by Stephen King
Paul Landon, slim and tall and already handsome at thirteen, has a book open in front of him. The book is Introduction to Algebra, and Scott has no reason to believe Paul is doing anything other than solving for x until Paul turns his head to look at him. Scott is still three steps from the bottom of the stairs when Paul does that. It is only an instant before Paul lunges at his younger brother, to whom he has never so much as raised a hand in their lives together, but it is long enough to see that no, Paul wasn’t just sitting there. No, Paul wasn’t just reading. No, Paul wasn’t studying.
Paul was lying in wait.
It isn’t blankness he sees in his brother’s eyes when Paul comes surging out of his chair hard enough to knock it skittering back against the wall, but pure bad-gunky. Those eyes are blue no more. Something has burst in the brain behind them and filled them with blood. Scarlet seeds stand in the corners.
Another child might have frozen to the spot and been killed by the monster who an hour before had been an ordinary brother with nothing on his mind but homework or perhaps what he and Scott could get Daddy for Christmas if they pooled their money. Scott, however, is no more ordinary than Paul. Ordinary children could never have survived Sparky Landon, and it’s almost certainly the experience of living with his father’s madness that saves Scott now. He knows the bad-gunky when he sees it, and wastes no time on disbelief. He turns instantly and tries to flee back up the stairs. He makes only three steps before Paul grabs him by the legs.
Snarling like a dog whose yard has been invaded, Paul curls his arms around Scott’s shins and yanks the younger boy’s legs out from under him. Scott grabs the banister and holds on. He gives a single two-word yell—“Daddy, help!”—and then is quiet. Yelling wastes energy. He needs all of his to hold on.
He doesn’t have enough strength to do so, of course. Paul is three years older, fifty pounds heavier, and much stronger. In addition to these things, he has run mad. If Paul pulls him free of the banister then, Scott will be badly hurt or killed in spite of his quick reaction, but instead of getting Scott, what Paul gets are Scott’s corduroy pants and both sneakers, which he forgot to tie when he jumped down off his bed.
(“If I’d tied my sneakers,” he will tell his wife much later as they lie in bed on the second floor of The Antlers in New Hampshire, “we’re most likely not here tonight. Sometimes I think that’s all my life comes down to, Lisey—a pair of untied Keds, size seven.”)
The thing that was Paul roars, stumbles backward with a hug of pants in its arms, and trips over the chair in which a handsome young fellow sat down an hour previous to map Cartesian coordinates. One sneaker falls to the bumpy, hillocky linoleum. Scott, meanwhile, is struggling to get going again, to get up to the second-floor landing while there’s still time, but his sock feet spin out from under him on the smooth stair-riser and he goes back down to one knee. His tattered underwear has been pulled partway down, he can feel a cold draft blowing on the crack of his ass, and there’s time to think Please God, I don’t want to die this way, with my fanny out to the wind. Then the brother-thing is up, bellowing and casting aside the pants. They skid across the kitchen table, leaving the algebra book but knocking the sugar-bowl to the floor—knocking it galley-west, their father might have said. The thing that was Paul leaps for him and Scott is bracing for its hands and the feel of its nails biting into his skin when there’s a terrific wooden thonk! and a hoarse, furious shout:—Leave ’im alone, you smuckin bastard! You bad-gunky fuck!
He forgot all about Daddy. The draft on his ass was Daddy coming in with the wood. Then Paul’s hands do grab him, the fingernails do bite in, and he’s pulled backward, his grip on the banister broken as easily as if it were a baby’s. In a moment he will feel Paul’s teeth. He knows it, this is the real bad-gunky, the deep bad-gunky, not what happens to Daddy when Daddy sees people who aren’t there or makes a blood-bool on himself or one of them (a thing he does less and less to Scott as Scott grows older), but the real deal, what Daddy meant all the times he’d just laugh and shake his head when they asked him why the Landreaus left France even though it meant leaving all their money and land behind, and they were rich, the Landreaus were rich, and he’s going to bite now, he’s going to bite me right now, RAH-CHEER—
He never feels Paul’s teeth. He feels hot breath on the unprotected meat of his left side just above the hip, and then there’s another heavy wooden thonk! as Daddy brings the stovelength down on Paul’s head again—two-handed, with all his strength. The sound is followed by a number of loose sliding sounds as Paul’s body goes slithering down to the kitchen linoleum.
Scott turns over. He’s lying splayed out on the lower stairs, dressed in nothing but an old flannel shirt, his underpants, and white athletic socks with holes in the heels. One foot is almost touching the floor. He’s too stunned to cry. His mouth tastes like the inside of a piggybank. That last whack sounded awful, and for an instant his powerful imagination paints the kitchen with Paul’s blood. He tries to cry out, but his shocked, flattened lungs can produce only a single dismayed squawk. He blinks and sees that there’s no blood, only Paul lying facedown in the sugar from the now defunct bowl, which lies bust in four big and change. That one’ll never dance the tango again, Daddy sometimes says when something breaks, a glass or a plate, but he doesn’t say it now, just stands over his unconscious son in his yellow work coat. There’s snow on his shoulders and in his shaggy hair, which is starting to go gray. In one gloved hand he holds the stovelength. Behind him, scattered in the entry like pickup sticks, is the rest of his armload. The door is still open and the cold draft is still blowing in. And now Scott sees there is blood, just a little, trickling from Paul’s left ear and down the side of his face.
—Daddy, is he dead?
Daddy slings the stovelength into the woodbox and brushes his long hair back. There’s melting snow in the stubble on his cheeks—No he aint. That would be too easy. He tromps to the back door and slams it shut, cutting off the draft. His every movement expresses disgust, but Scott has seen him act so before—when he gets Official Letters about taxes or schooling or things like that—and is pretty sure that what he really is is scared.
Daddy comes back and stands over his floorbound boy. He rocks from one booted foot to the other awhile. Then he looks up at the other one.
—Help me get him down cellar, Scoot.
It isn’t wise to question Daddy when he tells you to do a thing, but Scott is frightened. Also, he is next door to naked. He comes down to the kitchen and starts pulling his pants on.—Why, Daddy? What are you going to do with him?
And for a wonder, Daddy doesn’t hit him. Doesn’t even yell at him.
—I’ll be smucked if I know. Truss him up down there for a start while I think about it. Hurry up. He won’t be out long.
—Is it really the bad-gunky? Like with the Landreaus? And your Uncle Theo?
—What do you think, Scoot? Get his head, less you want it to bump all the way down. He won’t be out long I tell you, and if he starts again, you might not be so lucky. Me either. Bad-gunky’s strong.
Scott does as his father says. It’s the nineteen-sixties, it’s America, men will soon be walking on the moon, but here they have a boy to deal with who has seemingly gone feral in the turn of a moment. The father simply accepts the fact. After his first shocked questions, the son does, as well. When they reach the bottom of the cellar stairs, Paul begins to stir again and make thick sounds deep in his throat. Sparky Landon puts his hands around his older son’s throat and begins to choke him. Scott screams in horror and tries to grab his father.
—Daddy, no!
Sparky Landon releases one hand from what it’s been doing long enough to administer an absent backhand blow to his younger son. Scott goes reeling back and strikes the table sitting in the middle of the dirt-floored room. Standing on it is an ancient hand-crank printing press that Paul has somehow coaxed back into working. He has printed some of Scott’s stories on it; they are the younger brother
’s first publications. The crank of this quarter-ton behemoth bites painfully into Scott’s back and he crumples up, grimacing, watching as his father resumes choking.
—Daddy, don’t kill ’im! PLEASE DON’T KILL ’IM!
—I ain’t, Landon says without looking around, I should, but I aint. Not yet, anyway. More fool me, but he’s my own boy, my fuckin firstborn, and I won’t unless I have to. Which I fear I will. Sweet Mother Machree! But not yet. Mother-fogged if I will. Only it won’t do to let him wake up. You aint never seen anything like this, but I have. I got lucky upstairs because I was behind him. Down here I could chase him two hours and never catch him. He’d run up the walls and halfway across the sweetmother ceiling. Then, when he wore me down…
Landon removes his hands from Paul’s throat and peers fixedly into the still white face. That little trickle of blood from Paul’s ear seems to have stopped.
—There. How you like that, you mother, you motherfuck? He’s out again. But he not for long. Fetch out that coil of rope from understair. That’ll do until we can get some chain out of the shed. Then I dunno. Then it depends.
—Depends on what, Daddy?
Scared. Has he ever been so scared? No. And his father is looking at him in a way that scares him even more. Because it is a knowing way.
—Why, I guess it depends on you, Scoot. You’ve made him better a lot of times…and why do you want to come over all cow’s eyes that way? You think I didn’t know? Jayzus, for a smart boy ain’t you dumb! He turns his head and spits on the dirt floor. You’ve made him better of a lot of things. Maybe you can make him better of this. I never heard of anyone getting better from the bad-gunky…not the real bad-gunky…but I never heard of anybody just like you, either, so maybe you can. Have on ’til your cheeks crack, my old man would’ve said. But for now just fetch out that coil of rope from understair. And step to it, you little gluefoot motherfuck, because he’s
11
“He’s stirring already,” Lisey said as she lay on the oyster-white carpet of her dead husband’s study. “He’s
12
“Stirring already,” Lisey says as she sits on the cold floor of the guest room, holding her husband’s hand—a hand that is warm but dreadfully lax and waxy in her own. “Scott said
13
The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound;
these are the sounds of dead voices on dead records
floating down the broken shaft of memory.
When I turn to you to ask if you remember,
When I turn to you in our bed
14
In bed with him is where she hears these things; in bed with him at The Antlers, after a day when something happened she absolutely cannot explain. He tells her as the clouds thin and the moon nears like an announcement and the furniture swims to the very edge of visibility. She holds him in the dark and listens, not wanting to believe (helpless not to), as the young man who will shortly become her husband says, “Daddy tole me to fetch out that coil of rope from understair. ‘And you want to step to it, you little gluefoot motherfuck,’ he says, ‘because he’s not gonna stay out for long. And when he comes to
15
—When he comes to he’s gonna be one ugly bug.
Ugly bug. Like Scooter you old Scoot and the bad-gunky, ugly bug is an interior idiom of his family that will haunt his dreams (and his speech) for the rest of his productive but too-short life.
Scott gets the coil of rope from beneath the stairs and brings it to Daddy. Daddy trusses Paul up with quick, dancing economy, his shadow looming and turning on the cellar’s stone walls in the light of three hanging seventy-five-watt bulbs, which are controlled by a turn-switch at the top of the stairs. He ties Paul’s arms so stringently behind him that the balls of his shoulders stand out even through his shirt. Scott is moved to speak again, afraid of Daddy though he is.
—Daddy, that’s too tight!
Daddy shoots a glance Scott’s way. It’s just a quick one, but Scott sees the fear there. It scares him. More than that, it awes him. Before today he would have said his Daddy wasn’t ascairt of nothing but the School Board and their damned Registered Mails.
—You don’t know, so shut up! I aint having him get a-loose! He might not kill us before it was over if that happen, but I’d most certainly have to kill him. I know what I’m doin!
You don’t, Scott thinks, watching Daddy tie Paul’s legs together first at the knees, then at the ankles. Already Paul has begun to stir again, and to mutter deep in his throat. You’re only guessing. But he understands the truth of Daddy’s love for Paul. It may be ugly love, but it’s true and strong. If it wasn’t, Daddy wouldn’t guess at all. He would have just kept hammering Paul with that stovelength until he was dead. For just a moment part of Scott’s mind (a cold part) wonders if Daddy would run the same risk for him, for Scooter old Scoot who didn’t even dare jump off a three-foot bench until his brother stood cut and bleeding before him, and then he swats the thought into darkness. It isn’t him who got the bad-gunky.
At least, not yet.
Daddy finishes by tying Paul around the middle to one of the painted steel posts that hold up the cellar’s ceiling.—There, he says, stepping away, panting like a man who’s just roped a steer in a rodeo ring. That’ll hold him awhile. You go on out to the shed, Scott. Get the light chain that’s laying just inside the door and the big heavy tractor-chain that’s in the bay on the left, with the truck parts. Do you know where I mean?
Paul has been sagging over the rope around his torso. Now he sits up so suddenly he bangs his head on the post with sickening force. It makes Scott grimace. Paul looks at him with eyes that were blue only an hour ago. He grins, and the corners of his mouth stretch up far higher than they should be able to…almost to the lobes of his ears, it seems.
—Scott, his father says.
For once in his life, Scott pays no attention. He’s mesmerized by the Halloween mask that used to be his brother’s face. Paul’s tongue comes dancing from between his parted teeth and does a jitterbug in the dank cellar air. At the same time his crotch darkens as he pisses his pa—
There’s a clout upside his head that sends Scott reeling backward and he hits the printing-press table again.
—Don’t look at him, nummie, look at me! That ugly bug’ll hypnotize you like a snake does a bird! You better wake the smuck up, Scooter—that aint your brother anymore.
Scott gapes at his father. Behind them, as if to underline Daddy’s point, the thing tied to the post lets out a roar much too loud to have come from a human chest. But that’s all right, because it isn’t a human sound. Not even close.
—Go get those chains, Scotty. Both of em. And be quick. That tie-job aint gonna hold him. I’m gonna go upstairs and get my .30-06. If he gets a-loose before you get back with those chains—
—Daddy, please don’t shoot him! Don’t shoot Paul!
—Bring the chains. Then we’ll see what we can figger out.
—That tractor-chain’s too long! Too heavy!
—Use the wheelbarra, nummie. The big barra. Go on, now, step to it.
Scott looks over his shoulder once and sees his father backing to the foot of the stairs. He does it slowly, like a lion-tamer leaving the cage after the act is over. Below him, spotlighted in the glare of one hanging bulb, is Paul. He’s whamming the back of his head so rapidly against the post that Scott thinks of a jackhammer. At the same time he’s jerking from side to side. Scott can’t believe Paul isn’t bleeding or knocking himself unconscious, but he’s not. And he sees his father is right. The ropes won’t hold him. Not if he keeps up that constant assault.
He won’t be able to, he thinks as his father goes one way (to get his gun out of the front closet) and Scott goes another (to yank on his boots). He’ll kill himself if he goes on like that. But then he thinks of the roar he heard bursting out of his brother’s chest—that impossible catmurder roar—and doesn’t really believe it.
An
d as he runs coatless into the cold, he thinks he might even know what’s happened to Paul. There’s a place where he can go when Daddy has hurt him, and he has taken Paul there when Daddy has hurt Paul. Yes, plenty of times. There are good things in that place, beautiful trees and healing water, but there are also bad things. Scott tries not to go there at night, and when he does he’s quiet and comes back quick, because the deep intuition of his child’s heart tells him night is when the bad things mostly come out. Night is when they hunt.
If he can go there, is it so hard to believe that something—a bad-gunky something—could get inside Paul and then come over here? Something that saw him and marked him, or maybe just a dumb germ that crawled up his nose and stuck in his brain?
And if so, whose fault is that? Who took Paul in the first place?
In the shed, Scott throws the light chain in the wheelbarrow. That’s easy, the work of only seconds. Getting the tractor-chain in there is a lot harder. The tractor-chain is puffickly huh-yooge, talking all the while in its clanky language, which is all steel vowels. Twice heavy loops slip through his trembling arms, the second time pinching his skin and dragging it open, bringing blood in bright rosettes. The third time he almost has it in the wheelbarrow when a twenty-pound armload of links lands crooked, on the side of the barrowbed instead of on the square, and the entire load of chainlink topples over on Scott’s foot, burying it in steel and making him scream a perfect soprano choir–cry of pain.
—Scooter, you comin before the turn of two thousand? Daddy bawls from the house. If you’re comin, you better damn well motherfuckin come!
Scott looks that way, eyes wide and terrified, then sets the wheelbarrow up again and bends over the big greasy heap of chain. His foot will still be bruise-gaudy a month later and he’ll feel pain there all the way to the end of his life (that’s one problem traveling to that other place is never able to fix), but at the time he feels nothing after the initial flare. He again begins the job of loading the links into the wheelbarrow, feeling the hot sweat go rolling down his sides and back, smelling the wild stink of it, knowing that if he hears a gunshot it will mean Paul’s brains are out on the cellar floor and it’s his fault. Time becomes a physical thing with weight, like dirt. Like chain. He keeps expecting Daddy to yell at him again from the house and when he still hasn’t by the time Scott begins trundling the wheelbarrow back toward the yellow gleam of the kitchen lights, Scott begins to have a different fear: that Paul has gotten a-loose after all. It isn’t Paul’s brains lying down there on the sour-smelling dirt, it’s Daddy’s guts, pulled from his living stomach by the thing that was Scott’s brother just this afternoon. Paul’s up the stairs and hiding in the house and as soon as Scott goes inside the bool hunt will start. Only this time he will be the prize.