by Stephen King
Stackhouse arrived first. The doctors were right behind him.
“Jim,” Stackhouse said to Evans, after he had taken in the situation. “Lift her. Get me some slack in that rope.”
Evans put his arms around the dead woman’s waist—for a moment it almost looked as if they were dancing—and lifted her. Stackhouse began picking at the knot under her jaw.
“Hurry up,” Evans said. “She’s got a load in her drawers.”
“I’m sure you’ve smelled worse,” Stackhouse said. “Almost got it . . . wait . . . okay, here we go.”
He lifted the noose over the dead woman’s head (swearing under his breath when one of her arms flopped chummily down on the nape of his neck) and carried her to the mattress. The noose had left a blackish-purple brand on her neck. The four of them regarded her without speaking. At six-three, Trevor Stackhouse was tall, but Hendricks overtopped him by at least four inches. Standing between them, Mrs. Sigsby looked elfin.
Stackhouse looked at Mrs. Sigsby, eyebrows raised. She looked back without speaking.
On the table beside the bed was a brown pill bottle. Dr. Hendricks picked it up and rattled it. “Oxy. Forty milligrams. Not the highest dosage, but very high, just the same. The ’scrip is for ninety tablets, and there are only three left. I’m assuming we won’t do an autopsy—”
You got that right, Stackhouse thought.
“—but if one were to be performed, I believe we’d find she took most of them before putting the rope around her neck.”
“Which would have been enough to kill her in any case,” Evans said. “This woman can’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. It’s obvious that sciatica wasn’t her primary problem, whatever she may have said. She couldn’t have kept up with her duties for much longer no matter what, so just . . .”
“Just decided to end it,” Hendricks finished.
Stackhouse was looking at the message on the wall. “Hell is waiting,” he mused. “Considering what we’re doing here, some might call that a reasonable assumption.”
Not prone for vulgarity as a general rule, Mrs. Sigsby said, “Bullshit.”
Stackhouse shrugged. His bald head gleamed beneath the light fixture as if Turtle Waxed. “Outsiders is what I meant, people who don’t know the score. Doesn’t matter. What we’re seeing here is simple enough. A woman with a terminal disease decided to pull the plug.” He pointed at the wall. “After declaring her guilt. And ours.”
It made sense, but Mrs. Sigsby didn’t like it. Alvorson’s final communication to the world might have expressed guilt, but there was also something triumphant about it.
“She had a week off not very long ago,” Fred the janitor volunteered. Mrs. Sigsby hadn’t realized he was still in the room. Somebody should have dismissed him. She should have dismissed him. “She went back home to Vermont. That’s prob’ly where she got the pills.”
“Thanks,” Stackhouse said. “That’s very Sherlockian. Now don’t you have floors to buff?”
“And clean those camera housings,” Mrs. Sigsby snapped. “I asked for that to be done last week. I won’t ask again.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Not a word about this, Mr. Clark.”
“No, ma’am. Course not.”
“Cremation?” Stackhouse asked when the janitor was gone.
“Yes. We’ll have a couple of the caretakers take her to the elevator while the residents are at lunch. Which will be”—Mrs. Sigsby checked her watch—“in less than an hour.”
“Is there a problem?” Stackhouse asked. “Other than keeping this from the residents, I mean? I ask because you look like there’s a problem.”
Mrs. Sigsby looked from the words printed on the bathroom tiles to the dead woman’s black face, the tongue protruding. She turned from that final raspberry to the two doctors. “I’d like you to both step out. I need to speak to Mr. Stackhouse privately.”
Hendricks and Evans exchanged a look, then left.
4
“She was your snitch. That’s your problem?”
“Our snitch, Trevor, but yes, that’s the problem. Or might be.”
A year ago—no, more like sixteen months, there had still been snow on the ground—Maureen Alvorson had requested an appointment with Mrs. Sigsby and asked for any job that might provide extra income. Mrs. Sigsby, who’d had a pet project in mind for almost a year but no clear idea of how to implement it, asked if Alvorson would have a problem bringing any information she gleaned from the children. Alvorson agreed, and had even demonstrated a certain level of low cunning by suggesting the story about various supposed dead zones, where the microphones worked poorly or not at all.
Stackhouse shrugged. “What she brought us rarely rose above the level of gossip. Which boy was spending the night with which girl, who wrote TONY SUCKS on a table in the caff, that sort of thing.” He paused. “Although snitching might have added to her guilt, I suppose.”
“She was married,” Mrs. Sigsby said, “but you’ll notice she’s no longer wearing her wedding ring. How much do we know about her life in Vermont?”
“I don’t recall offhand, but it will be in her file, and I’m happy to look it up.”
Mrs. Sigsby considered this, and realized how little she herself knew about Maureen Alvorson. Yes, she had known Alvorson was married, because she had seen the ring. Yes, she was retired military, as were many on the Institute’s staff. Yes, she knew that Alvorson’s home was in Vermont. But she knew little else, and how could that be, when she had hired the woman to spy on the residents? It might not matter now, not with Alvorson dead, but it made Mrs. Sigsby think of how she had left her walkie-talkie behind, assuming that the janitor had his knickers in a twist about nothing. It also made her think about the dusty camera housings, the slow computers and the small and inefficient staff in charge of them, the frequent food spoilage in the caff, the mouse-chewed wires, and the slipshod surveillance reports, especially on the night shift that ran from 11 PM to 7 AM, when the residents were asleep.
It made her think about carelessness.
“Julia? I said I’d—”
“I heard you. I’m not deaf. Who is on surveillance right now?”
Stackhouse looked at his watch. “Probably no one. It’s the middle of the day. The kids will either be in their rooms or doing the usual kid things.”
So you assume, she thought, and what is the mother of carelessness if not assumption? The Institute had been in operation for over sixty years, well over, and there had never been a leak. Never a reason (not on her watch, anyway) to use the special phone, the one they called the Zero Phone, for anything other than routine updates. Nothing, in short, they hadn’t been able to handle in-house.
There were rumors in the Bend, of course. The most common among the citizens being that the compound out in the woods was some kind of nuclear missile base. Or that it had to do with germ or chemical warfare. Another, and this was closer to the truth, was that it was a government experimental station. Rumors were okay. Rumors were self-generated disinformation.
Everything is okay, she told herself. Everything is as it should be. The suicide of a disease-riddled housekeeper is just a bump in the road, and a minor one at that. Still, it was suggestive, of larger . . . well, not problems, it would be alarmist to call them that, but concerns, for sure. And some of it was her own fault. In the early days of Mrs. Sigsby’s tour, the camera housings never would have been dusty, and she never would have left her office without her walkie. In those days she would have known a lot more about the woman she was paying to snitch on the residents.
She thought about entropy. The tendency to coast when things were going well.
To assume.
“Mrs. Sigsby? Julia? Do you have orders for me?”
She came back to the here and now. “Yes. I want to know everything about her, and if there’s nobody in the surveillance room, I want someone there ASAP. Jerry, I think.” Jerry Symonds was one of their two computer techs, and the best they had wh
en it came to nursing the old equipment along.
“Jerry’s on furlough,” Stackhouse said. “Fishing in Nassau.”
“Andy, then.”
Stackhouse shook his head. “Fellowes is in the village. I saw him coming out of the commissary.”
“Goddammit, he should be here. Zeke, then. Zeke the Greek. He’s worked surveillance before, hasn’t he?”
“I think so,” Stackhouse said, and there it was again. Vagueness. Supposition. Assumption.
Dusty camera housings. Dirty baseboards. Careless talk on B-Level. The surveillance room standing empty.
Mrs. Sigsby decided on the spur of the moment that some big changes were going to be made, and before the leaves started to turn color and fall off the trees. If the Alvorson woman’s suicide served no other purpose, it was a wake-up call. She didn’t like speaking to the man on the other end of the Zero Phone, always felt a slight chill when she heard the faint lisp in his greeting (never Sigsby, always Thigby), but it had to be done. A written report wouldn’t do. They had stringers all over the country. They had a private jet on call. The staff was well paid, and their various jobs came with all the bennies. Yet this facility more and more resembled a Dollar Store in a strip mall on the verge of abandonment. It was mad. Things had to change. Things would change.
She said, “Tell Zeke to run a check on the locater buttons. Let’s make sure all of our charges are present and accounted for. I’m especially interested in Luke Ellis and Avery Dixon. She was talking to them a lot.”
“We know what they’ve been talking about, and it doesn’t come to much.”
“Just do it.”
“Happy to. In the meantime, you need to relax.” He pointed to the corpse with her blackened face and impudently protruding tongue. “And get some perspective. This was a very sick woman who saw the end approaching and high-sided it.”
“Run a check on the residents, Trevor. If they’re all in their places—bright shiny faces optional—then I’ll relax.”
Only she wouldn’t. There had been too much relaxation already.
5
Back in her office, she told Rosalind she didn’t want to be disturbed unless it was Stackhouse or Zeke Ionidis, who was currently running a surveillance check on D-Level. She sat behind her desk, looking at the screen saver on her computer. It showed a white sand beach on Siesta Key, where she told people she planned to retire. She had given up telling herself that. Mrs. Sigsby fully expected to die here in the woods, possibly in her little house in the village, more likely behind this very desk. Two of her favorite writers, Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling, had died at their desks; why not her? The Institute had become her life, and she was okay with that.
Most of the staff was the same. Once they had been soldiers, or security personnel at hard-edged companies like Blackwater and Tomahawk Global, or law enforcement. Denny Williams and Michelle Robertson of the Ruby Red team had been FBI. If the Institute wasn’t their lives when they were recruited and came on-station, it became their lives. It wasn’t the pay. It wasn’t the bennies or the retirement options. Part of it had to do with a manner of living that was so familiar to them it was a kind of sleep. The Institute was like a small military base; the adjacent village even had a PX where they could buy a wide range of goods at cheap prices and gas up their cars and trucks, paying ninety cents a gallon for regular and a dollar-five for hi-test. Mrs. Sigsby had spent time at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, and the town of Dennison River Bend reminded her—on a much smaller scale, granted—of Kaiserslautern, where she and her friends sometimes went to blow off steam. Ramstein had everything, even a twinplex theater and a Johnny Rockets, but sometimes you just wanted to get away. The same was true here.
But they always come back, she thought, looking at a sand beach she sometimes visited but where she would never live. They always come back and no matter how sloppy some things have become around here, they don’t talk. That’s one thing they are never sloppy about. Because if people found out what we’re doing, the hundreds of children we have destroyed, we’d be tried and executed by the dozens. Given the needle like Timothy McVeigh.
That was the dark side of the coin. The bright side was simple: the entire staff, from the often annoying but undoubtedly competent Dr. Dan “Donkey Kong” Hendricks and Drs. Heckle and Jeckle in Back Half, right down to the lowliest janitor, understood that nothing less than the fate of the world was in their hands, as it had been in the hands of those who had come before them. Not just the survival of the human race, but the survival of the planet. They understood there was no limit to what they could and would do in pursuit of those ends. No one who fully grasped the Institute’s work could regard it as monstrous.
Life here was good—good enough, anyway, especially for men and women who’d eaten sand in the Mideast and seen fellow soldiers lying in shitty villages with their legs blown off or their guts hanging out. You got the occasional furlough; you could go home and spend time with your family, assuming you had one (many Institute employees did not). Of course you couldn’t talk to them about what you did, and after awhile they—the wives, the husbands, the children—would realize that it was the job that mattered, not them. Because it took you over. Your life became, in descending order, the Institute, the village, and the town of Dennison River Bend, with its three bars, one featuring live country music. And once the realization set in, the wedding ring would more often than not come off, as Alvorson’s had done.
Mrs. Sigsby unlocked the bottom drawer of her desk and took out a phone that looked similar to the ones the extraction teams carried: big and blocky, like a refugee from a time when cassette tapes were giving way to CDs and portable phones were just starting to show up in electronics stores. It was sometimes called the Green Phone, because of its color, and more often the Zero Phone, because there was no screen and no numbers, just three small white circles.
I will call, she thought. Maybe they’ll applaud my forward thinking and congratulate me on my initiative. Maybe they’ll decide I’m jumping at shadows and it’s time to think of a replacement. Either way it has to be done. Duty calls, and it should have called sooner.
“But not today,” she murmured.
No, not today, not while there was Alvorson to take care of (and dispose of ). Maybe not tomorrow or even this week. What she was thinking of doing was no small thing. She would want to make notes, so that when she did call, she could be as on-point as possible. If she really meant to use the Zero, it was imperative that she be ready to reply concisely when she heard the man at the other end say Hello, Mithith Thigby, how can I help?
It’s not the same as procrastinating, she told herself. Not at all. And I don’t necessarily want to get anyone in trouble, but—
Her intercom gave a soft tone. “I have Zeke for you, Mrs. Sigsby. Line three.”
Mrs. Sigsby picked up. “What have you got for me, Ionidis?”
“Perfect attendance,” he said. “Twenty-eight locater blips in Back Half. In Front Half there’s two kids in the lounge, six in the playground, five in their rooms.”
“Very good. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, ma’am.”
Mrs. Sigsby got up feeling a little better, although she couldn’t have said precisely why. Of course the residents were all accounted for. What had she been thinking, that some of them had gone off to Disney World?
Meanwhile, on to the next chore.
6
Once all the residents were at lunch, Fred the janitor pushed a trolley borrowed from the cafeteria kitchen to the door of the room where Maureen Alvorson had ended her life. Fred and Stackhouse wrapped her in a swatch of green canvas and rolled her up the corridor, double-time. From further on came the sound of the animals at feeding time, but here all was deserted, although someone had left a teddy bear lying on the floor in front of the elevator annex. It stared at the ceiling with its glassy shoebutton eyes. Fred gave it an irritated kick.
Stackhouse looked at him reproachfully. “Bad l
uck, pal. That’s some child’s comfort-stuffy.”
“I don’t care,” Fred said. “They’re always leaving their shit around for us to pick up.”
When the elevator doors opened, Fred started to pull the trolley in. Stackhouse pushed him back, and not gently. “Your services are not required beyond this point. Pick up that teddy and put it in the lounge or in the canteen, where its owner will see it when he or she comes out. And then start dusting those fucking bulbs.” He pointed up at one of the overhead camera housings, rolled the trolley in, and held his card up to the reader.
Fred Clark waited until the doors were shut before giving him the finger. But orders were orders, and he’d clean the housings. Eventually.
7
Mrs. Sigsby was waiting for Stackhouse on F-Level. It was cold down here, and she was wearing a sweater over her suit jacket. She nodded to him. Stackhouse nodded back and rolled the trolley into the tunnel between Front Half and Back Half. It was the very definition of utilitarian, with its concrete floor, curved tile walls, and overhead fluorescents. A few of these were stuttering, giving the tunnel a horror movie feel, and a few others were dead out. Someone had pasted a New England Patriots bumper sticker on one wall.
More carelessness, she thought. More drift.
The door at the Back Half end of the corridor bore a sign reading AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Mrs. Sigsby used her card and pushed it open. Beyond was another elevator lobby. A short upward journey brought them to a lounge only slightly less utilitarian than the service tunnel they had taken to get to Back Half. Heckle—real name Dr. Everett Hallas—was waiting for them. He was wearing a big grin and constantly touching the corner of his mouth. It reminded Mrs. Sigsby of the Dixon boy’s obsessive nose-pulling. Except Dixon was only a kid, and Hallas was in his fifties. Working in Back Half took a toll, the way working in an environment polluted with low-level radiation would take a toll.