“No,” he whispered. “No.” He tried to get up from the toilet, but his legs wouldn’t support him and his considerable bottom thumped back onto the ring. “Please, no. Don’t.”
A hand crept around the edge of the curtain, but instead of pulling it back, the fingers only folded around it. Tattooed on those fingers was a word: CANT.
“Jack.”
He couldn’t reply. He sat naked on the toilet with the last of his shit still dripping and plopping into the bowl, his heart a runaway engine in his chest. He felt that soon it would rip right out of him, and his last sight on earth would be of it lying on the tiles, splattering blood on his ankles and the comics section of the Flint City Call with its final twitching beats.
“That’s not a sunburn, Jack.”
He wanted to faint. To just collapse off the toilet, and if he gave himself a concussion on the tile floor, even fractured his skull, so what? At least he would be out of this. But consciousness stubbornly remained. The shadowy figure in the tub remained. The fingers on the curtain remained: CANT, in fading blue letters.
“Touch the back of your neck, Jack. If you don’t want me to pull back this curtain and show myself, do it now.”
Hoskins raised a hand and pressed it to the nape of his neck. His body’s reaction was immediate: terrifying bolts of pain which ran up to his temples and down to his shoulders. He looked at his hand and saw it was smeared with blood.
“You’ve got cancer,” the figure behind the curtain informed him. “It’s in your lymph glands, and your throat, and your sinuses. It’s in your eyes, Jack. It’s eating into your eyes. Soon you’ll be able to see it, little gray knobs of malignant cancer cells swimming around in your vision. Do you know when you got it?”
Of course he knew. When this creature had touched him out there in Canning Township. When it had caressed him.
“I gave it to you, but I can take it back. Would you like me to take it back?”
“Yes,” Jack whispered. He began to cry. “Take it back. Please take it back.”
“Will you do something if I ask you?”
“Yes.”
“You won’t hesitate?”
“No!”
“I believe you. And you won’t give me any reason not to believe you, will you?”
“No! No!”
“Good. Now clean yourself up. You stink.”
The CANT hand withdrew, but the shape behind the shower curtain was still staring at him. Not a man, after all. Something far worse than the worst man who had ever lived. Hoskins reached for the toilet paper, aware as he did so that he was tilting sideways off the seat and that the world was simultaneously dimming and dwindling. And that was good. He fell, but there was no pain. He was unconscious before he hit the floor.
2
Jeannie Anderson woke at four that morning, with her usual wee-hours full bladder. Ordinarily she would have used their bathroom, but Ralph had been sleeping badly ever since Terry Maitland had been shot, and tonight he had been particularly restless. She got out of bed and made her way to the bathroom at the end of the hall, the one past the door to Derek’s room. She considered flushing after relieving herself and decided even that might wake him. It could wait until morning.
Two more hours, Lord, she thought as she left the bathroom. Two more hours of good sleep, that’s all I w—
She stopped halfway down the hall. The downstairs had been dark when she left the bedroom, hadn’t it? She had been more asleep than awake, but surely she would have noticed a light on.
Are you sure of that?
No, not completely, but there certainly was a light on down there now. White light. Muted. The one over the stove.
She went to the stairs and stood at the top, looking down at that light, brow wrinkled, thinking profoundly. Had the burglar alarm been set before they went to bed? Yes. Arming it before bed was a house rule. She set it, and Ralph had double-checked it before they went up. One or the other of them always set the alarm, but the double-checks, like Ralph’s poor sleeping, had only begun since the death of Terry Maitland.
She considered waking Ralph and decided against it. He needed his sleep. She considered going back to get his service revolver, in the box on the high shelf in the closet, but the closet door squeaked and that would surely wake him. And wasn’t that pretty paranoid? The light probably had been on when she went to the bathroom and she just hadn’t noticed. Or maybe it had gone on by itself, a malfunction. She descended the steps quietly, moving to the left on the third step and to the right on the ninth to avoid the creaks, not even thinking about it.