فصل 21 - بخش 11

21

They stepped through the arch side by side, Holly holding onto Ralph’s arm like a bride with stage fright. She had the light; Ralph had his Glock, and intended to use it as soon as he had a target. One shot. Only there was no target, not at first.

Beyond the arch was a jutting lip of stone that made a sort of balcony seventy feet above the main cave’s floor. A metal stairway spiraled down. Holly glanced up and felt dizzy. The stairs rose another two hundred feet or more, past an opening that had probably been the main entrance, all the way to the stalactite-hung roof. She realized the entire bluff was hollow, like a fake bakery shop cake. Going down, the stairway looked okay. Above them, part of it had come loose from the fist-sized bolts that held it, and hung drunkenly over the drop.

Waiting for them at the bottom, in the light of an ordinary standing lamp – the kind you might see in any reasonably well-appointed living room – was the outsider. The lamp’s cord snaked away to a softly humming red box with HONDA printed on the side. At the extreme outer edge of the circle of radiance was a cot with a blanket bunched at the bottom.

Ralph had caught up with many fugitives in his time, and the thing they had come looking for could have been any of them: hollow-eyed, too thin, used hard. He was wearing jeans, a rawhide vest over a dirty white shirt, and scuffed cowboy boots. He appeared unarmed. He was looking up at them with Claude Bolton’s face: the black hair, the high cheekbones suggesting some Native American blood a few generations back, the goatee. Ralph couldn’t see the ink on his fingers from where he was, but he knew it was there.

Tat-Man, Hoskins had called him.

‘If you really mean to talk to me, you’ll have to chance the stairs. They held me, but I have to tell you the truth – they’re not all that steady.’ His words, although spoken in a conversational voice, overlapped each other, doubling and tripling, as if there were not just one outsider but many, a cabal of them hiding in the shadows and the fissures where the light of that single floor lamp could not reach.

Holly started for the stairs. Ralph stopped her. ‘I’ll go first.’

‘I should. I’m lighter.’

‘I’ll go first,’ he repeated. ‘When I get down – if I get down – you come.’ He spoke quietly, but guessed that, given the acoustics, the outsider could hear every word. At least I hope so, Ralph thought. ‘But stop at least a dozen steps up. I have to talk to him.’

He was looking at her as he said this, and looking hard. She glanced at the Glock, and he gave the barest nod. No, there would be no talking, no long-winded Q-and-A. All that was over. One shot to the head, and then they were out of here. Assuming the roof didn’t fall in on them, that was.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Be careful.’

There was no way to do that – either the old spiral staircase would hold or it wouldn’t – but he tried to think himself lighter as he went down. The stairs groaned and squalled and shuddered.

‘Doing well so far,’ the outsider said. ‘Walk close to the wall, that might be safest.’

Afest … est … est …

Ralph reached the bottom. The outsider stood motionless near his strangely domestic lamp. Had he bought it – and the generator, and the cot – at the Home Depot in Tippit? Ralph thought it likely. It seemed to be the go-to place in this godforsaken part of the Lone Star State. Not that it mattered. Behind him, the stairs began to squall and groan again as Holly descended.

Now that Ralph was on the same level, he stared at the outsider with what was almost scientific curiosity. He looked human, but was oddly hard to grasp, even so. It was like looking at a picture with your eyes slightly crossed. You knew what it was you were seeing, but everything was skewed and slightly out of true. It was Claude Bolton’s face, but the chin was wrong, not rounded but square, and slightly cleft. The jawline on the right was longer than the one on the left, giving the face as a whole a slanted aspect that stopped just short of grotesque. The hair was Claude’s, as black and shiny as a crow’s wing, but there were streaks of a lighter reddish-brown shade. Most striking of all were the eyes. One was brown, as Claude’s were brown, but the other was blue.

Ralph knew the cleft chin, the long jaw, the reddish-brown hair. And the blue eye, that most of all. He had seen the light go out of it as Terry Maitland died in the street on a hot July morning not long ago.

‘You’re still changing, aren’t you? The projection my wife saw may have looked exactly like Claude, but the real you hasn’t caught up yet. Has it? You’re not quite there.’

He meant these to be the last words the outsider would hear. The protesting groans from the stairs had stopped, which meant Holly was standing high up enough to be safe. He raised the Glock, gripping his right wrist in his left hand.

The outsider lifted his arms to either side, presenting himself. ‘Kill me if you want, Detective, but you’ll be killing yourself and your lady friend, too. I don’t have access to your thoughts, as I do Claude’s, but I have a good idea of what’s in your mind, just the same: you’re thinking that one shot is an acceptable risk. Am I right?’

Ralph said nothing.

‘I’m sure I am, and I must tell you it would be a great risk.’ He raised his voice and shouted, ‘CLAUDE BOLTON IS MY NAME!’

The echoes seemed even louder than the shout. Holly gave a cry of surprise as a piece of stalactite high above, perhaps cracked almost through already, detached from the ceiling and fell like a rock dagger. It posed no danger to any of them, hitting bottom well outside the feeble circle of lamplight, but Ralph took the point.

‘Since you knew enough to find me here, you may already know this,’ the outsider said, lowering his arms, ‘but in case you don’t, two boys were lost in the caves and passages below this one, and when a rescue party tried to find them—’

‘Someone fired a gun and brought down a piece of the roof,’ Holly said from the stairs. ‘Yes, we know.’

‘That happened in the Devil’s Slide passage, where the sound of the gunshot would have been dampened.’ Smiling. ‘Who knows what will happen if Detective Anderson fires his gun in here? Surely a few of the bigger stalactites will come raining down. Even so, you might avoid them. Of course if you don’t, you’ll be crushed. Then there’s the possibility you might cause the entire top of the bluff to collapse, burying us all in a landslide. Want to risk it, Detective? I’m sure you meant to when you came down the stairs, but I have to tell you that the odds would not be in your favor.’

Those stairs creaked briefly as Holly came down another step. Maybe two.

Keep your distance, Ralph thought, but there was no way he could make her do that. This lady had a mind of her own.

‘We also know why you’re here,’ she said. ‘Claude’s uncle and cousins are here. In the ground.’

‘Indeed they are.’ He – it – was smiling more widely now. The gold tooth in that smile was Claude’s, like the letters on his fingers. ‘Along with many others, including the two children they hoped to save. I feel them in the earth. Some are close. Roger Bolton and his sons are over there, not twenty feet below Snake’s Belly.’ He pointed. ‘I feel them the most strongly, not just because they’re close, but because they are the blood I’m becoming.’

‘Not good to eat, though, I guess,’ Ralph said. He was looking at the cot. Barely visible on the stone floor beside it, next to a Styrofoam cooler, was another untidy litter of bones and skin.

‘No, of course not.’ The outsider looked at him impatiently. ‘But their remains give off a glow. A kind of … I don’t know, these are not things I ordinarily talk about … a kind of emanation. Even those foolish boys give off that glow, although it’s faint. They’re very far down. You might say they died exploring uncharted regions of the Marysville Hole.’ At this, his smile reappeared, showing not just the gold tooth but almost all of them. Ralph wondered if he had been smiling like that as he murdered Frank Peterson, eating his flesh and drinking the child’s dying agony along with his blood.

‘A glow like a nightlight?’ Holly asked. She sounded genuinely curious. The stairs squalled as she descended another step or two. Ralph wished mightily that she was going the other way: up and out, back into the hot Texas sunshine.

The outsider only shrugged.

Go back, he thought at Holly. Turn around and go back. When I’m sure you’ve had time enough to make it out the Ahiga back door, I’ll take the shot. Even if it makes my wife a widow and my son fatherless, I’ll take the shot. I owe it to Terry and all the others who came before him.

‘A nightlight,’ she repeated, coming down another step. ‘You know, for comfort. I had one when I was a girl.’

The outsider was looking up at her over Ralph’s shoulder. With his back to the standing lamp and his face in the shadows, Ralph could see a strange shine in those mismatched eyes. Except that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t in them but coming from them, and now Ralph understood what Grace Maitland had meant when she said the thing she’d seen had straws for eyes.

‘Comfort?’ The outsider seemed to consider the word. ‘Yes, I suppose so, although I’ve never thought of it that way. But also information. Even dead, they’re full of Bolton-ness.’

‘Do you mean memories?’ Another step closer. Ralph took his left hand off his wrist and motioned her back, knowing she wouldn’t go.

‘No, not those.’ He looked impatient with her again, but there was something else there, too. A certain eagerness Ralph knew from many interrogation rooms. Not every suspect wanted to talk, but most of them did, because they had been alone in the closed room of their thoughts. And this thing must have been alone with its thoughts for a very long time. Alone, period. You only had to look at him to know it.

‘Then what is it?’ She was still in the same place, and thank God for small blessings, Ralph thought.

‘Bloodline. There’s something in bloodline that goes beyond memory or the physical similarities that are carried down through the generations. It’s a way of being. A way of seeing. It’s not food, but it is strength. Their souls are gone, their ka, but something is left, even in their dead brains and bodies.’

‘A kind of DNA,’ she said. ‘Maybe tribal, maybe racial.’

‘I suppose. If you like.’ He took a step toward Ralph, holding out the hand with MUST written on the fingers. ‘It’s like these tattoos. They aren’t alive, but they hold certain infor—’

‘Stop!’ she shouted, and Ralph thought, Christ, she’s even closer. How could she do that without me hearing?

The echoes rose, seeming to expand, and something else fell. Not a stalactite this time, but a chunk of rock from one of the rough walls.

‘Don’t do that,’ the outsider said. ‘Unless you want to risk bringing the whole thing down on our heads, don’t raise your voice like that.’

When Holly spoke again, her voice was lower but still urgent. ‘Remember what he did to Detective Hoskins, Ralph. His touch is poisonous.’

‘Only when I’m in this transformative state,’ the outsider said mildly. ‘It’s a form of natural protection, and rarely fatal. More like poison ivy than some sort of radiation. Of course, Detective Hoskins was … susceptible, shall we say. And once I’ve touched someone, I can often – not always, but often – get into their minds. Or the minds of their loved ones. I did that with Frank Peterson’s family. Only a little, enough to push them in directions they were already going.’

‘You should stay where you are,’ Ralph said.

The outsider raised his tattooed hands. ‘Certainly. As I’ve said, you’re the man with the gun. But I can’t let you leave. I’m too tired to relocate, you see. I had to make the drive down here far too soon, and I had to buy a few supplies, which drained me even more. It seems we’re at a standoff.’

‘You put yourself in this position,’ Ralph said. ‘I mean, you know that, right?’

The outsider looked at him out of a face that still held the fading remains of Terry Maitland and said nothing.

‘Heath Holmes, okay. The others before Holmes, also okay. But Maitland was a mistake.’

‘I suppose that’s so.’ The outsider looked puzzled, but still complacent. ‘Yet I’ve taken others who had strong alibis and immaculate reputations. With evidence and eyewitness testimony, the alibis and reputations make no difference. People are blind to explanations that lie outside their perception of reality. You should never have come looking for me. You never should have even sensed me, no matter how strong his alibi was. Yet you did. Was it because I came to the courthouse?’

Ralph said nothing. Holly had come down the last step and was now standing beside him.

The outsider sighed. ‘That was a mistake, I should have thought more seriously about the presence of TV cameras, but I was still hungry. Yet I could have stayed away. I was gluttonous.’

‘Add overconfident, while you’re at it,’ Ralph said. ‘And overconfidence breeds carelessness. Cops see a lot of that.’

‘Well, perhaps I was all three. But I think I might have gotten away even with that.’ He was looking speculatively at the pale, gray-haired woman next to Ralph. ‘It is you I have to thank for being in this current situation, isn’t it? Holly. Claude says your name is Holly. What made you able to believe? How were you able to convince a party of modern men who probably don’t believe in anything beyond the range of their five senses to come down here? Have you seen another one like me somewhere?’ The eagerness in his voice was unmistakable.

‘We didn’t come here to answer your questions,’ Holly said. One of her hands was stuffed into the pocket of her wrinkled suit jacket. In the other, she held the UV flashlight, which was not turned on at the moment; the only light came from the standing lamp. ‘We came here to kill you.’

‘I’m not sure how you hope to do that … Holly. Your friend might chance firing his gun if it was just the two of us, but I don’t think he wants to risk your life, as well. And while one or both of you might try to attack me physically, I think you’d find me surprisingly strong as well as a bit poisonous. Yes, even in my current depleted state.’

‘It’s a standoff for now,’ Ralph said, ‘but not for long. Hoskins wounded State Police Lieutenant Yunel Sablo but didn’t kill him. By now he will have called this in.’

‘A good try, but not out here,’ the outsider said. ‘There is no cell reception for six miles going east and a dozen going west. Did you think I wouldn’t check?’

Ralph had been hoping for just that, but it had been a thin hope. As it happened, however, he had another card in his hand. ‘Hoskins also blew up the vehicle we came in. There’s smoke. Plenty of it.’

For the first time he saw real alarm in the outsider’s face.

‘That changes things. I’ll have to run. In my current state, that will be difficult and painful. If you wanted to make me angry, Detective, you’ve succeed—’

‘You asked me if I’d seen one of your kind before,’ Holly interrupted. ‘I haven’t – well, not exactly – but I’m sure Ralph has. Strip away the shape-changing, the memory-sucking, and the glowing eyes, and you’re just a sexual sadist and common pedophile.’

The outsider recoiled as if she had struck him. For a moment he seemed to forget all about the burning SUV sending up smoke signals from the abandoned parking lot. ‘That’s offensive, ridiculous, and untrue. I eat to live, that’s all. Your kind does the same thing when you slaughter pigs and cows. That’s all you are to me – cattle.’

‘You’re lying.’ Holly took a step forward, and when Ralph tried to take her by the arm, she shook him off. Red roses had begun to bloom in her pale cheeks. ‘Your ability to look like someone you’re not – something you’re not – guarantees trust. You could have taken any of Mr Maitland’s friends. You could have taken his wife. But instead of that, you took a child. You always take children.’

‘They’re the strongest, sweetest food! Have you never eaten veal? Or calves’ liver?’

‘You don’t just eat them, you ejaculate on them.’ Her mouth twisted in disgust. ‘You splooge on them. Oough!’

‘To leave DNA!’ he shouted.

‘You could leave it other ways!’ she shouted back, and something else fell from the eggshell ceiling above them. ‘But you don’t put your thing in, do you? Is it because you’re impotent?’ She raised a finger, then let it curl. ‘Is it is it is it?’

‘Shut up!’

‘You take children because you’re a child rapist who can’t even do it with his penis, you have to use a—’

He ran at her, his face twisting into an expression of hate that had nothing of Claude Bolton or Terry Maitland in it; this was its own thing, as black and awful as the lower depths where the Jamieson twins had finally surrendered their lives. Ralph raised his gun, but Holly stepped into his line of fire before he could get off a round.

‘Don’t shoot, Ralph, don’t shoot!’

Something else fell, this time something big, smashing the outsider’s cot and cooler and sending shards of mineral-sparkling stones spinning across the polished floor.

Holly pulled something from a pocket of her suit coat on the side that always sagged. The thing was long and white and stretched, as if it contained something heavy. At the same time, she turned on the UV flashlight and shined it full in the outsider’s face. He winced, made a snarling sound, and turned his head, still reaching for her with Claude Bolton’s tattooed hands. She drew the white thing cross-body above her small breasts, all the way to her shoulder, and swung it with all her strength. The loaded end connected with the outsider’s head just below the hairline, at the temple.

What Ralph saw then would haunt his dreams for years to come. The left half of the outsider’s head caved in as if it had been made of papier-mâché rather than bone. The brown eye jumped in its socket. The thing went to its knees, and its face seemed to liquefy. Ralph saw a hundred features slide across it in mere seconds, there and gone: high foreheads followed low ones, bushy eyebrows and ones so blond they were hardly there, deepset eyes and ones that bulged, lips both wide and thin. Buck teeth protruded, then disappeared; chins jutted and sank. Yet the last face, the one that lingered longest, almost certainly the outsider’s true face, was utterly nondescript. It was the face of anyone you might pass on the street, seen at one moment and forgotten the next.

Holly swung again, striking the cheekbone this time and driving the forgettable face into a hideous crescent. It looked like something out of an insane children’s book.

In the end, it’s nothing, Ralph thought. Nobody. What looked like Claude, what looked like Terry, what looked like Heath Holmes … nothing. Only false fronts. Only stage dressing.

Reddish wormlike things began to pour from the hole in the outsider’s head, from its nose, from the cramped teardrop which was all that remained of its unsteady mouth. The worms fell to the stone floor of the Chamber of Sound in a squirming flood. Claude Bolton’s body first began to tremble, then to buck, then to shrivel inside its clothes.

Holly dropped the flashlight and raised the white thing over her head (it was a sock, Ralph saw, a man’s long white athletic sock), now holding it in both hands. She brought it down one final time, crashing it into the top of the thing’s head. Its face split down the middle like a rotted gourd. There was no brain in the cavity thus revealed, only a writhing nest of those worms, inescapably reminding Ralph of the maggots he had discovered in that long-ago cantaloupe. Those already released were squirming across the floor toward Holly’s feet.

She backed away from them, ran into Ralph, then buckled at the knees. He grabbed her and held her up. All the color had left her face. Tears spilled down her cheeks.

‘Drop the sock,’ he said in her ear.

She looked at him, dazed.

‘Some of those things are on it.’

When she still did nothing but look at him with a kind of dazed wonder, Ralph attempted to pull it from her fist. At first he couldn’t. She had it in a death grip. He pried at her fingers, hoping he wouldn’t have to break them to make her let go, but he would if he had to. If that was what it took. Those things would be a lot worse than poison ivy if they touched her. And if they got under her skin …

She seemed to come back to herself – a little, anyway – and opened her hand. The sock dropped, the toe making a clunking sound when it hit the stone floor. He backed away from the worms, which were still blindly seeking (or maybe not blind at all; they were coming right for the two of them), pulling Holly by the hand, which was still curled from the fierce grip she’d had on the sock. She looked down, saw the danger, and drew in a breath.

‘Don’t scream,’ he told her. ‘Can’t risk anything else falling down. Just climb.’

He began to pull her up the stairs. After the first four or five she was able to climb on her own, but they were going backward in order to keep an eye on the worms, which were still spilling from the outsider’s cloven head. Also from the teardrop mouth.

‘Stop,’ she whispered. ‘Stop, look at them, they’re just milling around. They can’t get up the steps. And they’re starting to die.’

She was right. They were slowing down, and a great heap of them near the outsider wasn’t moving at all. But the body was; somewhere inside it, the animating force was still trying to live. The Bolton-thing humped and jerked, arms waving in a kind of semaphore. As they watched, the neck shortened. The remains of the head began to draw into the collar of the shirt. Claude Bolton’s black hair at first stuck up, then was gone.

‘What is it?’ Holly whispered. ‘What are they?’

‘I don’t know and I don’t care,’ Ralph said. ‘I only know that you’ll never have to buy a drink for the rest of your life, at least when you’re with me.’

‘I rarely drink alcohol,’ she said. ‘It goes badly with my medicine. I think I told you tha—’

She abruptly leaned over the rail and vomited. He held her while she did it.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘Don’t be. Let’s—’

‘Get the frack out of here,’ she finished for him.