Just After Sunset by Stephen King

He could call the police, but he felt he had a right to more satisfaction than that after what he had been through. Quite a lot more.

“Witches don’t call the police,” he said. “Especially not us gay ones.”

His motor scooter was still out there, but he had no intention of riding back just yet. For one thing, too many people would see the mud-man on the red Vespa Granturismo. He didn’t think anyone would call the cops but they’d laugh. Curtis didn’t want to be noticed, and he didn’t want to be laughed at. Not even behind his back.

Also, he was tired. More tired than he’d ever been in his life.

He lay down on the discount-store sofa and put one of the pillows behind his head. He had left the trailer door open and a little breeze frisked through, stroking his dirty skin with delicious fingers. He was wearing nothing but the overalls now. He had stripped off his filthy undershorts and the remaining sock before putting them on.

I don’t smell myself at all, he thought. Isn’t that amazing?

Then he fell asleep, deeply and completely. He dreamed of Betsy bringing him the idiot stick, the tags on her collar jingling. He took the controller from her, and when he pointed it at the TV, he saw The Motherfucker peering in the window.

Curtis woke four hours later, sweating and stiff and stinging all over. Outside, thunder was rumbling as that afternoon’s storm approached, right on schedule. He made his way down the makeshift trailer steps sidesaddle, like an old man with arthritis. He felt like an old man with arthritis. Then he sat down, looking alternately at the darkening sky and at the portable toilet from which he had escaped.

When the rain began, he stepped out of the overalls, threw them back into the trailer to keep them dry, and then stood there naked in the downpour, his face turned upward, smiling. That smile didn’t falter even when a stroke of lightning forked down on the far side of Durkin Grove Village, close enough to fill the air with the tang of ozone. He felt perfectly, deliciously safe.

The cold rain sluiced him relatively clean, and when it began to let up, he slowly climbed the trailer steps again. When he was dry, he put the overalls back on. And when late-day sun began to spoke through the unraveling clouds, he walked slowly up the hill to where his Vespa was parked. The key was clutched in his right hand, Betsy’s now-battered ID tag pressed between the first two fingers.

The Vespa wasn’t used to being left out in the rain, but it was a good pony and started after only two cranks of the engine, settling at once into its usual good-natured purr. Curtis mounted up, barefooted and helmetless, a blithe spirit. He rode back to Turtle Island that way, with the wind blowing his filthy hair and belling the overalls out around his legs. He saw few cars, and got across the main road with no problems at all.

He thought he could use a couple of aspirins before going to see Grunwald, but otherwise he had never felt better in his life.

By seven o’clock that evening, the afternoon shower was just a memory. The Turtle Island sunsetters would gather on the beach in another hour or so for the usual end-of-day show, and Grunwald expected to be among them. For now, however, he lay in his patio hot tub with his eyes closed, a weak gin and tonic near to hand. He had taken a Percocet prior to climbing into the tub, knowing it would be a help when it came to the short walk down to the beach, but his sense of almost dreamy satisfaction persisted. He hardly needed the painkillers. That might change, but for the time being, he hadn’t felt so well in years. Yes, he was facing financial ruin, but he had enough cash socked away to keep him comfortable for the time he had left. More important, he had taken care of the queer who had been the author of all his misery. Ding-dong, the wicked witch was d—

“Hello, Grunwald. Hello, you motherfucker.”

Grunwald’s eyes flew open. A dark shape was standing between him and the westering sun, looking cut from black paper. Or funeral crepe. It looked like Johnson, but surely it could not be; Johnson was locked in the overturned toilet, Johnson was a shithouse mouse either dying or dead. Also, a smarmy little bandbox dresser like Johnson would never have been caught dead looking like an extra from that old Hee-Haw show. It was a dream, it had to be. But—

“You awake? Good. I want you to be awake for this.”

“Johnson?” Just a whisper. It was all he could manage. “That’s not really you, is it?” But now the figure moved a little—just enough to allow the late-day sun to strike across his scratched face—and Grunwald saw that it was. And what was that he had in his hand?

Curtis saw what The Motherfucker was looking at, and considerately turned a little more, so that the sun struck across it, too. It was a hair dryer, Grunwald realized. It was a hair dryer, and he was sitting chest-deep in a hot tub.

He grabbed the side, meaning to pull himself out, and Johnson stepped on his hand. Grunwald cried out and jerked his hand back. Johnson’s foot was bare, but he had brought it down heel first, and hard.

“I like you right where you are,” Curtis said, smiling. “I’m sure you felt the same about me, but I got out, didn’t I? And I even brought you a present. Stopped by my house to get it. Don’t refuse it on that account; it’s only slightly used, and I blew off all the gay-dust on my way over here. By way of the backyard, actually. Convenient that the power’s off in the stupid cattle-fence you used to kill my dog. Here you go.” And he dropped the hair dryer into the hot tub.

Grunwald screamed and tried to catch it, but he missed. The hair dryer splashed, then sank. One of the water jets turned it over and over on the bottom. It bumped Grunwald’s scrawny legs and he jerked away from it, still screaming, sure he was being electrocuted.

“Take it easy,” Johnson said. He was still smiling. He unsnapped first one strap of the overalls he was wearing, then the other. They dropped to his ankles. He was naked beneath, with faint streaks of filth from the holding tank still on the insides of his arms and thighs. There was a nasty brown clot of something in his navel. “It wasn’t plugged in. I don’t even know if that old hair-dryer-in-the-tub thing works. Although I must admit that if I’d had an extension cord, I might have made the experiment.”

“Get away from me,” Grunwald rasped.

“Nah,” Johnson said. “Don’t think so.” Smiling, always smiling. Grunwald wondered if the man had gone mad. He would have gone mad in circumstances similar to those in which he’d left Johnson. How had he gotten out? How, in God’s name?

“The rain shower this afternoon washed off most of the shit, but I’m still quite dirty. As you see.” Johnson spied the nasty wad in his navel, pried it out with a finger, and flicked it casually into the hot tub like a booger.

It landed on Grunwald’s cheek. Brown and stinking. Starting to run. Good God, it was shit. He cried out again, this time in revulsion.

“He shoots, he scores,” Johnson said, smiling. “Not very nice, is it? And although I don’t exactly smell it anymore, I’m very tired of looking at it. So be a neighbor, would you, and share your hot tub.”

“No! No, you can’t—”

“Thanks!” Johnson said, smiling, and jumped in. There was a great splash. Grunwald could smell him. He reeked. Grunwald floundered for the other side of the hot tub, skinny shanks flashing white above the bubbling water, the tan on his equally skinny legs looking like taupe nylon stockings. He flung one arm over the edge of the tub. Then Johnson grabbed him around the neck with one badly scratched but horribly strong arm and hauled him back into the water.

“No no no no no!” Johnson said, smiling. He pulled Grunwald against him. Little brown-black flecks danced on the surface of the bubbling water. “Us gay guys rarely bathe alone. Surely you came across that fact in your Internet researches. And gay witches? Never!”

“Let me go!”

“Maybe.” But Johnson hugged him closer, horribly intimate, still stinking of the Port-O-San. “First, though, I think you need to visit the gayboy ducking stool. Kind of a baptism. Wash away your sins.” The smile became a grin, the grin a rictus. Grunwald realized he was going to die. Not in his bed, in some misty, medicated future, but right here. Johnson was going to drown him in his own hot tub, and the last thing he’d see would be little particles of filth floating in the previously clean water.