And as the last trace of white disappeared from his face, Roy Benson stopped struggling and lay still.
Jerry staggered away from the dead man. He stumbled to the door, found the bathroom, and vomited into the sink. He continued retching until only spittle and bad air came up, then looked at himself in the mirror, half expecting to see that terrible blackness erasing his own features, just as it had consumed Roy Benson.
But that was not what he saw. Instead, he turned and looked at the cigarette in the ashtray by the toilet. The ashtray was filled with butts, but this one was still smoking, the last tendril of nicotine dissipating as Jerry watched.
Nobody in this house smoked. Nobody smoked, or drank, or swore. Nobody did anything except work and pray and, over the last few days, rot away like old meat.
And he knew then why the Bensons had not called for help.
Someone was here, he realized.
Someone was here to watch them die.
II
Ten days later, and two thousand miles to the east, Lloyd Hopkins said the words that nobody wanted to say.
“We’re going to have to replace that plow.”
Hopkins was wearing his new uniform trousers, which seemed to him to be fitting a little more snugly than they should have. He was wearing new pants because one change of clothes was in the wash, while the second had been ripped to shreds during a recent search for a pair of hikers. The hikers were reported missing by Jed Wheaton, the owner of Easton’s sole motel, after they failed to return from a scoot around Broad Mountain two days earlier. As it turned out, the couple—from New York, wouldn’t you know it—were apparently overcome by lust for each other while on the trail, and had checked into a lodge under assumed names because they thought it would spice up the occasion. They didn’t bother to tell Jed Wheaton, so when they didn’t come back to their room that night he called the station house, and Chief Lopez rounded up the rescue team, which included Lloyd Hopkins, his only full-time patrol officer, to begin searching first thing next morning. They were still out on the mountain when the couple, their appetites under control again, turned up at the motel to settle their bill and collect the rest of their stuff. Under instructions from the chief, Jed had refused to let them leave until Lopez got back to town and gave them the kind of dressing-down that stopped just short of beating them to a pulp and hanging them from the town’s WELCOME sign as an example to others.
Now, Hopkins, Lopez, and Errol Crisp, Easton’s new mayor, were all standing in the garage of the municipal building, looking at the town’s sole, ancient snowplow.
“Maybe we could get someone to patch it up,” said Errol. “That worked before.”
Lopez snorted. “Yesterday, it bled oil like someone had just stabbed it with a spear. Today we can’t even get it started. If it was a horse, you’d shoot it.”
Errol gave one of his long sighs, the ones he used whenever the idea of spending money was raised. He was the first black mayor Easton had ever elected, and he was trying to step lightly in his first month on the job. The last thing he wanted was people complaining that he was spending money like a freed slave. At sixty, Errol was the oldest of the three men in the garage. Lopez, who didn’t look even the one-sixteenth Spanish that he claimed to be, was twelve years younger. Lloyd Hopkins, meanwhile, looked like a teenager. A chubby teenager, maybe, but a teenager nonetheless. Errol wasn’t even sure if the kid was legally allowed to drink.
“The council’s not going to like it,” said Errol.
“The council’s going to like it a whole lot less when its members can’t see the town for the snow,” said Lopez. “The council’s not going to like it when businesses start complaining that nobody can park on the street, or that folks are falling off the curb and breaking their legs because they can’t tell where the sidewalk ends and the road begins. For crying out loud, Errol, this thing doesn’t owe us anything. It’s older than Lloyd here.”
Lloyd shifted his thighs, trying to work some space between the fabric of his pants and his skin. When that didn’t work, he tried to discreetly extract the material from the crevices into which it had lodged itself.
“The hell is wrong with you, son?” asked Errol. He took a couple of steps back from the young policeman, just in case whatever was ailing him could jump.
“Sorry,” said Lloyd. “These trousers don’t fit right.”
“Why are you wearing them, they don’t fit right?”
Lopez answered. “He’s wearing them because he was too vain to admit that he’d put on a little weight since the last time he had to buy new pants. Thirty-four inches, my ass. I told you when you were ordering them that you ought to get measured up. Errol here will see thirty-four again before your waist does.”
Lloyd reddened but didn’t reply.
“Don’t worry,” said Lopez. “We’ll get you another pair. Put it down to experience.”
“You better put it down to ‘miscellaneous expenses,’ ” said Errol. “I don’t want people asking how come we buying pants like they’s a shortage on the way. Shit, son, I got a two-year-old grandson don’t need two pairs of pants in a month, and he’s growing like grass in summertime. Two years old, even he knows when a pair of pants ain’t going to fit him.”
Lopez grinned and let the mayor ride on Lloyd for a while. He knew what was going on, even if Lloyd didn’t. Errol would get himself worked up in a lather over a forty-dollar pair of blues so he could feel better about spending one hundred times that amount on a new plow. Once he’d finished, Lopez would walk with him back to his office and they’d work out the details of the purchase. There would be a new plow in the garage in a week. Lloyd might even have trousers that fitted him by then. Still, the young patrolman could be forgiven his little idiosyncrasies. He was honest, diligent, smarter than he looked, except when it came to his weight, and he didn’t claim overtime. Lopez would have a talk with him about his diet. Lloyd tended to listen to his superior on most things. Who knew, maybe those trousers could end up fitting him after all. It might take a while, but Lopez viewed Lloyd as a work in progress in any number of ways.
Easton was a typical New Hampshire town: not quite pretty, but not ugly either; a little too far away from the big winter playgrounds to enjoy much of a tourist trade from them, but close enough for the locals to hop in a car and spend a day on the slopes, if they chose. It had a couple of bars, a main street on which more than half of the businesses made a reasonable income year-round, and one motel, which was as much a hobby as a business for its owner. Its school had an adequate football team and a basketball team that most people preferred not to mention. It also had a sense of civic pride out of all proportion to its apparently modest aspect; a conscientious, if frugal, town council; a police department that consisted of just two full-time cops and a handful of part-timers; and a crime rate just slightly below the average for a town of its size. All told, the chief sometimes reflected, there were better places to live, but there were also far, far worse.
Frank Lopez, the chief’s father, worked as an accountant in Easton from 1955 until 1994, when he retired and moved to Santa Barbara with his wife. His son, Jim, had by that time been a policeman in Manchester for almost twenty years. In 2001, the chief’s job in Easton became vacant and Jim Lopez applied for it and got it. He had his quarter century under his belt, and while he didn’t want to leave law enforcement, he fancied a quieter life for himself. His marriage had broken up ten years previously, childless but also without bitterness, and Easton, his hometown, offered him familiarity, comfort, and a place in which to settle comfortably into middle age. The job didn’t tax him unduly, he was liked and respected, and he had met a woman whom he suspected he loved.
All told, Jim Lopez was happier than he had ever been.
The Easton Motel was quiet that week. After the fuss about the hikers, Jed Wheaton was kind of grateful not to have too many guests to worry about. Things would pick up again once the snows came, when Easton usually enjoyed a small trickle-down fro
m the winter tourist trade. It would still be a bad year, but something might be salvaged from it.
Of the twelve rooms, only a couple were currently occupied. There were two young Japanese tourists in one, who giggled a lot and took too many photographs but kept their room so tidy that Maria, the maid, said she felt like she was making more of a mess than they were. They folded their towels, didn’t leave hairs in the shower or the sink, and even made their own beds.
“Wouldn’t it be great if everybody who stayed here was like them?” Maria asked Jed that morning, after she came back from checking the rooms.
“Yeah, wonderful,” he replied. “I could fire you and spend the money I saved on making my old age more comfortable.”
“Tcah!” Maria dismissed him with a flick of her wrist. “You’d miss me if I wasn’t here. You like having a pretty young girl around.”
Maria was Puerto Rican, big and ribald, and happily married to the town’s best mechanic. She might have been a pretty girl once, but now she looked like she’d just eaten one. Maria worked hard, was never late or bad-tempered, took care of the desk and the reservations, and generally had more to do with keeping the motel running from day to day than Jed did. In turn, he paid her well and didn’t complain when she used her knowledge of the inner workings of the vending machines to feed herself the occasional free candy bar.
As if to test her skills, and Jed’s tolerance, Maria walked over to the big red candy machine in the corner of the office, put her ear to its side, listening to it like a safecracker would to a safe, then gave it a sharp slap with the palm of her hand.
A Snickers bar fell from its perch into the tray.
“How do you do that?” asked Jed, not for the first time. “I try, but I just end up hurting my hand.”
Then, as if realizing that he was effectively condoning theft against himself, he continued: “And if you’re going to do that, at least don’t do it in front of me. It’s like robbing a bank and asking for a receipt.”
Maria sat down and unwrapped the candy bar.
“You want some?”
“No. Thank you. Why am I even saying ‘Thank you’? I paid for the damn thing.”
“What’d it cost you, a whole seventy-five cents?”
“It’s the principle.”
“Yah, yah, yah: the principle. Some principle, costs seventy-five cents. Even with what you pay me, I could buy me a lot of principles.”
“Yeah, well maybe you should consider investing in some, like not stealing, for one.”
“It’s not stealing, you see me doing it and you don’t say nothing. That’s giving, not stealing.”
Jed left her to it. He reviewed the guest register. They had nobody else checking in that day, then two confirmeds for Thursday and five for Friday. Combined with those who might follow the signs from the highway when they tired of driving, it didn’t look so bad for the rest of the week.
“Guy in twelve,” Maria said.
“What about him?”
Maria stood, walked to the door to check that there was nobody around, then leaned in toward Jed.
“I don’t like him.”
The guest in room 12 had arrived in darkness two nights before. Jed’s son, Phil, who was home for a couple of days from college and didn’t mind earning a few extra bucks on the desk, had checked him in.
“Why? He won’t let you steal his candy?”
Maria didn’t reply immediately. Usually, she was quick to make her feelings known. Jed put his pen down and looked serious.
“He do something to you?” he asked.
Maria shook her head.
“So what is it?”
“He’s got a bad feeling about him,” she said. “I tell you, I went to clean his room. The drapes were closed, but there was no sign on the door. I knocked, heard nothing, so I opened the door.”
“And?”
“He was just… sitting there, on the bed. It didn’t look slept in. He was just there, his hands on his knees, facing the door like he’d been waiting for me to come in. I said I was sorry and he said, no, it was all right, I could come in. I said, no, I’ll come back, but he insisted. He said he didn’t sleep so good at night, and that he might try to have a nap later in the morning, so he’d prefer if I cleaned the room now. But it didn’t look like there was nothing to clean, so I said to him, what do you want me to do? He told me he’d used some towels in the bathroom, that was all.
“So I got some clean towels and went to the bathroom. He was still sitting on the bed, but I could see him watching me. He was smiling, and I felt like there was something wrong.”
For the first time, Jed noticed that Maria had not eaten the candy bar. It remained, untouched, in her hand. She saw him looking at it, then carefully wrapped it and put it on the counter.
“I don’t want it now,” she said.
Jed thought that she was about to cry.
“That’s okay,” he said. “I’ll put it in the refrigerator. You can eat it whenever you want.”
He picked it up and placed it carefully on a shelf in the little unit behind the counter.
“Go on,” he said. “You were telling me about twelve.”
She nodded.
“I went into the bathroom, and all of the towels were on the floor. When I picked them up, I think there was blood on them.”
“Blood?”
“I think so, yes, but it was black, like oil.”
“Maybe it was oil.”
Jed wasn’t sure which was worse: blood or some jackass using his towels to mop up an oil leak from his car.
“Maybe. I don’t know. I got them in a bag in the laundry. I can show you.”
“Well, we’ll see. So that’s it: dirty towels?”
Maria raised her hand. She was not finished yet.
“I put on my gloves and picked up the towels. I was going to take them outside when I looked at the toilet. The seat was up. I always check anyway, just in case, you know, it needs to be cleaned. There was more black in there, like he’d puked it up from inside him, or worse. It was all over the bowl.
“I turned around, and he was standing beside me. I think I cried out, because he frightened me. I almost fell, but he reached out so that I didn’t slip. He told me he was sorry, that he should have warned me about the bathroom.
“ ‘I been ill,’ he said. ‘Real sick.’
“His breath smelled bad. ‘You need a doctor?’ I said.
“ ‘No, no doctor. No cure for what ails me, ma’am, but I feel like I’m on the mend. I just needed to get some stuff out of my system.’
“Then he let me go. I picked up the towels, replaced them with clean ones, and flushed the bowl. I was going to scrub it, but he told me I didn’t have to do that. When I left, he was just sitting on the bed, like he was when I arrived. I asked him did he want me to pull the drapes and he said, no, he was sensitive to the light. I closed the door and left him there.”
Jed thought for a time.
“So, he’s been sick,” he said at last. “Nothing to stop a sick man renting a room, I guess, though I figure we’d better be careful with those towels. You said you wore your gloves, right?”
“I always wear my gloves. The HIV, the AIDS, I’m always real careful.”
“Good,” said Jed. “That’s good.”
He nodded to himself.
“I’ll go down and check on him myself, once I’m done here, maybe convince him to let Doc Bradley take a look at him. Doesn’t sound to me like he’s on the mend, he leaves black blood in the bowl. Doesn’t sound like he’s getting better at all, if he’s doing that.”
He told Maria to head home early, spend some time with her grandchild. He would roust Phil if there was anything that needed to be done. Sure, Phil might whine some, but he was a good kid. Jed would miss him when he headed back to school at the end of the week. He wouldn’t be seeing him again until after Christmas, since Phil was spending the holidays with his mom in Seattle. Jed consoled himself with the thought that the
boy would be back before New Year’s and, if the choice were his own, Phil would probably have preferred Easton to Seattle anyway. Most of his buddies would be back for the holiday season in the hopes of getting a little skiing in, and Phil was as good as any of them on the slopes.
In the meantime, he’d talk to the guy in 12 and try to figure out if there was anything that needed to be done. He might even send him on his way, since there would be nothing worse for business than a stranger dying in one of his rooms. Maria thanked him before she left. He could see that she was badly shaken, although he wasn’t certain why. Sure, finding bloodied towels and a bloodied bowl in a room occupied by a sick man wasn’t nice for anyone, but they’d had to mop up a lot worse in the past. Hell, there was a bachelor party that stopped off a couple of years back and left Jed thinking it might be easier just to burn down the motel and rebuild it instead of cleaning it.
Jed drew the register toward him and ran his finger down the page until he came to the name of the man in 12.
“Carson,” he read aloud. “Buddy Carson. Well, Buddy, looks like you may be checking out sooner than you think.”
In more ways than one, he thought.
Although the man who gave his name as Buddy Carson had arrived at the motel only two nights before, he had been drifting around Easton and its environs for more than a week, ever since he left Colorado. Two thousand miles, and he’d covered it in less than two days. Buddy didn’t need to sleep more than an hour or two at most, and didn’t eat much other than candy bars and sweet things. Sometimes he wondered about his eating habits, but it didn’t occupy him for long. Buddy had more important things to worry about, like easing his pain and feeding the appetite of the thing that dwelt within him.