by Stephen King
Over the next hour or so there were more thumps and jolts as more cars were added to what would soon be Number 4297, headed into southern New England and away from the Institute.
Away, Luke thought. Away, away, away.
A couple of times he heard men talking, once quite close, but there was too much noise to make out what they were saying. Luke listened and chewed at fingernails that were already chewed down to the quick. What if they were talking about him? He remembered the switch-engine driver gabbing on his cell phone. What if Maureen had talked? What if he had been discovered missing? What if one of Mrs. Sigsby’s minions—Stackhouse seemed the most likely—had called the trainyard and told the station operator to search all outgoing cars? If that happened, would the man start with boxcars that had slightly open side doors? Did a bear shit in the woods?
Then the voices dwindled and were lost. The bumps and shoves continued as 4297 took on weight and freight. Vehicles came and went. Sometimes there were honks. Luke jumped at every one. He wished to God he knew what time it was, but he didn’t. He could only wait.
After what seemed forever, the bumps and thumps ceased. Nothing happened. Luke began to edge toward another doze and had almost made it when the biggest thump of all came, tossing him sideways. There was a pause, then the train began to move again.
Luke squirmed out of his hiding place and went to the partially open door. He looked out just in time to see the green-painted office building slide past. The operator and the pin-puller were back in their rocking chairs, each with a piece of the newspaper. 4297 thudded over a final junction point, then passed another cluster of deserted buildings. Next came a weedy ballfield, a trash dump, a couple of empty lots. The train rolled by a trailer park where kids were playing.
Minutes later, Luke found himself looking at downtown Dennison River Bend. He could see shops, streetlights, slant parking, sidewalks, a Shell station. He could see a dirty white pickup waiting for the train to pass. These things were just as amazing to him as the sight of the stars over the river had been. He was out. There were no techs, no caretakers, no token-operated machines where kids could buy booze and cigarettes. As the car swayed into a mild turn, Luke braced his hands against the boxcar’s sidewalls and shuffled his feet. He was too tired to lift them, and so it was a very poor excuse for a victory dance, but that was what it was, just the same.
23
Once the town was gone, replaced by deep forest, exhaustion slammed Luke. It was like being buried under an avalanche. He crawled behind the cartons again, first lying on his back, which was his preferred sleeping position, then turning over on his stomach when the lacerations on his shoulderblades and buttocks protested. He was asleep at once. He slept through the stop at Portland and the one in Portsmouth, although the train jerked each time a few old cars were subtracted from 4297’s pull-load and others were added. He was still asleep when the train stopped at Sturbridge, and only struggled back to consciousness when the door of his box was rattled open, filling it with the hot light of a July late afternoon.
Two men came in and started loading the furniture into a truck backed up to the open boxcar door—first the sofas, then the lamp trios, then the chairs. Soon they would start on the cartons, and Luke would be discovered. There were all those engines and lawnmowers, and plenty of room to hide behind them in the far corner, but if he moved he would also be discovered.
One of the loading guys approached. He was close enough for Luke to smell his aftershave when someone called from outside. “Hey, you guys, there’s a delay on the engine transfer. Shouldn’t be long, but you got time for a coffee, if you want one.”
“How about a beer?” asked the man who would have seen Luke on his bed of furniture pads in another three seconds.
This was greeted with laughter, and the men left. Luke backed out of his space and hobbled to the door on legs that were stiff and painful. Around the edge of the truck that was being loaded, he saw three men strolling toward the station-house. This one was painted red instead of green, and was four times the size of the one at Dennison River Bend. The sign on the front of the building said STURBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS.
Luke thought of slipping out through the gap between the boxcar and the truck, but this trainyard was in full swing, with lots of workmen (and a few workwomen) going here and there on foot and in vehicles. He would be seen, he would be questioned, and he knew he could not tell his story coherently in his present condition. He was vaguely aware that he was hungry, and a little more aware of his throbbing ear, but those things paled before his need for more sleep. Perhaps this boxcar would be shunted onto a sidetrack once the furniture was unloaded, and once it was dark, he could find the nearest police station. By then he might be able to talk without sounding like a lunatic. Or not completely like one. They might not believe him, but he was sure they would give him something to eat, and maybe some Tylenol for his throbbing ear. Telling them about his parents was his trump card. That was something they could verify. He would be returned to Minneapolis. That would be good, even if it meant going to some kind of kiddy facility. There would be locks on the doors, but no immersion tank.
Massachusetts was an excellent start, he had been fortunate to get this far, but it was still too close to the Institute. Minneapolis, on the other hand, was home. He knew people. Mr. Destin might believe him. Or Mr. Greer, at the Broderick School. Or . . .
But he couldn’t think of anyone else. He was too tired. Trying to think was like trying to look through a window bleared with grease. He got on his knees and crawled to the far-right corner of the Southway Express box and peered out from between two rototillers, waiting for the men from the truck to come back and finish loading the furniture destined for Bender and Bowen Fine Furniture. They might still find him, he knew. They were guys, and guys liked to inspect anything with a motor in it. They might want to look at the riding mowers, or the weed-whackers. They might want to check the horsepower on the new Evinrudes—they were crated, but all the info would be on the invoices. He would wait, he would make himself small, he would hope that his luck—already stretched thin—would stretch a little further. And if they didn’t find him, he would sink back into sleep.
Only there was no waiting or watching for Luke. He lay on one arm and was asleep again in minutes. He slept when the two men came back and finished their loading chores. He slept when one of them bent to check out a John Deere garden tractor not four feet from where Luke lay curled up and dead to the world. He slept when they left and one of the yard workers closed the Southway’s door, this time all the way. He slept through the thud and thump of new cars being added, and stirred just slightly when a new engine replaced 4297. Then he slept again, a twelve-year-old fugitive who had been harried and hurt and terrified.
Train 4297 had a pull-limit of forty cars. Vic Destin would have identified the new loco as a GE AC6000CW, the 6000 standing for the horsepower it was capable of generating. It was one of the most powerful diesel locomotives at work in America, able to pull a train over a mile long. Running out of Sturbridge, first southeast and then dead south, this express train, 9956, was pulling seventy cars.
Luke’s box was mostly empty now, and would remain that way until 9956 stopped in Richmond, Virginia, where two dozen Kohler home generators would be added to its load. Most of these were tagged for Wilmington, but two—and the entire assortment of small-engine appliances and doodads behind which Luke was now sleeping—were going to Fromie’s Small Engine Sales and Service, in the little town of DuPray, South Carolina. 9956 stopped there three times a week.
Great events turn on small hinges.
HELL IS WAITING
1
As Train 4297 was leaving the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, yard, bound for Sturbridge, Mrs. Sigsby was studying the files and BDNF levels of two children who would shortly be residing at the Institute. One was male, one female. Ruby Red team would be bringing them in later that evening. The boy, a ten-year-old from Sault Ste. Marie, was just 80 on the BDN
F scale. The girl, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago, was an 86. According to the file, she was autistic. That would make her difficult, both for staff and the other residents. If she had been below 80, they might have passed on her. But 86 was an outstanding score.
BDNF stood for brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Mrs. Sigsby understood very little of its chemical underpinnings, that was Dr. Hendricks’s bailiwick, but she understood the basics. Like BMR, basal metabolic rate, BDNF was a scale. What it measured was the growth and survival rate of neurons throughout the body, and especially in the brain.
Those few with high BDNF readings, not even .5 per cent of the population, were the luckiest people in the world; Hendricks said they were what God had intended when He made human beings. They were rarely affected by memory loss, depression, or neuropathic pain. They rarely suffered from obesity or the extreme malnutrition that afflicted anorexics and bulimics. They socialized well with others (the incoming girl being a rare exception), were apt to stop trouble rather than start it (Nick Wilholm being another rare exception), they had low susceptibility to such neuroses as obsessive-compulsive disorder, and they had high verbal skills. They got few headaches and almost never suffered from migraines. Their cholesterol stayed low no matter what they ate. They did tend to have below average or poor sleep cycles but compensated for this by napping rather than taking sleeping aids.
While not fragile, BDNF could be damaged, sometimes catastrophically. The most common cause was what Hendricks called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, CTE for short. As far as Mrs. Sigsby could tell, that came down to plain old head-banging concussion. Average BDNF was 60 units per milliliter; football players who’d been in the game ten years or more usually measured in the mid-30s, sometimes in the 20s. BDNF declined slowly with normal ageing, much faster with those suffering from Alzheimer’s. None of this mattered to Mrs. Sigsby, who was tasked only with getting results, and over her years at the Institute, results had been good.
What mattered to her, to the Institute, and to those who funded the Institute and had kept it a hard secret since 1955, was that children with high BDNF levels came with certain psychic abilities as part of the package: TK, TP, or (in rare cases) a combination of the two. The children themselves sometimes didn’t know about these abilities, because the talents were usually latent. Those who did know—usually high-functioning TPs like Avery Dixon—were sometimes able to use their talents when it seemed useful to do so, but ignored them the rest of the time.
Almost all newborns were tested for BDNF. Children such as the two whose files Mrs. Sigsby was now reading were flagged, followed, and eventually taken. Their low-level psychic abilities were refined and enhanced. According to Dr. Hendricks, those talents could also be expanded, TK added to TP and vice-versa, although such expansion did not affect the Institute’s mission—its raison d’etre—in the slightest. The occasional success he’d had with the pinks he was given as guinea pigs would never be written up. She was sure Donkey Kong mourned that, even though he had to know that publication in any medical journal would land him in a maximum security prison instead of winning him a Nobel Prize.
There was a perfunctory knock at the door, and then Rosalind stuck her head in, looking apologetic. “I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am, but it’s Fred Clark, asking to see you. He seems—”
“Refresh me. Who is Fred Clark?” Mrs. Sigsby took off her reading glasses and rubbed the sides of her nose.
“One of the janitors.”
“Find out what he wants and tell me later. If we’ve got mice chewing the wiring again, it can wait. I’m busy.”
“He says it’s important, and he seems extremely upset.”
Mrs. Sigsby sighed, closed the folder, and put it in a drawer. “All right, send him in. But this better be good.”
It wasn’t. It was bad. Very.
2
Mrs. Sigsby recognized Clark, she’d seen him in the halls many times, pushing a broom or swishing a mop, but she had never seen him like this. He was dead pale, his graying hair was in a tangle, as if he had been rubbing or yanking at it, and his mouth was twitching infirmly.
“What’s the problem, Clark? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“You have to come, Mrs. Sigsby. You have to see.”
“See what?”
He shook his head and repeated, “You have to come.”
She went with him along the walkway between the administration building and the West Wing of the residence building. She asked Clark twice more exactly what the problem was, but he would only shake his head and repeat that she had to see it for herself. Mrs. Sigsby’s irritation at being interrupted began to be supplanted by a feeling of unease. One of the kids? A test gone bad, as with the Cross boy? Surely not. If there was a problem with one of them, a caretaker, a tech, or one of the doctors would have been more likely to discover it than a janitor.
Halfway down the mostly deserted West Wing corridor, a boy with a big belly pooching out his sloppily untucked shirt was peering at a piece of paper hanging from the knob of a closed door. He saw Mrs. Sigsby coming and immediately looked alarmed. Which was just the way he should look, in Mrs. Sigsby’s opinion.
“Whipple, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“What did you say to me?”
Stevie chewed his lower lip as he considered this. “Yes, Mrs. Sigsby.”
“Better. Now get out of here. If you’re not being tested, find something to do.”
“Okay. I mean yes, Mrs. Sigsby.”
Stevie headed off, casting one glance back over his shoulder. Mrs. Sigsby didn’t see it. She was looking at the sheet of paper that had been pushed over the doorknob. DO NOT ENTER was written on it, probably by the pen clipped to one of Clark’s shirt pockets.
“I would have locked it if I had a key,” Fred said.
The janitors had keys to the various supply closets on A-Level, also to the vending machines so they could resupply them, but not to the exam or residence rooms. The latter were rarely locked, anyway, except when some bad actor got up to nonsense and had to be restricted for a day as punishment. Nor did the janitors have elevator key cards. If they needed to go to one of the lower levels, they had to find a caretaker or a tech and ride down with them.
Clark said, “If that fat kid had gone in there, he would have gotten the shock of his young life.”
Mrs. Sigsby opened the door without replying and beheld an empty room—no pictures or posters on the wall, nothing on the bed but a bare mattress. No different from any number of rooms in the residence wing these last dozen or so years, when the once strong inflow of high-BDNF children had slowed to a trickle. It was Dr. Hendricks’s theory that high BDNF was being bred out of the human genome, as were certain other human characteristics, like keen vision and hearing. Or, according to him, the ability to wiggle one’s ears. Which might or might not have been a joke. With Donkey Kong, you could never be sure.
She turned to look at Fred.
“It’s in the bathroom. I closed the door, just in case.”
Mrs. Sigsby opened it and stood frozen for a space of seconds. She had seen a great deal during her tenure as Institute head, including the suicide of one resident and the attempted suicide of two others, but she had never seen the suicide of an employee.
The housekeeper (there was no mistaking the brown uniform) had hung herself from the shower head, which would have broken under the weight of someone heavier—the Whipple boy she’d just shooed away, for instance. The dead face glaring back at Mrs. Sigsby was black and swollen. Her tongue protruded from between her lips, almost as if she were giving them a final raspberry. Written on the tile wall in straggling letters was a final message.
“It’s Maureen,” Fred said in a low voice. He took a wad of handkerchief from the back pocket of his work pants and wiped his lips with it. “Maureen Alvorson. She—”
Mrs. Sigsby broke through the ice of shock and looked over her shoulder. The door to the hall was standing open. “Clo
se that.”
“She—”
“Close that door!”
The janitor did as he was told. Mrs. Sigsby felt in the right pocket of her suit jacket, but it was flat. Shit, she thought. Shit, shit, shit. Careless to have forgotten to bring her walkie, but who knew something like this was in store?
“Go back to my office. Tell Rosalind to give you my walkie-talkie. Bring it to me.”
“You—”
“Shut up.” She turned to him. Her mouth had thinned to a slit, and the way her eyes were bulging from her narrow face made Fred retreat a step. She looked crazy. “Do it, do it fast, and not a word to anyone about this.”
“Okay, you bet.”
He went out, closing the door behind him. Mrs. Sigsby sat down on the bare mattress and looked at the woman hanging from the shower head. And at the message she had written with the lipstick Mrs. Sigsby now observed lying in front of the toilet.
HELL IS WAITING. I’LL BE HERE TO MEET YOU.
3
Stackhouse was in the Institute’s village, and when he answered her call, he sounded groggy. She assumed he had been living it up at Outlaw Country the night before, possibly in his brown suit, but didn’t bother asking. She just told him to come to the West Wing at once. He’d know which room; a janitor would be standing outside the door.
Hendricks and Evans were on C-Level, conducting tests. Mrs. Sigsby told them to drop what they were doing and send their subjects back to residence. Both doctors were needed in the West Wing. Hendricks, who could be extremely irritating even at the best of times, wanted to know why. Mrs. Sigsby told him to shut up and come.