He had been called back in three days early, however, which wasn’t fair when his damn vacation had been on the roster board since May. Feeling this made it his right （his perfect right） to turn those three days into what Ralph Anderson would have called a stay-cation, he spent that Wednesday afternoon bar-hopping. By his third stop, he had managed to mostly forget about the spooky interlude out in Canning Township, and by the fourth, he had stopped worrying quite so much about the sunburn, and the peculiar fact that he seemed to have come by it at night.
His fifth stop was at Shorty’s Pub. There he asked the bartender—a very pretty lady whose name now slipped his mind, although not the entrancing length of her legs in tight Wrangler jeans—to look at the back of his neck and tell him what she saw. She obliged.
“It’s a sunburn,” she said.
“Just a sunburn, right?”
“Yeah, just a sunburn.” Then, after a pause: “But a pretty bad one. Got a few little blisters there. You should put some—”
“Aloe on it, yeah. I heard.”
After five vodka-tonics （or maybe it had been six）， he drove home at exactly the speed limit, bolt upright and peering over the wheel. Wouldn’t be good to get stopped. The legal limit in this state was .08.
He arrived at the old hacienda about the same time Holly Gibney was beginning her presentation in Howard Gold’s conference room. He stripped to his undershorts, remembered to lock all the doors, and went in the bathroom to tap a kidney that badly needed tapping. With that chore accomplished, he once more used the hand-mirror to check out the back of his neck. Surely the sunburn was getting better by now, probably starting to flake. But no. The burn had turned black. Deep fissures crisscrossed the nape of his neck. Pearly rivulets of pus dribbled from two of them. He moaned, closed his eyes, then opened them again and breathed a sigh of relief. No black skin. No fissures. No pus. But the nape was bright red, and yes, there were some blisters. It didn’t hurt as much to touch it as it had earlier, but why would it, when he had a skinful of Russian anesthetic?
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?”