Chiral Mad 3

by Stephen King

  Leaning against her car, she watches the stars appear, glittering like bits of glass trapped in the deepening blue. The mountains are a dark shadow at the horizon, and she’s struck with a sense that no matter how long she drives, they’ll remain where they are, preventing her from ever crossing the state, from ever reaching California.

  “Know why? Because you’re not good enough,” her mother says. “Do you hear me, you worthless little shit? You don’t deserve a damn thing.”

  Erika’s vision blurs, and pain threads through her limbs. “Not again,” she whispers. “Please, not again. Haven’t I done enough?”

  But the first girl’s words ring in her ears: It will get worse before it gets better.

  Her vision splits, and she shatters in two. The girl now standing in front of her, maybe seven or eight, gives Erika a tentative smile. Her gaze flits to the narrow ribbon connecting them, and her smile falls. Then her chin lifts, her eyes widen.

  Look at all the stars!

  “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” Erika’s voice quavers and the girl frowns.

  I think I should go back. Can I go back now?

  Erika shakes her head. “Not yet.” When the hurt begins to push free, all jagged points of glass, she doesn’t fight it, nor does she turn away. She’ll give the girl at least that, no matter how hard it is to bear witness. She owes her that much.

  The tether twitches once, twice; the girl drops to the ground and covers her head with her hands. Her body convulses. You’re hurting me, she shrieks. Stop! Stop it!

  Her voice is aluminum foil on amalgam fillings. Erika winces, rocks back and forth.

  Please make it stop. Please don’t hurt me anymore.

  But Erika can’t. She can’t. Damage has to go somewhere, and she’s carried it long enough.

  The tether blackens, shrivels, disappears.

  The girl struggles to her feet, her cries shrieking into the night, her flesh slashed and gouged. Erika steps away, palms out, an apology caught on her tongue. Nothing she can say will make this right. The girl’s mouth is an O of pain and terror, her eyes accusations, and when the dark begins to bloom its poisonous flowers, Erika whispers “I’m sorry.”

  A throat clears and Erika jumps. The gas station attendant is watching her, his forehead creased. “You okay, miss?”

  She nods, finds her voice. “Yes, I think I am, but thank you for asking.”

  “You be safe out there, okay?”

  “I will.”

  For a moment, he looks as though he wants to say something more, but he doesn’t. And with shoulders straight, she drives on.

  Erika stands at the California sign with arms crossed and elbows cupped in her palms. Tree-covered mountains rise in gentle slopes, and a cool breeze kisses her skin. Although she’s five and a half hours from her destination and can’t yet smell the ocean, she senses it there. A wish. A dream. A chance. She tips her head, catching the sun’s warmth on her face. Her mother’s voice is a ghost of silence and she laughs into the wind. She’s free. Finally, she’s free.

  Elk, California, a tiny town in Mendocino County, is home to only two hundred and fifty people. A place picked at random; a place with no ties to anyone or anything she’s ever known. A place to forget, to begin anew.

  She slips off her shoes and pads across the beach, the sand cool between her toes. Strands of loose hair playdance across her cheeks as she pauses to inhale the salt tang of the ocean. The Pacific is as beautiful as she imagined it would be, the blue richer than any photograph she’s seen, the sun dappling the surface of the water with flickering light, the crashing waves singing a lullaby.

  There are so many things she needs to do, but for now, this is where she has to be. Here, she’s not worthless. Here, she’s not afraid. Here, she’s Erika alone. She tries to take a step closer to the water but can’t convince her feet to move.

  “Such a waste of space. Such a fucking mistake. I wish you were never born.”

  The words are laced with vehemence, and Erika staggers, falling to her hands and knees. She can’t breathe, can’t think; the pain is too much. It’s fire and glass and razors and darkness. The ocean twins, a blurry half-image of the receding waves overlaying her own until she splits, until the girl crawls from her belly and drops to the sand in a grim simulation of birth, the tether a misplaced umbilical cord, a liar’s promise of sustenance.

  The toddler has chubby legs and fingers, a rounded belly, and baby-fine hair several shades lighter than the color it will become. Her face should be smiles and hope and nothing more, but her eyes already have the look of a wounded animal, and Erika catches her lower lip between her teeth, chokes back tears.

  Gingerbread girls can never run fast enough, never travel far enough. There’s always a fox at the end, and that fox, once it sinks in its teeth, will never let go, not until all the good parts are gone and what’s left simply goes through the motions while waiting for the end to come.

  Erika’s shoulders slump, her chin drops, her throat clenches. The hurt washes over her, a baptism of defeat, and she can taste the triumph of her mother’s laughter.

  She scrubs her mouth with the back of her hand and gets to her feet. Curls her hands into fists. Straightens her spine and swallows her sorrow. No, she’s made it all this way, she won’t stop now. She won’t give in.

  Her younger self grabs handfuls of sand, lets the grains sieve between her fingers. Erika tucks a lock of hair behind her ear, smiles, and opens her arms.

  The little girl hesitates. Picka-up me? she says.

  Erika nods.

  Nice lady?

  Erika nods again, her smile on the verge of disintegration. The girl’s skin is warm and solid beneath Erika’s touch, no matter what she knows in her head. The heart can make anything real; so too can hurt.

  “You’re the last one, aren’t you?” she says. “The last one I have to say goodbye to, the last one I have to let go.”

  The little girl giggles and touches Erika’s cheek, leaving a dusting of sand behind. Erika holds her close, breathing in the smell of talcum powder. Part of her wants to stay this way, to stand here forever, but innocence lost can never be reclaimed, so with slow, careful steps she heads into the surf. As spray mists around them, the little girl squeals and tries to squirm from her grasp.

  “Shh,” Erika says. “Everything will be okay.” She heads deeper in, breathes “I’m sorry” into the girl’s hair. As a wave approaches, she inhales and goes under, sinking to her knees. The chill seeps into her bones, sets her teeth to chatter, but she clamps her jaw tight. Against her shoulder, collarbones, and thighs, the little girl’s hands spasm, her head thrashes, her legs kick.

  Erika tightens her arms until they ache. The current buffets her from side to side and her lungs scream, but she remains beneath the water until the little girl’s grip loosens, until she stops moving, until her weight becomes impossibly heavy. The tether snaps free, and Erika breaks through the surf with a cry.

  Hair drifting in seaweed tangles, arms outstretched, the little girl’s body floats like a discarded doll, mercifully facedown, then a wave rushes in and when it recedes, the little girl is gone.

  Alone, Erika makes her way back to the shore, her steps sure, her spine straight. Her eyes sting, but whether from tears or the salt of the sea she doesn’t know. Right now it doesn’t matter. Waves nudge her thighs and the current tugs her ankles, but she keeps moving.

  The only way forward is through.

  PROMISE

  P. GARDNER GOLDSMITH

  It took some time

  But now I’m ready

  Walking in the forest

  Moonlight through the trees

  Vision filled with

  Beautiful you

  To the stone wall

  To sit and say

  That ring was a promise

  I want to keep

  Tonight.

  Today.

  I clear my throat

  Wipe ghostly hands

  Kneel
ing on the hillside

  Cool air on my arms

  New ring ready

  Beautiful thing

  To hear crickets

  To see the moon

  To face your tombstone

  And hear you weep

  Tonight.

  Always.

  SECONDS

  JACK KETCHUM

  IT WAS WHEN they’d finished making love one bright late-August afternoon that she turned to him and said, we have to talk, you and I.

  He smiled. You and I.

  Always the professor, always correct. He’d have said you and me.

  Precise, even down to the minutia. Who else was in this room, anyway? In this bed.

  You and I.

  “Okay. Talk,” he said.

  The sun through her open window burnished his curly hair, brushed the tender down along his arm. Could she tell him this? So many times she had meant to tell him, wished to tell him. A terrible thing, this being in love. Your secrets could not be your own anymore. They begged to be shared.

  He lay there with his chin cupped in his hand, his elbow denting the bed between them. Gazing at her, waiting, a smile on his lips. She could feel the heat of him, more humid than the heat of the sun, alive.

  “How long has it been?” she said.

  He didn’t need her to translate. How long have we been?

  He laughed. “Almost four months. End of the semester. The week after I graduated. You forget already?”

  “And what do you know about me, really? In all that time.”

  His eyes swept the room as though searching for clues. The simple antique furnishings—the walnut wardrobe, the rosewood nightstand, her neat uncluttered dresser and tri-fold mirror. The four-poster bed.

  Her paintings on the walls, which he thought wonderful. And which she had consigned to the bedroom only. An old man asleep on a ruined city sidewalk, a tin cup tilted downward, empty in his hand. A male figure seen from above, approaching a lighted third-floor window in the dark, a female shape silhouetted behind it, one hand lifting its curtain. A bare ancient oak tree against a winter sky, tendrils reaching plaintive for the heavens.

  “Hands,” he said. “You love hands.”

  She took his. “That I do,” she said. “What else.”

  “The Expressionists.”

  She nodded. “What else.”

  “You’re an amazing teacher. You’re incredible in bed. You have the softest skin I’ve ever touched. And I’m pretty sure you love me. Am I right?”

  He’s so young, she thought. He needs to hear it again, even though I’ve already told him a dozen times or more, in so many ways. And once, under a streetlight in the park, under a moon as bright as any I’ve ever seen, quietly aloud. And he said the same to me.

  “Yes,” she said. “I do. I love you.”

  The second time only. In all these years.

  She leaned over and kissed him, felt her lips go soft beneath his own. Her resolve began to falter. A shaft of reflected sunlight bored through the window, slashed her naked thigh. She turned away.

  “What else? What else do you know?”

  Playing along, he sighed. “Let’s see. You were married once, for six years I think you said. Six, right? You’re a country girl transplanted to the city. Your dad owned a bar. You’re an only child. You like Chardonnay, draft beer, soft-shell crabs and Italian food. Red sauce, not the northern stuff. You’re a real blonde. You …”

  “How old do you think I am, Colin?”

  “How old?” He laughed. “Well, older than me.”

  “I’m serious. How old.”

  She watched him consider.

  “Okay. Married six years. You’ve been at the University what? ten? And your husband was … gone … before that. You’ve got your Masters so that’s six years of college. I guess when I’ve thought about it, which I gotta tell you, isn’t real often, I mean when I do the math, I’ve always thought mid-forties. Forty-fiveish? Somewhere around there. You look way younger, though. But you already know that.”

  She felt the full weight of this now settle tight in her chest. In the thud of her heartbeat. In the palms of her hands. The cold near certainty of losing him. It had been so very long since she’d let herself care. On the street below a car-horn honked three times in rapid succession, then stopped. She heard the rustle of traffic as though over shards of glass.

  “I was born November 10th, 1939. Five minutes after midnight. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was President. The Nazis were about to slaughter the Warsaw Jews. That year Gone with the Wind won the Oscar.

  “In three months, I’ll be seventy-six. Seventy-six years old.”

  He laughed again. A short, puzzled laugh this time.

  “Excuse me? ”

  Now that’s pretty ridiculous, he thought. He searched her face, looking for the put-on.

  It wasn’t there.

  How could it not be there?

  Instead he saw tension. A flicker in her eyes. He saw fear.

  “Not funny, Miriam.”

  “I stopped ageing,” she said, “when Todd died. When my husband died. Probably that very day. I just stopped. Just like that. September 8th, 1974. I was thirty-four years old.”

  She watched his eyes.

  He doesn’t believe me. He thinks I’m crazy, she thought.

  “I’m not crazy.”

  He let go of her hand.

  “Hey, I never said you were. This is a joke, right? A weird one. But a joke.”

  “No joke. Todd died the day Ford pardoned Nixon.”

  This was nuts. He’d have been a year old. What was she playing at?

  “You’re angry.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “I can see it in your face.”

  “I just don’t know why you’d…”

  “Let me tell you some things, okay? Can you bear with me a little while?”

  Of course he could. He’d been in love with her since about halfway through the first month of her class in Advanced Acrylics: Still Life to Abstraction his senior year. Fallen fast and hard. She was the reason he hadn’t given up on painting. Or rather, gone back to it after three years in digital design. He’d painted her three times now, from memory. He hadn’t shown her yet.

  This was still nuts but he’d listen.

  “My father was born in 1908. During Prohibition he made his own bootleg whiskey and ran a speakeasy off Highway 31 with gambling in the back room. When the Twenty-First Amendment came along he turned it into a bar and chop house. He held on to the one-armed bandits though and my friends and I used to feed them steel slugs all day while our parents sat at the bar.

  “My mother raised chickens in back and occasionally one would go to the block. I remember my first beheading. The sound of the cleaver coming down on that scarred, stained old stump of wood, the chicken’s bill opening and closing, the eyes blinking while its headless body ran skittering across the yard. My mother laughing as I tore away terrified through the back door and huddled by the restroom.

  “But that bar did well for me. It sent me to college. The first one in my family ever to get there. They hated it that I majored in art even though my watercolors, landscapes mostly, hung all over the restaurant walls. Cheap décor, I guess. They weren’t very good. But they insisted I minor in education. Women back then went into teaching or nursing or secretarial or they went into nothing at all.

  “I went for my Masters in education, which surprised them. They were figuring high school. I was figuring if you have to teach, make it college. And I still saw painting as the main thing. The thing I wanted most of all. I did a show now and then. Local stuff, nothing major. But I was getting it out there. I was painting in oil and acrylic by then and my subject matter had changed. No more landscapes, no more still lifes. I was doing narrative, moments from some of the books I’d read—Hemingway, Steinbeck, du Maurier, Nevil Shute, John O’Hara. Or else from magazines and newspapers. I’d work from photos in Life or Look. I stole pretty shamelessly. Not mov
ie stars, just people. Real people. Street scenes, old Korean War photos, families. Each image, each detail, as sharp as I could make it.

  “I’d done a series on entrances and exits. A woman stepping into a flower shop. A fireman climbing down a fire escape. People crowding through the revolving door at Macy’s. A bartender—of course—hauling garbage out the back door into an alley. That kind of thing. It was 1967. I think I had a dozen of them for the community center show along with a handful of other, older pieces.

  “I’m manning my table. It’s mid-afternoon. Nobody’s buying a damn thing. Then along comes Todd Marbert. Doctor Todd Marbert. Hand me a cigarette, would you?”

  The pack on the nightstand was almost empty. We’ll have to buy more, he thought. It struck him with an odd kind of relevance. However strange this story, however incredible, they were going to need more. He shook one out for her and one for himself, lit hers and then his own, lay back on his pillow and watched the smoke drift toward the freedom of the open window.

  “He bought a painting. The one he chose was of a middle-aged woman seated in the polished, glass-enclosed ticket booth of a movie theatre, the sign above her reading LYRIC, OPEN TILL 4AM and below that, ADMISSION $1.00. A vase of tall gladioli stood on the counter. There were two double-doors to the right of her, clear heavy glass, as were the walls behind her. And through them you could see the rows and rows of lightbulbs studding the lobby ceiling.”

  “An old-fashioned movie palace.”

  “That’s right. The woman was stony-faced, unsmiling, wearing a neatly-pressed white blouse, her hair pulled tight into a bun, her posture almost military, rigid, perfect.”

  “A lady who took her job quite seriously.”

  “Exactly. At a movie palace. A pleasure-dome. I’ve often wondered what was playing. The image was from a photo in Life. You didn’t see the marquee. But I liked the irony. The image of a severe woman dispensing something essentially trivial, encased in glass and bathed in light.