by Stephen King
Walking behind the others and unseen by them, I shivered.
"I hope you remembered Aladdin, Boss Edgecombe," Brutal said as we reached the far end of the tunnel.
"Don't worry," I said. Aladdin looked no different from the other keys I carried in those days--and I had a bunch that must have weighed four pounds--but it was the master key of master keys, the one that opened everything. There was one Aladdin key for each of the five cellblocks in those days, each the property of the block super. Other guards could borrow it, but only the bull-goose screw didn't have to sign it out.
There was a steel-barred gate at the far end of the tunnel. It always reminded me of pictures I'd seen of old castles; you know, in days of old when knights were bold and chivalry was in flower. Only Cold Mountain was a long way from Camelot. Beyond the gate, a flight of stairs led up to an unobtrusive bulkhead-style door with signs reading NO TRESPASSING and STATE PROPERTY and ELECTRIFIED WIRE on the outside.
I opened the gate and Harry swung it back. We went up, John Coffey once more in the lead, shoulders slumped and head bent. At the top, Harry got around him (not without some difficulty, either, although he was the smallest of the three of us) and unlocked the bulkhead. It was heavy. He could move it, but wasn't able to flip it up.
"Here, boss," John said. He pushed to the front again--bumping Harry into the wall with one hip as he did so--and raised the bulkhead with one hand. You would have thought it was painted cardboard instead of sheet steel.
Cold night air, moving with the ridge-running wind we would now get most of the time until March or April, blew down into our faces. A swirl of dead leaves came with it, and John Coffey caught one of them with his free hand. I will never forget the way he looked at it, or how he crumpled it beneath his broad, handsome nose so it would release its smell.
"Come on," Brutal said. "Let's go, forward harch."
We climbed out. John lowered the bulkhead and Brutal locked it--no need for the Aladdin key on this door, but it was needed to unlock the gate in the pole-and-wire cage which surrounded the bulkhead.
"Hands to your sides while you go through, big fella," Harry murmured. "Don't touch the wire, if you don't want a nasty burn."
Then we were clear, standing on the shoulder of the road in a little cluster (three foothills around a mountain is what I imagine we looked like), staring across at the walls and lights and guard-towers of Cold Mountain Penitentiary. I could actually see the vague shape of a guard inside one of those towers, blowing on his hands, but only for a moment; the road-facing windows in the towers were small and unimportant. Still, we would have to be very, very quiet. And if a car did come along now, we could be in deep trouble.
"Come on," I whispered. "Lead the way, Harry."
We slunk north along the highway in a little conga-line, Harry first, then John Coffey, then Brutal, then me. We breasted the first rise and walked down the other side, where all we could see of the prison was the bright glow of the lights in the tops of the trees. And still Harry led us onward.
"Where'd you park it?" Brutal stage-whispered, vapor puffing from his mouth in a white cloud. "Baltimore?"
"It's right up ahead," Harry replied, sounding nervous and irritable. "Hold your damn water, Brutus."
But Coffey, from what I'd seen of him, would have been happy to walk until the sun came up, maybe until it went down again. He looked everywhere, starting--not in fear but in delight, I am quite sure--when an owl hoo'd. It came to me that, while he might be afraid of the dark inside, he wasn't afraid of it out here, not at all. He was caressing the night, rubbing his senses across it the way a man might rub his face across the swells and concavities of a woman's breasts.
"We turn here," Harry muttered.
A little finger of road--narrow, unpaved, weeds running up the center crown--angled off to the right. We turned up this and walked another quarter of a mile. Brutal was beginning to grumble again when Harry stopped, went to the left side of the track, and began to remove sprays of broken-off pine boughs. John and Brutal pitched in, and before I could join them, they had uncovered the dented snout of an old Farmall truck, its wired-on headlights staring at us like buggy eyes.
"I wanted to be as careful as I could, you know," Harry said to Brutal in a thin, scolding voice. "This may be a big joke to you, Brutus Howell, but I come from a very religious family, I got cousins back in the hollers so damn holy they make the Christians look like lions, and if I get caught playing at something like this--!"
"It's okay," Brutal said. "I'm just jumpy, that's all."
"Me too," Harry said stiffly. "Now if this cussed old thing will just start--"
He walked around the hood of the truck, still muttering, and Brutal tipped me a wink. As far as Coffey was concerned, we had ceased to exist. His head was tilted back and he was drinking in the sight of the stars sprawling across the sky.
"I'll ride in back with him, if you want," Brutal offered. Behind us, the Farmall's starter whined briefly, sounding like an old dog trying to find its feet on a cold winter morning; then the engine exploded into life. Harry raced it once and let it settle into a ragged idle. "No need for both of us to do it."
"Get up front," I said. "You can ride with him on the return trip. If we don't end up making that one locked into the back of our own stagecoach, that is."
"Don't talk that way," he said, looking genuinely upset. It was as if he had realized for the first time how serious this would be for us if we were caught. "Christ, Paul!"
"Go on," I said. "In the cab."
He did as he was told. I yanked on John Coffey's arm until I could get his attention back to the earth for a bit, then led him around to the rear of the truck, which was stake-sided. Harry had draped canvas over the posts, and that would be of some help if we passed cars or trucks going the other way. He hadn't been able to do anything about the open back, though.
"Upsy-daisy, big boy," I said.
"Goin for the ride now?"
"That's right."
"Good." He smiled. It was sweet and lovely, that smile, perhaps the more so because it wasn't complicated by much in the way of thought. He got up in back. I followed him, went to the front of the truckbed, and banged on top of the cab. Harry ground the transmission into first and the truck pulled out of the little bower he had hidden it in, shaking and juddering.
John Coffey stood spread-legged in the middle of the truckbed, head cocked up at the stars again, smiling broadly, unmindful of the boughs that whipped at him as Harry turned his truck toward the highway. "Look, boss!" he cried in a low, rapturous voice, pointing up into the black night. "It's Cassie, the lady in the rockin chair!"
He was right; I could see her in the lane of stars between the dark bulk of the passing trees. But it wasn't Cassiopeia I thought of when he spoke of the lady in the rocking chair; it was Melinda Moores.
"I see her, John," I said, and tugged on his arm. "But you have to sit down now, all right?"
He sat with his back against the cab, never taking his eyes off the night sky. On his face was a look of sublime unthinking happiness. The Green Mile fell farther behind us with each revolution of the Farmall's bald tires, and for the time being, at least, the seemingly endless flow of John Coffey's tears had stopped.
7
IT WAS TWENTY-FIVE MILES to Hal Moores's house on Chimney Ridge, and in Harry Terwilliger's slow and rattly farm truck, the trip took over an hour. It was an eerie ride, and although it seems to me now that every moment of it is still etched in my memory--every turn, every bump, every dip, the scary times (two of them) when trucks passed us going the other way--I don't think I could come even close to describing how I felt, sitting back there with John Coffey, both of us bundled up like Indians in the old blankets Harry had been thoughtful enough to bring along.
It was, most of all, a sense of lostness--the deep and terrible ache a child feels when he realizes he has gone wrong somewhere, all the landmarks are strange, and he no longer knows how to find his way home. I was out
in the night with a prisoner--not just any prisoner, but one who had been tried and convicted for the murder of two little girls, and sentenced to die for the crime. My belief that he was innocent wouldn't matter if we were caught; we would go to jail ourselves, and probably Dean Stanton would, too. I had thrown over a life of work and belief because of one bad execution and because I believed the overgrown lummox sitting beside me might be able to cure a woman's inoperable brain tumor. Yet watching John watch the stars, I realized with dismay that I no longer did believe that, if I ever really had; my urinary infection seemed faraway and unimportant now, as such harsh and painful things always do once they are past (if a woman could really remember how bad it hurt to have her first baby, my mother once said, she'd never have a second). As for Mr. Jingles, wasn't it possible, even likely, that we had been wrong about how badly Percy had hurt him? Or that John--who really did have some kind of hypnotic power, there was no doubt of that much, at least--had somehow fooled us into thinking we'd seen something we hadn't seen at all? Then there was the matter of Hal Moores. On the day I'd surprised him in his office, I'd encountered a palsied, weepy old man. But I didn't think that was the truest side of the warden. I thought the real Warden Moores was the man who'd once broken the wrist of a skatehound who tried to stab him; the man who had pointed out to me with cynical accuracy that Delacroix's nuts were going to cook no matter who was out front on the execution team. Did I think that Hal Moores would stand meekly aside and let us bring a convicted child-murderer into his house to lay hands on his wife?
My doubt grew like a sickness as we rode along. I simply did not understand why I had done the things I had, or why I'd persuaded the others to go along with me on this crazy night journey, and I did not believe we had a chance of getting away with it--not a hound's chance of heaven, as the oldtimers used to say. Yet I made no effort to cry it off, either, which I might have been able to do; things wouldn't pass irrevocably out of our hands until we showed up at Moores's house. Something--I think it might have been no more than the waves of exhilaration coming off the giant sitting next to me--kept me from hammering on top of the cab and yelling at Harry to turn around and go back to the prison while there was still time.
Such was my frame of mind as we passed off the highway and onto County 5, and from County 5 onto Chimney Ridge Road. Some fifteen minutes after that, I saw the shape of a roof blotting out the stars and knew we had arrived.
Harry shifted down from second to low (I think he only made it all the way into top gear once during the whole trip). The engine lugged, sending a shudder through the whole truck, as if it, too, dreaded what now lay directly ahead of us.
Harry swung into Moores's gravelled driveway and parked the grumbling truck behind the warden's sensible black Buick. Ahead and slightly to our right was a neat-as-a-pin house in the style which I believe is called Cape Cod. That sort of house should have looked out of place in our ridge country, perhaps, but it didn't. The moon had come up, its grin a little fatter this morning, and by its light I could see that the yard, always so beautifully kept, now looked uncared for. It was just leaves, mostly, that hadn't been raked away. Under normal circumstances that would have been Melly's job, but Melly hadn't been up to any leaf-raking this fall, and she would never see the leaves fall again. That was the truth of the matter, and I had been mad to think this vacant-eyed idiot could change it.
Maybe it still wasn't too late to save ourselves, though. I made as if to get up, the blanket I'd been wearing slipping off my shoulders. I would lean over, tap on the driver's-side window, tell Harry to get the hell out before--
John Coffey grabbed my forearm in one of his hamhock fists, pulling me back down as effortlessly as I might have done to a toddler. "Look, boss," he said, pointing. "Someone's up."
I followed the direction of his finger and felt a sinking--not just of the belly, but of the heart. There was a spark of light in one of the back windows. The room where Melinda now spent her days and nights, most likely; she would be no more capable of using the stairs than she would of going out to rake the leaves which had fallen during the recent storm.
They'd heard the truck, of course--Harry Terwilliger's goddam Farmall, its engine bellowing and farting down the length of an exhaust pipe unencumbered by anything so frivolous as a muffler. Hell, the Mooreses probably weren't sleeping that well these nights, anyway.
A light closer to the front of the house went on (the kitchen), then the living-room overhead, then the one in the front hall, then the one over the stoop. I watched these forward-marching lights the way a man standing against a cement wall and smoking his last cigarette might watch the lockstep approach of the firing squad. Yet I did not entirely acknowledge to myself even then that it was too late until the uneven chop of the Farmall's engine faded into silence, and the doors creaked, and the gravel crunched as Harry and Brutal got out.
John was up, pulling me with him. In the dim light, his face looked lively and eager. Why not? I remember thinking. Why shouldn't he look eager? He's a fool.
Brutal and Harry were standing shoulder to shoulder at the foot of the truck, like kids in a thunderstorm, and I saw that both of them looked as scared, confused, and uneasy as I felt. That made me feel even worse.
John got down. For him it was more of a step than a jump. I followed, stiff-legged and miserable. I would have sprawled on the cold gravel if he hadn't caught me by the arm.
"This is a mistake," Brutal said in a hissy little voice. His eyes were very wide and very frightened. "Christ Almighty, Paul, what were we thinking?"
"Too late now," I said. I pushed one of Coffey's hips, and he went obediently enough to stand beside Harry. Then I grabbed Brutal's elbow like this was a date we were on and got the two of us walking toward the stoop where that light was now burning. "Let me do the talking. Understand?"
"Yeah," Brutal said. "Right now that's just about the only thing I do understand."
I looked back over my shoulder. "Harry, stay by the truck with him until I call for you. I don't want Moores to see him until I'm ready." Except I was never going to be ready. I knew that now.
Brutal and I had just reached the foot of the steps when the front door was hauled open hard enough to flap the brass knocker against its plate. There stood Hal Moores in blue pajama pants and a strap-style tee-shirt, his iron-gray hair standing up in tufts and twists. He was a man who had made a thousand enemies over the course of his career, and he knew it. Clasped in his right hand, the abnormally long barrel not quite pointing at the floor, was the pistol which had always been mounted over the mantel. It was the sort of gun known as a Ned Buntline Special, it had been his grandfather's, and right then (I saw this with a further sinking in my gut) it was fully cocked.
"Who the hell goes there at two-thirty in the goddam morning?" he asked. I heard no fear at all in his voice. And--for the time being, at least--his shakes had stopped. The hand holding the gun was as steady as a stone. "Answer me, or--" The barrel of the gun began to rise.
"Stop it, Warden!" Brutal raised his hands, palms out, toward the man with the gun. I have never heard his voice sound the way it did then; it was as if the shakes turned out of Moores's hands had somehow found their way into Brutus Howell's throat. "It's us! It's Paul and me and . . . it's us!"
He took the first step up, so that the light over the stoop could fall fully on his face. I joined him. Hal Moores looked back and forth between us, his angry determination giving way to bewilderment. "What are you doing here?" he asked. "Not only is it the shank of the morning, you boys have the duty. I know you do, I've got the roster pinned up in my workshop. So what in the name of . . . oh, Jesus. It's not a lockdown, is it? Or a riot?" He looked between us, and his gaze sharpened. "Who else is down by that truck?"
Let me do the talking. So I had instructed Brutal, but now the time to talk was here and I couldn't even open my mouth. On my way into work that afternoon I had carefully planned out what I was going to say when we got here, and had thought that it didn
't sound too crazy. Not normal--nothing about it was normal--but maybe close enough to normal to get us through the door and give us a chance. Give John a chance. But now all my carefully rehearsed words were lost in a roaring confusion. Thoughts and images--Del burning, the mouse dying, Toot jerking in Old Sparky's lap and screaming that he was a done tom turkey--whirled inside my head like sand caught in a dust-devil. I believe there is good in the world, all of it flowing in one way or another from a loving God. But I believe there's another force as well, one every bit as real as the God I have prayed to my whole life, and that it works consciously to bring all our decent impulses to ruin. Not Satan, I don't mean Satan (although I believe he is real, too), but a kind of demon of discord, a prankish and stupid thing that laughs with glee when an old man sets himself on fire trying to light his pipe or when a much-loved baby puts its first Christmas toy in its mouth and chokes to death on it. I've had a lot of years to think on this, all the way from Cold Mountain to Georgia Pines, and I believe that force was actively at work among us on that morning, swirling everywhere like a fog, trying to keep John Coffey away from Melinda Moores.
"Warden . . . Hal . . . I . . ." Nothing I tried made any sense.
He raised the pistol again, pointing it between Brutal and me, not listening. His bloodshot eyes had gotten very wide. And here came Harry Terwilliger, being more or less pulled along by our big boy, who was wearing his wide and daffily charming smile.
"Coffey," Moores breathed. "John Coffey." He pulled in breath and yelled in a voice that was reedy but strong: "Halt! Halt right there, or I shoot!"
From somewhere behind him, a weak and wavery female voice called: "Hal? What are you doing out there? Who are you talking to, you fucking cocksucker?"
He turned in that direction for just a moment, his face confused and despairing. Just a moment, as I say, but it should have been long enough for me to snatch the long-barrelled gun out of his hand. Except I couldn't lift my own hands. They might have had weights tied to them. My head seemed full of static, like a radio trying to broadcast during an electrical storm. The only emotions I remember feeling were fright and a kind of dull embarrassment for Hal.