Cherri finished cutting a slice of citrus—there were fresh lemons and limes in the little fridge, how’s that for a nice touch—and dropped it into her drink. Gin and tonic. Pete could smell it. His nose was very good. Had to be, in the food trade. Maria drank a nice glass of Chardonnay, always had. The girl sensed him watching, turned around. “You want something?”
Pete laughed. “Oh yeah,” he said heartily. “But give me a minute here. I’m still breathing hard.”
She smiled professionally. “Not that. I meant to drink.”
“Oh. Vodka,” he said. “Neat. No fruit. Lots of ice.” He winked. “And there will be a second time, trust me.”
“Can’t wait,” she said, and turned back to fix his drink.
Pete smiled. He heard a clank from out in the corridor—some job donkey getting back from work. He took another puff off the cigar, settled back. Savored sitting there. Loved it, the full naked ugliness of it. Out there some spent management consultant with Tums breath, some exhausted attorney struggling home with an armful of files. And him, in here, balls in the wind and a big drink on the way. Can’t wait. Sarcasm? Almost certainly. Didn’t matter. She looked forward to it, or not. She found his body bearable, or not. She liked doing what he asked—nothing weird, he didn’t need weird, just the usual from someone new and young and beautiful was enough—or not. None of it mattered. She had four hundred dollars of his already. At the end he’d most likely make it up to five. Maria could drop that much on some Manolos without blinking; and did, regularly. Meanwhile, that was all it took to get someone like Cherri to give it all up.
As she clattered about, pouring Stoly Black into a glass, then adding the ice, Pete considered booking her again. Though she was cute—really very cute, when she squatted to pick up a spilled cube, looking briefly unpoised—he knew he wouldn’t. Having a new one each time was the point. If he went with her again, there’d be the question of whether it was better or worse than last time. She’d use his name, know what he wanted to drink, and familiarity would start to set in. He’d have time to notice things about her, to wonder why she didn’t have the sense to put the ice in the glass first, or how she hadn’t learned that gin went better with lime. And now, this afternoon, when they had sex again and this time he got only semihard and had to finish it off himself, that’d be just the way it was. He knew it would be that way, but she didn’t. Next time, she would. Not knowing was the big thing. Not knowing, not having to care.
She was out of sight now, making some god-awful noise with the icebox. What the fuck for? The glass was sitting there on the counter, full right to the top. Any more and it would be spilling out the . . . Hey. Ice cube around the nipple. That was a thought.
He leaned across to the ashtray to rest out the cigar. Save it for later. “Babe,” he said, indulgently, “the ice is fine. You can bring it on through.” He turned back.
There was a man standing in the room.
“Who the fuck are you?” Pete said.
The man’s smile said he had no intention of answering. Pete knew straightaway that this wasn’t some other guy with a key to the fuck pad. The girl stepped into sight behind him, putting on her shirt. “I’m done, right?” she asked the man.
He didn’t answer her either. Without taking his eyes off Pete he reached to the side and grabbed her by the hair. Before she’d had time to squawk he’d smacked her face into the partition wall. She grunted, went straight down.
Pete put it together quickly. The clank in the hallway; the rattling of the ice bucket to disguise her opening the door. He didn’t know who the guy was, or what he wanted, but he could see now that he had a knife. It was a big knife, could be a cook’s knife. Except it didn’t look at all clean.
The room seemed cold suddenly, flat and full of stale smoke. The man stepped over the girl, glancing away for a moment. Pete dimly realized this was a chance, that he had to get up, move, get out of there. He couldn’t seem to do any of these things. The man was only a little over average height, and trim. Pete outweighed him by many pounds and had long-term experience in smacking people’s heads; he just wasn’t convinced either would make a difference. He felt fat, naked, and in no position to change anything about the world.
“You’re Peter Ferillo, is that correct?” the man said, picking something up off the counter. When it glinted Pete saw it was the apartment’s bottle opener, and when the man turned his face to him, all thoughts of movement seemed to fade away.
“Look,” Pete said, “I don’t know what the fuck’s happening here. But I got money. With me. If that’s what this is about, it’s okay.”
“It’s not about money,” the man said. His voice was soft, almost friendly. His eyes were not.
“Then what?” Pete said. “What have I done?”
“This isn’t about you,” the man said.
“Who the hell are you?”
“My name . . . is the Upright Man.”
The man watched Pete’s face for a reaction. He rolled the bottle opener in his hand absentmindedly, then nodded—as if, with sudden inspiration, he’d thought of a use for it. Pete didn’t know what that might be.
Over the course of the next hour and a half, he found out.
PART II
THE SMOKING ROAD
This is what I intend to do, but I do not know why.
—GERARD SCHAEFER, SERIAL KILLER,
INTO THE MIND OF THE GHOUL
CHAPTER TEN
WHEN THE GUY FIRST APPEARED, PHIL BANNER was leaning against the car outside Izzy’s eating a hot mushroom-and-egg sandwich he hadn’t paid for. Not his fault—he always offered, and Izzy always said no—but it still made him feel a little guilty. Not enough to stop him eating it, though, or to keep from going back most mornings. The sandwich was good and thick and not really designed to be eaten with fingers, and the guy with the blood was probably in view for a few minutes before Banner lifted his head and saw him. When he did he watched for a good five seconds, still chewing and not really sure what he was seeing, before he hurriedly put the food down.
The man was walking right down the middle of the street. The road was empty because it was eight-thirty in the morning and very cold but it didn’t look like traffic would have changed the guy’s course. He looked as though he barely knew where he was. He was wearing a backpack that looked both new and tattered. He was lurching like something out of a zombie movie, one leg dragging behind, and when Phil took a few cautious steps forward he saw he was also covered in blood. It was dried, or seemed to be, but there was a lot of it. There was a big bump on the man’s forehead, with a nasty gash across it, and innumerable other cuts and scrapes across his face and hands. Dried mud covered most of the rest, and just about all of his clothes.
Phil took another step. “Sir?”
The man kept on moving as though he hadn’t heard. He was breathing hard but steadily, the exhales clouding up around his face. In, out, in, out, as if the rhythm had become important to him. As if it was that, or nothing. Then slowly his head turned. He kept on moving forward but looked at Phil. His eyes were bloodshot and he had a couple days’ growth of beard. There was ice in it. It had been a long time since Phil had seen a man who looked so cold.
The guy stopped, finally. He blinked, opened his mouth. Shut it again, looked up the road for a moment. He seemed so interested in what was down there that Phil glanced that way himself, but saw only the short remaining stretch of town that he expected.
“Sir, are you okay?” He knew it was a stupid question. The guy self-evidently wasn’t okay. But it was what you said. You come across a person with a knife embedded in his head—not that that was likely to happen, in a town like this; frankly, choking on a fish bone was far more likely—you ask if he’s okay.
A change occurred across the man’s features, slow and uneven, and Phil realized it was probably intended to be a smile.
“This is Sheffer, isn’t it?” he asked. The movements of his face were cramped, as if his mouth was almost f
rozen shut.
“Yes, sir, it is.”
The smile broadened. “No shit.”
“Sir?”
The guy shook his head, suddenly looking more together, as if the shambling had been some habit he’d gotten into to keep himself going past the point at which he thought he’d have to drop. Phil realized that he looked slightly familiar.
“That’s some sense of direction,” the man said. “Say what you like.” His face crumpled.
Phil saw that Izzy and a couple local customers were now standing outside the diner, and that a similar audience was assembling across the street in the market’s small parking lot. It was time to take charge of the situation.
“Sir, have you been in an accident of some kind?”
The man looked at him. “Bigfoot,” he said, nodded, and then slowly fell flat on his back.
TWO HOURS LATER TOM KOZELEK WAS SITTING IN the police station. He was wrapped in three blankets and holding a cup of chicken soup in both hands. He was in the room they normally used for interviewing, on the rare occasions the Sheffer police had cause to interview anyone, and for storing coats and wet boots and has-no-other-home stuff the rest of the time. It had a desk and three chairs and a clock. It had previously been the kitchen area before that was moved upstairs to be next to the redone administrative space, and had a partially glassed wall that made it look a little like a room in some much larger and more urban law enforcement facility. It would have, at least, had the glass not been home to stickers celebrating the town’s Halloween parade. The stickers had been designed each year by the school’s most talented young art student, which was the main thing that kept the glass partition from looking businesslike: either someone had blindfolded the kids before handing them the paints or Sheffer was never going to host any famous hometown museum. Phil Banner had occasionally expressed the opinion that they should get them done by someone who could draw a little. He had been assured that when he had kids he would feel differently. He was going to wait and see.
Phil was standing with Melissa Hoffman. Melissa lived thirty miles away over in Ellensburg and worked at the small county hospital there. Sheffer’s own doctor, Dr. Dandridge, was well liked but older than God and significantly less infallible, and so lately Melissa’s tended to be the number they called. She was in her late thirties, not at all bad-looking and she didn’t seem to know it. She was happily married to a thick-set guy who owned a small secondhand bookstore and chain-smoked Marlboro Lite. Go figure.
She looked away from the glass window. “He’s fine,” she said. “Ankle’s a bit messed up. Banged around in general. Little bit of exposure, but no frostbite. He’s vague on details but from what he said he got most of his big bumps a couple of days ago: if he was going to get a concussion, he would have had it already and probably not be here now. He needs feeding and sleep and that’s all, folks. He’s a lucky guy.”
Phil nodded. He really wished the chief was here, and not a hundred miles away visiting his sister. “But the other stuff.”
She shrugged. “Said he was okay physically. Mentally is another story.” She turned to the desk where the backpack the man had been wearing had thawed. Cold water covered the surface and had dripped through cracks to the floor. She took a pen from the pot on the corner and used it to poke around, holding the bag open gingerly with her other hand. “This thing is laced with alcohol, and you say he’d been drinking before.”
Phil nodded. It hadn’t taken him long to work out why the man’s face seemed familiar. “He was trying to break into Big Frank’s bar late one night last weekend. I had to request that he stop.”
Melissa looked at the man through the window. He appeared only dozily awake, and incapable of raising a rumpus of any kind. As she watched he blinked slowly, like an old dog on the verge of sleep. “Did he seem dangerous? Psychotic?”
“No. More kind of sad. Happened to run into Joe and Zack next morning, and they said some guy had been in there all evening, drinking it up by himself. Sounded like the same person.”
“So four days of drinking, most likely nothing to eat, then a stomach full of sleeping pills. The signs for being in a happy place aren’t great. Still, he doesn’t come across like a crazy person.”
“They never do.” Phil hesitated. “He said he saw Bigfoot.”
She laughed. “Yeah, people do, from time to time. What he actually saw was a bear. You know that.”
“I guess.”
Melissa looked at him hard for a moment, and Phil found himself blushing when she smiled. “You do know that, right?”
“Of course,” he said, impatiently.
Now was not the time for a discussion of what Phil’s uncle had once thought he’d seen—or felt, more accurately—in the deep forest way up over the ridge. No one had ever taken that seriously, except perhaps Phil himself, when he was small. His uncle eventually stopped telling the story. More than a handful of towns up in the Cascades had their own local legends and BF displays, and you could buy lattes and muffins from more than one roadside stall fashioned in the shape of a big hairy creature. Not in Sheffer. Around these parts, Bigfoot was bunk. Or, as the chief liked to put it, BF was a pile of BS. A well-worn lure for a certain kind of tourist town, that was all, and Sheffer wasn’t that kind of town. Sheffer was quiet, genteel, and had once been used as the background of a whimsical television series. It had the rail museum and rolling stock. There were nice restaurants, and only nice people came to eat in them. The town wanted to keep it that way. The chief wanted it most of all.
But more than a handful of people had been standing out in the street when the Tom guy had said the word, and not all of them were locals. By the end of the day a few might pass on what had happened that morning to their friends and relatives. Phil knew what the chief thought about that kind of thing too, and he really wished he’d gotten the guy inside someplace before he could say the B word. A little honest publicity was one thing: you wanted to point out that a television star or two had spent the night in town over the last decade, that was better than fine. Some reporters turning up to portray the town as a bunch of money-grabbing yokels would not be so good a deal. When Phil had called him on his cell phone, the chief said he would be back by early afternoon at the latest. Phil was glad about that.
“Going to see if that guy wants some more of Izzy’s soup,” he said, and Melissa nodded.
She watched as he went into the room, sat at the end of the table, and spoke gently to the man seated there. She believed Kozelek should really be examined for aftereffects of the sleeping pills he’d taken, but he was adamant that he didn’t want to go to any hospital, and she had no power to make him. He’d survived three very cold days and nights in the woods, and walked a very long distance in hard terrain. Given that, he looked in good shape for a guy who’d been out there trying to die. There was a case for saying he should be talking to someone about that part of things, too, but again it wasn’t something she could force. She privately thought that when his brain had thawed out properly, both that and talk of unknown species would gently fade away. Then they could just ship him back to L.A. or wherever it was he was from, and life in Sheffer would go on as usual.
As she turned to go she noticed something in the bottom of the open backpack. She stopped and took a closer look. In among the shards of glass and sodden fragments of drug packets were a few things that looked like tiny bunches of dried flowers.
She took one of them out, and saw they weren’t flowers after all; more like short, bedraggled stalks. The stuff looked as though it must have fallen into the man’s bag as he careened through the forest, knocked off passing bushes and trees.
Either that, or as if it had been bought from a man on a street corner somewhere, and had fallen out of its baggie.
Here was a man who said he’d seen things, and tried to break into bars by all accounts, and in his bag was a little bunch of natural-looking matter. How about that. Partly out of professional concern, but mainly from good, old-fashioned
curiosity, Melissa slipped the tiny bunch into her bag and then went outside to drive back to the hospital where, she was fairly confident, not much of interest would be happening.
AT ABOUT LUNCHTIME, TOM’S HEAD BEGAN TO really ache. It had been hurting a little before. Had hurt for a significant proportion of His Time Away, in fact. But this was different. This was worse.
Tom was still sitting in his chair in the office with the window. He had come to think of it as his chair, at least. He had spent the entire morning in it, therefore it was his. In His Time Away things had become simpler for Tom. He was inclined to think in basic terms. Possession was nine-tenths of the whatever. This was his chair now, and God help the man who tried to take it. Nobody seemed especially keen to, anyhow. The Phil guy popped his head in every now and then, but otherwise, since the doctor woman, he had been left alone.
The headache was a slow, rolling affair and had an expensive, professional quality to it. This headache knew its trade. It had relevant experience. It covered his head like a cold counterpane, heavy and insistent, and had begun to maintain outposts in other parts of his body too. His guts, primarily. He had told the doctor he didn’t want to go to the hospital at least partly to gauge her reaction. If she’d barked, “Think again, moron, you’re deeply, deeply fucked and we’re going to drag you by the hair to a scary place with machines with green readouts and then you’re going to die,” then he’d have gone quietly. She hadn’t, which meant there was a chance he was okay. He felt okay, in general, apart from the headache, and the feeling in his guts, which he was inclined to see as a subdivision of the headache. He’d read somewhere that there was a mat of neural tissue spread around the stomach, actually the second largest collection of such tissue in the entire body (after the brain, of course). Hence gut reactions, gut feelings, blah, blah, blah. He could see this might make evolutionary sense: give the innards enough of a brain to enable it to send up signals saying “Don’t eat that rotten crap again, remember what happened last time,” much as his own had done when he’d made it back to his bag, in the forest. He was hoping the way it felt now was merely a sign of it being in sympathy with his head. If it felt this way on its own account, it was possible he should have gone to the hospital after all.
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