minute. I had another reason for coming here. You better sit down.”
16
Even though she was a much stronger person than she had been on the day she’d had the great good fortune to meet Bill Hodges, Holly was not used to telling people they had to change their behavior, or that they were flat-out wrong. That younger woman had been a terrified, scurrying mouse who sometimes thought suicide might be the best solution for her feelings of terror, inadequacy, and free-floating shame. What she felt most of all on the day when Bill had sat down next to her behind a funeral parlor she could not bring herself to enter, was the sense that she had lost something vital; not just a purse or a credit card, but the life she could have led if things had been just a little different, or if God had seen fit to put just a little more of some important chemical in her system.
I think you lost this, Bill had said, without ever actually saying it. Here, better put it back in your pocket.
Now Bill was dead and here was this man, so like Bill in many ways: his intelligence, his occasional flashes of good humor, and most of all, his doggedness. She was sure Bill would have liked him, because Detective Ralph Anderson also believed in chasing the case.
But there were differences, too, and not just that he was thirty years younger than Bill had been when he died. That Ralph had made a terrible mistake in arresting Terry Maitland in public, before he understood the true dimensions of the case, was only one of those differences, and probably not the most important, no matter how it haunted him.
God, help me tell him what I need to tell him, because this is the only chance I’ll have. And let him hear me. Please God, let him hear me.
She said, “Every time you and the others talk about the outsider, it’s conditional.”
“I’m not sure I understand you, Holly.”
“I think you do. ‘If he exists. Supposing he exists. Assuming he exists.’ ”
Ralph was silent.
“I don’t care about the others, but I need you to believe, Ralph. I need you to believe. I do, but I’m not enough.”
“Holly—”
“No,” she said fiercely. “No. Listen to me. I know it’s crazy. But is the idea of El Cuco any more inexplicable than some of the terrible things that happen in the world? Not natural disasters or accidents, I’m talking about the things some people do to others. Wasn’t Ted Bundy just a version of El Cuco, a shape-shifter with one face for the people he knew and another for the women he killed? The last thing those women saw was his other face, his inside face, the face of El Cuco. There are others. They walk among us. You know they do. They’re aliens. Monsters beyond our understanding. Yet you believe in them. You’ve put some of them away, maybe seen them executed.”
He was silent, thinking about this.
“Let me ask you a question,” she said. “Suppose it had been Terry Maitland who killed that child, and tore off his flesh, and put a branch up inside him? Would he be any less inexplicable than the thing that might be hiding in that cave? Would you be able to say, ‘I understand the darkness and evil that was hiding behind the mask of the boys’ athletic coach and good community citizen. I know exactly what made him do it’?”
“No. I’ve arrested men who have done terrible things—and a woman who drowned her baby daughter in the bathtub—and I’ve never understood. Most times they don’t understand themselves.”
“No more than I understood why Brady Hartsfield set out to kill himself at a concert and take a thousand or more innocent children with him. What I’m asking is simple. Believe in this. If only for the next twenty-four hours. Can you do that?”
“Will you be able to get some sleep if I say yes?”
She nodded, her eyes never leaving him.
“Then I believe. For the next twenty-four hours, at least, El Cuco exists. Whether or not he’s in the Marysville Hole remains to be seen, but he exists.”
Holly exhaled and stood up, hair windblown, suit coat hanging down on one side, shirt untucked. Ralph thought she looked both adorable and horribly fragile. “Good. I’m going to bed.”
He saw her to the door and opened it. As she stepped out, he said, “No end to the universe.”
She looked at him solemnly. “That’s right. No end to the fracking thing. Goodnight, Ralph.”
THE MARYSVILLE HOLE
July 27th
1
Jack awoke at four in the morning.
The wind was blowing outside, blowing hard, and he hurt all over. Not just his neck, but his arms, his legs, his belly, his butt. It felt like a sunburn. He threw back the covers, sat on the edge of the bed, and turned on the bedside lamp, which cast a sallow sixty-watt glow. He looked down at himself and saw nothing on his skin, but the pain was there. It was inside.
“I’ll do what you want,” he told the visitor. “I’ll stop them. I promise.”
There was no answer. The visitor either wasn’t replying or wasn’t there. Not now, at least. But he had been. Out at that goddam barn. Just one light ticklish touch, almost a caress, but it had been enough. Now he was full of poison. Cancer poison. And sitting here in this shitty motel room, long before dawn, he was no longer sure the visitor could take back what he had given him, but what choice did he have? He had to try. If that didn’t work . . .
“I’ll shoot myself?” The idea made him feel a little better. It was an option his mother hadn’t had. He said it again, more decisively. “I’ll shoot myself.”
No more hangovers. No more driving home at exactly the speed limit, stopping at every light, not wanting to get pulled over when he knew he’d blow at least a 1, maybe even a 1.2. No more calls from his ex, reminding him that he was once more late with her monthly check. As if he didn’t know. What would she do if those checks stopped coming? She’d have to go to work, see how the other half lived, oh boo-hoo. No more sitting home all day, watching Ellen and Judge Judy. What a shame.
He dressed and went out. The wind wasn’t exactly cold, but it was chilly, and seemed to go right through him. It had
been hot when he left Flint City, and he’d never thought of bringing a jacket. Or a change of clothes. Or even a toothbrush.
That’s you, honey, he could hear the old ball and chain saying. That’s you all over. A day late and a buck short.
Cars, pickup trucks, and a few campers were drawn up to the motel building like nursing puppies. Jack went down the covered walkway far enough to make sure the blue SUV belonging to the meddlers was still there. It was. They were all tucked up in their rooms, no doubt dreaming pleasant pain-free dreams. He entertained a brief fantasy of going room to room and shooting them all. The idea was attractive but ridiculous. He didn’t know which rooms they were in, and eventually someone—not necessarily the Chief Meddler—would start shooting back. This was Texas, after all, where people liked to believe they were still living in the days of cattle drives and gunfighters.
Better to wait for them where the visitor said they might come. He could shoot them there and be pretty sure of getting away with it; no one around for miles. If the visitor could take away the poison once the job was done, all would end well. If he couldn’t, Jack would suck the end of his service Glock and pull the trigger. Fantasies of his ex waitressing or working in the glove factory for the next twenty years were entertaining, but not the most important consideration. He wasn’t going the way his mother had gone, with her skin splitting open every time she tried to move. That was the important consideration.
He got in his truck, shivering, and headed for the Marysville Hole. The moon sat near the horizon, looking like a cold stone. The shivering became shaking, so bad that he swerved across the broken white line a couple of times. That was okay; all the big rigs either used Highway 190 or the interstate. There was no one on the Rural Star at this ungodly hour except for him.
Once the Ram’s engine was warm, he turned the heater on high and that was better. The pain in his lower body began to subside. The back of his neck still throbbed like a very bitch, though, and when he rubbed it, his palm came away covered with snowflakes of dead skin. The idea occurred to him that maybe the pain in his neck was just a real, ordinary sunburn, and everything else was in his mind. Psychosomatic, like the old ball and chain’s bullshit migraines. Could psychosomatic pain actually wake you up out of a sound sleep? He didn’t know, but he knew that the visitor who’d been hiding behind the shower curtain in his bedroom had been real, and you didn’t want to screw around with someone like that. What you wanted to do with someone like that was exactly what he said.