by Stephen King
He was suntanned, he had fifteen dollars in his pocket from his last job--dishwasher at the Golden Spoon Diner in Auburn--and his muscles felt stretched and toughened. Though sometimes he wanted to cry, he had not given in to his tears since that first miserable night. He was in control, that was the difference. Now that he knew how to proceed, had worked it out so painstakingly, he was on top of what was happening to him; he thought he could see the end of his journey already, though it was so far ahead of him. If he travelled mainly in this world, as Speedy had told him, he could move as quickly as he had to and get back to New Hampshire with the Talisman in plenty of time. It was going to work, and he was going to have many fewer problems than he had expected.
That, at least, was what Jack Sawyer was imagining as a dusty blue Ford Fairlane swerved off to the shoulder of the road and waited for him to run up to it, squinting into the lowering sun. Thirty or forty miles, he thought to himself. He pictured the page from Rand McNally he had studied that morning, and decided: Oatley. It sounded dull, small, and safe--he was on his way, and nothing could hurt him now.
2
Jack bent down and looked in the window before opening the Fairlane's door. Fat sample books and printed fliers lay messily over the back seat; two oversize briefcases occupied the passenger seat. The slightly paunchy black-haired man who now seemed almost to be mimicking Jack's posture, bending over the wheel and peering through the open window at the boy, was a salesman. The jacket to his blue suit hung from the hook behind him; his tie was at half-mast, his sleeves were rolled. A salesman in his mid-thirties, tooling comfortably through his territory. He would love to talk, like all salesmen. The man smiled at him and picked up first one of the outsize briefcases, hoisting it over the top of the seat and onto the litter of papers behind, then the other. "Let's create a little room," he said.
Jack knew that the first thing the man would ask him was why he was not at school.
He opened the door, said, "Hey, thanks," and climbed in.
"Going far?" the salesman asked, checking the rear-view mirror as he slid the gear-lever down into drive and swung back out onto the road.
"Oatley," Jack said. "I think it's about thirty miles."
"You just flunked geography," the salesman said. "Oatley's more like forty-five miles." He turned his head to look at Jack, and surprised the boy by winking at him. "No offense," he said, "but I hate to see young kids hitching. That's why I always pick em up when I see em. At least I know they're safe with me. No touchie-feelie, know what I mean? Too many crazies out there, kid. You read the papers? I mean, I'm talking carnivores. You could turn yourself into an endangered species."
"I guess you're right," Jack said. "But I try to be pretty careful."
"You live somewhere back there, I take it?"
The man was still looking at him, snatching little birdlike peeks ahead down the road, and Jack frantically searched his memory for the name of a town back down the road. "Palmyra. I'm from Palmyra."
The salesman nodded, said, "Nice enough old place," and turned back to the highway. Jack relaxed back into the comfortable plush of the seat. Then the man finally said, "I guess you're not actually playing hooky, are you?" and it was time yet again for the Story.
He had told it so often, varying the names of the towns involved as he worked westward, that it had a slick, monologue-like feel in his mouth. "No, sir. It's just that I have to go over to Oatley to live with my Aunt Helen for a little while. Helen Vaughan? That's my mom's sister. She's a schoolteacher. My dad died last winter, see, and things have been pretty tough--then two weeks ago my mom's cough got a lot worse and she could hardly get up the stairs and the doctor said she had to stay in bed for as long as she could and she asked her sister if I could come stay with her for a while. Her being a teacher and all, I guess I'll be in Oatley school for sure. Aunt Helen wouldn't let any kid play hooky, you bet."
"You mean your mother told you to hitchhike all the way from Palmyra to Oatley?" the man asked.
"Oh no, not at all--she'd never do that. No, she gave me bus money but I decided to save it. There won't be much money from home for a long time, I guess, and Aunt Helen doesn't really have any money. My mom would hate it if she knew I was thumbing it. But it seemed like a waste of money to me. I mean, five bucks is five bucks, and why give it to a bus driver?"
The man looked sideways at him. "How long do you think you'll be in Oatley?"
"Hard to say. I sure hope my mom gets well pretty soon."
"Well, don't hitch back, okay?"
"We don't have a car anymore," Jack said, adding to the Story. He was beginning to enjoy himself. "Can you believe this? They came out in the middle of the night and repossessed it. Dirty cowards. They knew everybody would be asleep. They just came out in the middle of the night and stole the car right out of the garage. Mister, I would have fought for that car--and not so I could get a ride to my aunt's house. When my mom goes to the doctor, she has to walk all the way down the hill and then go about another five blocks just to get to the bus stop. They shouldn't be able to do that, should they? Just come in and steal your own car? As soon as we could, we were going to start making the payments again. I mean, wouldn't you call that stealing?"
"If it happened to me, I suppose I would," the man said. "Well, I hope your mother gets better in a hurry."
"You and me both," Jack said with perfect honesty.
And that held them until the signs for the Oatley exit began to appear. The salesman pulled back into the breakdown lane just after the exit ramp, smiled again at Jack and said, "Good luck, kid."
Jack nodded and opened the door.
"I hope you don't have to spend much time in Oatley, anyhow."
Jack looked at him questioningly.
"Well, you know the place, don't you?"
"A little. Not really."
"Ah, it's a real pit. Sort of place where they eat what they run over on the road. Gorillaville. You eat the beer, then you drink the glass. Like that."
"Thanks for the warning," Jack said and got out of the car. The salesman waved and dropped the Fairlane into drive. In moments it was only a dark shape speeding toward the low orange sun.
3
For a mile or so the road took him through flat dull countryside--far off, Jack saw small two-story frame houses perched on the edges of fields. The fields were brown and bare, and the houses were not farmhouses. Widely separated, the houses overlooking the desolate fields existed in a gray moveless quiet broken only by the whine of traffic moving along I-90. No cows lowed, no horses whinnied--there were no animals, and no farm equipment. Outside one of the little houses squatted half a dozen junked and rusting cars. These were the houses of men who disliked their own species so thoroughly that even Oatley was too crowded for them. The empty fields gave them the moats they needed around their peeling frame castles.
At length he came to a crossroads. It looked like a crossroads in a cartoon, two narrow empty roads bisecting each other in an absolute nowhere, then stretching on toward another kind of nowhere. Jack had begun to feel insecure about his sense of direction, and he adjusted the pack on his back and moved up toward the tall rusted iron pipe supporting the black rectangles, themselves rusting, of the street names. Should he have turned left instead of right off the exit ramp? The sign pointing down the road running parallel to the highway read DOGTOWN ROAD. Dogtown? Jack looked down this road and saw only endless flatness, fields full of weeds and the black streak of asphalt rolling on. His own particular streak of asphalt was called MILL ROAD, according to the sign. About a mile ahead it slipped into a tunnel nearly overgrown by leaning trees and an oddly pubic mat of ivy. A white sign hung in the thickness of ivy, seemingly supported by it. The words were too small to be read. Jack put his right hand in his pocket and clutched the coin Captain Farren had given him.
His stomach talked to him. He was going to need dinner soon, so he had to move off this spot and find a town where he could earn his meals. Mill Road it was--at lea
st he could go far enough to see what was on the other side of the tunnel. Jack pushed himself toward it, and the dark opening in the bank of trees enlarged with every step.
Cool and damp and smelling of brick dust and overturned earth, the tunnel seemed to take the boy in and then tighten down around him. For a moment Jack feared that he was being led underground--no circle of light ahead showed the tunnel's end--but then realized that the asphalt floor was level. TURN ON LIGHTS, the sign outside the tunnel had read. Jack bumped into a brick wall and felt grainy powder crumble onto his hands. "Lights," he said to himself, wishing he had one to turn on. The tunnel must, he realized, bend somewhere along its length. He had cautiously, slowly, carefully, walked straight into the wall, like a blind man with his hands extended. Jack groped his way along the wall. When the coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons did something like this, he usually wound up splashed across the front of a truck.
Something rattled busily along the floor of the tunnel, and Jack froze.
A rat, he thought. Maybe a rabbit out taking a shortcut between fields. But it had sounded bigger than that.
He heard it again, farther away in the dark, and took another blind step forward. Ahead of him, just once, he heard an intake of breath. And stopped, wondering: Was that an animal? Jack held his fingertips against the damp brick wall, waiting for the exhalation. It had not sounded like an animal--certainly no rat or rabbit inhaled so deeply. He crept a few inches forward, almost unwilling to admit to himself that whatever was up there had frightened him.
Jack froze again, hearing a quiet little sound like a raspy chuckle come out of the blackness before him. In the next second a familiar but unidentifiable smell, coarse, strong, and musky, drifted toward him out of the tunnel.
Jack looked back over his shoulder. The entrance was now only half-visible, half-obscured by the curve of the wall, a long way off and looking about the size of a rabbit-hole.
"What's in here?" he called out. "Hey! Anything in here with me? Anybody?"
He thought he heard something whisper deeper into the tunnel.
He was not in the Territories, he reminded himself--at the worst he might have startled some imbecilic dog who had come into the cool dark for a nap. In that case, he'd be saving its life by waking it up before a car came along. "Hey, dog!" he yelled. "Dog!"
And was rewarded instantly by the sound of paws trotting through the tunnel. But were they . . . going out or coming in? He could not tell, listening to the soft pad pad pad, whether the animal was leaving or approaching. Then it occurred to him that maybe the noise was coming toward him from behind, and he twisted his neck and looked back and saw that he had moved far enough along so that he could not see that entrance, either.
"Where are you, dog?" he said.
Something scratched the ground only a foot or two behind him, and Jack jumped forward and struck his shoulder, hard, against the curve of the wall.
He sensed a shape--doglike, perhaps--in the darkness. Jack stepped forward--and was stopped short by a sense of dislocation so great that he imagined himself back in the Territories. The tunnel was filled with that musky, acrid zoo-odor, and whatever was coming toward him was not a dog.
A gust of cold air smelling of grease and alcohol pushed toward him. He sensed that shape getting nearer.
Only for an instant he had a glimpse of a face hanging in the dark, glowing as if with its own sick and fading interior light, a long, bitter face that should have been almost youthful but was not. Sweat, grease, a stink of alcohol on the breath that came from it. Jack flattened himself against the wall, raising his fists, even as the face faded back into the dark.
In the midst of his terror he thought he heard footfalls softly, quickly covering the ground toward the tunnel's entrance, and turned his face from the square foot of darkness which had spoken to him to look back. Darkness, silence. The tunnel was empty now. Jack squeezed his hands under his armpits and gently fell back against the brick, taking the blow on his knapsack. A moment later he began to edge forward again.
As soon as Jack was out of the tunnel, he turned around to face it. No sounds emerged, no weird creatures slunk toward him. He took three steps forward, peered in. And then his heart nearly stopped, because coming toward him were two huge orange eyes. They halved the distance between themselves and Jack in seconds. He could not move--his feet were past the ankles in asphalt. Finally he managed to extend his hands, palm-out, in the instinctive gesture of warding-off. The eyes continued toward him, and a horn blasted. Seconds before the car burst out of the tunnel, revealing a red-faced man waving a fist, Jack threw himself out of the way.
"SHIIITHEEAAA . . ." came from the contorted mouth.
Still dazed, Jack turned and watched the car speed downhill toward a village that had to be Oatley.
4
Situated in a long depression in the land, Oatley spread itself out meagerly from two principal streets. One, the continuation of Mill Road, dipped past an immense and shabby building set in the midst of a vast parking lot--a factory, Jack thought--to become a strip of used-car lots (sagging pennants), fast-food franchises (The Great Tits of America), a bowling alley with a huge neon sign (BOWL-A-RAMA!), grocery stores, gas stations. Past all this, Mill Road became Oatley's five or six blocks of downtown, a strip of old two-story buildings before which cars were parked nose-in. The other street was obviously the location of Oatley's most important houses--large frame buildings with porches and long slanting lawns. Where these streets intersected stood a traffic light winking its red eye in the late afternoon. Another light perhaps eight blocks down changed to green before a high dingy many-windowed building that looked like a mental hospital, and so was probably the high school. Fanning out from the two streets was a jumble of little houses interspersed with anonymous buildings fenced in behind tall wire mesh.
Many of the windows in the factory were broken, and some of the windows in the strip of downtown had been boarded over. Heaps of garbage and fluttering papers littered the fenced-in concrete yards. Even the important houses seemed neglected, with their sagging porches and bleached-out paint jobs. These people would own the used-car lots filled with unsaleable automobiles.
For a moment Jack considered turning his back on Oatley and making the hike to Dogtown, wherever that was. But that would mean walking through the Mill Road tunnel again. From down in the middle of the shopping district a car horn blatted, and the sound unfurled toward Jack full of an inexpressible loneliness and nostalgia.
He could not relax until he was all the way to the gates of the factory, the Mill Road tunnel far up behind him. Nearly a third of the windows along the dirty-brick facade had been broken in, and many of the others showed blank brown squares of cardboard. Even out on the road, Jack could smell machine oil, grease, smouldering fanbelts, and clashing gears. He put his hands in his pockets and walked downhill as quickly as he could.
5
Seen close up, the town was even more depressed than it had looked from the hill. The salesmen at the car lots leaned against the windows in their offices, too bored to come outside. Their pennants hung tattered and joyless, the once-optimistic signs propped along the cracked sidewalk fronting the rows of cars--ONE OWNER! FANTASTIC BUY! CAR OF THE WEEK!--had yellowed. The ink had feathered and run on some of the signs, as if they had been left out in the rain. Very few people moved along the streets. As Jack went toward the center of town, he saw an old man with sunken cheeks and gray skin trying to wrestle an empty shopping cart up onto a curb. When he approached, the old man screeched something hostile and frightened and bared gums as black as a badger's. He thought Jack was going to steal his cart! "Sorry," Jack said, his heart pounding again. The old man was trying to hug the whole cumbersome body of the cart, protecting it, all the while showing those blackened gums to his enemy. "Sorry," Jack repeated. "I was just going to . . ."
"Fusshhingfeef! FusshhingFEEEFF!" the old man screeched, and tears crawled into the wrinkles on his cheeks.
Jack hurrie
d off.
Twenty years before, during the sixties, Oatley must have prospered. The relative brightness of the strip of Mill Road leading out of town was the product of that era when stocks went go-go and gas was still cheap and nobody had heard the term "discretionary income" because they had plenty of it. People had sunk their money into franchise operations and little shops and for a time had, if not actually flourished, held their heads above the waves. This short series of blocks still had that superficial hopefulness--but only a few bored teenagers sat in the franchise restaurants, nursing medium Cokes, and in the plate-glass windows of too many of the little shops placards as faded as those in the used-car lots announced EVERYTHING MUST GO! CLOSING SALE. Jack saw no signs advertising for help, and kept on walking.
Downtown Oatley showed the reality beneath the happy clown's colors left behind by the sixties. As Jack trudged along these blocks of baked-looking brick buildings, his pack grew heavier, his feet more tender. He would have walked to Dogtown after all, if it were not for his feet and the necessity of going through the Mill Road tunnel again. Of course there was no snarling man-wolf lurking in the dark there--he'd worked that out by now. No one could have spoken to him in the tunnel. The Territories had shaken him. First the sight of the Queen, then that dead boy beneath the cart with half his face gone. Then Morgan; the trees. But that was there, where such things could be--were, perhaps, even normal. Here, normality did not admit such gaudiness.
He was before a long, dirty window above which the flaking slogan FURNITURE DEPOSITORY was barely legible on the brickwork. He put his hands to his eyes and stared in. A couch and a chair, each covered by a white sheet, sat fifteen feet apart on a wide wooden floor. Jack moved farther down the block, wondering if he was going to have to beg for food.