by Stephen King
A cement path led up to the porch steps, and on both sides the grass was long and violently green. To the right, close by the porch itself, the dewy grass was beaten down. When the dew evaporated, the grass would spring back up, but now it held the shape of footprints. He was a city boy, no kind of woodsman, but you would have to be blind, he thought, not to see by the tracks that there had been two of them: a big one and a small one. Sometime during the night they had come up to the screen and looked in at him. It gave him a chill. It was the stealth he didn’t like.
If they don’t show themselves pretty quick, he thought, I’m going to try and flush them out. Just the thought that he could do that brought most of his self-confidence back. He slipped into his pack and got going.
By noon he had reached US 1 in Wells. He flipped a coin and it came up tails. He turned south on 1, leaving the coin to gleam indifferently up from the dust. Joe found it twenty minutes later and stared at it as if it were a hypnotist’s crystal. He put it in his mouth and Nadine made him spit it out.
Two miles down the road Larry saw it for the first time, the huge blue animal, lazy and slow this day. It was completely different from the Pacific or the Atlantic that lay off Long Island. This water was a darker blue, nearly cobalt, and it came up to the land in one rushing swell after another and bit at the rocks. Spume as thick as eggwhite jumped into the air and then splattered back. The waves made a constant growling boom against the shore.
Larry parked his bike and walked toward the ocean, feeling a deep excitement that he couldn’t explain. He was here, he had made it to the place where the sea took over. This was the end of east. This was land’s end.
He crossed a marshy field, his shoes squishing through water standing around hummocks and clumps of reeds. There was a rich and fecund tidal smell. As he drew closer to the headland, the thin skin of earth was peeled away and the naked bone of granite poked through—granite, Maine’s final truth. Gulls rose, clean white against the blue sky, crying and wailing. He had never seen so many birds in one place before. It occurred to him that, despite their white beauty, gulls were carrion eaters. The thought that followed was nearly unspeakable, but it had formed fully in his mind before he could push it away: The pickings must be real good just lately.
He began to walk again, and a moment later he stood upon the naked headland. The seawind struck him full force, lifting his heavy growth of hair back from his forehead. He lifted his face into it, into the harsh-clean salt-smell of the blue animal. The combers, glassy blue-green, moved slowly in, their slopes becoming more pronounced as the bottom shallowed up beneath them, their peaks gaining first a curl of foam, then a curdly topping. Then they crashed suicidally against the rocks as they had since the beginning of time, destroying themselves, destroying an infinitesimal bit of the land at the same time. There was a ramming, coughing boom as water was forced deep into some half-submerged channel of rock that had been carved out over the millennia.
He sat down with his feet dangling over the edge, feeling a little overcome. He sat there for half an hour or better. The seabreeze honed his appetite and he rummaged in his pack for lunch. He ate heartily. Thrown spray had turned the legs of his bluejeans black. He felt cleaned out, fresh.
He walked back across the marsh, still so full of his own thoughts that he first supposed the rising scream to be the gulls again. He had even started to look up at the sky before he realized with a nasty jolt of fear that it was a human scream. A warcry.
A young boy was running across the road toward him, muscular legs pumping. In one hand he held a long butcher knife. He was naked except for underpants and his legs were crisscrossed with bramble welts. Behind him, just coming out of the brush and nettles on the far side of the highway was a woman. She looked pale, and there were circles of weariness under her eyes.
"Joe!" she called, and then began to run as if it hurt her to do so.
Joe came on, never heeding, his bare feet splashing up thin sheets of marsh water. His entire face was drawn back in a tight and murderous grin. The butcher knife was high over his head, catching the sun.
He’s coming to kill me, Larry thought, entirely poleaxed by the idea. This boy . . . what did I ever do to him?
"Joe!” the woman screamed, this time in a high, weary, despairing voice. Joe ran on, closing the distance.
Larry had time to realize he had left his rifle with his bike, and then the screaming boy was upon him.
As the boy brought the butcher knife down in a long, sweeping arc, Larry’s paralysis broke. He stepped aside and, not even thinking, brought his right foot up and sent the wet yellow workboot it was wearing into the boy’s midriff. And what he felt was pity: there was nothing to the kid, he went over like a candlepin. He looked fierce but he was no heavyweight.
“Joe!” Nadine called. She tripped over a hummock and fell to her knees, splashing her white blouse with brown mud. “Don’t hurt him! Please, don’t hurt him!”
Joe had fallen flat on his back. Larry took a step forward and tromped on his right wrist, pinning the hand holding the knife to the muddy ground.
“Let go of it, kid.”
The boy hissed and then made a grunting, gobbling sound like a turkey. His upper lip drew back from his teeth. His Chinese eyes glared into Larry’s. Keeping his foot on the boy’s wrist was like standing on a wounded but still vicious snake. He could feel the boy trying to yank his hand free, and never mind if it was at the expense of skin, flesh, or even a broken bone. He jerked into a half-sitting position and tried to bite Larry’s leg through the heavy wet denim of his jeans. Larry stepped down even harder on the thin wrist and Joe uttered a cry—not of pain but defiance.
“Let it go, kid.”
Joe continued to struggle.
The stalemate would have continued until Joe got the knife free or until Larry broke his wrist if Nadine had not finally arrived, muddy, breathless, and staggering with weariness.
Without looking at Larry she dropped to her knees. “Let it go!” she said quietly but with great firmness. Her face was sweaty but calm. She held it only inches above Joe’s contorted, twisting features. He snapped at her like a dog and continued to struggle. Grimly, Larry strove to keep his balance. If the boy got free now, he would probably strike at the woman first.
“Let. . . it. . . go!” Nadine said.
The boy growled. Spit leaked between his clenched teeth.
“We’ll leave you, Joe.”
Larry felt a further tensing of the arm under his foot, then a loosening. The fierce anger was leaking out of the boy’s face.
“We’ll leave you behind,” she said. ‘77/ leave you and go with him. Unless you’re good.”
A further relaxation. But the boy was looking at her grievingly, accusingly, reproachfully. Then he shifted his gaze slightly to look up at Larry and he could read the hot jealousy in those blue-gray eyes. Even with the sweat running off him in buckets, that stare made Larry feel cold.
She continued to speak calmly. No one would hurt him. No one would leave him. If he let go of the knife. Everyone would be friends.
Gradually Larry became aware that the hand under his shoe had relaxed and let go of the knife. The boy lay dormant, staring up at the sky. He had opted out. Larry took his foot off Joe’s wrist, bent quickly, and picked up the knife. He turned and scaled it up and out toward the headland. The blade whirled and whirled, throwing off spears of sunlight. Joe’s strange eyes followed its course and he gave one long, hooting wail of pain. The knife bounced on the rocks with a thin clatter and skittered over the edge.
Larry turned back and regarded them. The woman was looking at Joe’s right forearm where the waffled shape of Larry’s boot was deeply embedded and turning an angry, exclamatory red. Her dark eyes looked up from that to Larry’s face. They were full of sorrow.
Larry felt the old defensive and self-serving words rise—I had to do it, it wasn’t my fault, listen lady, he wanted to kill me—because he thought he could read the judgment in thos
e sorrowing eyes: You ain’t no nice guy.
But in the end he said nothing. The situation was what the situation was, and his actions had been forced by the kid’s. Looking at the boy, who had now curled himself up desolately over his own knees and put a thumb in his mouth, he doubted if the boy himself had initiated the situation. And it could have ended in a worse way, with one of them cut or even killed.
So he said nothing, and he met the woman’s soft gaze and thought: I think I’ve changed. Somehow. I don’t know how much.
She said: “I’m Nadine Cross. This is Joe. I’m happy to meet you.”
“Larry Underwood.”
They shook hands, both smiling faintly at the absurdity.
“Let’s walk back to the road,” Nadine said.
They started off side by side, and after a few steps Larry looked back over his shoulder at Joe, who was still sitting over his knees and sucking his thumb, apparently unaware they were gone.
“He’ll come.”
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure.”
As they came to the highway’s gravel shoulder she stumbled and Larry took her arm. She looked at him gratefully.
“Can we sit down?” she asked.
“Sure.”
So they sat down on the pavement, facing each other. After a little bit Joe got up and plodded toward them, looking down at his bare feet. He sat a little way apart from them. Larry looked at him warily, then back at Nadine Cross.
“You were the two following me.”
“You knew? Yes. I thought you did.”
“How long?”
“Two days now,” Nadine said. “We were staying in the big house at Epsom.” Seeing his puzzled expression she added: “By the creek. You fell asleep by the rock wall.”
He nodded. “And last night the two of you came to peek at me while I was sleeping on that porch. Maybe to see if I had horns or a long red tail.”
“That was Joe,” she said quietly. “I came after him when I found he was gone. How did you know?”
“You left tracks in the dew.”
“Oh.” She looked at him closely, examining him, and although he wanted to, Larry didn’t drop his eyes. “I don’t want you to be angry with us. I suppose that sounds ridiculous after Joe just tried to kill you, but Joe isn’t responsible.”
“Is that his real name?”
“No, just what I call him.”
“He’s like a savage in a National Geographic TV show.”
“Yes, just like that. I found him on the lawn of a house—his house, maybe, the name was Rockway—sick from a bite. A rat bite, maybe. He doesn’t talk. He growls and grunts. Until this morning I’ve been able to control him. But I . . . I’m tired, you see . . . and . . She shrugged. Marsh-mud was drying on her blouse in what could have been a series of Chinese ideograms. “I dressed him at first. He took everything off but his underpants. Eventually I got tired of trying. I was a schoolteacher, not a missionary. The minges and mosquitoes don’t seem to bother him.” She paused. “I want us to come with you. I guess there is no way to be coy about it, under the circumstances.”
Larry wondered what she would think if he told her about the last woman who had wanted to come with him. Not that he ever would; that episode was deeply buried, even if the woman in question was not. He was no more anxious to bring up Rita than a murderer would be to drag his victim’s name into parlor conversation.
“I don’t know where I’m going,” he said. “I came up from New York City, the long way around, I guess. The plan was to find a nice house on the coast and just lie up there until October or so. But the longer I go, the more I want other people. The longer I go, the more all of this seems to hit me.”
He was expressing himself badly and didn’t seem to be able to do better without bringing up Rita or his bad dreams about the black man.
“I’ve been scared a lot of the time,” he said carefully, “because I’m on my own. Pretty paranoid. It’s like I expected Indians to just swoop down and scalp me.”
“In other words, you’ve stopped looking for houses and started looking for people.”
“Yes, maybe.”
“You’ve found us. That’s a start.”
“I do believe you found me. And that boy worries me, Nadine. I have to be up front about that. His knife’s gone, but the world is full of knives just lying around waiting to be picked up.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want to sound brutal . . He trailed off, hoping she would say it for him, but she said nothing at all, only looked at him with those dark eyes.
“Would you consider leaving him?” There it was, spit out like a lump of rock, and he still didn’t sound like much of a nice guy . . . but was it right, was it fair to either of them, to make a bad situation worse by burdening themselves with a ten-year-old psychopath?
“I couldn’t do that,” Nadine said calmly. “I understand the danger, and I understand that the danger would be primarily to you. He’s jealous. He’s afraid that you might become more important to me than he is. He might very well try to ... try to get at you again unless you can make friends with him or at least convince him you don’t mean to . . She trailed off, leaving that part vague. “But if I left him, that would be the same as murder. And I won’t be a party to that.”
“You will be if he cuts my throat in the middle of the night.”
She bowed her head.
Speaking so quietly that only she could hear (he didn’t know if Joe, who was watching them, understood what they were talking about or not), Larry said, “He probably would have done it last night if you hadn’t come after him. Isn’t that the truth?”
Softly she replied: “Those are things that might be.”
Larry laughed. “The Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come?”
She looked up. “I want to come with you, Larry, but I can’t leave Joe. You will have to decide.”
“You don’t make it easy.”
“It’s no easy life anymore.”
He thought about it. Joe sat on the soft shoulder of the road, watching them with his seawater eyes. Behind them, the real sea moved restlessly against the rocks, booming in its secret channels where it had infiltrated the land.
“All right,” he said. “I think you’re being dangerously softhearted, but. . . all right.”
“Thank you,” Nadine said. “I will be responsible for his actions.” “That will be a great comfort if he kills me.”
“That would be on my heart for the rest of my life,” Nadine said, and a sudden certainty that all her words about the sanctity of life would someday not too distant rise up to mock her swept her like a cold wind, and she shuddered. No, she told herself. I’ll not kill. Not that. Never that.
They camped that night on the soft white sand of the Wells public beach. Larry built a large fire above the strand of kelp that marked the last high tide and Joe sat on the other side, away from him and Nadine, feeding small sticks into the blaze. Occasionally he would hold a bigger stick into the flames until it caught like a torch and then tear away down the sand, holding it aloft like a single flaming birthday candle. They were able to see him until he was beyond the thirty-foot glow of the fire and then only his moving torch, drawn back in the wind manufactured by his wild sprinting. The seabreeze had come up a little, and it was cooler than it had been for days. The breeze danced the flames up toward the black starshot sky. Embers cycloned up even higher and flickered out. He thought of fall, still distant but not so far as it had been on that day in June when he had discovered his mother lying on the floor, delirious. He shivered a little. North, far down the beach, Joe’s torch bobbed up and down. It made him feel lonely and all the colder—that single light flickering in the large and silent darkness. The surf rolled and boomed.
“Do you play?”
He jumped a little at her voice and looked at the guitar case lying beside them on the sand. It had been leaning against a Steinway piano in the music room of the big house they had broken in
to to get their supper. He had loaded his pack with enough cans to replace what they had eaten this day, and had taken the guitar on impulse, not even looking inside the case to see what it was—coming from a house like that, it was probably a good ’un. He hadn’t played since that crazy Malibu party, and that had been six weeks ago. In another life.
“Yeah, I do,” he said, and discovered that he wanted to play, not for her but because sometimes it felt good to play, it eased your mind. And when you had a bonfire on the beach, someone was supposed to play the guitar. That was practically graven in stone.
“Let’s see what we got here,” he said, and unsnapped the catches.
He had expected something good, but what lay inside the case was still a happy surprise. It was a Gibson twelve-string, a beautiful instrument, perhaps even custom-made. Larry wasn’t enough of a judge of guitars to be sure. He did know that the fretboard inlays were real mother-of-pearl, catching reddish-orange glints from the fire and waxing them into prisms of light.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
“It sure is.”
He strummed it and liked the sound it made, even open and not quite in tune. The sound was fuller and richer than the sound you got from a six-string. A harmonic sound, but tough. That was the good thing about a steel-string guitar, you got a nice tough sound. And the strings were Black Diamonds, wrapped and a little hokey, but you got an honest sound, a trifle rough when you changed chords —zing! He smiled a little, remembering Barry Greig’s contempt for the smooth flat guitar strings. He had always called them “dollar slicks.” Good old Barry, who wanted to be Steve Miller when he grew up.
“What are you smiling about?” Nadine asked.
“Old times,” he said, and felt a little sad.
He tuned by ear, getting it just right, still thinking about Barry and Johnny McCall and Wayne Stukey. As he was finishing she tapped him lightly on the shoulder and he looked up.