by Stephen King
“Yes,” Hoskins whispered. “Yes, anything.”
“Then listen.”
Jack Hoskins listened.
10
There was no FBI warning at the front of Holly’s film, which didn’t surprise Ralph. Who would bother to copyright such an elderly artifact, when it was trash to begin with? The music was a hokey mixture of wavering violins and jarringly cheerful norteño accordion riffs. The print was scratchy, as if it had been run many times by long-dead projectionists who hadn’t given much of a shit.
I can’t believe I’m sitting here, Ralph thought. This is loonybin stuff.
Yet both his wife and Marcy Maitland were watching with the concentration of students preparing for a final exam, and the others, although clearly not so invested, were paying close attention. Yune Sablo had a faint smile on his lips. Not the smile of a person who feels what he’s seeing is ridiculous, Ralph thought, but of a man glimpsing a bit of the past; a childhood legend brought to life.
The movie opened on a nighttime street where all the businesses seemed to be either bars or whorehouses or both. The camera followed a pretty woman in a low-cut dress, walking hand in hand with her daughter, who looked to be about four. This evening stroll through a bad part of town with a kid who should have been in bed might have been explained later in the film, but not in the part Ralph and the others saw.
A drunk wavered up to the woman, and while his mouth said one thing, the voice actor dubbing his voice said, “Hey, baybee, want a date?” in a Mexican accent that made him sound like Speedy Gonzales. She brushed him off and walked on. Then, in a shadowy area between two streetlights, a dude in a long black cloak straight out of a Dracula film swooped from an alley. He had a black bag in one hand. With the other, he snatched up the kiddo. Mom screamed and gave chase, catching him under the next streetlight and grabbing at his bag. He whirled around, the convenient streetlight illuminating the face of a middle-aged man with a scar on his forehead.
Mr. Cloak snarled, revealing a mouthful of fake fangs. The woman drew back, hands raised, looking less like a mother in terror than an opera singer about to belt her way into an aria from Carmen. The child-stealer flipped his cloak over the little girl and fled, but not before a fellow emerging from one of the street’s many bars hailed him in another hideous Speedy Gonzales accent: “Hey Professor Espinoza, where you go’een? Let me buy you a dreenk!”
In the next scene, the mother was brought to the town’s morgue (EL DEPOSITO DE CADAVERES on the frosted glass door), and did the predictable histrionic screaming when the sheet was lifted to reveal her presumably mutilated child. Next came the arrest of the man with the scar, who turned out to be a well-respected educator at a nearby university.
What followed was one of cinema’s shorter trials. The mother testified; so did a couple of guys with Speedy Gonzales accents, including the one who had offered to buy the professor a dreenk; the jury filed out to consider its verdict. Adding a surreal touch to these otherwise predictable proceedings was the appearance of five women in the back row, all dressed in what appeared to be superhero costumes complete with fancy masks. Nobody in the courtroom, including the judge, seemed to find them out of place.
The jury filed back in; Professor Espinoza was convicted of murder most foul; he hung his head and looked guilty. One of the masked women jumped to her feet and declared, “Thees ees a miscarritch of justice! Professor Espinoza would never harm a child!”
“But I saw heem!” the mother screamed. “Thees time you are wrong, Rosita!”
The masked women in the superhero costumes trooped out of the courtroom in their cool boots, and the movie cross-faded to a close-up of a hangman’s noose. The camera drew back to show a scaffold surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. Professor Espinoza was led up the steps. As the rope was placed around his neck, his gaze fixed on a man in a hooded monk’s robe at the back of the crowd. There was a black bag between the monk’s sandaled feet.
This was a stupid and poorly made movie, but Ralph still felt a prickle run down his arms and covered Jeannie’s hand with his own when she reached for him. He knew exactly what they were going to see next. The monk pushed back his hood to reveal Professor Espinoza’s face, convenient forehead scar and all. He grinned, showing those ridiculous plastic fangs . . . pointed at his black bag . . . and laughed.
“There!” the real professor screamed from the gallows. “There he is, there!”
The crowd turned, but the man with the black bag was gone. Espinoza got his own black bag: a death-hood that was pulled over his head. From beneath it he screamed, “The monster, the monster, the mon—” The trap opened, and he plummeted through.
The next sequence was of the masked superhero women chasing the fake monk over some rooftops, and it was here that Holly pushed pause. “Twenty-five years ago, I saw a version with subtitles instead of dubbing,” she said. “What the professor is screaming at the end is El Cuco, El Cuco.”
“What else?” Yune murmured. “Jesus, I haven’t seen one of those luchadora movies since I was a kid. There must have been a dozen of them.” He looked around at the others, as if coming out of a dream. “Las luchadoras—lady wrestlers. And the star of this one, Rosita, she was famous. You should see her with her mask off, ay caramba.” He shook his hand, as if he had touched something hot.
“There weren’t just a dozen, there were at least fifty,” Holly said quietly. “Everyone in Mexico loved las luchadoras. The films were like today’s superhero movies. On a much smaller budget, of course.”
She would like to lecture them on this fascinating (to her, it was) bit of film history, but this was not the time, not with Detective Anderson looking as though he had just taken a big bite of something nasty. Nor would she tell them that she had also loved the luchadora films. They had been played for laughs on the local Cleveland TV station that broadcast Shlock Theater every Saturday night. Holly supposed the local college kids got drunk and tuned in to yuk it up about the poor dubbing and the costumes they no doubt considered hokey, but there had been nothing funny about las luchadoras to the frightened and unhappy high school girl that she had been. Carlotta, Maria, and Rosita were strong, and brave, always helping the poor and downtrodden. Rosita Muñoz, the most famous, even proudly called herself a cholita, which was how that unhappy high school girl had felt about herself most of the time: a halfbreed. A freak.
“Most of the Mexican wrestling women movies were retellings of ancient legends. This one is no different. Do you see how it fits what we know about these murders?”
“Perfectly,” Bill Samuels said. “I’ll give you that. The only problem is that it’s nuts. Out to lunch. If you actually believe in El Cuco, Ms. Gibney, then you are el cuckoo.”
Says the man who told me about the disappearing footprints, Ralph thought. He did not believe in El Cuco, but he thought the woman had displayed a lot of guts in showing them the film when she must have known what their reaction would be. He was interested to see how Ms. Gibney of Finders Keepers would respond.
“El Cuco is said to live on the blood and fat of children,” Holly said, “but in the world—our real world—he would survive not just on those things, but on people who think as you do, Mr. Samuels. As I suppose you all do. Let me show you one more thing. Just a snippet, I promise.”
She went to chapter nine of the DVD, the second-to-last. The action picked up with one of the luchadoras—Carlotta—cornering the hooded monk in a deserted warehouse. He tried to escape by way of a convenient ladder. Carlotta grabbed him by the back of his billowing robe and tossed him over her shoulder. He did a midair flip and landed on his backside. The hood flew back, revealing a face that was not a face at all, but a lumpy blank. Carlotta screamed as two glowing prongs emerged from where the eyes should have been. They must have had some kind of mystic repelling power, because Carlotta staggered against the wall and held one hand up in front of her luchadora mask, trying to shield herself.
“Stop it,” Marcy said. “Oh God, please.”
Ho
lly poked her laptop. The image on the screen disappeared, but Ralph could still see it: an optical effect that was prehistoric compared to the CGI stuff you could view in any Cineplex these days, but effective enough if you had heard a certain little girl’s story of the intruder in her bedroom.
“Do you think that’s what your daughter saw, Mrs. Maitland?” Holly asked. “Not exactly, I don’t mean that, but—”
“Yes. Of course. Straws for eyes. That’s what she said. Straws for eyes.”
11
Ralph stood up. His voice was calm and level. “With all due respect, Ms. Gibney, and considering your past . . . uh, exploits . . . I have no doubt that respect is due, there is no supernatural monster named El Cuco who lives on the blood of children. I’d be the first to admit that this case—the two cases, if they’re linked, and it seems more and more certain that they are—has some very strange elements, but this is a false trail you’re leading us down.”
“Let her finish,” Jeannie said. “Before you close your mind entirely, for God’s sake let her have her say.”
He saw that his wife’s anger was now on the edge of fury. He understood why, could even sympathize. By refusing to entertain Gibney’s ridiculous story of El Cuco, Jeannie felt he was also refusing to believe what she herself had seen in their kitchen early this morning. And he wanted to believe her, not just because he loved and respected her, but because the man she described fitted Claude Bolton to a T, and he couldn’t explain that. Still, he said the rest, to all of them and especially to Jeannie. He had to. It was the bedrock truth upon which his whole life stood. Yes, there had been maggots in the cantaloupe, but they had gotten in there by some natural means. Not knowing what it was didn’t change that, or negate it.
He said, “If we believe in monsters, in the supernatural, how do we believe in anything?”
Ralph sat down and tried to take Jeannie’s hand. She pulled it away.
“I understand how you feel,” Holly said. “I get it, believe me, I do. But I’ve seen things, Detective Anderson, that allow me to believe in this. Oh, not the movie, not even the legend behind the movie, exactly. But in every legend there’s a grain of truth. Leave it for now. I would like to show you a timeline I drew up before I left Dayton. May I do that? It won’t take long.”
“You have the floor,” Howie said. He sounded bemused.
Holly opened a file and projected it on the wall. Her printing was small but clear. Ralph thought what she had drawn up would pass muster in any courtroom. That much he had to give her.
“Thursday, April 19th. Merlin Cassidy leaves the van in a Dayton parking lot. I believe it was stolen the same day. We won’t call the thief El Cuco, we’ll just call him the outsider. Detective Anderson will feel more comfortable with that.”
Ralph kept silent, and this time when he tried for Jeannie’s hand, she let him take it, although she did not fold her fingers over his.
“Where did he stash it?” Alec asked. “Any idea?”
“We’ll get to that, but for now, may I stick with the Dayton chronology?”
Alec lifted a hand for her to go on.
“Saturday, April 21st. The Maitlands fly to Dayton and check into their hotel. Heath Holmes—the real one—is in Regis, staying with his mother.
“Monday, April 23rd. Amber and Jolene Howard are killed. The outsider eats of their flesh and drinks of their blood.” She looked at Ralph. “No, I don’t know it. Not for sure. But reading between the lines of the newspaper stories, I’m sure that body parts were missing, and the bodies were bled mostly white. Is that similar to what happened to the Peterson boy?”
Bill Samuels spoke up. “Since the Maitland case is closed and we’re having an informal discussion here, I have no problem telling you that it is. Flesh was missing from Frank Peterson’s neck, right shoulder, right buttock, and left thigh.”
Marcy made a strangled sound. When Jeannie started to go to her, Marcy waved her off. “I’m all right. I mean . . . no, I’m not, but I’m not going to throw up or faint or anything.”
Observing her ashy skin, Ralph was not so sure.
Holly said, “The outsider dumps the panel truck he used to abduct the girls near the Holmes home—” She smiled at that. “—where he can be sure it will be found, and become another part of the evidence against his chosen scapegoat. He leaves the girls’ underwear in the Holmes basement—another brick in the wall.
“Wednesday, April 25th. The bodies of the Howard girls are found in Trotwood, between Dayton and Regis.
“Thursday, April 26th. While Heath Holmes is in Regis, helping his mother around the house and running errands, the outsider shows up at the Heisman Memory Unit. Was he looking for Mr. Maitland specifically, or could it have been anyone? I don’t know for sure, but I think he had Terry Maitland in his sights, because he knew the Maitlands were visiting from another state, far away. The outsider, whether you call him natural or unnatural or supernatural, is like many serial killers in one way. He likes to move around. Mrs. Maitland, could Heath Holmes have known that your husband was planning to visit his father?”
“I guess so,” Marcy said. “The Heisman likes to know in advance when relatives are coming from other parts of the country. They make a special effort in those cases, get the residents haircuts or perms, and arrange off-unit visits, when possible. That wasn’t, in the case of Terry’s dad. His mental problems were too far advanced.” She leaned forward, eyes fixed on Holly. “But if this outsider wasn’t Holmes, even if he looked like Holmes, how could he know?”
“Oh, that’s easy if you accept the basic premise,” Ralph said. “If the guy is replicating Holmes, so to speak, he’d probably have access to all of Holmes’s memories. Have I got it right, Ms. Gibney? Is that how the story goes?”
“Let’s say it is, at least to a degree, but let’s not get hung up on it. I’m sure we’re all tired, and Mrs. Maitland would probably like to get home to her children.”
Hopefully before she passes out, Ralph thought.
Holly went on. “The outsider knows he’ll be seen and noticed at the Heisman Memory Unit. It’s what he wants. And he’s sure to leave more evidence that will incriminate the real Mr. Holmes: hair from one of the murdered girls. But I believe his most important reason for going there on April 26th was to spill Terry Maitland’s blood, exactly as he later spilled blood from Mr. Claude Bolton. It’s always the same pattern. First come the murders. Then he marks his next victim. His next self, you could say. After that, he goes into hiding. Except it’s really a kind of hibernation. Like a bear, he may move around from time to time, but mostly he stays in a pre-selected den for a certain length of time, resting, while the change takes place.”
“In the legends, the transformation takes years,” Yune said. “Whole generations, maybe. But that’s legend. You don’t think it takes that long, do you, Ms. Gibney?”
“I think only weeks, months at the very most. For awhile during the transformative process from Terry Maitland to Claude Bolton, his face might look like it was made out of Play-Doh.” She turned to look at Ralph directly. She found this difficult, but sometimes it was necessary. “Or as if he had been badly burned.”
“Don’t buy it,” Ralph said. “And that’s an understatement.”
“Then why wasn’t the burned man in any of the footage?” Jeannie asked.
Ralph sighed. “I don’t know.”
Holly said, “Most legends hold a grain of truth, but they’re not the truth, if you see what I mean. In the stories, El Cuco lives on blood and flesh, like a vampire, but I think this creature also feeds on bad feelings. Psychic blood, you could say.” She turned to Marcy. “He told your daughter he was glad she was unhappy and sad. I believe that was the truth. I believe he was eating her sadness.”
“And mine,” Marcy said. “And Sarah’s.”
Howie spoke up. “Not saying any of this is true, not saying that at all, but the Peterson family fits the scenario, doesn’t it? All of them wiped out except for the fa
ther, and he’s in a persistent vegetative state. A creature who lives on unhappiness—a grief-eater instead of a sin-eater—would have loved the Petersons.”
“And how about that shit-show at the courthouse?” Yune put in. “If there really was a monster that eats negative emotions, that would have been Thanksgiving dinner for it.”
“Do you people hear yourselves?” Ralph asked. “I mean, do you?”
“Wake up,” Yune said harshly, and Ralph blinked as if he had been slapped. “I know how far out it is, we all do, you don’t need to keep telling us, like you’re the only sane man in the lunatic asylum. But there is something here that’s way out of our experience. The man at the courthouse, the one who wasn’t in any of the news footage, is only part of it.”
Ralph felt his face growing warm, but kept silent and took his scolding.
“You need to stop fighting this every step of the way, ese. I know you don’t like the puzzle, I don’t like it, either, but at least admit that the pieces fit. There’s a chain here. It leads from Heath Holmes to Terry Maitland to Claude Bolton.”
“We know where Claude Bolton is,” Alec said. “I think a trip down to Texas to interview him would be the logical next move.”
“Why, in God’s name?” Jeannie asked. “I saw the man who looks like him here, just this morning!”
“We should discuss that,” Holly said, “but I want to ask Mrs. Maitland a question first. Where was your husband buried?”
Marcy looked startled. “Where . . . ? Why, here. In town. Memorial Park Cemetery. We hadn’t . . . you know . . . made plans for that, or anything. Why would we? Terry wouldn’t have turned forty until December . . . we thought we had years . . . that we deserved years, like anyone leading good lives . . .”
Jeannie got a handkerchief from her purse and handed it to Marcy, who began to wipe at her eyes with trance-like slowness.
“I didn’t know what I should . . . I was just . . . you know, stunned . . . trying to get my head around the idea that he was gone. The funeral director, Mr. Donelli, suggested Memorial because Hillview is almost full . . . and on the other side of town, besides . . .”
