by Stephen King
It doesn’t matter where it sends him. What matters is that long suspended day. There are two boys who spend the morning ranging in and around a slumped distempered farmhouse far out in the country as the sun climbs slowly in the sky toward depthless shadowless noon. This is a simple tale of shouts and laughter and dooryard dust and socks that fall down until they puddle around dirty ankles; this is a story of boys who are too busy to pee inside and so water the briars on the south side of the house instead. It’s about a little kid not that long out of his diapers collecting slips of paper from the foot of a ladder leading up to the barn loft, from under the porch stoop steps, from behind the junked-out Maytag washer in the backyard, and beneath a stone near the old dry well. (—Don’t fall in, you little booger! says the spooky Daddyvoice, now coming from the high weeds at the edge of the bean field, which has been left fallow this year.) And finally Scott is directed this way:
15 I’M UNDERNEATH YOUR EVERY DREEM
Underneath my every dream, he thinks. Underneath my every dream…where is that?
—Need help, you little booger? the spooky voice intones.—Because I’m getting hungry for my lunch.
Scott is, too. It’s afternoon, now, he’s been at this for hours, but he asks for another minute. The spooky Daddyvoice informs him he can have thirty seconds.
Scott thinks furiously. Underneath my every dream…underneath my every…
He’s blessedly de-quipped with ideas having to do with the subconscious mind or the id, but has already begun to think in metaphor, and the answer comes to him in a divine, happy flash. He races up the stairs as fast as his small legs will carry him, hair flying back from his tanned and grimy forehead. He goes to his bed in the room he shares with Paul, looks beneath his pillow, and sure enough, there is his bottle of RC Cola—a tall one!—along with a final slip of paper. The message on it is the same as always:
16 BOOL! THE END!
He lifts the bottle as he will much later hold up a certain silver spade (a hero is what he feels like), then turns around. Paul comes sauntering in the door, holding his own bottle of RC and carrying the church key from the Things Drawer in the kitchen.
—Not bad, Scott-O. Took you awhile, but you got there.
Paul opens his bottle, then Scott’s. They clink the longnecks together. Paul says this is “having a host,” and when you do it you have to make a wish.
—What do you wish for, Scott?
—I wish the Bookmobile comes this summer. What do you wish for, Paul?
His brother looks at him calmly. In a little while he will go downstairs and make them peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, taking the step-stool from the back porch, where their fatally noisy pet once slept and played, in order to get a fresh jar of Shedd’s from the top shelf in the pantry. And he says
11
But here Scott falls silent. He looks at the bottle of wine, but the bottle of wine is empty. He and Lisey have taken off their parkas and laid them aside. It has grown more than warm under the yum-yum tree; it’s hot, really just short of stifling, and Lisey thinks: We’ll have to leave soon. If we don’t, the snow lying on the fronds will melt enough to come crashing down on us.
12
Sitting in her kitchen with the menu from The Antlers in her hands, Lisey thought, I’ll have to leave these memories soon, too. If I don’t, something a lot heavier than snow will come crashing down on me.
But wasn’t that what Scott had wanted? What he’d planned? And wasn’t this bool hunt her chance to strap it on?
Oh, but I’m scared. Because now I’m so close.
Close to what? Close to what?
“Hush,” she whispered, and shivered as if before a cold wind. One all the way down from Yellowknife, perhaps. But then, because she was two-minded, two-hearted: “Just a little more.”
It’s dangerous. Dangerous, little Lisey.
She knew it was, could already see bits of the truth shining through holes in her purple curtain. Shining like eyes. Could hear voices whispering that there were reasons why you didn’t look into mirrors unless you really had to (especially not after dark and never at twilight), reasons to avoid fresh fruit after sunset and to fast completely between midnight and six AM.
Reasons not to unbury the dead.
But she didn’t want to leave the yum-yum tree. Not just yet.
Didn’t want to leave him.
He had wished for the Bookmobile, even at the age of three a very Scott wish. And Paul? What was Paul’s
13
“What, Scott?” she asks him. “What was Paul’s wish?”
“He said, ‘I wish Daddy dies at work. That he gets lectercuted and dies.’”
She looks at him, mute with horror and pity.
Abruptly Scott begins stuffing things back into the pack. “Let’s get out of here before we roast,” he says. “I thought I could tell you a lot more, Lisey, but I can’t. And don’t say I’m not like the old man, because that’s not the point, okay? The point is that everyone in my family got some of it.”
“Paul, too?”
“I don’t know if I can talk about Paul anymore now.”
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s go back. We’ll take a nap, then build a snowman, or something.”
The look of intense gratitude he shoots her makes her feel ashamed, because really, she was ready for him to stop—she’s taken in all she can process, at least for the time being. In a word, she’s freaked. But she can’t leave it completely, because she’s got a good idea of how the rest of this story must go. She almost thinks she could finish it for him. But first she has a question.
“Scott, when your brother went after the RC Colas that morning…the prizes for the good bool…”
He’s nodding, smiling. “The great bool.”
“Uh-huh. When he went down to that little store…Mulie’s…didn’t anybody think it was weird to see a six-year-old kid come in all covered with cuts? Even if the cuts were covered with Band-Aids?”
He stops doing up the buckles on the pack and looks at her very seriously. He’s still smiling, but the flush in his cheeks has faded almost entirely; his skin looks pale, almost waxy. “The Landons are fast healers,” he says. “Didn’t I ever tell you that?”
“Yes,” she agrees. “You did.” And then, freaked or not, she pushes ahead a little farther. “Seven more years,” she says.
“Seven, yes.” He looks at her, the pack between his bluejeaned knees. His eyes ask how much she wants to know. How much she dares to know.
“And Paul was thirteen when he died?”
“Thirteen. Yes.” His voice is calm enough, but now all the red is gone from his cheeks, although she can see sweat trickling down the skin there, and his hair is limp with it. “Almost fourteen.”
“And your father, did he kill him with his knife?”
“No,” Scott says in that same calm voice, “with his rifle. His .30-06. In the cellar. But Lisey, it’s not what you think.”
Not in a rage, that’s what she believes he’s trying to tell her. Not in a rage but in cold blood. That is what she thinks under the yum-yum tree, when she still sees Part Three of her fiancé’s story as “The Murder of the Saintly Older Brother.”
14
Hush, Lisey, hush, little Lisey, she told herself in the kitchen—badly frightened now, and not only because she had been so wrong in what she’d believed about the death of Paul Landon. She was frightened because she was realizing—too late, too late—that what’s done can’t be undone, and what’s remembered must somehow be lived with ever after.
Even if the memories are insane.
“I don’t have to remember,” she said, bending the menu swiftly back and forth in her hands. “I don’t have to, I don’t have to, I don’t have to unbury the dead, crazy shite like that doesn’t happen, it
15
“It isn’t what you think.”
She will think what she thinks, however; she may love Scott Landon, but she isn’t bound to the wheel of his terribl
e past, and she will think what she thinks. She will know what she knows.
“And you were ten when it happened? When your father—?”
“Yes.”
Just ten years old when his father killed his beloved older brother. When his father murdered his beloved older brother. And Part Four of this story has its own dark inevitability, doesn’t it? There’s no doubt in her mind. She knows what she knows. The fact that he was only ten doesn’t change it. He was, after all, a prodigy in other ways.
“And did you kill him, Scott? Did you kill your father? You did, didn’t you?”
His head is lowered. His hair hangs, obscuring his face. Then from below that dark curtain comes a single hard dry barking sob. It is followed by silence, but she can see his chest heaving, trying to unlock. Then:
“I put a pickaxe in his head while he was a-sleepun and then dump him down the old dry well. It was in March, during the bad sleet-storm. I drug him outside by the feet. I tried to take him where Paul was burrit but I coont. I trite, I trite and I trite, but Lisey he woon’t go. He was like the firs’ shovel. So I dump him down the well. So far as I know he’s still there, although when they auctioned the farm I was…I…Lisey…I…I…I was afraid…”
He reaches out for her blindly and if she hadn’t been there he would have gone right on his face but she is there and then they are
They are
Somehow they are
16
“No!” Lisey snarled. She threw the menu, now so strenuously bent it was almost a tube, back into the cedar box and slammed the lid. But it was too late. She had gone too far. It was too late because
17
Somehow they’re outside in the pouring snow.
She took him in her arms under the yum-yum tree, and then
(boom! bool!)
they are outside in the snow.
18
Lisey sat in her kitchen with the cedar box on the table before her, eyes closed. The sunlight pouring in the east window came through her lids and made a dark red beet soup that moved with the rhythm of her heart—a rhythm that was just now much too fast.
She thought: All right, that one got through. But I guess I can live with just one. Just one won’t kill me.
I trite and I trite.
She opened her eyes and looked at the cedar box sitting there on the table. The box for which she had searched so diligently. And thought of something Scott’s father had told him. The Landons—and the Landreaus before them—split into two types: gomers and bad-gunky.
The bad-gunky was—among other things—a species of homicidal mania.
And gomers? Scott had given her the lowdown on those that night. Gomers were your garden-variety catatonics, like her very own sister, up there in Greenlawn.
“If this is all about saving Amanda, Scott,” Lisey whispered, “you can forget it. She’s my sis and I love her, but not quite that much. I’d go back into that…that hell…for you, Scott, but not for her or anyone else.”
In the living room the telephone began to ring. Lisey jumped in her seat as if stabbed, and screamed.
IX. Lisey and The Black Prince
of The Incunks (The Duty of Love)
1
If Lisey didn’t sound like herself, Darla didn’t notice. She was too guilty. Also too happy and relieved. Canty was coming back from Boston to “help out with Mandy.” As if she could. As if anyone can, including Hugh Alberness and the entire Greenlawn staff, Lisey thought, listening to Darla prattle on.
You can help, Scott murmured—Scott, who would always have his say. It seemed that not even death would stop him. You can, babyluv.
“—entirely her own idea,” Darla was assuring.
“Uh-huh,” Lisey said. She could have pointed out that Canty would still be enjoying her time away with her husband, entirely unaware that Amanda had a problem if Darla hadn’t felt the need to call her (hadn’t stuck her oar in, as the saying was), but the last thing Lisey wanted right now was an argument. What she wanted was to put the damned cedar box back under the mein gott bed and see if she could forget she had ever found it in the first place. While talking to Darla, another of Scott’s old maxims had occurred to her: the harder you had to work to open a package, the less you ended up caring about what was inside. She was sure you could adapt that to missing items—cedar boxes, for instance.
“Her flight gets into the Portland Jetport just a little past noon,” Darla was saying, all in a rush. “She said she’d rent a car and I said no, that’s silly, I said I’ll come down and pick you up.” Here she paused, gathering herself for the final leap. “You could meet us there, Lisey. If you wanted. We could have lunch at the Snow Squall—just us girls, like in the good old days. Then we could go up to see Amanda.”
Now which good old days would those be? Lisey thought. The ones when you used to pull my hair, or the ones when Canty used to chase me around and call me Miss Lisa No Tits? What she said was, “You go on down and I’ll join you if I can, Darl. I’ve got some things here I have to—”
“More cooking?” Now that she had confessed to guilting Cantata into coming north, Darla sounded positively roguish.
“No, this has to do with donating Scott’s old papers.” And in a way, it was the truth. Because no matter how the business with Dooley/McCool turned out, she wanted Scott’s study emptied. No more dawdling. Let the papers go to Pitt, that was undoubtedly where they belonged, but with the stipulation that her professor pal should have nothing to do with them. Woodsmucky could go hang.
“Oh,” Darla said, sounding suitably impressed. “Well, in that case…”
“I’ll join you if I can,” Lisey repeated. “If not, I’ll see you both this afternoon, at Greenlawn.”
That was jake with Darla. She passed on Canty’s flight information, which Lisey obediently wrote down. Hell, she supposed she might even go down to Portland. At the very least it would get her out of the house—away from the phone, the cedar box, and most of the memories that now seemed poised above her head like the contents of some terrible sagging piñata.
And then, before she could stop it, one more fell out. She thought: You didn’t just go out from under the willow into the snow, Lisey. There was a little more to it than that. He took you—
“NO!” she shouted, and slapped the table. The sound of herself shouting was frightening but it did the trick, lopped off the dangerous train of thought cleanly and completely. It might grow back, though—that was the trouble.
Lisey looked at the cedar box sitting on the table. It was the look a woman might give a well-loved dog that has bitten her for no particular reason. Back under the bed with you, she thought. Back under the mein gott bed, and then what?
“Bool-the-end, that’s what,” she said. Then she left the house, crossing the dooryard to the barn, holding the cedar box out before her as if it contained something either breakable or highly explosive.
2
Her office door stood open. From its foot a bright rectangle of electric light lay across the barn floor. The last time Lisey had been in there, she’d left laughing. What she didn’t remember was if she’d left the door open or shut. She thought the light had been off, thought she’d never turned it on in the first place. On the other hand, at one point she’d been absolutely positive that Good Ma’s cedar box had been in the attic, hadn’t she? Was it possible one of the deputies had gone in there for a peek and left the light on? Lisey supposed it was. She supposed anything was possible.
Clutching the cedar box to her middle almost protectively, she went to the open office door and looked in. It was empty…appeared to be empty…but…
Without the least self-consciousness, she applied one eye to the crack between the jamb and the door. “Zack McCool” wasn’t standing back there. No one was. But when she looked into the office again, she could see that the answering machine’s message window was once more lit up with a bright red 1. She went in, tucked the box under one arm, and pushed the PLAY button. There was a moment
of silence, and then Jim Dooley’s calm voice spoke.
“Missus, I thought we agreed on eight o’clock last night,” he said. “Now I see cops around the place. Seems like you don’t understand how serious this bi’ness is, although I sh’d think a dead cat in a mailbox would be pretty hard to misunderstand.” A pause. She looked down at the answering machine, fascinated. I can hear him breathing, she thought. “I’ll be seeing you, Missus,” he said.
“Smuck you,” she whispered.
“Now Missus, that ain’t—isn’t—nice,” said Jim Dooley, and for a moment she thought the answering machine had, well, answered her. Then she realized this second version of Dooley’s voice was in living color, so to speak, and had come from behind her. Once again feeling like an inhabitant in one of her own dreams, Lisey Landon turned around to face him.
3
She was dismayed by his ordinariness. Even standing in the doorway of her little never-was barn office with a gun in one hand (he had what looked like a lunchsack in the other), she wasn’t sure she could have picked him out of a police lineup, assuming the other men in it were also slim, dressed in summerweight khaki workclothes, and wearing Portland Sea Dogs baseball caps. His face was narrow and unlined, the eyes bright blue—the face of a million Yankees, in other words, not to mention six or seven million hillbilly men from the mid-and deep South. He might have been six feet tall; he might have been a little under. The lick of hair which escaped the ball cap’s round rim was an unremarkable sandy brown.