by Stephen King
The fog had burned off by the time they had finished breakfast and packed their gear. As Nadine had said, Joe showed no qualms about riding behind Larry; in fact, he climbed on Larry’s bike without waiting to be asked.
“Slow,” Larry said for the fourth time. “We’re not going to hurry and have an accident.”
“Fine,” Nadine said. “Larry, I’m excited enough just to be going.”
They stopped for lunch under the tree by the brook where Larry had fallen asleep. He was relieved to find that cycling wasn’t nearly as bad as he had thought it might be; they were making fairly decent time, even though it was necessary to putt along the sidewalks at walking speed in the villages they came to along the way. Nadine was being extremely careful going around blind curves, and even on the open road she didn’t urge Larry to go any faster than the steady thirty-five-miles-an-hour pace he was setting. He thought that, barring bad weather, they would be in Stovington by July 19.
They stopped for supper west of Concord, where Nadine said they could save time on Lauder and Goldsmith’s route by taking 1-89.
“There’ll be a lot of stalled traffic,” Larry said doubtfully.
“We can weave in and out,” she said. “And use the breakdown lanes. The worst that can happen is we’ll have to backtrack to the nearest exit and go around on a secondary road.”
They went on for two hours after supper, and did indeed come upon a block that was impossible to skirt. A car-and-trailer combination had struck a gigantic Winnebago camper. The three of them, working together, were able to hoist the bikes over the highway guardrails, trundle them past the wreck, and then hoist them back onto the turnpike. It was exhausting work, and when the block was at last behind them, there was no question of going on. They spread their blankets near the two Hondas and slept. There were no dreams that night.
The following afternoon they came to a colossal smashup—there was no question of getting around this one. Over a dozen cars had been involved. They were only two miles beyond the Enfield exit and so they didn’t have far to backtrack, but all three of them were tired and discouraged. Nadine was particularly snappish, because her turnpike idea hadn’t worked very well. They stopped in the Enfield town park to rest.
“What did you do before, Nadine?” Larry asked. “Did you teach?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Little kids?”
“First and second grades.”
That explained a lot about her attachment to Joe, and her calm, efficient handling of him.
“How did you guess that, Larry?”
“I used to date a speech therapist from Oakland,” he said. “I know that sounds like the start of some weird dirty joke, but it’s the truth. She worked for the Oakland school system. Younger grades. Kids with harelips, cleft palates, deaf kids, the works. She used to say that correcting speech defects in children was just showing them alternate ways of getting certain sounds. Show them, say the word. Over and over, until something in the kid’s head clicked. And when she talked about the click happening, she looked the way you did when Joe said ‘You’re welcome.’ ”
“Did I?” She smiled a little wistfully. “I love the little ones. Some of my kids were bruised, but none of them were spoiled, not irrevocably. The little ones are the only good human beings.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Children are good. If you work with them, you get to be a romantic. That’s not so bad. Wasn’t your speech therapist friend happy in her work?”
“Yeah. She liked it. Were you married, Nadine?”
“Married? No. Never married.” She looked down at her hands, which were plucking grass nervously. “I’m the original old maid schoolteacher, younger than I look but older than I feel. Thirty-seven.” She touched her white-streaked hair. “Premature. My grandmother’s hair was completely white by the time she was forty. I think I’m going to last five years longer.”
“Where did you teach?”
“Pittsfield. A small private school. Very exclusive. Ivy-covered walls, all the latest playground equipment. The car pool was two Thunderbirds—one of them a 1957—three Mercedes, a couple of Lincolns and a Chrysler Imperial. Damn the energy crisis, full speed ahead.” “You must have been good.”
“I was,” she said, and smiled. “But it doesn’t matter now.”
He put an arm around her and she stiffened. “I wish you wouldn’t.” “You don’t want me to?”
“No. I don’t.”
He drew his arm back, baffled. She did want him to, that was the thing; he could feel her wanting coming off her in waves. Her color was very high now, and she was looking desperately down at her hands, which had uprooted a drift of grass. Her eyes were shiny, on the verge of tears.
“Nadine—” (honey is that you?)
She looked up and he saw she was past the verge; she was crying. She was about to speak when Joe strolled up, carrying his guitar case. They looked at him guiltily, as if they had been discovered doing something rather more personal than talking.
“Lady,” Joe said conversationally.
“What?” Larry asked, startled and not tracking very well.
“Lady.” Joe jerked his thumb back over his shoulder.
Larry and Nadine looked at each other. Suddenly there was a new voice, highpitched and choking with emotion, almost as startling as the voice of God.
“Thank heaven!” it cried. “Oh, thank heaven!”
They stood up and saw a woman half-running up the street toward them. She was smiling and crying at the same time.
“I’m so glad to see you,” she said. “Thank heaven—”
She swayed and might have fainted if Larry hadn’t been there to steady her until her dizziness passed. Larry guessed her age at twenty-five. She was dressed in jeans and a plain white cotton blouse. Her blue eyes stared desperately at Larry, as if trying to convince the brain behind them that this was not a hallucination, that the three people she saw were really here.
“I’m Larry Underwood. The lady is Nadine Cross. The boy is Joe. We’re all very happy to meet you.”
The woman continued to stare at him wordlessly for a moment, and then walked slowly away from him and toward Nadine. “I’m so pleased,” she began, “so pleased to meet you.” She stumbled a little. “Oh my God, are you really people?”
“Yes,” Nadine said.
The woman put her arms around Nadine and sobbed. Nadine held her. Joe stood in the street by a stalled pickup truck, his guitar case
in one hand, his thumb in his mouth. At last he went to Larry and Larry held his hand. The two of them watched the women solemnly.
Her name was Lucy Swann and she was eager to go with them to Stovington and excited at the prospect of meeting Harold and Frances. Larry found a knapsack for her, and Nadine went with her to her house to help her pack . . . two changes of clothes, an extra pair of shoes, a raincoat. And pictures of her late husband and daughter.
They camped that night in Quechee, now over the state line and into Vermont. Lucy told them her story; it was not much different from the others they would hear.
Her husband and daughter had died within a day of each other. She nursed them as best she could, and when they were gone she waited to catch it and die herself. By July 3, she was the only living soul in Enfield, New Hampshire.
“Wes and me, we had to get married,” Lucy said. “That was the summer of ’74, just after I graduated high school. My mom and dad didn’t want me to marry him. They wanted me to go away to have the baby and then give her up. But I wouldn’t. My mom said it would end in a divorce. My dad said Wes was just a no-account, shiftless man. I said, maybe, we’ll see. And we settled down real good, the three of us. It was more Marcy than me that settled Wes down. He thought the sun rose and set on that baby.” With a sigh that was more than half a sob, she said: “I sure never thought it would end like this.”
“No one did, Lucy,” Larry said.
“I guess I could have gotten along. I was, until I st
arted having all those bad dreams.”
Larry’s head jerked up. “Dreams?” Joe was also looking at her. A moment before he had been nodding out, but now he was staring at Lucy, his eyes gleaming.
“Bad dreams, nightmares,” Lucy said. “They’re not always the same. Mostly it’s a man chasing me, and I can never see exactly what he looks like because he’s all wrapped up in a cloak. And he stays in the shadows and the alleys. I got so I was afraid to go to sleep. But now maybe I’ll—”
“Brrr-ack man!” Joe cried suddenly, so fiercely they all jumped. He leaped to his feet and held his arms out like a miniature Bela
Lugosi, his fingers hooked into claws. “Brrr-ack man! Bad dreams! Bad cares! Cares me!”
Scares me, that’s what he’s trying to say, Larry thought. Bad dreams, bad scares. Joe, I couldn’t agree more.
“This is crazy,” he said aloud, and then stopped. They were all
looking at him. Suddenly the darkness seemed very dark indeed, and Lucy looked frightened again.
“Lucy, do you ever dream about. . . well, a place in Nebraska?”
“I had a dream one night about an old Negro woman,” she said, “but it didn’t last very long. She said something like ‘You come see me.’ Then I was back in Enfield and that . . . that scary guy was chasing me. Then I woke up.”
Larry looked at her so long that she colored and dropped her eyes.
He looked at Joe. “Joe, do you ever dream about . . . uh, corn? An old woman? A guitar?” Joe only looked at him from Nadine’s encircling arm.
“Leave him alone, you’ll upset him more,” Nadine said, but she was the one who sounded upset.
“A house, Joe? A little house with the porch up on jacks?”
He thought he saw a gleam in Joe’s eyes.
“Stop it, Larry!” Nadine said.
Inspiration struck. “A swing, Joe? A swing made out of a tire?”
Joe jerked in Nadine’s arms. She tried to hold him, but he broke through. “The swing!” Joe said exultantly. “The swing! The swing!” He whirled away from them and pointed first at Nadine, then at Larry, then at Lucy. “Her! You! Lots!”
Lucy Swann looked stunned. “The swing,” she said. “I remember that, too.” She looked at Larry, scared. “Why are we all having the same dream? How can that be? Is someone using a ray on us?”
“I don’t know.” He looked at Nadine. “Have you had them too?” “I don’t dream,” she said, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“Are you sure—”
“I told you I don’t dream!” Her voice was sharp, nearly hysterical. “Can’t you just leave me alone? Do you have to badger me?”
She got up and left the fire, almost running.
Lucy looked after her uncertainly for a moment and then stood up. “I’ll go after her.”
“Yeah, you better. Thanks, Lucy.”
She came back with Nadine shortly. They had both been crying, Larry saw, but they seemed to be on good terms now.
“I’m sorry,” Nadine said. “It’s just that I’m always upset. It comes out in funny ways, I guess. And I’m tired.”
The subject did not come up again. They sat and listened to Joe run through his repertoire. He was getting very good indeed now, and in with the hootings and grunts, fragments of the lyrics were coming through.
At last they slept, Larry on one end, Nadine on the other, Joe and Lucy between. He dreamed first of the black man on the high rooftop, looking east, and then of the old woman sitting on her porch. Only in this dream he knew that the man with no face was coming, striding through the corn, knocking his own twisted swathe through the corn, his terrible hot grin tattooed to his face, coming toward them, coming closer.
Larry woke up in the middle of the night, out of breath, his chest constricted with terror. The others slept like stones. Somehow in that dream he had known that the black man was not coming empty-handed. In his arms, borne like an offering, he had held the decaying body of Rita Blakemoor, now stiff and swollen, her flesh ripped by weasels. A mute accusation to be thrown at his feet, a putrid offering that would scream his guilt to the others, to silently proclaim that he wasn’t no nice guy, never had been, never would be.
The old woman on one side, the black man on the other, he thought, already turning to sleep again. And all the rest of us somewhere between, on the border . . . choosing up sides?
Then he slept again, and his sleep was silent darkness, undisturbed.
“Oh God,” Nadine said emptily. Larry looked at her face and saw a disappointment too deep for tears. Her face was pale, her remarkable eyes clouded and dull.
It was the evening of July 19, and the shadows were drawing long. The four of them stood together in a line outside a wrought-iron fence. Below and behind them lay the town of Stovington, not much changed from the way Stu Redman had seen it on his last day of captivity. Beyond the fence and a lawn that had once been well kept but which was now getting shaggy and littered by sticks and leaves that had blown onto it during afternoon thunderstorms was the Plague Center itself, three stories high, who knew how much more underground. The place was deserted, silent, empty.
In the center of the lawn, a large sign had been erected:
ROUTE 7 TO RUTLAND
ROUTE 4 TO SCHUYLERVILLE
ROUTE 29 TO I-87
I-87 TO I-90
I-90 WEST
EVERYONE HERE IS DEAD
WE ARE MOVING WEST TO NEBRASKA
STAY ON OUR ROUTE
WATCH FOR SIGNS
HAROLD EMERY LAUDER
FRANCES GOLDSMITH
STUART REDMAN
GLEN BATEMAN
JULY 8, 1980
“Harold, my man,” Larry murmured. “Can’t wait to shake your hand and buy you a beer . . . or a Payday.”
“Larry!” Lucy said sharply.
Nadine had fainted.
Chapter 36
She tottered out onto her porch at twenty to eleven on the morning of July 20, carrying her coffee and her toast with her as she did every day that the Coca-Cola thermometer outside the sink window read over fifty degrees. It was high summer, the finest summer Mother Abagail could recollect since 1950, the year her mother had died at the goodish age of ninety-three. Too bad there ain’t more folks around to enjoy it, she thought as she sat carefully down in her armless rocking chair. But did they ever enjoy it? Some did, of course; young folks in love did, and old folks whose bones remembered so clearly what the death-clutch of winter was. Now most of the young folks and old folks were gone, and most of those in between. God had brought down a harsh judgment on the human race.
Some might argue with such a harsh judgment, but Mother Abagail was not among their number. He had done it once with water, and sometime further along, He would do it with fire. Her place was not to judge God, although she wished He hadn’t seen fit to set the cup before her lips that He had. But when it came to matters of judgment, she was satisfied with the answer God had given Moses from the burning bush when Moses had seen fit to question. Who are you? Mose asks, and God comes back from that bush just as pert as you like: I Am, Who I AM. In other words, Mose, stop beatin around this here bush and get your old ass in gear.
She wheezed laughter and nodded her head and dipped her toast into the wide mouth of her coffee cup until it was soft enough to chew. It had been sixteen years since she had bid hail and farewell to her last tooth. Toothless she had come from her mother’s womb, and toothless she would go into her own grave. Molly, her great-granddaughter, and her husband had given her a set of false teeth for Mother’s Day just a year later, the year she herself had been ninety-three, but they hurt her gums and now she only wore them when she knew Molly and Jim were coming. Then she would take them from the box in the drawer and rinse them off good and stick them in. And if she had time before Molly and Jim came, she would make faces at herself in the spotty kitchen mirror and growl through all those big white fake teeth and laugh fit to split. She looked like an old black Everglades gato
r.
She was old and feeble, but her mind was pretty much in order. Abagail Freemantle was her name, born in 1872 and with the birth certificate to prove it. She’d seen a heap during her time on the earth, but nothing to match the goings-ons of the last month or so. No, there never had been such a thing, and now her time was coming to be a part of it and she hated it. She was old. She wanted to rest and enjoy the cycle of the seasons between now and whenever God got tired of watching her make her daily round and decided to call her on home to Glory. But what happened when you questioned God? The answer you got was I Am, Who I AM, and that was the end. When His own Son prayed that the cup be taken from His lips, God never even answered . . . and she wasn’t up to that snuff, no how, no way. Just an ordinary sinner was all she was, and it scared her to think that God had looked down at a little baby girl poking out between her mother’s legs back in the spring of 1872 and had said to Himself: / got to keep her around a goodish time. She’s got work in 1980, on the other side of a whole heap of calendar pages.
Her time here in Hemingford Home was coming to an end, and her final season of work lay ahead of her in the West, near the Rocky Mountains. He had sent Moses to mountain-climbing and Noah to boatbuilding; He had seen His own Son nailed up on a Tree. What did He care how miserably afraid Abby Freemantle was of the man with no face, he who stalked her dreams?
She never saw him; she didn’t have to see him. He was a shadow passing through the corn at noon, a cold pocket of air, a gore-crow peering down at you from the phone lines. His voice called to her in all the sounds that had ever frightened her—soft, it was the tick of a deathwatch beetle under the stairs, telling that someone loved would soon pass over; spoken loud it was the afternoon thunder rolling amid the clouds that came out of the west like boiling Armageddon. And sometimes there was no sound at all but the lonely rustle of the nightwind in the corn but she would know he was there and that was the worst of all, because then the man with no face seemed only a little less than God Himself; at those times it seemed that she was