by Stephen King
I have to stop drinking so much, he thought. Seeing shit that’s not there is a pretty clear signal. You could even call it a warning.
He had no aloe vera ointment, so he slathered the burn with some arnica gel. That stung, but the pain soon went away (or at least subsided to a dull throb). That was good, right? He took a hand towel to drape over his pillow so it wouldn’t get all stained, lay down, and turned out the light. But the dark was no good. It seemed he could feel the pain more in the dark, and it was all too easy to imagine something in the room with him. The something that had been behind him out there at that abandoned barn.
The only thing out there was my imagination. The way that black skin was my imagination. And the cracks. And the pus.
All true, but it was also true that when he turned on the bedside lamp, he felt better. His final thought was that a good night’s sleep would put everything right.
8
‘Do you want me to dim the lights a bit more?’ Howie asked.
‘No,’ Holly said. ‘This is information, not entertainment, and although the movie is short – only eighty-seven minutes – we won’t need to watch all of it, or even most of it.’ She wasn’t as nervous as she had feared she would be. At least not so far. ‘But before I show it to you, I need to make something very clear, something I think you all must know by now, although you may not be quite ready to admit the truth into your conscious minds.’
They looked at her, silent. All those eyes. She could hardly believe she was doing this – surely not Holly Gibney, the mouse who had sat at the back of all her classrooms, who never raised her hand, who wore her gym clothes under her skirts and blouses on phys ed days. Holly Gibney who even in her twenties hadn’t dared speak back to her mother. Holly Gibney who had actually lost her mind on two occasions.
But all that was before Bill. He trusted me to be better, and for him I was. And I will be now, for these people.
‘Terry Maitland didn’t murder Frank Peterson and Heath Holmes didn’t murder the Howard girls. Those murders were committed by an outsider. He uses our modern science – our modern forensics – against us, but his real weapon is our refusal to believe. We’re trained to follow the facts, and sometimes we scent him when the facts are conflicting, but we refuse to follow that scent. He knows it. He uses it.’
‘Ms Gibney,’ Jeannie Anderson said, ‘are you saying the murders were committed by a supernatural creature? Something like a vampire?’
Holly considered the question, biting at her lips. At last she said, ‘I don’t want to answer that. Not yet. I want to show you some of the movie I brought first. It’s a Mexican film, dubbed in English and released as part of drive-in double features in this country fifty years ago. The English title is Mexican Wrestling Women Meet the Monster, but in Spanish—’
‘Oh, come on,’ Ralph said. ‘This is ridiculous.’
‘Shut up,’ Jeannie said. She kept her voice low, but they all heard the anger in it. ‘Give her a chance.’
‘But—’
‘You weren’t there last night. I was. You need to give this a chance.’
Ralph crossed his arms over his chest, just as Samuels had. It was a gesture Holly knew well. A warding-off gesture. An I won’t listen gesture. She pushed on.
‘The Mexican title is Rosita Luchadora e Amigas Conocen El Cuco. In Spanish it means—’
‘That’s it!’ Yune shouted, making them all jump. ‘That’s the name I couldn’t get when we were eating at that restaurant on Saturday! Do you remember the story, Ralph? The one my wife’s abuela told her when she was just pequeña?’
‘How could I forget?’ Ralph said. ‘The guy with the black bag who kills little kids and rubs their fat …’ He stopped, thinking – in spite of himself – of Frank Peterson and the Howard girls.
‘Does what?’ Marcy Maitland asked.
‘Drinks their blood and rubs their fat on him,’ Yune said. ‘It supposedly keeps him young. El Cuco.’
‘Yes,’ Holly said. ‘He’s known in Spain as El Hombre con Saco. The Man with the Sack. In Portugal he’s Pumpkinhead. When American children carve pumpkins for Halloween, they’re carving the likeness of El Cuco, just as children did hundreds of years ago in Iberia.’
‘There was a rhyme about El Cuco,’ Yune said. ‘Abuela used to sing it sometimes, at night. Duérmete, niño, duérmete ya … can’t remember the rest.’
‘Sleep, child, sleep,’ Holly said. ‘El Cuco’s on the ceiling, he’s come to eat you.’
‘Good bedtime rhyme,’ Alec commented. ‘Must have given the kids sweet dreams.’
‘Jesus,’ Marcy whispered. ‘You think something like that was in our house? Sitting on my daughter’s bed?’
‘Yes and no,’ Holly said. ‘Let me put on the movie. The first ten minutes or so should be enough.’
9
Jack dreamed he was driving a deserted two-lane highway with nothing but empty on both sides and a thousand miles of blue sky above. He was at the wheel of a big truck, maybe a tanker, because he could smell gasoline. Sitting beside him was a man with short black hair and a goatee. Tattoos covered his arms. Hoskins knew him, because Jack visited Gentlemen, Please frequently (although rarely in his official capacity), and had had many pleasant conversations with Claude Bolton, who had a record but was not a bad fellow at all since he’d cleaned up his act. Except this version of Claude was a very bad fellow. It was this Claude who had pulled back the shower curtain enough for Hoskins to be able to read the word on his fingers: CANT.
The truck passed a sign reading MARYSVILLE, POP. 1280.
‘That cancer’s spreading fast,’ Claude said, and yes, it was the voice that had come from behind the shower curtain. ‘Look at your hands, Jack.’
He looked down. His hands on the wheel had turned black. As he stared at them, they fell off. The tanker truck ran off the road, tilted, started to go over. Jack understood that it was going to explode, and he hauled himself out of the dream before that could happen, gasping for breath and staring up at the ceiling.
‘Jesus,’ he whispered, checking to make sure his hands were still there. They were, and so was his watch. He had been asleep less than an hour. ‘Jesus Chri—’
Someone moved on his left. For a moment he wondered if he had brought the pretty bartender with the long legs home with him, but no, he’d been alone. A fine young woman like that wouldn’t want to have anything to do with him, anyway. To her he would just be an overweight, fortysomething drunk who was losing his h—
He looked around. The woman in bed with him was his mother. He only knew it was her because of the tortoiseshell clip dangling from the few remaining strings of her hair. She had been wearing that clip at her funeral. Her face had been made up by the mortician, kind of waxy and doll-like, but on the whole not too bad. This face was mostly gone, the flesh putrefying off the bone. Her nightgown clung to her because it was drenched with pus. There was the stench of rotting meat. He tried to scream, couldn’t.
‘This cancer is waiting for you, Jack,’ she said. He could see her teeth clacking, because her lips were gone. ‘It’s eating into you. He can take it back now, but soon it will be too late even for him. Will you do what he wants?’
‘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.’
Holly 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 c
ase – 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.’
