The Outsider (Holly Gibney #1)

by Stephen King

Terry almost told him what he had been doing there, then decided against it. Thinking was beginning to replace reacting, and he realized this car, with its fading aroma of enchiladas, was enemy territory.

Then I was thinking about Derek, Ralph thought. That was before Terry looked me in the eye, as if he had a right to. And before he called me a bastard, which should have bounced right off and somehow didn’t.

Was it possible that the monster inside him had not only killed the boy, but erased all memory of what he had done? And then… what? Filled in the blank with a detailed false history of a teachers’ conference in Cap City?

Sorry, Ollie thought. That’s the word of the day. Last week we were a family, now there’s just Dad and me. Sorry’s the word for that, all right. The very one, there is no other.

They watched without talking, each in his own way exploring the edges of the hole that had appeared in their lives, so as not to fall in.

Ralph wanted to believe him. And could not.

“Your chest, Terry. He got you in the heart, or just above it. You need to make a dying declaration, okay? You need to tell me you killed Frank Peterson. This is your chance to clear your conscience.” Terry smiled, and a thin trickle of blood spilled from either side of his mouth. “But I didn’t,” he said. His voice was low, little more than a whisper, but perfectly audible. “I didn’t, so tell me, Ralph… how are you going to clear yours?”

The professor said people had the mistaken idea that Poe wrote fantastic stories about the supernatural, when in fact he wrote realistic stories about abnormal psychology.”

“I would like to believe in God,” she said, “because I don’t want to believe we just end, even though it balances the equation—since we came from blackness, it seems logical to assume that it’s to blackness we return. But I believe in the stars, and the infinity of the universe. That’s the great Out There. Down here, I believe there are more universes in every fistful of sand, because infinity is a two-way street. I believe there’s another dozen thoughts in my head lined up behind each one I’m aware of. I believe in my consciousness and my unconscious, even though I don’t know what those things are. And I believe in A. Conan Doyle, who had Sherlock Holmes say, ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’ ”

Time had passed, and time probably did heal all wounds, but God, some of them healed so slowly. And the difference between I have and I had was such a gulf.