by Stephen King
“Florida’s a helluva place,” Joe said. “Helluva place. Home of the newly wed and the nearly dead. My grandfather retired to Florida, God rest his soul. When I die, I want to go peacefully, in my sleep, like Grampa Fred. Not screaming, like the passengers in his car.”
Roland roared with laughter at that one, and Susannah did, too. Oy’s grin was wider than ever.
“My grandma, she was great, too. She said she learned how to swim when someone took her out on the Cuyahoga River and threw her off the boat. I said, ‘Hey, Nana, they weren’t trying to teach you how to swim.’”
Roland snorted, wiped his nose, then snorted again. His cheeks had bloomed with color. Laughter elevated the entire metabolism, put it almost on a fight-or-flight basis; Susannah had read that somewhere. Which meant her own must be rising, because she was laughing, too. It was as if all the horror and sorrow were gushing out of an open wound, gushing out like—
Well, like blood.
She heard a faint alarm-bell start to ring, far back in her mind, and ignored it. What was there to be alarmed about? They were laughing, for goodness’ sake! Having a good time!
“Can I be serious a minute? No? Well, fuck you and the nag you rode in on—tomorrow when I wake up, I’ll be sober, but you’ll still be ugly.
“And bald.”
(Roland roared.)
“I’m gonna be serious, okay? If you don’t like it, stick it where you keep your change-purse. My Nana was a great lady. Women in general are great, you know it? But they have their flaws, just like men. If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving a baby’s life, for instance, she’ll save the baby without even considering how many men are on base. Bing!” He rapped his head with his knuckles and popped his eyes in a way that made them both laugh. Roland tried to put his coffee cup down and spilled it. He was holding his stomach. Hearing him laugh so hard—to surrender to laughter so completely— was funny in itself, and Susannah burst out in a fresh gale.
“Men are one thing, women are another. Put em together and you’ve got a whole new taste treat. Like Oreos. Like Peanut Butter Cups. Like raisin cake with snot sauce. Show me a man and a woman and I’ll show you the Peculiar Institution—not slavery, marriage. But I repeat myself. Bing!” He rapped his head. Popped his eyes. This time they seemed to come kasproing halfway out of their sockets
(how does he do that)
and Susannah had to clutch her stomach, which was beginning to ache with the force of her laughter. And her temples were beginning to pound. It hurt, but it was a good hurt.
“Marriage is having a wife or a husband. Yeah! Check Webster’s! Bigamy is having a wife or husband too many. Of course, that’s also monogamy. Bing!”
If Roland laughed any harder, Susannah thought, he would go sliding right out of his chair and into the puddle of spilled coffee.
“Then there’s divorce, a Latin term meaning ‘to rip a man’s genitals out through the wallet.’
“But I was talking about Cleveland, remember? You know how Cleveland got started? A bunch of people in New York said, ‘Gee I’m starting to enjoy the crime and the poverty, but it’s not quite cold enough. Let’s go west.’”
Laughter, Susannah would reflect later, is like a hurricane: once it reaches a certain point, it becomes self-feeding, self-supporting. You laugh not because the jokes are funny but because your own condition is funny. Joe Collins took them to this point with his next sally.
“Hey, remember in elementary school, you were told that in case of fire you have to line up quietly with the smallest people in front and the tallest people at the end of the line? What’s the logic in that? Do tall people burn slower?”
Susannah shrieked with laughter and slapped the side of her face. This produced a sudden and unexpected burst of pain that drove all the laughter out of her in a moment. The sore beside her mouth had been growing again, but hadn’t bled in two or three days. When she inadvertently struck it with her flailing hand, she knocked away the blackish-red crust covering it. The sore did not just bleed; it gushed.
For a moment she was unaware of what had just happened. She only knew that slapping the side of her face hurt much more than it should have done. Joe also seemed unaware (his eyes were mostly closed again), must have been unaware, because he rapped faster than ever: “Hey, and what about that seafood restaurant they have at Sea World? I got halfway through my fishburger and wondered if I was eating a slow learner! Bing! And speaking of fish—”
Oy barked in alarm. Susannah felt sudden wet warmth run down the side of her neck and onto her shoulder.
“Stop, Joe,” Roland said. He sounded out of breath. Weak. With laughter, Susannah supposed. Oh, but the side of her face hurt, and—
Joe opened his eyes, looking annoyed. “What? Jesus Christ, you wanted it and I was giving it to ya!”
“Susannah’s hurt herself.” The gunslinger was up and looking at her, laughter lost in concern.
“I’m not hurt, Roland, I just slapped myself upside the head a little harder than I m—” Then she looked at her hand and was dismayed to see it was wearing a red glove.
NINE
Oy barked again. Roland snatched the napkin from beside his overturned cup. One end was brown and soaking with coffee, but the other was dry. He pressed it against the gushing sore and Susannah winced away from his touch at first, her eyes filling with tears.
“Nay, let me stop the bleeding at least,” Roland murmured, and grasped her head, working his fingers gently into the tight cap of her curls. “Hold steady.” And for him she managed to do it.
Through her watering eyes Susannah thought Joe still looked pissed that she had interrupted his comedy routine in such drastic (not to mention messy) fashion, and in a way she didn’t blame him. He’d been doing a really good job; she’d gone and spoiled it. Aside from the pain, which was abating a little now, she was horribly embarrassed, remembering the time she had started her period in gym class and a little trickle of blood had run down her thigh for the whole world to see—that part of it with whom she had third-period PE, at any rate. Some of the girls had begun chanting Plug it UP!, as if it were the funniest thing in the world.
Mixed with this memory was fear concerning the sore itself. What if it was cancer? Before, she’d always been able to thrust this idea away before it was fully articulated in her mind. This time she couldn’t. What if she’d caught her stupid self a cancer on her trek through the Badlands?
Her stomach knotted, then heaved. She kept her fine dinner in its place, but perhaps only for the time being.
Suddenly she wanted to be alone, needed to be alone. If she was going to vomit, she didn’t want to do it in front of Roland and this stranger. Even if she wasn’t, she wanted some time to get herself back under control. A gust of wind strong enough to shake the entire cottage roared past like a hot-enj in full flight; the lights flickered and her stomach knotted again at the sea-sick motion of the shadows on the wall.
“I’ve got to go … the bathroom …” she managed to say. For a moment the world wavered, but then it steadied down again. In the fireplace a knot of wood exploded, shooting a flurry of crimson sparks up the chimney.
“You sure?” Joe asked. He was no longer angry (if he had been), but he was looking at her doubtfully.
“Let her go,” Roland said. “She needs to settle herself down, I think.”
Susannah began to give him a grateful smile, but it hurt the sore place and started it bleeding again, too. She didn’t know what else might change in the immediate future thanks to the dumb, unhealing sore, but she did know she was done listening to jokes for awhile. She’d need a transfusion if she did much more laughing.
“I’ll be back,” she said. “Don’t you boys go and eat all the rest of that pudding on me.” The very thought of food made her feel ill, but it was something to say.
“On the subject of pudding, I make no promise,” Roland said. Then, as she began to turn away: “If thee feels light-headed in there, call
me.”
“I will,” she said. “Thank you, Roland.”
TEN
Although Joe Collins lived alone, his bathroom had a pleasantly feminine feel to it. Susannah had noticed that the first time she’d used it. The wallpaper was pink, with green leaves and— what else?—wild roses. The john looked perfectly modern except for the ring, which was wood instead of plastic. Had he carved it himself? She didn’t think it was out of the question, although probably the robot had brought it from some forgotten store of stuff. Stuttering Carl? Was that what Joe called the robot? No, Bill. Stuttering Bill.
On one side of the john there was a stool, on the other a claw-foot tub with a shower attachment that made her think of Hitchcock’s Psycho (but every shower made her think of that damned movie since she’d seen it in Times Square). There was also a porcelain washstand set in a waist-high wooden cabinet—good old plainoak rather than ironwood, she judged. There was a mirror above it. She presumed you swung it out and there were your pills and potions. All the comforts of home.
She removed the napkin with a wince and a little hissing cry. It had stuck in the drying blood, and pulling it away hurt. She was dismayed by the amount of blood on her cheeks, lips, and chin—not to mention her neck and the shoulder of her shirt. She told herself not to let it make her crazy; you ripped the top off something and it was going to bleed, that was all. Especially if it was on your stupid face.
In the other room she heard Joe say something, she couldn’t tell what, and Roland’s response: a few words with a chuckle tacked on at the end. So weird to hear him do that, she thought. Almost like he’s drunk. Had she ever seen Roland drunk? She realized she had not. Never falling-down drunk, never mother-naked, never fully caught by laughter … until now.
Ten’ yo business, woman, Detta told her.
“All right,” she muttered. “All right, all right.”
Thinking drunk. Thinking naked. Thinking lost in laughter. Thinking they were all so close to being the same thing.
Maybe they were the same thing.
Then she got up on the stool and turned on the water. It came in a gush, blotting out the sounds from the other room.
She settled for cold, splashing it gently on her face, then using a facecloth—even more gently—to clean the skin around the sore. When that was done, she patted the sore itself. Doing it didn’t hurt as much as she’d been afraid it might. Susannah was a little encouraged. When she was done, she rinsed out Joe’s facecloth before the bloodstains could set and leaned close to the mirror. What she saw made her breathe a sigh of relief. Slapping her hand incautiously to her face like that had torn the entire top off the sore, but maybe in the end that would turn out to be for the best. One thing was for sure: if Joe had a bottle of hydrogen peroxide or some kind of antibiotic cream in his medicine cabinet, she intended to give the damned mess a good cleaning-out while it was open. And ne’mine how much it might sting. Such a cleansing was due and overdue. Once it was finished, she’d bandage it over and then just hope for the best.
She spread the facecloth on the side of the basin to dry, then plucked a towel (it was the same shade of pink as the wallpaper) from a fluffy stack on a nearby shelf. She got it halfway to her face, then froze. There was a piece of notepaper lying on the next towel in the stack. It was headed with a flower-decked bench being lowered by a pair of happy cartoon angels. Beneath was this printed, bold-face line:
And, in faded fountain pen ink:
Frowning, Susannah plucked the sheet of notepaper from the stack of towels. Who had left it here? Joe? She doubted it like hell. She turned the paper over. Here the same hand had written:
In the other room, Joe continued to speak and this time Roland burst out laughing instead of just chuckling. It sounded to Susannah as if Joe had resumed his monologue. In a way she could understand that—he’d been doing something he loved, something he hadn’t had a chance to do in a good long stretch of years—but part of her didn’t like the idea at all. That Joe would resume while she was in the bathroom tending to herself, that Roland would let him resume. Would listen and laugh while she was shedding blood. It seemed like a rotten, boys-clubby kind of thing to do. She supposed she had gotten used to better from Eddie.
Why don’t you forget the boys for the time being and concentrate on what’s right in front of you? What does it mean?
One thing seemed obvious: someone had expected her to come in here and find that note. Not Roland, not Joe. Her. What a bad girl, it said. Girl.
But who could have known? Who could have been sure? It wasn’t as if she made a habit of slapping her face (or her chest, or her knee) when she laughed; she couldn’t remember a single other instance when—
But she could. Once. At a Dean Martin–Jerry Lewis movie. Dopes at Sea, or something like that. She’d been caught up in the same fashion then, laughing simply because the laughter had reached some point of critical mass and become self-feeding. The whole audience—at the Clark in Times Square, for all she knew—doing the same, rocking and rolling, swinging and swaying, spraying popcorn from mouths that were no longer their own. Mouths that belonged, at least for a few minutes, to Martin and Lewis, those dopes at sea. But it had only happened that once.
Comedy plus tragedy equals make-believe. But there’s no tragedy here, is there?
She didn’t expect an answer to this, but she got one. It came in the cold voice of intuition.
Not yet, there isn’t.
For no reason whatsoever she found herself thinking of Lippy. Grinning, gruesome Lippy. Did the folken laugh in hell? Susannah was somehow sure they did. They grinned like Lippy the Wonder-Nag when Satan began his
(take my horse … please)
routine, and then they laughed. Helplessly. Hopelessly. For all of eternity, may it please ya not at all.
What in the hell’s wrong with you, woman?
In the other room, Roland laughed again. Oy barked, and that also sounded like laughter.
Odd’s Lane, Odd Lane …think about it.
What was there to think about? One was the name of the street, the other was the same thing, only without the—
“Whoa-back, wait a minute,” she said in a low voice. Little more than a whisper, really, and who did she think would hear her? Joe was talking—pretty much nonstop, it sounded like— and Roland was laughing. So who did she think might be listening? The cellar-dweller, if there really was one?
“Whoa-on a minute, just wait.”
She closed her eyes and once more saw the two street-signs on their pole, signs that were actually a little below the pilgrims, because the newcomers had been standing on a snowbank nine feet high. TOWER ROAD, one of the signs had read— that one pointing to the plowed road that disappeared over the horizon. The other, the one indicating the short lane with the cottages on it, had said ODD’S LANE, only …
“Only it didn’t,” she murmured, clenching the hand that wasn’t holding the note into a fist. “It didn’t.”
She could see it clearly enough in her mind’s eye: ODD LANE, with the apostrophe and the S added, and why would somebody do that? Was the sign-changer maybe a compulsive neatnik who couldn’t stand—
What? Couldn’t stand what?
Beyond the closed bathroom door, Roland roared louder than ever. Something fell over and broke. He’s not used to laughing like that, Susannah thought. You best look out, Roland, or you’ll do yourself damage. Laugh yourself into a hernia, or something.
Think about it, her unknown correspondent had advised, and she was trying. Was there something about the words odd and lane that someone didn’t want them to see? If so, that person had no need to worry, because she sure wasn’t seeing it. She wished Eddie was here. Eddie was the one who was good at the funky stuff: jokes and riddles and … an …
Her breath stopped. An expression of wide-eyed comprehension started to dawn on her face, and on the face of her twin in the mirror. She had no pencil and was terrible at the sort of mental rearrangements that she now ha
d to—
Balanced on the stool, Susannah leaned over the waist-high washstand and blew on the mirror, fogging it. She printed ODD LANE. Looked at it with growing understanding and dismay. In the other room, Roland laughed harder than ever and now she recognized what she should have seen thirty valuable seconds ago: that laughter wasn’t merry. It was jagged and out of control, the laughter of a man struggling for breath. Roland was laughing the way the folken laughed when comedy turned to tragedy. The way folken laughed in hell.
Below ODD LANE she used the tip of her finger to print DANDELO, the anagram Eddie might have seen right away, and surely once he realized the apostrophe-S on the sign had been added to distract them.
In the other room the laughter dropped and changed, becoming a sound that was alarming instead of amusing. Oy was barking crazily, and Roland—
Roland was choking.
CHAPTER VI:
PATRICK DANVILLE
ONE
She wasn’t wearing her gun. Joe had insisted she take the La-ZBoy recliner when they’d returned to the living room after dinner, and she’d put the revolver on the magazine-littered end-table beside it, after rolling the cylinder and drawing the shells. The shells were in her pocket.
Susannah tore open the bathroom door and scrambled back into the living room. Roland was lying on the floor between the couch and the television, his face a terrible purple color. He was scratching at his swollen throat and still laughing. Their host was standing over him, and the first thing she saw was that his hair—that baby-fine, shoulder-length white hair—was now almost entirely black. The lines around his eyes and mouth had been erased. Instead of ten years younger, Joe Collins now looked twenty or even thirty years younger.
The son of a bitch.
The vampire son of a bitch.
Oy leaped at him and seized Joe’s left leg just above the knee. “Twenny-five, sissy-four, nineteen, hike!” Joe cried merrily, and kicked out, now as agile as Fred Astaire. Oy flew through the air and hit the wall hard enough to knock a plaque reading GOD BLESS OUR HOME to the floor. Joe turned back to Roland.