by Stephen King
“When you go inside a place, you put your shoes out on the stoop,” Packsack said. “The crazy ones won’t take them, don’t worry about that, and it tells other people the place is taken and to move along, find another. Saves”—his eyes dropped to the heavy automatic weapon Clay was carrying—“Saves accidents.”
“Have there been accidents?” Tom asked.
“Oh yes,” Packsack said, with chilling indifference. “There’s always accidents, people being what they are. But there’s plenty of places, so there’s no need for you to have one. Just put out your shoes.”
“How do you know that?” Alice asked.
He gave her a smile that improved his face out of all measure. But it was hard not to smile at Alice; she was young, and even at three in the morning, she was pretty. “People talk; I listen. I talk, sometimes other folks listen. Did you listen?”
“Yes,” Alice said. “Listening’s one of my best things.”
“Then pass it on. Bad enough to have them to contend with.” He didn’t have to be more specific. “Too bad to have accidents among ourselves on top of that.”
Clay thought of Natalie pointing the .22. He said, “You’re right. Thank you.”
Tom said, “That one’s ‘The Beer Barrel Polka,’ isn’t it?”
“That’s right, son,” Packsack said. “Myron Floren on the squeezebox. God rest his soul. You might want to stop in Gaiten. It’s a nice little village two miles or so up the road.”
“Is that where you’re going to stay?” Alice asked.
“Oh, me and Rolfe might push on a dight farther,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because we can, little ma’am, that’s all. You have a good day.”
This time they didn’t contradict him, and although the two men had to be pushing seventy, they were soon out of sight, following the beam of a single flashlight, which Rucksack—Rolfe—held.
“Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music Makers,” Tom marveled.
“ ‘Baby Elephant Walk,’ ” Clay said, and laughed.
“Why did Dodge have a good time, too?” Alice wanted to know.
“Because it could, I guess,” Tom said, and burst out laughing at her perplexed expression.
11
The music was coming from Gaiten, the nice little village Packsack had recommended as a place to stop. It was not nearly as loud as the AC/DC concert Clay had gone to in Boston as a teenager—that had left his ears ringing for days—but it was loud enough to make him think of summer band concerts he’d attended in South Berwick with his parents. In fact he had it in his mind that they would discover the source of the music on the Gaiten town common—likely some elderly person, not a phone-crazy but disaster-addled, who had taken it into his head to serenade the ongoing exodus with easy-listening oldies played through a set of battery-powered loudspeakers.
There was a Gaiten town common, but it was deserted save for a few people eating either a late supper or an early breakfast by the glow of flashlights and Coleman lanterns. The source of the music was a little farther to the north. By then Lawrence Welk had given way to someone blowing a horn so mellow it was soporific.
“That’s Wynton Marsalis, isn’t it?” Clay asked. He was ready to call it quits for the night and thought Alice looked done almost to death.
“Him or Kenny G,” Tom said. “You know what Kenny G said when he got off the elevator, don’t you?”
“No,” Clay said, “but I’m sure you’ll tell me.”
“ ‘Man! This place rocks!’ ”
Clay said, “That’s so funny I think my sense of humor just imploded.”
“I don’t get it,” Alice said.
“It’s not worth explaining,” Tom said. “Listen, guys, we’ve got to call it a night. I’m about kilt.”
“Me too,” Alice said. “I thought I was in shape from soccer, but I’m really tired.”
“Yeah,” Clay agreed. “Baby makes three.”
They had already passed through Gaiten’s shopping district, and according to the signs, Main Street—which was also Route 102—had now become Academy Avenue. This was no surprise to Clay, because the sign on the outskirts of town had proclaimed Gaiten home to Historic Gaiten Academy, an institution of which Clay had heard vague rumors. He thought it was one of those New England prep schools for kids who can’t quite make it into Exeter or Milton. He supposed the three of them would be back in the land of Burger Kings, muffler-repair shops, and chain motels soon enough, but this part of New Hampshire 102 was lined with very nice-looking homes. The problem was, there were shoes—sometimes as many as four pairs—in front of most of the doors.
The foot-traffic had thinned considerably as other travelers found shelter for the coming day, but as they passed Academy Grove Citgo and approached the fieldstone pillars flanking Gaiten Academy’s entrance drive, they began to catch up to a trio just ahead: two men and a woman, all well into middle age. As these three walked slowly up the sidewalk, they inspected each house for one without shoes placed at the front door. The woman was limping badly, and one of the men had his arm around her waist.
Gaiten Academy was on the left, and Clay realized this was where the music (currently a droning, string-laden version of “Fly Me to the Moon”) was coming from. He noticed two other things. One was that the road-litter here—torn bags, half-eaten vegetables, gnawed bones—was especially heavy, and that most of it turned in at the gravel Academy drive. The other was that two people were standing there. One was an old man hunched over a cane. The other was a boy with a battery-powered lantern parked between his shoes. He looked no more than twelve and was dozing against one of the pillars. He was wearing what looked like a school uniform: gray pants, gray sweater, a maroon jacket with a crest on it.
As the trio ahead of Clay and his friends drew abreast of the Academy drive, the old man—dressed in a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows—spoke to them in a piercing, I-will-be-heard-all-the-way-to-the-back-of-the-lecture-hall voice. “Hi, there! Hi, I say! Won’t you come in here? We can offer you shelter, but more importantly, we have to—”
“We don’t have to anything, mister,” the woman said. “I got four burst blisters, two on each foot, and I can hardly walk.”
“But there’s plenty of room—” the old fellow began. The man supporting the woman gave him a look that must have been unpleasant, because the old fellow stopped. The trio went past the drive and the pillars and the sign on old-fashioned iron S-hooks reading GAITEN ACADEMY EST. 1846 “A Young Mind Is A Lamp In The Darkness.”
The old fellow slumped over his cane again, then saw Clay, Tom, and Alice approaching and straightened up once more. He seemed about to hail them, then apparently decided his lecture-hall approach wasn’t working. He poked his companion in the ribs with the tip of his cane instead. The boy straightened up with a wild look as behind them, where brick buildings loomed in the dark along the slope of a mild hill, “Fly Me to the Moon” gave way to an equally sluggish rendition of something that might once have been “I Get a Kick out of You.”
“Jordan!” he said. “Your turn! Ask them in!”
The boy named Jordan started, blinked at the old man, then looked at the new trio of approaching strangers with gloomy mistrust. Clay thought of the March Hare and the Dormouse in Alice in Wonderland. Maybe that was wrong—probably it was—but he was very tired. “Aw, they won’t be any different, sir,” he said. “They won’t come in. Nobody will. We’ll try again tomorrow night. I’m sleepy.”
And Clay knew that, tired or not, they were going to find out what the old man wanted… unless Tom and Alice absolutely refused, that was. Partly because the old man’s companion reminded him of Johnny, yes, but mostly because the kid had made up his mind that no one was going to help in this not-very-brave new world—he and the one he called sir were on their own because that was just how it went. Only if that were true, pretty soon there wouldn’t be anything worth saving.
“Go on,” the old man encouraged him. He pr
odded Jordan with the tip of his cane again, but not hard. Not painfully. “Tell them we can give them shelter, we have plenty of room, but they ought to see, first. Someone needs to see this. If they also say no, we will indeed give up for the night.”
“All right, sir.”
The old man smiled, exposing a mouthful of large horse-teeth. “Thank you, Jordan.”
The boy walked toward them with absolutely no relish, his dusty shoes scuffing, his shirttail hanging below the hem of his sweater. He held his lantern in one hand, and it fizzed faintly. There were dark up-all-night circles under his eyes, and his hair badly needed washing.
“Tom?” Clay asked.
“We’ll see what he wants,” Tom said, “because I can see it’s what you want, but—”
“Sirs? Pardon me, sirs?”
“One second,” Tom said to the boy, then turned back to Clay. His face was grave. “But it’s going to start getting light in an hour. Maybe less. So that old guy better be right about there being a place for us to stay.”
“Oh, yes, sir,” Jordan said. He looked like he didn’t want to hope and couldn’t help it. “Lots of places. Hundreds of dorm rooms, not to mention Cheatham Lodge. Tobias Wolff came last year and stayed there. He gave a lecture on his book, Old School.”
“I read that,” Alice said, sounding bemused.
“The boys who didn’t have cell phones have all run off. The ones who did have them…”
“We know about them,” Alice said.
“I’m a scholarship boy. I lived in Holloway. I didn’t have a cell phone. I had to use the dorm mother’s phone whenever I wanted to call home and the other boys would make fun of me.”
“Looks to me like you got the last laugh there, Jordan,” Tom said.
“Yes, sir,” he said dutifully, but in the light of his fizzing lantern Clay saw no laughter, only woe and weariness. “Won’t you please come and meet the Head?”
And although he had to be very tired himself, Tom responded with complete politeness, as if they had been standing on a sunny veranda—at a Parents’ Tea, perhaps—instead of on the trash-littered verge of Academy Avenue at four-fifteen in the morning. “That would be our pleasure, Jordan,” he said.
12
“The devil’s intercoms is what I used to call them,” said Charles Ardai, who had been chairman of Gaiten Academy’s English Department for twenty-five years and acting Headmaster of the Academy entire at the time of the Pulse. Now he stumped with surprising rapidity up the hill on his cane, keeping to the sidewalk, avoiding the river of swill that carpeted Academy Drive. Jordan walked watchfully beside him, the other three behind him. Jordan was worried about the old man losing his balance. Clay was worried that the man might have a heart attack, trying to talk and climb a hill—even a relatively mild one like this—at the same time.
“I never really meant it, of course; it was a joke, a jape, a comic exaggeration, but in truth, I never liked the things, especially in an academic environment. I might have moved to keep them out of the school, but naturally I would have been overruled. Might as well try to legislate against the rising of the tide, eh?” He puffed rapidly several times. “My brother gave me one for my sixty-fifth birthday. I ran the thing flat…” Puff, pant. “And simply never recharged it. They emit radiation, are you aware of this? In minuscule amounts, it’s true, but still… a source of radiation that close to one’s head… one’s brain…”
“Sir, you should wait until we get to Tonney,” Jordan said. He steadied Ardai as the Head’s cane slid on a rotten piece of fruit and he listed momentarily (but at an alarming angle) to port.
“Probably a good idea,” Clay said.
“Yes,” the Head agreed. “Only… I never trusted them, this is my point. I was never that way with my computer. Took to that like a duck to water.”
At the top of the hill, the campus’s main road split in a Y The left fork wound its way to buildings that were almost surely dorms. The right one went toward lecture halls, a cluster of administration buildings, and an archway that glimmered white in the dark. The river of garbage and discarded wrappers flowed beneath it. Headmaster Ardai led them that way, skirting as much of the litter as he could, Jordan holding his elbow. The music—now Bette Midler, singing “Wind Beneath My Wings”—was coming from beyond the arch, and Clay saw dozens of discarded compact discs among the bones and empty potato chip bags. He was starting to get a bad feeling about this.
“Uh, sir? Headmaster? Maybe we should just—”
“We’ll be fine,” the Head replied. “Did you ever play musical chairs as a child? Of course you did. Well, as long as the music doesn’t stop, we have nothing to worry about. We’ll have a quick peek, and then we’ll go over to Cheatham Lodge. That’s the Headmaster’s residence. Not two hundred yards from Tonney Field. I promise you.”
Clay looked at Tom, who shrugged. Alice nodded.
Jordan happened to be looking back at them (rather anxiously), and he caught this collegial interplay. “You ought to see it,” he told them. “The Head’s right about that. Until you see it, you don’t know.”
“See what, Jordan?” Alice asked.
But Jordan only looked at her—big young eyes in the dark. “Wait,” he said.
13
“Holy fucking shit,” Clay said. In his mind the words sounded like a full-throated bellow of surprise and horror—with maybe a soupçon of outrage—but what actually emerged was more of a whipped whimper. Part of it might have been that this close the music was almost as loud as that long-ago AC/DC concert (although Debby Boone making her sweet schoolgirl way through “You Light Up My Life” was quite a stretch from “Hell’s Bells,” even at full volume), but mostly it was pure shock. He thought that after the Pulse and their subsequent retreat from Boston he’d be prepared for anything, but he was wrong.
He didn’t think prep schools like this indulged in anything so plebeian (and so smashmouth) as football, but soccer had apparently been a big deal. The stands stacking up on either side of Tonney Field looked as if they could seat as many as a thousand, and they were decked with bunting that was only now beginning to look bedraggled by the showery weather of the last few days. There was an elaborate Scoreboard at the far end of the field with big letters marching along the top. Clay couldn’t read the message in the dark and probably wouldn’t have taken it in even if it had been daylight. There was enough light to see the field itself, and that was all that mattered.
Every inch of grass was covered with phone-crazies. They were lying on their backs like sardines in a can, leg to leg and hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder. Their faces stared up into the black predawn sky.
“Oh my Lord Jesus,” Tom said. His voice was muffled because one fist was pressed against his mouth.
“Catch the girl!” the Head rapped. “She’s going to faint!”
“No—I’m all right,” Alice said, but when Clay put his arm around her she slumped against him, breathing fast. Her eyes were open but they had a fixed, druggy look.
“They’re under the bleachers, too,” Jordan said. He spoke with a studied, almost showy calm that Clay did not believe for a minute. It was the voice of a boy assuring his pals that he’s not grossed out by the maggots boiling in a dead cat’s eyes… just before he leans over and blows his groceries. “Me and the Head think that’s where they put the hurt ones that aren’t going to get better.”
“The Head and I, Jordan.”
“Sorry, sir.”
Debby Boone achieved poetic catharsis and ceased. There was a pause and then Lawrence Welk’s Champagne Music Makers once more began to play “Baby Elephant Walk.” Dodge had a good time, too, Clay thought.
“How many of those boomboxes have they got rigged together?” he asked Headmaster Ardai. “And how did they do it? They’re brainless, for Christ’s sake, zombies!” A terrible idea occurred to him, illogical and persuasive at the same time. “Did you do it? To keep them quiet, or…I don’t know…”
“He didn’t d
o it,” Alice said. She spoke quietly from her safe place within the circle of Clay’s arm.
“No, and both of your premises are wrong,” the Head told him.
“Both? I don’t—”
“They must be dedicated music-lovers,” Tom mused, “because they don’t like to go inside buildings. But that’s where the CDs are, right?”
“Not to mention the boomboxes,” Clay said.
“There’s no time to explain now. Already the sky has begun to lighten, and… tell them, Jordan.”
Jordan replied dutifully, with the air of one who recites a lesson he does not understand, “All good vampires must be in before cockcrow, sir.”
“That’s right—before cockcrow. For now, only look. That’s all you need to do. You didn’t know there were places like this, did you?”
“Alice knew,” Clay said.
They looked. And because the night had begun to wane, Clay realized that the eyes in all those faces were open. He was pretty sure they weren’t seeing; they were just… open.
Something bad’s going on here, he thought. The flocking was only the beginning of it.
Looking at the packed bodies and empty faces (mostly white; this was New England, after all) was awful, but the blank eyes turned up to the night sky filled him with unreasoning horror. Somewhere, not too distant, the morning’s first bird began to sing. It wasn’t a crow, but the Head still jerked, then tottered. This time it was Tom who steadied him.
“Come on,” the Head told them. “It’s only a short walk to Cheatham Lodge, but we ought to start. The damp has made me stiffer than ever. Take my elbow, Jordan.”
Alice broke free of Clay and went to the old man’s other side. He gave her a rather forbidding smile and a shake of his head. “Jordan can take care of me. We take care of each other now—ay, Jordan?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Jordan?” Tom asked. They were nearing a large (and rather pretentious) Tudor-style dwelling that Clay presumed was Cheatham Lodge.