by Stephen King
There was a dead air hockey game in the basement and Harold was working on its pinholed surface. There was an open book beside him. On the facing page was a diagram. He would look at the diagram for a while, then look at the apparatus he was working on, and then he would do something to it. Spread out neatly by his right hand were the tools from his Triumph motorcycle kit. Little snips of wire littered the air hockey table.
“You know,” he said absently, “you ought to take a walk.”
“Why?” She felt a trifle hurt. Harold’s face was tense and unsmiling. Nadine could understand why Harold smiled as much as he did; because when he stopped, he looked insane. She suspected that he was insane, or very nearly.
“Because I don’t know how old this dynamite is,” Harold said.
“What do you mean?”
“Old dynamite sweats,” he said, and looked up at her. She saw that his entire face was running with sweat, as if to prove his point. “It perspires, to be perfectly couth. And what it perspires is pure nitroglycerine, one of the world’s great unstable substances. So if it’s old, there’s a very good chance that this little Science Fair project is going to blow us sky high.”
“Well, you don’t have to sound so snotty about it,” Nadine said.
“Nadine? Dear girl?”
“What?”
Harold looked at her calmly and without smiling. “Shut your fucking trap.”
She did, but she didn’t take a walk, although she wanted to. Surely if this was Flagg’s will (and the planchette had told her that Harold was Flagg’s way of taking care of the committee), the dynamite wouldn’t be old. And even if it was old, it wouldn’t explode until it was supposed to . . . would it? Just how much control over events did Flagg have?
Enough, she told herself, he has enough. But she wasn’t sure, and she was increasingly uneasy. She had been back to her house and Joe was gone. She had gone to see Lucy, and had borne the cold reception long enough to learn that since she had moved in with Harold, Joe (Lucy, of course, called him Leo) had “slipped back some.” Lucy obviously blamed her for that, too . . . but if an avalanche came rumbling down from Flagstaff Mountain or an earthquake ripped Pearl Street apart, Lucy would probably blame her for those things, too. Not that there wouldn’t be enough to blame on her and Harold very soon. Still, she had been bitterly disappointed not to have seen Joe . . .to kiss him goodbye. She and Harold were not going to be in the Boulder Free Zone much longer.
Never mind, best you let him go completely now that you’re embarked on this obscenity. You’d only be doing him harm . . . and possibly harm to yourself as well, because Joe . . . sees things, knows things. Let him stop being Joe, let me stop being Nadine-mom. Let him go back to being Leo.
But the paradox in that was inexorable. She could not believe that any of these Zone people had more than a year’s life left in them, and that included the boy. It was not his will that they should live . . .
. . . so tell the truth, it isn’t just Harold who is his instrument. It's you too. You, who once defined the single unforgivable sin in the postplague world as murder, as the taking of a single human life . . .
Suddenly she found herself wishing that the dynamite was old, that it would blow up and put an end to both of them. A merciful end. And then she found herself thinking about what would happen afterward, after they had gotten over the mountains, and felt the old slippery warmth kindle in her belly.
“There,” Harold said gently. He had lowered his apparatus into a Hush Puppies shoebox and set it aside.
“It’s done.”
“Yes.”
“Will it work?”
“Would you like to try it and find out?” His words were bitterly sarcastic, but she didn’t mind. His eyes were working over her in that greedy, crawling little boy’s way that she had come to recognize. He had come back from that distant place—the place from which he had written what was in the ledger that she had read and then replaced carelessly under the loose hearthstone where it had originally been. Now she could handle him. Now his talk was just talk.
“Would you like to watch me play with myself first? Like last night?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay. Good.”
She went up first, and she could feel him looking up the short skirt of the little sailor dress she was wearing. She was bare beneath it.
The door closed, and the thing that Harold had made sat in the open shoebox in the gloom. There was a battery-powered Realistic walkie-talkie handset from Radio Shack. Its back was off. Wired to it were eight sticks of dynamite. The book was still open. It was from the Boulder Public Library, and the title was 65 National Science Fair PrizerWinners. The diagram showed a doorbell wired up to a walkie-talkie similar to the one in the shoebox. The caption beneath said: Third Prize, 1977 National Science Fair, Constructed by Brian Ball, Rutland, Vermont. Say the word and ring the bell up to twelve miles away!
Some hours later that evening, Harold came back downstairs, put the cover on the shoebox, and carried it carefully upstairs. He put it on the top shelf of a kitchen cupboard. Ralph Brentner had told him that afternoon that the Free Zone Committee was inviting Chad Norris to speak at their next meeting. When was that going to be? Harold had inquired casually. September 2, Ralph had said.
September 2.
Chapter 47
Larry and Leo were sitting on the curb in front of the house. Larry was drinking a warm Hamm’s Beer, Leo a warm Orange Spot. From out back came the steady, gruff roar of the Lawnboy. Lucy was cutting the grass. It was the last day of August. Larry had offered to do it, but Lucy shook her head. “Find out what’s wrong with Leo, if you can.”
The day after Nadine had moved in with Harold, Leo hadn’t appeared for breakfast. Larry had found the boy in his room, dressed only in his underpants, his thumb in his mouth. He was uncommunicative and hostile. Larry had been more frightened than Lucy, because she didn’t know how Leo had been when Larry had first encountered him. His name had been Joe then, and he had been brandishing a killer’s knife.
The best part of a week had passed since then, and Leo was a little better, but he hadn’t come back all the way and he wouldn’t talk about what had happened.
“That woman had something to do with it,” Lucy had said, screwing the cap onto the lawnmower’s tank.
“Nadine? What makes you think that?”
“Well, I wasn’t going to mention it. But she came by here the other day while you and Leo were trying the fishing down at Cold Creek. She wanted to see the boy. I was just as glad the two of you were gone.”
“Lucy—”
She gave him a quick kiss, and he had slipped his hand under her halter and given her a friendly squeeze. “I judged you wrong before,” she said. “I guess I’ll always be sorry for that. And I’m never going to like Nadine Cross. There’s something wrong with her.”
Larry didn’t answer, but he thought Lucy’s judgment was probably
a true one. That night up by King Sooper’s she had been like a crazy woman.
“And have you noticed how white her hair is getting?”
Larry nodded. He had. Now, half an hour after that discussion, he drank his Hamm’s and watched Leo bounce the Ping-Pong ball he had found the day the two of them had walked up to Harold’s, where Nadine now lived. The small white ball was smudged but still not dented. Thok-thok-thok against the pavement. Bouncy-bouncy-bally, look-at-the-way-we-play.
“You want to go fishing, kiddo?” Larry offered suddenly.
“No fish,” Leo said. “Do you know Mr. Ellis?”
“Sure.”
“He says we can drink the water when the fish come back. Drink it without—” He made a hooting noise and waved his fingers in front of his eyes. His seawater green eyes were fixed on Larry’s.
“Without boiling it?”
“Yes.”
Thok-thok-thok.
“I like Dick. Him and Laurie. Always give me something to eat. He’s afraid they won’t be able to, but I think th
ey will.”
“Will what?”
“Be able to make a baby. Dick thinks he may be too old. But I guess he’s not.”
Larry started to ask how Leo and Dick had gotten on that subject, and then didn’t. The answer, of course, was that they hadn’t. Dick wouldn’t talk to a small boy about something so personal as making a baby. Leo had just. . . had just known.
Thok-thok-thok.
Yes, Leo knew things ... or intuited them. He hadn’t wanted to go in Harold’s house and had said something about Nadine ... he couldn’t remember exactly what... but Larry had recalled that discussion and had felt very uneasy when he heard that Nadine had moved in with Harold. It had been as if the boy was in a trance, as if—
(—thok-thok-thok—)
Larry watched the Ping-Pong ball bounce up and down, and suddenly he looked into Leo’s face. The boy’s eyes were dark and faraway. The sound of the lawnmower was a faroff, soporific drone. The daylight was smooth and warm. And Leo was in a trance again, as if he had read Larry’s thought and simply responded to it.
Very casually Larry said: “Yes, I think they can make a baby.
Dick can’t be any more than fifty-five at the outside. Cary Grant made one when he was almost seventy, I believe.”
“Who’s Cary Grant?” Leo asked. The ball went up and down, up and down.
(Notorious. North by Northwest.)
“Don’t you know?” he asked Leo.
“He was that actor,” Leo said. “He was in Notorious. And Northwest."
(North by Northwest.)
“North by Northwest, I mean,” Leo said in a tone of agreement. His eyes never left the Ping-Pong ball’s bouncing course and Larry was reminded eerily of Tom Cullen and his elephant.
“That’s right,” he said. “How’s Nadine-mom, Leo?”
“She calls me Joe. I’m Joe to her.”
“Oh.”
“It’s bad now. It’s bad with both of them.”
“Nadine and—”
(Harold?)
“Yes, him.”
“They’re not happy?”
“He’s got them fooled. They think he wants them.”
“He?”
“Him" The word hung on the still summer air.
Thok-thok-thok.
“They’re going to go west,” Leo said.
“Jesus,” Larry muttered. He suddenly felt the old fear sweep him. Did he really want to hear any more of this? It was like watching a tomb door swing slowly open in a silent graveyard, seeing a hand emerge—
Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it, I don’t want to know it. “Nadine-mom wants to think it’s your fault,” Leo said. “She wants to think you drove her to Harold. But she waited on purpose. She waited until you loved Lucy-mom too much. She waited until she was sure. It’s like he’s rubbing away the part of her brain that knows right from wrong. Little by little he’s rubbing that part away. And when it’s gone she’ll be as crazy as everyone else in the west. Crazier, maybe.”
“Leo—” Larry whispered, and Leo answered immediately:
“She calls me Joe. I’m Joe to her.”
“Shall I call you Joe?” Larry asked doubtfully.
“No.” There was a note of pleading in the boy’s voice. “No, please don’t.” “You miss your Nadine-mom, don’t you, Leo?”
“She’s dead,” Leo said with chilling simplicity.
“Is that why you wouldn’t talk after she came here? Did you know she was here that day we tried the fishing?”
“Yes.” It seemed to answer both questions.
“But you’re talking now.”
“I have you and Lucy-mom to talk to.”
“Yes, of course—”
“But not for always!” the boy said fiercely. “Not for always, unless you talk to Frannie! Talk to Frannie! Talk to Frannie!”
“About Nadine?”
“No!”
“About what? About you?”
Leo’s voice rose, became even more shrill. “It’s all written down! You know! Frannie knows! Talk to Frannie!”
“The committee—”
“Not the committee! The committee won’t help you, it won’t help anyone, the committee is the old way, he laughs at your committee because it’s the old way and the old ways are his ways, you know, Frannie knows, if you talk together you can—”
Leo brought the ball down hard—THOK!—and it rose higher than his head and came down and rolled away. Larry watched it, his mouth dry, his heart thudding nastily in his chest.
“I dropped my ball,” Leo said, and ran to get it.
Larry sat watching him.
Frannie, he thought.
The two of them sat on the edge of the bandshell stage, their feet dangling. It was an hour before dark, and a few people were walking through the park, some of them holding hands. The children’s hour is also the lovers’ hour, Fran thought disjointedly. Larry had just finished telling her everything Leo had said in his trance, and her mind was whirling with it.
“So what do you think?” Larry asked.
“I don’t know what to think,” she said softly, “except I don’t like any of the things that have been happening. Visionary dreams. An old woman who’s the voice of God for a while and then walks off into the wilderness. Now a little boy who seems to be a telepath. It’s like life in a fairy tale. Sometimes I think the superflu left us alive but drove us all mad.”
“He said I should talk to you. So I am.”
“Written down,” Fran said. “He was right, that kid. It’s the whole root of the problem, I think. If I hadn’t been so stupid, so conceited, as to write it all down ... oh, goddam me!”
Larry stared at her, amazed. “What are you talking about?”
So she told him, beginning with the day in June that Harold had driven into the driveway of her Ogunquit home in Roy Brannigan’s Cadillac. As she talked, the last bright daylight changed to a bluish shade. The lovers in the park began to drift away. A thin rind of moon rose. In the high-rise condominium on the far side of Canyon Boulevard, a few Coleman gaslamps had come on. She told him about the sign on the barn roof and how she had been sleeping when Harold risked his life to put her name on the bottom. About meeting Stu in Fabyan, and about Harold’s shrill get-away-from-my-bone reaction to Stu. She told him about her diary, and about the thumbprint in it. By the time she finished, it was past nine o’clock and the crickets were singing. A silence fell between them and Fran waited apprehensively for Larry to break it. But he seemed lost in thought.
At last he said, “How sure are you about that fingerprint? In your own mind are you positive it was Harold’s?”
“I knew it was Harold’s print the first time I saw it.”
“That barn he put the sign on,” Larry said. “You remember the night I met you I said I’d been up in it? And that Harold had carved his initials on a beam in the loft?”
“Yes.”
“It wasn’t just his initials. It was yours, too. In a heart. The kind of thing a lovesick little boy would do on his school desk.”
She put her hands over her eyes and wiped them. “What a mess,” she said huskily.
“You’re not responsible for Harold Lauder’s actions, keed.” He took her hand in both of his and held it tightly. He looked at her. “Take it from me, the original dipstick, oilslick, and drippy dick. You can’t hold it against yourself. Because if you do . . His grip tightened to a degree where it became painful, but his voice remained soft. “If you do, you really will go mad. It’s hard enough for a person to keep their own socks pulled up, let alone someone else’s.”
He took his hand away and they were quiet for a time.
“You think Harold bears Stu a killing grudge?” he said at last. “You really think it’s that deep?”
“Yes,” she said. “Maybe the whole committee. But I don’t know what—”
His hand fell on her shoulder, stilling her. In the darkness his posture had changed, his eyes had widened. His lips moved soundle
ssly.
“Larry? What—”
“When he went downstairs,” Larry muttered. “He went down to get a corkscrew or something.”
“What?”
He turned toward her slowly, as if his head was on a rusty hinge. “You know,” he said, “there just might be a way to resolve all this. I don’t guarantee it, because I didn’t look in the book, but ... it makes such beautiful sense . . . Harold reads your diary and not only gets an earful but an idea ... all the best writers kept journals, didn’t they?”
“Are you saying Harold’s got a diary?”
“When he went down to the basement, the day I brought the wine, I was looking around his living room. He said he was going to put in some chrome and leather, and I was trying to figure out how it would look. And I noticed this loose stone on the hearth—”
“YES!” she bellowed, so loudly that he jumped. “The day I snuck in . . . and Nadine Cross came . . . I sat on the hearth ... I remember that loose stone.” She looked at Larry again. “There it is again. As if something had us by the nose, was leading us to it. . “Coincidence,” he said, but he sounded uneasy.
“Is it? We were both in Harold’s house. We both noticed the loose stone. And we’re both here now. Is it coincidence?”
“I don’t know.”
“What was under that stone?”
“A ledger,” he said slowly. “I didn’t look in it. At the time I thought it could just as easily have belonged to the previous owner of the house as to Harold. But if it did, wouldn’t Harold have found it? We both noticed the loose stone. So let’s say he finds it. Even if the guy who lived there before the flu had filled it up with little secrets— the amount he cheated on his taxes, his sex fantasies about his daughter, I don’t know what all—those secrets wouldn’t have been Harold’s secrets. Do you see that?”
“Yes, but—”
“Don’t interrupt while Inspector Underwood is elucidating, you slip of a girl. So if the secrets weren’t Harold’s secrets, why would he have put the ledger back under the stone? Harold’s journal.”
“Do you think it’s still there?”
“Maybe. I think we’d better look and see.”
“Now?”