Copyright © 2021 Stephen King
All rights reserved.
Cover Design by Eric Amling
First eBook edition: September 2021
Humble Bundle, Inc.
San Francisco, CA
No part of this work may be reproduced, distributed, recorded, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in any database or retrieval system, without prior permission by Darhansoff & Verrill Literary Agents.
RED SCREEN
Wilson is having a bad morning. He cuts himself shaving and is using a Kleenex to clean away a rill of blood on his chin when Sandi pops her head in to admonish him about leaving the toilet seat up and the cap off the toothpaste. He spills juice on his tie and has to change it. Before he can escape to work, there are several more admonishments: she found beer bottles in the trash instead of the recycling, and he forgot to rinse his ice cream bowl before putting it in the dishwasher. There’s another one, but it goes in one ear and out the other without catching on anything in between. Kind of a bummer, all in all. Has he become forgetful and a little slipshod lately, or has she changed in the last six or eight months? He doesn’t know and it’s too early for such questions.
Yet once in the car and backing down the driveway, he has an idea that elevates his mood. If there’s such a thing as bad karma, he may have frontloaded his for the day and from here on...
“Clear sailing!” he exclaims, and treats himself a cigarette out of the pack in the glove compartment.
This optimistic idea holds for fifteen minutes. Then he gets a call redirecting him to 34th Avenue in Queens. He is told to see the officers, which is never good karma. ‡
Five hours later, when he should be thinking about lunch, Wilson is instead looking through one-way glass into a small interview room. There’s a table and two chairs. In one of the chairs sits a man named Leonard Crocker. He’s handcuffed to a ringbolt on his side of the table. He’s wearing a strap-style undershirt on top of khaki work pants. His outer shirt is now in a tagged plastic bag and bound for Forensics. When its turn comes (it will be awhile because there’s always a backlog), the bloodstains on it will be typed and DNA-matched. This is a formality. Crocker has already confessed to the murder. Soon his undershirt and khakis will be swapped for jailhouse tans.
Wilson puts on his ID lanyard. When he goes into the room, he also puts on a smile. “Hi, Mr. Crocker. Remember me?”
Leonard Crocker seems perfectly at ease, handcuffs and all. “You’re the detective.”
“Right!” Wilson sits down. “Do you answer to Len, Lennie, or Leonard?”
“Lennie, mostly. That’s what the guys down at the plumbing shop call me.”
“Lennie it is, then. What we’re having here—if you agree—is just sort of a preliminary conversation. You were given your rights, correct?”
Lennie smiles as a man does when seeing through a trick question. “First by the officers at the scene, then by you. I called them, you know. The officers.”
“Great! Just to recap, anything you say—”
“Can be used against me.”
Wilson’s smile widens into a grin. “Bingo! What about legal representation? How’s your memory on that? Because we’re being recorded, you know.”
“I can have a lawyer at any time. If I can’t afford one, you’ll get me one. It’s the law.”
“Correctamundo. So do you want one? Just say the word.” And I can get some lunch, Wilson thinks.
“I’m happy to talk to you, Detective, but I’ll need a lawyer at the trial, right?”
“Unless you want to defend yourself. But a man who defends himself—”
Lennie raises a finger and cocks his head, more the gesture of a scholar than a plumber. “—has a fool for a client.”
Wilson laughs and nods. “Give the man a kewpie doll.” Then he grows more serious, folding his hands under his chin and looking straight at Lennie. “Why don’t we get right to the point? You killed your wife this morning, didn’t you? Stabbed her three times in the stomach, after which she bled out. That’s what you told the officers, right? And me.”
Lennie shakes his head. “If you’ll recall, what I actually said was I did it.”
“Meaning you killed your wife. Arlene Crocker.”
“She wasn’t my wife.”
Wilson takes his notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket and consults it.
“Isn’t your wife Arlene Crocker?”
“Not today. Not for the last year.” He considers. “Maybe longer. It’s hard to tell for sure.”
“Are you saying you killed a stranger? One who just happens to look like your wife of nine years?”
“Yes.” Lennie is looking at Wilson patiently, his face saying eventually you’ll get to the right questions but I’m not going to help you.
“So…when we type and DNA-test the blood on your kitchen floor and all over your shirt, it won’t match that of the deceased woman?”
“Oh, it probably will.” Lennie gives a judicious nod. “I’m almost sure it will. Although I hope your science people will look for peculiar…mmm…” He searches for the right word. “Peculiar components. I don’t think you’ll find any, but it would be wise to check. I expect to go to jail for killing that thing, but I’d certainly prefer not to.”
Now Wilson understands. Crocker has already got an insanity plea on his radar.
“What are you telling me, Lennie? That your wife was possessed? Help me understand.”
Lennie thinks it over. “I don’t think you could call it that, exactly. When a person is possessed—correct me if I’m wrong, Detective—a spirit, or maybe a demon, comes in and takes over, but that person is still there, inside. Being held prisoner. Is that your understanding?”
Wilson has seen The Exorcist and a couple of similar movies, so he nods. “Pretty much. But that isn’t what happened to your wife?”
“No. She died when it came in. They all do.”
“They all? Who all?”
“Not many so far, compared to the population of the earth, which is almost eight billion—you can google it—but there’s more of them all the time. They take over, Detective. It’s the perfect disguise. We’re the perfect disguise.”
Wilson pretends to think this over. What he’s really thinking is this interview will be useless to the District Attorney. There’s going to be plenty of rigamarole ahead—a couple of prosecution psychiatrists, plus Crocker’s own shrink. Wilson wouldn’t be surprised if Crocker already had one on speed-dial.
“Aliens?”
Crocker’s face says the penny drops. “That’s right. Aliens. I don’t know if they come from space or from some parallel world. The websites are pretty much split on that. I think space. It makes sense, because…” He leans forward, earnest. “The speed of light, you know.” “What about it?”
Not that Wilson cares. He’s losing interest.
What interests him is a ham and turkey club from the deli down the street. And a Marlboro chaser.
“Spaceships can’t exceed it or they go backwards in time or maybe just disintegrate. That’s the science. But pure mind, Detective…that can make the jump. Only once they get here, they need bodies. Would probably die without them. We’re in the preliminary stage of the invasion now, but if the world governments don’t wise up, they’ll be coming in thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions.”
Crocker has been leaning forward over his cuffed and chained hands, but now he sits back. “It’s all on the Internet.”
“I bet it is, Lennie. I bet Kamala Harris is one of those invaders, just waiting for Amtrak Joe to croak so she can get her hands on the levers of power.” He gets up. “I think you need to go back to your cell and think this over before you get arraigned. And, just my advice, I think you need a good lawyer. Because only a good one could sell that to a jury.”