The Outsider_A Novel

by Stephen King

  “Uh-huh. I suppose you cut yourself, right?”

  “No, but my mother thought I did, because I let out a screech they probably heard next door. She came on the run, and I just pointed at the cantaloupe, laying there on the counter, split in two. It was full of maggots and flies. I mean those bugs were squirming all over each other. My mother got the Raid and sprayed the ones on the counter. Then she got a dish towel, wrapped the pieces in it, and threw them in the swill bucket out back. Since that day I can’t bear to look at a slice of cantaloupe, let alone eat one. That’s my Terry Maitland metaphor, Bill. The cantaloupe looked fine. It wasn’t spongy. The skin was whole. There was no way those bugs could have gotten inside, but somehow they did.”

  “Fuck your cantaloupe,” Samuels said, “and fuck your metaphor. I’m going home. Think before you quit the job, Ralph, okay? Your wife said I was getting out before Johnny Q. Public fired me, and she’s probably right, but you don’t have to face the voters. Just three retired cops that are this city’s excuse for Internal Affairs, and a shrink collecting some municipal shekels to supplement a private practice on life support. And there’s something else. If you quit, people will be even more sure that we screwed this thing up.”

  Ralph stared at him, then began laughing. It was hearty, a series of guffaws that came all the way up from the belly. “But we did! Don’t you know that yet, Bill? We did. Royally. We bought a cantaloupe because it looked like a good cantaloupe, but when we cut it open in front of the whole town, it was full of maggots. No way for them to get in, but there they were.”

  Samuels trudged toward the kitchen door. He opened the screen, then whirled around, his cowlick springing jauntily back and forth. He pointed at the hackberry tree. “That was a sparrow, goddammit!”

  3

  Shortly after midnight (around the time the last remaining member of the Peterson family was learning how to make a hangman’s noose, courtesy of Wikipedia), Marcy Maitland awoke to the sound of screams from her elder daughter’s bedroom. It was Grace at first—a mother always knows—but then Sarah joined her, creating a terrible two-part harmony. It was the girls’ first night out of the bedroom Marcy had shared with Terry, but of course the kids were still bunking together, and she thought they might do that for some time to come. Which was fine.

  What wasn’t fine were those screams.

  Marcy didn’t remember running down the hall to Sarah’s bedroom. All she remembered was getting out of bed and then standing inside the open door of Sarah’s room and beholding her daughters, sitting bolt upright in bed and clutching each other in the light of the full July moon that came flooding through the window.

  “What?” Marcy asked, looking around for an intruder. At first she thought he (surely it was a he) was crouched in the corner, but that was only a pile of cast-off jumpers, tee-shirts, and sneakers.

  “It was her!” Sarah cried. “It was G! She said there was a man! God, Mom, she scared me so bad!”

  Marcy sat on the bed and pried her younger daughter from Sarah’s arms and took Grace in her own. She was still looking around. Was he in the closet? He might be, the accordion doors were closed. He could have done that when he heard her coming. Or under the bed? Every childhood fear flooded back while she waited for a hand to close around her ankle. In the other would be a knife.

  “Grace? Gracie? Who did you see? Where was he?”

  Grace was crying too hard to answer, but she pointed at the window.

  Marcy went there, her knees threatening to come unhinged at every step. Were the police still watching the house? Howie said they would be making regular passes for awhile, but that didn’t mean they were there all the time, and besides, Sarah’s bedroom window—all of their bedroom windows—looked out on either the backyard or the side yard, between their house and the Gundersons’. And the Gundersons were away on vacation.

  The window was locked. The yard—every single blade of grass seeming to cast a shadow in the moonlight—was empty.

  She came back to the bed, sat, and stroked Grace’s hair, which was clumped and sweaty. “Sarah? Did you see anything?”

  “I . . .” Sarah considered. She was still holding Grace, who was sobbing against her big sister’s shoulder. “No. I might have thought I did, just for a second, but that was because she was screaming, ‘The man, the man.’ There was no one there.” And, to Gracie, “No one, G. Really.”

  “You had a bad dream, honey,” Marcy said. Thinking, Probably the first of many.

  “He was there,” Gracie whispered.

  “He must have been floating, then,” Sarah said, speaking with admirable reasonableness for someone who had been scared out of sleep only minutes before. “Because we’re on the second floor, y’know.”

  “I don’t care. I saw him. His hair was short and black and standing up. His face was lumpy, like Play-Doh. He had straws for eyes.”

  “Nightmare,” Sarah said matter-of-factly, as if this closed the subject.

  “Come on, you two,” Marcy said, striving for that same matter-of-fact tone. “You’re with me for the rest of the night.”

  They came without protest, and five minutes after she had them settled in, one on each side of her, ten-year-old Gracie had fallen asleep again.

  “Mom?” Sarah whispered.

  “What, honey?”

  “I’m scared of Daddy’s funeral.”

  “So am I.”

  “I don’t want to go, and neither does G.”

  “That makes three of us, sweetheart. But we’ll do it. We’ll be brave. It’s what your dad would have wanted.”

  “I miss him so much I can’t think of anything else.”

  Marcy kissed the gently beating hollow of Sarah’s temple. “Go to sleep, honey.”

  Sarah eventually did. Marcy lay awake between her daughters, looking up at the ceiling and thinking of Grace turning to the window in a dream so real she thought she was awake.

  He had straws for eyes.

  4

  Shortly after three AM (around the time Fred Peterson was trudging out into his backyard with a footstool from the living room in his left hand and his hangrope over his right shoulder), Jeanette Anderson awoke, needing to pee. The other side of the bed was empty. After doing her little bit of business, she went downstairs and found Ralph sitting in his Papa Bear easy chair, staring at the blank screen of the TV set. She observed him with a wifely eye and noted that he had dropped weight since the discovery of Frank Peterson’s body.

  She put a gentle hand on his shoulder.

  He didn’t look around. “Bill Samuels said something that’s nagging at me.”

  “What?”

  “That’s just it, I don’t know. It’s like having a word on the tip of your tongue.”

  “Was it about the boy who stole the van?”

  Ralph had told her about his conversation with Samuels while the two of them were lying in bed prior to turning out the light, passing it on not because any of it was substantive but because a twelve-year-old boy making it all the way from mid-state New York to El Paso in a series of stolen vehicles was sort of amazing. Maybe not Fate magazine amazing, but still pretty wild. He must really hate his stepdad, Jeannie had said before turning out the light.

  “I think it was something about the kid,” Ralph said now. “And there was a scrap of paper in that van. I meant to check back on that, and it kind of got lost in the shuffle. I don’t think I mentioned it to you.”

  She smiled and ruffled his hair, which—like the body under the pajamas—seemed thinner than it had in the spring. “You did, actually. You said it might be part of a take-out menu.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s in evidence.”

  “You told me that, too, hon.”

  “I might go down to the station tomorrow and take a peek. Maybe it will help me put a finger on whatever it was Bill said.”

  “I think that’s a good idea. Time to do something besides brood. You know, I went back and re-read that Poe story. The narrator says tha
t when he was at school, he kind of ruled the roost. But then this other boy arrived who had the same name.”

  Ralph took her hand and gave it an absent kiss. “Believable enough so far. William Wilson’s not as common a name as Joe Smith, maybe, but it’s not exactly Zbigniew Brzezinski, either.”

  “Yes, but then the narrator discovers that they have the same birth date, and they’re going around in similar clothes. Worst of all, they look something alike. People get them mixed up. Sound familiar?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, William Wilson Number One keeps meeting William Wilson Number Two later in life, and these meetings always end badly for Number One, who turns to a life of crime and blames Number Two. Are you following this?”

  “Considering it’s quarter past three in the morning, I think I’m doing a fine job.”

  “Well, in the end, William Wilson Number One stabs William Wilson Number Two with a sword, only when he looks into a mirror, he sees he’s stabbed himself.”

  “Because there never was any second William Wilson, I take it.”

  “But there was. Lots of other people saw the second one. In the end, though, William Wilson Number One had a hallucination and committed suicide. Because he couldn’t stand the doubleness, I guess.”

  She expected him to scoff, but he nodded instead. “Okay, that actually makes sense. Pretty damn good psychology, in fact. Especially for . . . what? The middle of the nineteenth century?”

  “Something like that, yes. I took a class in college called American Gothic, and we read a lot of Poe’s stories, including that one. The professor said people had the mistaken idea that Poe wrote fantastic stories about the supernatural, when in fact he wrote realistic stories about abnormal psychology.”

  “But before fingerprints and DNA,” Ralph said, smiling. “Let’s go to bed. I think I can sleep now.”

  But she held him back. “I’m going to ask you something now, husband of mine. Probably because it’s late and it’s just the two of us. There’s no one to hear you if you laugh at me, but please don’t, because that would make me sad.”

  “I won’t laugh.”

  “You might.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You told me Bill’s story about the footprints that just stopped, and you told me your story about the maggots that somehow got into the cantaloupe, but both of you were speaking in metaphors. Just as the Poe story is a metaphor for the divided self . . . or so my college prof said. But if you strip the metaphors away, what do you have?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The inexplicable,” she said. “So my question to you is pretty simple. What if the only answer to the riddle of the two Terrys is supernatural?”

  He didn’t laugh. He had no urge to laugh. It was too late at night for laughter. Or too early in the morning. Too something, anyway. “I don’t believe in the supernatural. Not ghosts, not angels, not the divinity of Jesus Christ. I go to church, sure, but only because it’s a peaceful place where I can sometimes listen to myself. Also because it’s the expected thing. I had an idea that’s why you went, too. Or because of Derek.”

  “I would like to believe in God,” she said, “because I don’t want to believe we just end, even though it balances the equation—since we came from blackness, it seems logical to assume that it’s to blackness we return. But I believe in the stars, and the infinity of the universe. That’s the great Out There. Down here, I believe there are more universes in every fistful of sand, because infinity is a two-way street. I believe there’s another dozen thoughts in my head lined up behind each one I’m aware of. I believe in my consciousness and my unconscious, even though I don’t know what those things are. And I believe in A. Conan Doyle, who had Sherlock Holmes say, ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’ ”

  “Wasn’t he the guy who believed in fairies?” Ralph asked.

  She sighed. “Come upstairs and let’s get funky. Then maybe we’ll both sleep.”

  Ralph went willingly enough, but even while they were making love (except at the moment of climax, when all thought was obliterated), he found himself remembering Doyle’s dictum. It was smart. Logical. But could you amend it to Once you eliminate the natural, whatever remains must be supernatural? No. He could not believe in any explanation that transgressed the rules of the natural world, not just as a police detective but as a man. A real person had killed Frank Peterson, not a spook from a comic book. So what remained, no matter how improbable? Only one thing. Frank Peterson’s killer had been Terry Maitland, now deceased.

  5

  On that Wednesday night, the July moon had risen as bloated and orange as a gigantic tropical fruit. By early Thursday morning, as Fred Peterson stood in his backyard, on the footstool where he had rested his feet during many a Sunday afternoon football game, it had shrunk to a cold silver coin riding high overhead.

  He slipped the noose around his neck and yanked it until the knot rested against the angle of his jaw, as the Wikipedia entry had specified (complete with helpful illustration). The other end was attached to the branch of a hackberry tree like the one beyond Ralph Anderson’s fence, although this one was a rather more elderly representative of Flint City’s flora, having sprouted around the time an American bomber was dropping its payload on Hiroshima (surely a supernatural event to the Japanese who witnessed it at a distance great enough to save them from being vaporized).

  The footstool rocked back and forth unsteadily beneath his feet. He listened to the crickets and felt the night breeze—cool and soothing after one hot day and before another he did not expect to see—on his sweaty cheeks. Part of his decision to draw a line under the Flint City Petersons and call the equation complete was a hope that Frank, Arlene, and Ollie had not gone far, at least not yet. It might still be possible to catch up. More of it was the unbearable prospect of attending a double funeral in the morning at the same mortuary—Donelli Brothers—that would bury the man responsible for their deaths in the afternoon. He couldn’t do it.

  He looked around one final time, asking himself if he really wanted to do this. The answer was yes, and so he kicked the footstool away, expecting to hear the crack of his neck breaking deep in his head before the tunnel of light opened before him—the tunnel with his family standing at the far end, beckoning him to a second and better life where harmless boys were not raped and murdered.

  There was no crack. He had missed or ignored the part in the Wikipedia entry about how a certain drop was necessary to break the neck of a man weighing two hundred and five pounds. Instead of dying, he began to strangle. As his windpipe closed and his eyes bulged in their sockets, his previously drowsing survival instinct awakened in a clangor of alarm bells and a glare of interior security lights. In a space of three seconds his body overrode his brain and the desire to die became the brute will to live.

  Fred raised his hands, groped, and found the rope. He pulled with all his strength. The rope slackened, and he was able to draw a breath—necessarily shallow, because the noose was still tight, the knot digging into the side of his throat like a swollen gland. Holding on with one hand, he groped for the branch to which he had tied the rope. His fingers brushed its underside, and loosed a few flakes of bark that fluttered down onto his hair, but that was all.

  He was not a fit man in his middle age, most of his exercise consisting of trips to the fridge for another beer during one of his beloved Dallas Cowboys football games, but even as a high school kid in phys ed, five pull-ups had been the best he could do. He could feel his one-handed grip slipping, and grabbed the rope with his other hand again, holding it slack long enough to pull in another half-breath, but unable to yank himself any higher. His feet swung back and forth eight inches above the lawn. One of his slippers came off, then the other. He tried to call for help, but all he could manage was a rusty wheeze . . . and who would possibly be awake to hear him at this hour of the morning? Nosy old Mrs. Gibson next door? She would
be asleep in her bed with her rosary in her hand, dreaming of Father Brixton.

  His hands slipped. The branch creaked. His breath stopped. He could feel the blood trapped in his head pulsing, getting ready to burst his brains. He heard a rasping sound and thought, It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  He flailed for the rope, a drowning man reaching for the surface of the lake into which he has fallen. Large black spores appeared in front of his eyes. They burst into extravagant black toadstools. But before they overwhelmed his sight, he saw a man standing on the patio in the moonlight, one hand resting possessively on the barbecue where Fred would never grill another steak. Or maybe it wasn’t a man at all. The features were crude, as if punched into being by a blind sculptor. And the eyes were straws.

  6

  June Gibson happened to be the woman who had made the lasagna Arlene Peterson dumped over her head before suffering her heart attack, and she wasn’t asleep. Nor was she thinking about Father Brixton. She was suffering herself, and plenty. It had been three years since her last attack of sciatica, and she had dared to hope it was gone for good, but here it was again, a nasty uninvited visitor who just barged in and took up residence. Only a telltale stiffness behind her left knee after the post-funeral gathering at the Petersons’ next door, but she knew the signs and begged Dr. Richland for an oxycodone prescription, which he had reluctantly written. The pills only helped a little. The pain ran down her left side from the small of her back to her ankle, where it cinched her with a thorny manacle. One of the cruelest attributes of sciatica—hers, anyway—was that lying down intensified the pain instead of easing it. So she sat here in her living room, dressed in her robe and pajamas, alternately watching an infomercial for sexy abs on TV and playing solitaire on the iPhone her son had given her for Mother’s Day.