by Stephen King
“Jesus,” Canty said. “That’s so awful, Lisa.”
“Yes. But she’s with people who understand her situation—or understand how to care for people in her situation, at least. And Darla and I will be sure to keep you in the loo—”
Lisey had been pacing around the bedroom with the cordless phone. Now she stopped, staring at the notebook that had slid most of the way from the right rear pocket of her discarded blue jeans. It was Amanda’s Little Notebook of Compulsions, only now Lisey was the one who felt compelled.
“Lisa?” Canty was the only one who called her that on a regular basis, and it always made her feel like the sort of woman who showed off the prizes on some TV game show or other—Lisa, show Hank and Martha what they’ve won! “Lisa, are you still there?”
“Yeah, honey.” Eyes on the notebook. Little rings gleaming in the sun. Little steel loops. “I said Darla and I will be sure to keep you in the loops. Loop.” The notebook was still curved with the shape of the buttock against which it had spent so many hours, and as she looked at it, Canty’s voice seemed to be fading. Lisey heard herself saying she was sure Canty would have done all the same things if she’d been the one on the spot. She bent over and slipped the notebook the rest of the way out of the jeans pocket. She told Cantata she would call that evening, told Cantata she loved her, told Cantata goodbye and tossed the cordless phone on the bed without so much as a glance. She had eyes only for the battered little notebook, seventy-nine cents at any Walgreen’s or Rexall. And why should she be so fascinated? Why, now that it was morning and she was rested? Clean and rested? With fresh sunshine pouring in, her compulsive search for the cedar box the night before seemed silly, nothing but a behavioral externalization of all the day’s anxieties, but this notebook didn’t seem silly, no, not at all.
And just to add to the fun, Scott’s voice spoke to her, more clearly than ever. God, but that voice was clear! And strong.
I left you a note, babyluv. I left you a bool.
She thought of Scott under the yum-yum tree, Scott in the weird October snow, telling her that sometimes Paul would tease him with a hard bool…but never too hard. She hadn’t thought of that in years. Had pushed it away, of course, with all the other things she didn’t want to think of; she’d put it behind her purple curtain. But what was so bad about this?
“He was never mean,” Scott had said. There had been tears in his eyes but none in his voice; his voice had been clear and steady. As always when he had a story to tell, he meant to be heard. “When I was little, Paul was never mean to me and I was never mean to him. We stuck together. We had to. I loved him, Lisey. I loved him so.”
By now she had flipped past the pages of numbers—poor Amanda’s numbers, all crammed madly together. She found nothing but blank pages beyond. Lisey thumbed through them faster and faster, her certainty that there was something here to find waning, then reached a page near the end with a single word printed on it:
HOLLY HOCKS
Why was that familiar? At first it wouldn’t come, and then it did. What’s my prize? she’d asked the thing in Amanda’s nightgown, the thing turned away from her. A drink, it had said. A Coke? An RC? she had asked, and it had said—
“It said…she or he said…‘Shut up, we want to watch the hollyhocks,’” Lisey murmured.
Yes, that was right, or almost right; close enough for government work, anyway. It meant nothing to her, and yet it almost did. She stared at the word a moment or two longer, then thumbed through to the end of the notebook. All the pages were blank. She was about to toss it aside when she saw ghostly words behind the last page. She flipped it up and found this printed on the bent inner surface of the notebook’s back cover:
4th Station: Look under the Bed
But before bending to look under the bed, Lisey flipped first back to the numbers at the front of the book and then to HOLLYHOCKS, which she had found half a dozen pages from the end, confirming what she already knew: Amanda printed her fours with a right angle and a downward slash, as they had been taught in grammar school: Y. It was Scott who had made fours that looked a little like an ampersand: 4. It had been Scott who looped his o’s together and had been in the habit of drawing a line under his jotted notes and memos. And it had always been Amanda’s habit to print in tiny capitals…with slightly lazy round letters: C’s, G’s, Y’s, and S’s.
Lisey flipped back and forth between HOLLYHOCKS and 4th Station: Look Under the Bed. She thought that if she put the two writing samples in front of Darla and Canty, they would without hesitation identify the former as Amanda’s work and the latter as Scott’s.
And the thing in the bed with her yesterday morning…
“It sounded like both of them,” she whispered. Her flesh was creeping. She hadn’t realized flesh could actually do that. “People would call me crazy, but it really did sound like both of them.”
Look under the bed.
At last she did as the note instructed. And the only bool she spied was an old pair of carpet slippers.
5
Lisey Landon sat in a bar of morning sun with her legs crossed at the shins and her hands resting on the balls of her knees. She had slept nude and sat that way now; the shadow of the sheers drawn across the east window lay on her slim body like the shadow of a stocking. She looked again at the note directing her to the fourth station of the bool—a short bool, a good bool, a few more and she’d get her prize.
Sometimes Paul would tease me with a hard bool…but never too hard.
Never too hard. With that in mind she closed the notebook with a snap and looked at the back cover. There, written in tiny dark letters below the Dennison trade name, was this:
mein gott
Lisey got to her feet and quickly began to dress.
6
The tree closes them in their own world. Beyond is the snow. And under the yum-yum tree is Scott’s voice, Scott’s hypnotic voice, and did she think Empty Devils was his horror story? This is his horror story, and except for his tears when he speaks of Paul and how they hung together through all the cutting and terror and blood on the floor, he tells it unfalteringly.
“We never had bool hunts when Daddy was home,” he says, “only when he was at work.” Scott has for the most part gotten the western Pennsylvania accent out of his talk, but now it creeps in, far deeper than her own Yankee accent, and somehow childish: not home but hum, not work but a strange distortion that comes out rurk. “Paul would always put the first one close by. It might say ‘5 stations of the bool’—to tell you how many clues there were—and then something like ‘Go look in the closet.’ The first one was only sometimes a riddle, but the others almost always were. I member one that said ‘Go where Daddy kicked the cat,’ and accourse that was the old well. Another one said ‘Go where we “farm all” day.’ And after a little bit I figured out that meant the old Farmall tractor down in eastfield by the rock wall, and sure enough, there was a station of the bool right there on the seat, held down with a rock. Because a station of the bool was only a scrap of paper, you know, written on and folded over. I almost always got the riddles, but if I was stuck, Paul would give me more clues until I solved it. And at the end I’d get my prize of a Coke or an RC Cola or a candybar.”
He looks at her. Beyond him is nothing but white—a wall of white. The yum-yum tree—it is actually a willow—bends around them in a magic circle, shutting out the world.
He says: “Sometimes when Daddy got the bad-gunky, cutting himself wasn’t enough to let it out, Lisey. One day when he was like that he put me
7
up on the bench in the hall, that was what he had said next, she could remember it now (whether she wanted to or not), but before she could follow the memory deeper into the purple where it had been hidden all this time, she saw a man standing on her back porch stoop. And it was a man, not a lawnmower or a vacuum cleaner but an actual man. Luckily, she had time to register the fact that, although he wasn’t Deputy Boeckman, he was also dressed in Castle
County khaki. This saved her the embarrassment of screaming like Jamie Lee Curtis in a Halloween movie.
Her visitor introduced himself as Deputy Alston. He had come to fetch away the dead cat in Lisey’s freezer, and also to assure her that he would be checking on her throughout the day. He asked if she had a cell phone and Lisey said she did. It was in the BMW, and she thought it might even be working. Deputy Alston suggested she keep it with her at all times, and that she program the Sheriff’s Office into the speed-dial directory. He saw her expression and told her he was prepared to do that for her, if she “was not conversant with that feature.”
Lisey, who rarely used the little cell phone at all, led Deputy Alston to her BMW. The gadget turned out to be only half-charged, but the cord was in the console compartment between the seats. Deputy Alston reached out to unplug the cigarette lighter, saw the light scattering of ashes around it, and paused.
“Go ahead,” Lisey told him. “I thought I was going to take the habit up again, but I guess I’ve changed my mind.”
“Probably wise, ma’am,” Deputy Alston said, unsmiling. He removed the Beemer’s cigarette lighter and plugged in the phone. Lisey had had no idea you could do that; when she thought of it at all, she’d always recharged the little Motorola phone in the kitchen. Two years, and she still hadn’t quite gotten used to the idea that there was no man around to read the instructions and puzzle out the meanings of Fig 1 and Fig 2.
She asked Deputy Alston how long the charging-up would take.
“To full? No more than an hour, maybe less. Will you be within reach of a telephone in the meantime?”
“Yes, I’ve got some things to do in the barn. There’s one there.”
“Fine. Once this one’s charged, clip it to your belt or hang it on the waistband of your pants. Any cause for alarm, hit the 1-key and bam, you’re talking to a cop.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. And as I said, I’ll be checking on you. Dan Boeckman will make this his twenty again tonight unless he has to roll on a call. That’ll probably happen—small towns like this, Friday nights are busy nights—but you’ve got your phone and your speed-dial, and he’ll always return here.”
“That’s fine. Have you heard anything at all about the man who’s been bothering me?”
“Not boo, ma’am,” Deputy Alston said, comfortably enough…but of course he could afford to be comfortable, no one had threatened to hurt him, and quite likely no one would. He stood approximately six-five and probably weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. Might go one-seventy-five, dressed n hung, her father might have added; in Lisbon, Dandy Debusher had been known for such witticisms.
“If Andy hears anything—Deputy Clutterbuck, I mean, he’s running things until Sheriff Ridgewick gets back from his honeymoon—I’m sure he’ll let you know right away. All you have to do in the meantime is take a few sensible precautions. Doors locked when you’re inside, right? Especially after dark.”
“Right.”
“And keep that phone handy.”
“I will.”
He gave her a thumbs-up and smiled when she gave it right back. “I’ll just go on and get that kitty now. Bet you’ll be glad to see the last of it.”
“Yes,” Lisey said, but what she really wanted to be rid of, at least for the time being, was Deputy Alston. So she could go out to the barn and check under the bed. The one that had spent the last twenty years or so sitting in a whitewashed chicken-pen. The one they had bought
(mein gott)
in Germany. In Germany where
8
everything that can go wrong does go wrong.
Lisey doesn’t remember where she heard this phrase and of course it doesn’t matter, but it occurs to her with increasing frequency during their nine months in Bremen: Everything that can go wrong does go wrong.
Everything that can, does.
The house on the Bergenstrasse Ring Road is drafty in the fall, cold in the winter, and leaky when the damp and hungover excuse for a spring finally comes. Both showers are balky. The downstairs toilet is a chuckling horror. The landlord makes promises, then stops taking Scott’s calls. Finally Scott hires a firm of German lawyers at a paralyzing expense—mostly, he tells Lisey, because he cannot stand to let the sonofabitching landlord get away with it, cannot stand to let him win. The sonofabitching landlord, who sometimes winks at Lisey in a knowing way when Scott isn’t looking (she has never dared to tell Scott, who has no sense of humor when it comes to the sonofabitching landlord), does not win. Under threat of legal action, he makes some repairs: the roof stops leaking and the downstairs toilet stops its horrible midnight laughter. He actually replaces the furnace. A blue-eyed miracle. Then he shows up one night, drunk, and screams at Scott in a mixture of German and English, calling Scott the American Communist boiling-potter, a phrase her husband treasures to the end of his days. Scott, far from sober himself (in Germany Scott and sober rarely even exchange postcards), at one point offers the sonofabitching landlord a cigarette and tells him Goinzee on! Goinzee on, mein Führer, bitte, bitte! That year Scott is drinking, Scott is joking, and Scott is siccing lawyers on sonofabitching landlords, but Scott isn’t writing. Not writing because he’s always drunk or always drunk because he’s not writing? Lisey doesn’t know. It’s sixenze of one, half a dozenze of the other. By May, when his teaching gig finally, mercifully ends, she no longer cares. By May she only wants to be someplace where conversation in the supermarket or the shops along the high street doesn’t sound to her like the manimals in that movie The Island of Dr. Moreau. She knows that’s not fair, but she also knows she hasn’t been able to make a single friend in Bremen, not even among the faculty wives who speak English, and her husband is gone too much at the University. She spends too much time in the drafty house, wrapped in a shawl but still usually cold, almost always lonely and miserable, watching television programs she doesn’t understand and listening to trucks rumble around the rotary up the hill. The big ones, the Peugeots, make the floors shake. The fact that Scott is also miserable, that his classes are going badly and his lectures are near-disasters, doesn’t help at all. Why in God’s name would it? Whoever said misery loves company was full of shite. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, however…that guy was onto something.
When Scott is at home, he’s in her eye a great deal more than she’s used to, because he’s not crawling off to the grim little room that’s been designated his study to write stories. He tries to write them at first, but by December his efforts have become sporadic and by February he’s given up entirely. The man who can write in a Motel 6 with eight lanes of traffic pounding by outside and a frat party going on upstairs has come utterly and completely unstrappinzee. But he doesn’t brood about it, not that she can see. Instead of writing he spends long, hilarious, and ultimately exhausting weekends with his wife. Often she drinks with him and gets drunk with him, because other than fuck him it’s all she can think of to do. There are blue hungover Mondays when Lisey is actually glad to see him going out the door, although when ten PM comes and he’s still not back, she’s always perched by the living room window that looks out on the Ring Road, waiting anxiously for the leased Audi he drives, wondering where he is and who he’s drinking with. How much he’s drinking. There are Saturdays when he persuades her to play strenuous games of hide and seek with him in the big drafty house; he says it will keep them warm, at least, and he’s right about that. Or they will chase each other, racing up and down stairs or pounding along the halls in their ridiculous lederhosen, laughing like a pair of dopey (not to mention horny) kids, yelling out their German buzzwords: Achtung! and Jawohl! and Ich habe Kopfschmerzen! and—most frequently—Mein Gott! More often than not these silly games end in sex. With booze or without it (but usually with), Scott always wants sex that winter and spring, and she believes that before they vacate the drafty house on the Bergenstrasse, they have done it in all the rooms, most of the bathrooms (including the one with the hideous laughing toil
et), and even some of the closets. All that sex is one of the reasons that she never (well, almost never) worries that he’s having an affair, in spite of the long hours he’s gone, in spite of the hard drinking, in spite of the fact that he’s not doing what he was made to do, which is to write stories.
But of course she’s not doing what she was made to do, either, and there are times when that knowledge catches up to her. She can’t say he lied to her, or even misdirected her; no, she can never say that. He only told her once, but that one time he was perfectly straight about it: there could be no kids. If she felt she had to have children—and he knew she came from a big family—then they couldn’t get married. It would break his heart, but if that was how she felt, that was the way it would have to be. He had told her that under the yum-yum tree, where they’d sat enclosed in the strange October snow. She only permits herself to remember that conversation during the lonely weekday afternoons in Bremen, when the sky always seems to be white and the hour none and the trucks rumble endlessly and the bed shakes beneath her. The bed that he bought and will later insist on having shipped back to America. Often she lies there with her arm over her eyes, thinking that this was a really terrible idea in spite of their laughing weekends and their passionate (sometimes febrile) lovemaking. They have done things in that lovemaking that she wouldn’t have credited even six months ago, and Lisey knows these variations have little to do with love; they’re about boredom, homesickness, booze, and the blues. His drinking, always heavy, has now begun to scare her. She sees the inevitable crash coming if he doesn’t pull back. And the emptiness of her womb has begun to depress her. They made a deal, yeah, sure, but under the yum-yum tree she didn’t fully understand that the years pass and time has weight. He may begin to write again when they get back to America, but what will she do? He never lied to me, she thinks as she lies on the Bremen bed with her arm over her eyes, but she sees a time—and not all that distant—when this fact will no longer satisfy, and the prospect frightens her. Sometimes she wishes she had never sat under that smucking willow with Scott Landon.