You know that’s bullshit. You thought you saw a man in the barn, but when you put the light on the guy, he turned out to be nothing but a piece of busted farm equipment. Now you think there’s a man in your tub, but what looks like his head is just the shower head and what looks like his arm is nothing but your long-handled back-scrubber stuck through the grab handle on the wall. The rattling sound you heard was either a draft or just in your head.

He closed his eyes. Opened them again and stared at the shower curtain with its stupid plastic flowers, the kind of shower curtain only an ex-wife could love. Now that he was fully awake, reality reasserted itself. Just the shower head, just the grab handle with the back-scrubber stuck through it. He was an idiot. A hungover idiot, the worst kind. He—

The shower curtain rattled again. It rattled because what he had wanted to believe was his back-scrubber now grew shadowy fingers and reached out to touch the plastic. The shower head turned and seemed to stare at him through the translucent curtain. The newspaper fell from Hoskins’s relaxing fingers and landed on the tiles with a soft flap. His head was thudding and thudding. The back of his neck was burning and burning. His bowels relaxed, and the small bathroom was filled with the smell of what Jack was suddenly sure had been his last meal. The hand was reaching for the edge of the curtain. In a second—two, at the most—it would be pulled back and he would be looking at something so horrible it would make his worst nightmare seem like a sweet daydream.

“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.

She walked to the kitchen door and peeked around the frame, feeling both stupid and not stupid at all. She sighed, blowing back her bangs. The kitchen was empty. She started across the room to turn off the stove light, then stopped. There were supposed to be four chairs at the kitchen table, three for the family and the one they called the guest chair. But now there were only three.

“Don’t move,” someone said. “If you move, I’ll kill you. If you scream, I’ll kill you.”

She stopped, pulse hammering, the hair on the back of her neck lifting. If she hadn’t done her business before coming down, urine would be running down her legs and puddling on the floor. The man, the intruder, was sitting on the guest chair in their living room, just far enough back from the archway that she could only see him from the knees down. He was wearing faded jeans and moccasins with no socks. His ankles were riddled with red blotches that might have been psoriasis. His upper body was just a vague silhouette. All she could tell was that his shoulders were broad and a little slumped—not as if he was tired, but as if they were so crammed with workout muscle that he couldn’t square them. It was funny, all you could see at a moment like this. Terror had frozen her brain’s usual sorting ability, and everything flowed in without prejudice. This was the man who had killed Frank Peterson. The man who bit into him like a wild animal and raped him with a tree branch. That man was in her house, and here she stood in her shortie pajamas, with her nipples no doubt sticking out like headlights.