Outsider

by Stephen King

  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.

  ‘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 hims
elf 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 for 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.’