The Institute

by Stephen King

  “He’s in the air,” Kalisha said. None of them needed to ask who she meant.

  “I’d love to fly again,” Helen said wistfully. “I would love that.”

  “Will they wait for him, Sha?” Nicky asked. “Or just turn on the gas? What’s your thinking?”

  “Who made me Professor Xavier?” She threw an elbow into Avery’s side . . . but gently. “Wake up, Avester. Smell the coffee.”

  “I’m awake,” Avery said. Not quite truthfully; he had still been drowsing, enjoying the hum. Thinking of telephones that got bigger, the way Bartholomew Cubbins’s hats had grown bigger and fancier. “They’ll wait. They have to, because if anything happens to us, Luke would know. And we’ll wait until he gets here.”

  “And when he does?” Kalisha asked.

  “We use the phone,” Avery said. “The big phone. All of us together.”

  “How big is it?” George sounded uneasy. “Because the last one I saw was very fuckin large. Almost as big as me.”

  Avery only shook his head. His eyelids drooped. At bottom he was still a little kid, and up long past his bedtime.

  The Ward A kids—it was hard not to think of them as the gorks, even for Kalisha—were still holding hands. The overheads brightened; one of the tubes actually shorted out. The hum deepened and strengthened. They felt it in Front Half, Kalisha was sure of that—Joe and Hadad, Chad and Dave, Priscilla and that mean one, Zeke. The rest of them, too. Were they frightened by it? Maybe a little, but—

  But they believe we’re trapped, she thought. They believe they’re still safe. They believe the revolt has been contained. Let them go on believing that.

  Somewhere there was a big phone—the biggest phone, one with extensions in many rooms. If they called on that phone (when they called on it, because there was no other choice), the power in this tunnel where they were trapped would go beyond any bomb ever exploded on the earth or below it. That hum, now just a carrier wave, might grow to a vibration that could topple buildings, maybe destroy whole cities. She didn’t know that for sure, but thought it might be true. How many kids, their heads now empty of everything but the powers for which they had been taken, were waiting for a call on the big phone? A hundred? Five hundred? Maybe even more, if there were Institutes all over the world.

  “Nicky?”

  “What?” He had also been drowsing, and he sounded irritated.

  “Maybe we can turn it on,” she said, and there was no need to be specific about what it was. “But if we do . . . can we turn it off again?”

  He considered this, then smiled. “I don’t know. But after what they did to us . . . frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

  9

  Quarter past eleven.

  Stackhouse was back in Mrs. Sigsby’s office, with the Zero Phone—still silent—on the desk. Forty-five minutes from now, the last day of the Institute’s normal operation would be over. Tomorrow this place would be abandoned, no matter how the business with Luke Ellis turned out. Containment of the program as a whole was possible in spite of the Wendy person Luke and his friend Tim were leaving down south, but this facility was blown. The important things tonight were obtaining the flash drive and making sure Luke Ellis was dead. Rescuing Mrs. Sigsby would be nice, but it was strictly optional.

  In point of fact, the Institute was being abandoned already. From where he sat, he had an angle on the road that led away from the Institute, first to Dennison River Bend, then to the rest of the lower forty-eight . . . not to mention Canada and Mexico, for those with passports. Stackhouse had called in Zeke, Chad, Chef Doug (twenty years with Halliburton), and Dr. Felicia Richardson, who had come to them from the Hawk Security Group. They were people he trusted.

  As for the others . . . he had seen their departing headlights flickering through the trees. He guessed only a dozen so far, but there would be more. Soon Front Half would be deserted except for the children currently in residence there. Maybe it was already. But Zeke, Chad, Doug, and Dr. Richardson would stick; they were loyalists. And Gladys Hickson. She would stick as well, maybe after all the others were gone. Gladys wasn’t just a scrapper; Stackhouse was becoming more and more certain that she was an out-and-out psycho.

  I’m psycho myself for staying, Stackhouse thought. But the brat’s right—they’d hunt me down. And he’s walking right into it. Unless . . .

  “Unless he’s playing me,” Stackhouse murmured.

  Rosalind, Mrs. Sigsby’s assistant, stuck her head in. Her usually perfect makeup had eroded over the course of the last difficult twelve hours, and her usually perfect graying hair was sticking up on the sides.

  “Mr. Stackhouse?”

  “Yes, Rosalind.”

  Rosalind looked troubled. “I believe Dr. Hendricks may have left. I believe I saw his car about ten minutes ago.”

  “I’m not surprised. You should go yourself, Rosalind. Head home.” He smiled. It felt strange to be smiling on a night like this, but it was a good strange. “I just realized that I’ve known you since I came here—many moons—and I don’t know where home is for you.”

  “Missoula,” Rosalind said. She looked surprised herself. “That’s in Montana. At least I suppose it’s still home. I own a house in Mizzou, but I haven’t been there in I guess five years. I just pay the taxes when they come due. When I have time off, I stay in the village. For vacation, I go down to Boston. I like the Red Sox and the Bruins, and the art cinema in Cambridge. But I’m always ready to come back.”

  Stackhouse realized it was the most Rosalind had said to him in those many moons, which stretched back over fifteen years. She had been here, Mrs. Sigsby’s faithful dogsbody, when Stackhouse had retired from his service as an investigator for the US Army (JAG), and here she still was, and looking about the same. She could have been sixty-five, or a well-preserved seventy.

  “Sir, do you hear that humming noise?”

  “I do.”

  “Is it a transformer or something? I never heard it before.”

  “A transformer. Yes, I suppose you could call it that.”

  “It’s very annoying.” She rubbed at her ears, further disarranging her hair. “I suppose the children are doing it. Is Julia—Mrs. Sigsby—coming back? She is, isn’t she?”

  Stackhouse realized (with amusement rather than irritation) that Rosalind, always so proper and so unobtrusive, had been keeping her ears peeled, hum or no hum.

  “I expect so, yes.”

  “Then I’d like to stay. I can shoot, you know. I go to the range in the Bend once a month, sometimes twice. I have the shooting club equivalent of a DM badge, and I won the small handgun competition last year.”

  Julia’s quiet assistant not only took excellent shorthand, she had a Distinguished Marksman badge . . . or, as she said, the equivalent of. Wonders never ceased.

  “What do you shoot, Rosalind?”

  “Smith & Wesson M&P .45.”

  “Recoil doesn’t bother you?”

  “With the help of a wrist support, I manage the recoil very well. Sir, if it’s your intention to free Mrs. Sigsby from the kidnappers holding her, I would much desire to be a part of that operation.”

  “All right,” Stackhouse said, “you’re in. I can use all the help I can get.” But he would have to be careful how he used her, because saving Julia might not be possible. She had become expendable now. The important thing was the flash drive. And that fucking too-smart-for-his-own-good boy.

  “Thank you, sir. I won’t let you down.”

  “I’m sure you won’t, Rosalind. I’ll tell you how I expect this will play out, but first I have a question.”

  “Yes?”

  “I know a gentleman is never supposed to ask, and a lady is never supposed to tell, but how old are you?”

  “Seventy-eight, sir.” She answered promptly enough, and while maintaining eye contact, but this was a lie. Rosalind Dawson was actually eighty-one.

  10

  Quarter of twelve.

  The Challenger aircraft
with 940NF on the tail and MAINE PAPER INDUSTRIES on the side droned north toward Maine at 39,000 feet. With a helping push from the jet stream, its speed was fluctuating gently between 520 and 550 miles an hour.

  Their arrival at Alcolu and subsequent takeoff had gone without incident, mostly because Mrs. Sigsby had a VIP entry pass from the Regal Air FBO, and she had been more than willing to use it to open the gate. She smelled a chance—still slim, but there—of getting out of this alive. The Challenger stood in solitary splendor with its air-stairs down. Tim had raised the stairs himself, secured the door, and then hammered on the closed cockpit door with the butt of the dead deputy’s Glock.

  “I think we’re all tight back here. If you’ve got a green board, let’s roll.”

  There was no answer from the other side of the door, but the engines began to cycle up. Two minutes later they went airborne. Now they were somewhere over West Virginia, according to the monitor on the bulkhead, and DuPray was in the rearview. Tim hadn’t expected to leave so suddenly, and certainly not under such cataclysmic circumstances.

  Evans was dozing, and Luke was dead to the world. Only Mrs. Sigsby was still awake, sitting upright, her gaze fixed on Tim’s face. There was something reptilian about those wide expressionless eyes. The last of Doc Roper’s pain pills might have put her out, but she had refused in spite of what must have been fairly bad pain. She had been spared a serious gunshot wound, but even a groove hurt plenty.

  “You have law enforcement experience, I believe,” she said. “It’s in the way you carry yourself, and in the way you reacted—quickly and well.”

  Tim said nothing, only looked at her. He had put the Glock beside him on the seat. Firing a gun at 39,000 feet would be a very bad idea, and really, why would he, even if they’d been at a much lower altitude? He was taking this bitch exactly where she wanted to go.

  “I don’t understand why you’re going along with this plan.” She nodded at Luke, who—with his dirty face and bandaged ear—looked much younger than twelve. “We both know he wants to save his friends, and I think we both know the plan is silly. Idiotic, really. Yet you agreed. Why was that, Tim?”

  Tim said nothing.

  “Why you’d get involved in the first place is a mystery to me. Help me understand.”

  He had no intention of doing that. One of the first things his mentor officer had taught him during the four months of his rookie probationary tour was you question perps. You never allow perps to question you.

  Even if he had been disposed to talk, he didn’t know what he could say that would sound even marginally sane. Could he tell her that his presence on this state-of-the-art airplane, the sort of craft only rich men and women usually saw the inside of, was an accident? That once upon a time a man bound for New York City had suddenly stood up on a much more ordinary plane, agreeing to give up his seat for a cash payment and a hotel voucher? That everything—the hitchhike north, the traffic tie-up on I-95, the walk to DuPray, the night knocker job—had followed from that single impulsive act? Or could he say that it was fate? That he had been moved to DuPray by the hand of some cosmic chess player, to save the sleeping boy from the people who had kidnapped him and wanted to use his extraordinary mind until it was used up? And if that were the case, what did it make Sheriff John, Tag Faraday, George Burkett, Frank Potter, and Bill Wicklow? Just pawns to be sacrificed in the great game? And what piece was he? It would be nice to believe himself a knight, but more likely, he was just another pawn.

  “Sure you don’t want that pill?” he asked.

  “You don’t intend to answer my question, do you?”

  “No, ma’am, I do not.” Tim turned his head and looked out at the leagues of darkness and the few lights down there, like fireflies at the bottom of a well.

  11

  Midnight.

  The box phone gave its hoarse cry. Stackhouse answered. The voice on the other end belonged to one of the off-duty caretakers, a man named Ron Church. The requested van was in place at the airport, Church said. Denise Allgood, an off-duty tech (although they were all supposedly on duty now), had driven behind Church in an Institute sedan. The idea was that, after leaving the vehicle on the tarmac, Ron would ride back here with Denise. But those two had a thing going on, which Stackhouse knew about. It was his business to know things, after all. He felt sure that with the boy’s ride in place, Ron and Denise would be heading for anywhere that wasn’t here. That was okay. Although the multiple desertions were sad, maybe they were for the best. It was time to draw a line under this operation. Enough of his people would stay for the final act, which was all that mattered.

  Luke and his friend Tim were going down, there was no question in his mind about that. Either it would be good enough for the lisping man on the other end of the Zero Phone or it wouldn’t. That was out of Stackhouse’s hands, and it was a relief. He supposed he had carried this streak of fatalism like a dormant virus since his days in Iraq and Afghanistan, and just hadn’t recognized it for what it was until now. He would do what he could, which was all any man or woman could do. The dogs barked and the caravan moved on.

  There was a tap at the door and Rosalind looked in. She had done something with her hair, which was an improvement. He was less sure about the shoulder holster she was now wearing. It was a bit surreal, like a dog wearing a party hat.

  “Gladys is here, Mr. Stackhouse.”

  “Send her in.”

  Gladys entered. There was an air mask dangling below her chin. Her eyes were red. Stackhouse doubted if she had been crying, so the irritation was probably from whatever bad medicine she’d been mixing up. “It’s ready. All I need to do is add the toilet bowl cleaner. You say the word, Mr. Stackhouse, and we’ll gas them.” She gave her head a quick, hard shake. “That hum is driving me crazy.”

  From the look of you, you don’t have far to go, Stackhouse thought, but she was right about the hum. The thing was, you couldn’t get used to it. Just when you thought you might, it would rise in volume—not in your ears, exactly, but inside your head. Then, all at once, it would drop back to its former and slightly more bearable level.

  “I was talking to Felicia,” Gladys said. “Dr. Richardson, I mean. She’s been watching them on her monitor. She says the hum gets stronger when they link up and drops when they let go of each other.”

  Stackhouse had already figured that out for himself. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist, as the saying went.

  “Will it be soon, sir?”

  He looked at his watch. “I think about three hours, give or take. The HVAC units are on the roof, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “I may be able to call you when it’s time, Gladys, but I may not. Things will probably happen fast. If you hear shooting from the front of the admin building, start the chlorine gas whether you hear from me or not. Then come. Don’t go back inside, just run along the roof to the East Wing of Front Half. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir!” She gave him a brilliant smile. It was the one all the kids hated.

  12

  Twelve-thirty.

  Kalisha was watching the Ward A kids and thinking about the Ohio State Marching Band. Her dad loved Buckeyes football, and she had always watched with him—for the closeness—but the only part she really cared about was halftime show, when the band (“The Priiide of the Buckeyes!” the announcer always proclaimed) would take the field, simultaneously playing their instruments and making shapes that were only discernible from above—everything from the S on Superman’s chest to a fantastic Jurassic Park dinosaur that walked around nodding its saurian head.

  The Ward A kids had no musical instruments, and all they made when they joined hands was the same circle—irregular, because the access tunnel was narrow—but they had the same . . . there was a word for it . . .

  “Synchronicity,” Nicky said.

  She looked around, startled. He smiled at her, brushing his hair back to give her a better look at eyes that were, let’s face it, sort of fascinati
ng.

  “That’s a big word even for a white boy.”

  “I got it from Luke.”

  “You hear him? You’re in touch with him?”

  “Sort of. Off and on. It’s hard to tell what’s my thinking and what’s his. It helped that I was asleep. Awake, my thoughts get in the way.”

  “Like interference?”

  He shrugged. “I guess. But if you open your mind, I’m pretty sure you can hear him, too. He comes through even clearer when they make one of their circles.” He nodded to the Ward A kids, who had resumed their aimless wandering. Jimmy and Donna were walking together, swinging their linked hands. “Want to try?”

  Kalisha tried to stop thinking. It was surprisingly hard at first, but when she listened to the hum, it got easier. The hum was sort of like mouthwash, only for the brain.

  “What’s funny, K?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Nicky said. “Mindwash instead of mouthwash. I like that.”

  “I’m getting something, but not much. He might be sleeping.”

  “Probably is. But he’ll wake up soon, I think. Because we’re awake.”

  “Synchronicity,” she said. “That’s some badass word. And it sounds just like him. You know the tokens they used to give us for the machines? Luke called them emoluments. That’s another badass word.”

  “Luke’s special because he’s so smart.” Nicky looked at Avery, who was leaning against Helen, both of them dead asleep. “And the Avester’s special just because . . . well . . .”

  “Just because he’s Avery.”

  “Yeah.” Nicky grinned. “And those idiots went and souped him up without putting a governor on his engine.” His smile was, let’s face it, as fascinating as his eyes. “It’s the two of them together that put us where we are, you know. Luke’s chocolate, Avery’s peanut butter. Either of them alone, nothing would have changed. Together they’re the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup that’s going to rip this joint.”

  She laughed. It was a stupid way to put it, but also pretty accurate. At least she hoped so. “We’re still stuck, though. Like rats in a plugged pipe.”