by Stephen King
So they dug the grave in the Head’s garden behind the Lodge and buried him among the beans and tomatoes. Tom and Clay lowered the shrouded form into the hole, which was about three feet deep. The exercise kept them warm, and only when they stopped did they notice the night had grown cold, almost frosty. The stars were brilliant overhead, but a heavy ground-mist was rolling up the Slope. Academy Avenue was already submerged in that rising tide of white; only the steeply slanted roofs of the biggest old houses down there broke its surface.
“I wish someone knew some good poetry,” Jordan said. His cheeks were redder than ever, but his eyes had receded into circular caves and he was shivering in spite of the two sweaters he was wearing. His breath came out in little puffs. “The Head loved poetry, he thought that stuff was the shit. He was…” Jordan’s voice, which had been strangely gay all night, finally broke. “He was so totally old-school.”
Alice folded him against her. Jordan struggled, then gave in.
“Tell you what,” Tom said, “let’s cover him up nice—cover him against the cold—and then I’ll give him some poetry. Would that be okay?”
“Do you really know some?”
“I really do,” Tom said.
“You’re so smart, Tom. Thank you.” And Jordan smiled at him with weary, horrible gratitude.
Filling in the grave was quick, although in the end they had to borrow some earth from the garden’s nether parts to bring it up to dead level. By the time they were finished, Clay was sweating again and he could smell himself. It had been a long time between showers.
Alice had tried to keep Jordan from helping, but he broke free of her and pitched in, using his bare hands to toss earth into the hole. By the time Clay finished tamping the ground with the flat of his spade, the boy was glassy-eyed with exhaustion, all but reeling on his feet like a drunk.
Nevertheless, he looked at Tom. “Go ahead. You promised.” Clay almost expected him to add, And make it good, señor, or I weel put a boolet in you, like a homicidal bandido in a Sam Peckinpah western.
Tom stepped to one end of the grave—Clay thought it was the top, but in his weariness could no longer remember. He could not even remember for sure if the Head’s first name had been Charles or Robert. Runners of mist curled around Tom’s feet and ankles, twined among the dead beanstalks. He removed his baseball cap, and Alice took off hers. Clay reached for his own and remembered he wasn’t wearing one.
“That’s right!” Jordan cried. He was smiling, frantic with understanding. “Hats off! Hats off to the Head!” He was bareheaded himself, but mimed taking a hat off just the same—taking it off and flinging it into the air—and Clay once more found himself fearing for the boy’s sanity. “Now the poem! Come on, Tom!”
“All right,” Tom said, “but you have to be quiet. Show respect.”
Jordan laid a finger across his lips to show he understood, and Clay saw by the brokenhearted eyes above that upraised finger that the boy had not lost his mind yet. His friend, but not his mind.
Clay waited, curious to see how Tom would go on. He expected some Frost, maybe a fragment of Shakespeare (surely the Head would have approved of Shakespeare, even if it had only been When shall we three meet again), perhaps even a little extemporaneous Tom McCourt. What he did not expect was what came from Tom’s mouth in low, precisely measured lines.
“Do not withhold Your mercy from us, O Lord; may Your love and Your truth always protect us. For troubles without numbers surround us; our sins have overtaken us and we cannot see. Our sins are more than the hairs of our heads, and our hearts fail within us. Be pleased, O Lord, to save us; O Lord, come quickly to help us.”
Alice was holding her sneaker and weeping at the foot of the grave. Her head was bowed. Her sobs were quick and low.
Tom pressed on, holding one hand out over the new grave, palm extended, fingers curled in. “May all who seek to take our lives as this life was taken be put to shame and confusion; may all who desire our ruin be turned back in disgrace. May those who say to us, ‘Aha, aha!’ be appalled at their own shame. Here lies the dead, dust of the earth—”
“I’m so sorry, Head!” Jordan cried in a breaking treble voice. “I’m so sorry, it’s not right, sir, I’m so sorry you’re dead—” His eyes rolled up and he crumpled to the new grave. The mist stole its greedy white fingers over him.
Clay picked him up and felt the pulse in Jordan’s neck, strong and regular. “Just fainted. What is it you’re saying, Tom?”
Tom look flustered, embarrassed. “A rather free adaptation of Psalm Forty. Let’s take him inside—”
“No,” Clay said. “If it’s not too long, finish.”
“Yes, please,” Alice said. “Finish. It’s lovely. Like salve on a cut.”
Tom turned and faced the grave again. He seemed to gather himself, or perhaps he was only finding his place. “Here lies the dead, dust of the earth, and here are we the living, poor and needy; Lord, think of us. You are our help and our deliverer; O my God, do not delay. Amen.”
“Amen,” Clay and Alice said together.
“Let’s get the kid inside,” Tom said. “It’s fucking freezing out here.”
“Did you learn that from the holy Hannahs at the First N.E. Church of Christ the Redeemer?” Clay asked.
“Oh, yes,” Tom said. “Many psalms by heart, good for extra desserts. I also learned how to beg on street corners and leaflet a whole Sears parking lot in just twenty minutes with A Million Years in Hell and Not One Drink of Water. Let’s put this kid to bed. I’m betting he’ll sleep through until at least four tomorrow afternoon and wake up feeling a hell of a lot better.”
“What if that man with the torn cheek comes and finds we’re still here after he told us to go?” Alice asked.
Clay thought that was a good question, but not one he needed to spend a lot of time mulling over. Either the Raggedy Man would give them another day’s grace or he wouldn’t. As he took Jordan upstairs to his bed, Clay found he was too tired to care one way or the other.
2
At around four in the morning, Alice bid Clay and Tom a foggy goodnight and stumbled off to bed. The two men sat in the kitchen, drinking iced tea, not talking much. There seemed nothing to say. Then, just before dawn, another of those great groans, made ghostly by distance, rode in on the foggy air from the northeast. It wavered like the cry of a theremin in an old horror movie, and just as it began to fade, a much louder answering cry came from Gaiten, where the Raggedy Man had taken his new, larger flock.
Clay and Tom went out front, pushing aside the barrier of melted boomboxes to get down the porch steps. They could see nothing; the whole world was white. They stood there awhile and went back in.
Neither the death-cry nor the answer from Gaiten woke Alice and Jordan; they had that much to be grateful for. Their road atlas, now bent and crumpled at the corners, was on the kitchen counter. Tom thumbed through it and said, “That might have come from Hooksett or Suncook. They’re both good-sized towns northeast of here—good-sized for New Hampshire, I mean. I wonder how many they got? And how they did it.”
Clay shook his head.
“I hope it was a lot,” Tom said with a thin and charmless smile. “I hope it was at least a thousand, and that they slow-cooked them. I find myself thinking of some restaurant chain or other that used to advertise ‘broasted chicken.’ Are we going tomorrow night?”
“If the Raggedy Man lets us live through today, I guess we ought to. Don’t you think?”
“I don’t see any choice,” Tom said, “but I’ll tell you something, Clay—I feel like a cow being driven down a tin chute into the slaughterhouse. I can almost smell the blood of my little moo-brothers.”
Clay had the same feeling, but the same question recurred: If slaughtering was what they had on their group mind, why not do it here? They could have done it yesterday afternoon, instead of leaving melted boomboxes and Alice’s pet sneaker on the porch.
Tom yawned. “Turning in. Are you good for an
other couple of hours?”
“I could be,” Clay said. In fact, he had never felt less like sleeping. His body was exhausted but his mind kept turning and turning. It would begin to settle a bit, and then he’d recall the sound the pen had made coming out of the Head’s eyesocket: the low squall of metal against bone. “Why?”
“Because if they decide to kill us today, I’d rather go my way than theirs,” Tom said. “I’ve seen theirs. You agree?”
Clay thought that if the collective mind which the Raggedy Man represented had really made the Head stick a fountain pen in his eye, the four remaining residents of Cheatham Lodge might find that suicide was no longer among their options. That was no thought to send Tom to bed on, however. So he nodded.
“I’ll take all the guns upstairs. You’ve got that big old .45, right?”
“The Beth Nickerson special. Right.”
“Good night, then. And if you see them coming—or feel them coming—give a yell.” Tom paused. “If you have time, that is. And if they let you.”
Clay watched Tom leave the kitchen, thinking Tom had been ahead of him all the time. Thinking how much he liked Tom. Thinking he’d like to get to know him better. Thinking the chances of that weren’t good. And Johnny and Sharon? They had never seemed so far away.
3
At eight o’clock that morning, Clay sat on a bench at one end of the Head’s victory garden, telling himself that if he weren’t so tired, he’d get up off his dead ass and make the old fellow some sort of marker. It wouldn’t last long, but the guy deserved it for taking care of his last pupil, if for nothing else. The thing was, he didn’t even know if he could get up, totter into the house, and wake Tom to stand a watch.
Soon they would have a chilly, beautiful autumn day—one made for apple-picking, cider-making, and touch-football games in the backyard. For now the fog was still thick, but the morning sun shone strongly through it, turning the tiny world in which Clay sat to a dazzling white. Fine suspended droplets hung in the air, and hundreds of tiny rainbow wheels circulated in front of his heavy eyes.
Something red materialized out of this burning whiteness. For a moment the Raggedy Man’s hoodie seemed to float by itself, and then, as it came up the garden toward Clay, its occupant’s dark brown face and hands materialized above and below it. This morning the hood was up, framing the smiling disfigurement of the face and those dead-alive eyes.
Broad scholar’s forehead, marred with a slash.
Filthy, shapeless jeans, torn at the pockets and worn more than a week now.
HARVARD across the narrow chest.
Beth Nickerson’s .45 was in the side-holster on his belt. Clay didn’t even touch it. The Raggedy Man stopped about ten feet from him. He—it—was standing on the Head’s grave, and Clay believed that was no accident. “What do you want?” he asked the Raggedy Man, and immediately answered himself: “To. Tell you.”
He sat staring at the Raggedy Man, mute with surprise. He had expected telepathy or nothing. The Raggedy Man grinned—insofar as he could grin, with that badly split lower lip—and spread his hands as if to say Shucks, ‘t’warn’t nuthin.
“Say what you have to say, then,” Clay told him, and tried to prepare for having his voice hijacked a second time. He discovered it was a thing you couldn’t prepare for. It was like being turned into a grinning piece of wood sitting on a ventriloquist’s knee.
“Go. Tonight.” Clay concentrated and said, “Shut up, stop it!”
The Raggedy Man waited, the picture of patience.
“I think I can keep you out if I try hard,” Clay said. “I’m not sure, but I think I can.”
The Raggedy Man waited, his face saying Are you done yet?
“Go ahead,” Clay said, and then said, “I could bring. More. I came. Alone.”
Clay considered the idea of the Raggedy Man’s will joined to that of an entire flock and conceded the point.
“Go. Tonight. North.” Clay waited, and when he was sure the Raggedy Man was done with his voice for the time being, he said, “Where? Why?”
There were no words this time, but an image suddenly rose before him. It was so clear that he didn’t know if it was in his mind or if the Raggedy Man had somehow conjured it on the brilliant screen of the mist. It was what they had seen scrawled in the middle of Academy Avenue in pink chalk:
KASHWAK=NO-FO
“I don’t get it,” he said.
But the Raggedy Man was walking away. Clay saw his red hoodie for a moment, once again seeming to float unoccupied against the brilliant mist; then that was gone, too. Clay was left with only the thin consolation of knowing that they had been going north anyway, and that they had been given another day’s grace. Which meant there was no need to stand a watch. He decided to go to bed and let the others sleep through, as well.
4
Jordan awoke in his right mind, but his nervy brilliance had departed. He nibbled at half a rock-hard bagel and listened dully as Clay recounted his meeting with the Raggedy Man that morning. When Clay finished, Jordan got their road atlas, consulted the index at the back, and then opened it to the western Maine page. “There,” he said, pointing to a town above Fryeburg. “This is Kashwak here, to the east, and Little Kashwak to the west, almost on the Maine-New Hampshire state line. I knew I recognized the name. Because of the lake.” He tapped it. “Almost as big as Sebago.”
Alice leaned closer to read the name on the lake. “Kash… Kashwakamak, I guess it is.”
“It’s in an unincorporated area called TR-90,” Jordan said. He tapped this on the map, also. “Once you know that, Kashwak Equals No-Fo is sort of a no-brainer, wouldn’t you say?”
“It’s a dead zone, right?” Tom said. “No cell phone towers, no microwave towers.”
Jordan gave him a wan smile. “Well, I imagine there are plenty of people with satellite dishes, but otherwise… bingo.”
“I don’t get it,” Alice said. “Why would they want to send us to a no-cell zone where everyone should be more or less all right?”
“Might as well ask why they let us live in the first place,” Tom said.
“Maybe they want to turn us into living guided missiles and use us to bomb the joint,” Jordan said. “Get rid of us and them. Two birds with one stone.”
They considered this in silence for a moment.
“Let’s go and find out,” Alice said, “but I’m not bombing anybody.”
Jordan eyed her bleakly. “You saw what they did to the Head. If it comes right down to it, do you think you’ll have any choice?”
5
There were still shoes on most of the stoops across from the fieldstone pillars marking the entrance to Gaiten Academy, but the doors of the nice-looking homes either stood open or had been torn off their hinges. A few of the dead they saw littered on those lawns as they once more began their trek north were phone-crazies, but most had been innocent pilgrims who had happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were the ones with no shoes on their feet, but there was really no need to look as far as their feet; many of the reprisal victims had literally been torn limb from limb.
Beyond the school, where Academy Avenue once more became Route 102, there was carnage on both sides for half a mile. Alice walked with her eyes resolutely closed, allowing Tom to lead her as if she were blind. Clay offered to do the same for Jordan, but he only shook his head and walked stolidly up the centerline, a skinny kid with a pack on his back and too much hair on his head. After a few cursory glances at the kill-off, he looked down at his sneakers.
“There are hundreds,” Tom said once. It was eight o’clock and full dark, but they could still see far more than they wanted to. Lying curled around a stop-sign at the corner of Academy and Spofford was a girl in red pants and a white sailor blouse. She looked no more than nine, and she was shoeless. Twenty yards away stood the open door of the house from which she had probably been dragged, screaming for mercy. “Hundreds.”
“Maybe not that many,” Clay
said. “Some of our kind were armed. They shot quite a few of the bastards. Knifed a few more. I even saw one with an arrow sticking out of his—”
“We caused this,” Tom said. “Do you think we have a kind anymore?”
This question was answered while they were eating their cold lunch at a roadside picnic spot four hours later. By then they were on Route 156, and according to the sign, this was a Scenic Turnout, offering a view of Historic Flint Hill to the west. Clay imagined the view was good, if you were eating lunch here at noon rather than midnight, with gas lanterns at either end of your picnic table to see by.
They had reached the dessert course—stale Oreos—when a party of half a dozen came toiling along, all of them older folks. Three were pushing shopping carts full of supplies and all were armed. These were the first other travelers they had seen since setting out again.
“Hey!” Tom called, giving them a wave. “Got another picnic table over here, if you want to sit a spell!”
They looked over. The older of the two women in the party, a grandmotherly type with lots of white, fluffy hair that shone in the starlight, started to wave. Then she stopped.
“That’s them,” one of the men said, and Clay did not mistake either the loathing or the fear in the man’s voice. “That’s the Gaiten bunch.”
One of the other men said, “Go to hell, buddy.” They kept on walking, even moving a little faster, although the grandmotherly type was limping, and the man beside her had to help her past a Subaru that had locked bumpers with somebody’s abandoned Saturn.
Alice jumped up, almost knocking over one of the lanterns. Clay grabbed her arm. “Don’t bother, kiddo.”
She ignored him. “At least we did something?” she shouted after them. “What did you do? Just what the fuck did you do?”
“Tell you what we didn’t do,” one of the men said. The little group was past the scenic turnout now, and he had to look back over his shoulder to talk to her. He could do this because the road was free of abandoned vehicles for a couple of hundred yards here. “We didn’t get a bunch of normies killed. There are more of them than us, in case you didn’t notice—”