by Stephen King
On one side of the john there was a stool, on the other a claw-foot tub with a shower attachment that made her think of Hitchcock’s Psycho (but every shower made her think of that damned movie since she’d seen it in Times Square). There was also a porcelain washstand set in a waist-high wooden cabinet—good old plainoak rather than ironwood, she judged. There was a mirror above it. She presumed you swung it out and there were your pills and potions. All the comforts of home.
She removed the napkin with a wince and a little hissing cry. It had stuck in the drying blood, and pulling it away hurt. She was dismayed by the amount of blood on her cheeks, lips, and chin—not to mention her neck and the shoulder of her shirt. She told herself not to let it make her crazy; you ripped the top off something and it was going to bleed, that was all. Especially if it was on your stupid face.
In the other room she heard Joe say something, she couldn’t tell what, and Roland’s response: a few words with a chuckle tacked on at the end. So weird to hear him do that, she thought. Almost like he’s drunk. Had she ever seen Roland drunk? She realized she had not. Never falling-down drunk, never mother-naked, never fully caught by laughter…until now.
Ten’ yo business, woman, Detta told her.
“All right,” she muttered. “All right, all right.”
Thinking drunk. Thinking naked. Thinking lost in laughter. Thinking they were all so close to being the same thing.
Maybe they were the same thing.
Then she got up on the stool and turned on the water. It came in a gush, blotting out the sounds from the other room.
She settled for cold, splashing it gently on her face, then using a facecloth—even more gently—to clean the skin around the sore. When that was done, she patted the sore itself. Doing it didn’t hurt as much as she’d been afraid it might. Susannah was a little encouraged. When she was done, she rinsed out Joe’s facecloth before the bloodstains could set and leaned close to the mirror. What she saw made her breathe a sigh of relief. Slapping her hand incautiously to her face like that had torn the entire top off the sore, but maybe in the end that would turn out to be for the best. One thing was for sure: if Joe had a bottle of hydrogen peroxide or some kind of antibiotic cream in his medicine cabinet, she intended to give the damned mess a good cleaning-out while it was open. And ne’mine how much it might sting. Such a cleansing was due and overdue. Once it was finished, she’d bandage it over and then just hope for the best.
She spread the facecloth on the side of the basin to dry, then plucked a towel (it was the same shade of pink as the wallpaper) from a fluffy stack on a nearby shelf. She got it halfway to her face, then froze. There was a piece of notepaper lying on the next towel in the stack. It was headed with a flower-decked bench being lowered by a pair of happy cartoon angels. Beneath was this printed, bold-face line:
And, in faded fountain pen ink:
Frowning, Susannah plucked the sheet of notepaper from the stack of towels. Who had left it here? Joe? She doubted it like hell. She turned the paper over. Here the same hand had written:
In the other room, Joe continued to speak and this time Roland burst out laughing instead of just chuckling. It sounded to Susannah as if Joe had resumed his monologue. In a way she could understand that—he’d been doing something he loved, something he hadn’t had a chance to do in a good long stretch of years—but part of her didn’t like the idea at all. That Joe would resume while she was in the bathroom tending to herself, that Roland would let him resume. Would listen and laugh while she was shedding blood. It seemed like a rotten, boys-clubby kind of thing to do. She supposed she had gotten used to better from Eddie.
Why don’t you forget the boys for the time being and concentrate on what’s right in front of you? What does it mean?
One thing seemed obvious: someone had expected her to come in here and find that note. Not Roland, not Joe. Her. What a bad girl, it said. Girl.
But who could have known? Who could have been sure? It wasn’t as if she made a habit of slapping her face (or her chest, or her knee) when she laughed; she couldn’t remember a single other instance when—
But she could. Once. At a Dean Martin–Jerry Lewis movie. Dopes at Sea, or something like that. She’d been caught up in the same fashion then, laughing simply because the laughter had reached some point of critical mass and become self-feeding. The whole audience—at the Clark in Times Square, for all she knew—doing the same, rocking and rolling, swinging and swaying, spraying popcorn from mouths that were no longer their own. Mouths that belonged, at least for a few minutes, to Martin and Lewis, those dopes at sea. But it had only happened that once.
Comedy plus tragedy equals make-believe. But there’s no tragedy here, is there?
She didn’t expect an answer to this, but she got one. It came in the cold voice of intuition.
Not yet, there isn’t.
For no reason whatsoever she found herself thinking of Lippy. Grinning, gruesome Lippy. Did the folken laugh in hell? Susannah was somehow sure they did. They grinned like Lippy the Wonder-Nag when Satan began his
(take my horse…please)
routine, and then they laughed. Helplessly. Hopelessly. For all of eternity, may it please ya not at all.
What in the hell’s wrong with you, woman?
In the other room, Roland laughed again. Oy barked, and that also sounded like laughter.
Odd’s Lane, Odd Lane…think about it.
What was there to think about? One was the name of the street, the other was the same thing, only without the—
“Whoa-back, wait a minute,” she said in a low voice. Little more than a whisper, really, and who did she think would hear her? Joe was talking—pretty much nonstop, it sounded like—and Roland was laughing. So who did she think might be listening? The cellar-dweller, if there really was one?
“Whoa-on a minute, just wait.”
She closed her eyes and once more saw the two street-signs on their pole, signs that were actually a little below the pilgrims, because the newcomers had been standing on a snowbank nine feet high. TOWER ROAD, one of the signs had read—that one pointing to the plowed road that disappeared over the horizon. The other, the one indicating the short lane with the cottages on it, had said ODD’S LANE, only…
“Only it didn’t,” she murmured, clenching the hand that wasn’t holding the note into a fist. “It didn’t.”
She could see it clearly enough in her mind’s eye: ODD’S LANE, with the apostrophe and the S added, and why would somebody do that? Was the sign-changer maybe a compulsive neatnik who couldn’t stand—
What? Couldn’t stand what?
Beyond the closed bathroom door, Roland roared louder than ever. Something fell over and broke. He’s not used to laughing like that, Susannah thought. You best look out, Roland, or you’ll do yourself damage. Laugh yourself into a hernia, or something.
Think about it, her unknown correspondent had advised, and she was trying. Was there something about the words odd and lane that someone didn’t want them to see? If so, that person had no need to worry, because she sure wasn’t seeing it. She wished Eddie was here. Eddie was the one who was good at the funky stuff: jokes and riddles and…an…
Her breath stopped. An expression of wide-eyed comprehension started to dawn her face, and on the face of her twin in the mirror. She had no pencil and was terrible at the sort of mental rearrangements that she now had to—
Balanced on the stool, Susannah leaned over the waist-high washstand and blew on the mirror, fogging it. She printed ODD LANE. Looked at it with growing understanding and dismay. In the other room, Roland laughed harder than ever and now she recognized what she should have seen thirty valuable seconds ago: that laughter wasn’t merry. It was jagged and out of control, the laughter of a man struggling for breath. Roland was laughing the way the folken laughed when comedy turned to tragedy. The way folken laughed in hell.
Below ODD LANE she used the tip of her finger to print DANDELO, the anagram Eddie might have
seen right away, and surely once he realized the apostrophe-S on the sign had been added to distract them.
In the other room the laughter dropped and changed, becoming a sound that was alarming instead of amusing. Oy was barking crazily, and Roland—
Roland was choking.
Chapter VI:
Patrick Danville
One
She wasn’t wearing her gun. Joe had insisted she take the La-Z-Boy recliner when they’d returned to the living room after dinner, and she’d put the revolver on the magazine-littered end-table beside it, after rolling the cylinder and drawing the shells. The shells were in her pocket.
Susannah tore open the bathroom door and scrambled back into the living room. Roland was lying on the floor between the couch and the television, his face a terrible purple color. He was scratching at his swollen throat and still laughing. Their host was standing over him, and the first thing she saw was that his hair—that baby-fine, shoulder-length white hair—was now almost entirely black. The lines around his eyes and mouth had been erased. Instead of ten years younger, Joe Collins now looked twenty or even thirty years younger.
The son of a bitch.
The vampire son of a bitch.
Oy leaped at him and seized Joe’s left leg just above the knee. “Twenny-five, sissy-four, nineteen, hike!” Joe cried merrily, and kicked out, now as agile as Fred Astaire. Oy flew through the air and hit the wall hard enough to knock a plaque reading GOD BLESS OUR HOME to the floor. Joe turned back to Roland.
“What I think,” he said, “is that women need a reason to have sex.” Joe put one foot on Roland’s chest—like a big-game hunter with his trophy, Susannah thought. “Men, on the other hand, only need a place! Bing!” He popped his eyes. “The thing about sex is that God gives men a brain and a dick, but only enough blood to operate one at a—”
He never heard her approach or lift herself into the La-Z-Boy in order to gain the necessary height; he was concentrating too completely on what he was doing. Susannah laced her hands together into a single fist, raised them to the height of her right shoulder, then brought them down and sideways with all the force she could manage. The fist struck the side of Joe’s head hard enough to knock him away. She had connected with solid bone, however, and the pain in her hands was excruciating.
Joe staggered, waving his arms for balance and looking around at her. His upper lip rose, exposing his teeth—perfectly ordinary teeth, and why not? He wasn’t the sort of vampire who survived on blood. This was Empathica, after all. And the face around those teeth was changing: darkening, contracting, turning into something that was no longer human. It was the face of a psychotic clown.
“You,” he said, but before he could say anything else, Oy had raced forward again. There was no need for the bumbler to use his teeth this time because their host was still staggering. Oy crouched behind the thing’s ankle and Dandelo simply fell over him, his curses ceasing abruptly when he struck his head. The blow might have put him out if not for the homey rag rug covering the hardwood. As it was he forced himself to a sitting position almost at once, looking around groggily.
Susannah knelt by Roland, who was also trying to sit up but not doing as well. She seized his gun in its holster, but he closed a hand around her wrist before she could pull it out. Instinct, of course, and to be expected, but Susannah felt close to panic as Dandelo’s shadow fell over them.
“You bitch, I’ll teach you to interrupt a man when he’s on a—”
“Roland, let it go!” she screamed, and he did.
Dandelo dropped, meaning to land on her and crush the gun between them, but she was an instant too quick. She rolled aside and he landed on Roland, instead. Susannah heard the tortured Owuff! as the gunslinger lost whatever breath he had managed to regain. She raised herself on one arm, panting, and pointed the gun at the one on top, the one undergoing some horridly busy change inside his clothes. Dandelo raised his hands, which were empty. Of course they were, it wasn’t his hands he used to kill with. As he did so, his features began to pull together, becoming more and more surface things—not features at all but markings on some animal’s hide or an insect’s carapace.
“Stop!” he cried in a voice that was dropping in pitch and becoming something like a cicada’s buzz. “I want to tell you the one about the archbishop and the chorus girl!”
“Heard it,” she said, and shot him twice, one bullet following another into his brain from just above what had been his right eye.
Two
Roland floundered to his feet. His hair was matted to the sides of his swollen face. When she tried to take his hand, he waved her away and staggered to the front door of the little cottage, which now looked dingy and ill-lit to Susannah. She saw there were food-stains on the rug, and a large water-blemish on one wall. Had those things been there before? And dear Lord in heaven, what exactly had they eaten for supper? She decided she didn’t want to know, as long as it didn’t make her sick. As long as it wasn’t poisonous.
Roland of Gilead pulled open the door. The wind ripped it from his grasp and threw it against the wall with a bang. He staggered two steps into the screaming blizzard, bent forward with his hands placed on his lower thighs, and vomited. She saw the jet of egested material, and how the wind whipped it away into the dark. When Roland came back in, his shirt and the side of his face were rimed with snow. It was fiercely hot in the cottage; that was something else Dandelo’s glammer had hidden from them until now. She saw that the thermostat—a plain old Honeywell not much different from the one in her New York apartment—was still on the wall. She went to it and examined it. It was twisted as far as it would go, beyond the eighty-five-degree mark. She pushed it back to seventy with the tip of a finger, then turned to survey the room. The fireplace was actually twice the size it had appeared to them, and filled with enough logs to make it roar like a steel-furnace. There was nothing she could do about that for the time being, but it would eventually die down.
The dead thing on the rug had mostly burst out of its clothes. To Susannah it now looked like some sort of bug with misshapen appendages—almost arms and legs—sticking out of the sleeves of its shirt and the legs of its jeans. The back of the shirt had split down the middle and what she saw in the gap was a kind of shell on which rudimentary human features were printed. She would not have believed anything could be worse than Mordred in his spider-form, but this thing was. Thank God it was dead.
The tidy, well-lit cottage—like something out of a fairy-tale, and hadn’t she seen that from the first?—was now a dim and smoky peasant’s hut. There were still electric lights, but they looked old and long-used, like the kind of fixtures one might find in a flophouse hotel. The rag rug was dark with dirt as well as splotched with spilled food, and unraveling in places.
“Roland, are you all right?”
Roland looked at her, and then, slowly, went to his knees before her. For a moment she thought he was fainting, and she was alarmed. When she realized, only a second later, what was really happening, she was more alarmed still.
“Gunslinger, I was ’mazed,” Roland said in a husky, trembling voice. “I was taken in like a child, and I cry your pardon.”
“Roland, no! Git up!” That was Detta, who always seemed to come out when Susannah was under great strain. She thought, It’s a wonder I didn’t say “Git up, honky,” and had to choke back a cry of hysterical laughter. He would not have understood.
“Give me pardon, first,” Roland said, not looking at her.
She fumbled for the formula and found it, which was a relief. She couldn’t stand to see him on his knees like that. “Rise, gunslinger, I give you pardon in good heart.” She paused, then added: “If I save your life another nine times, we’ll be somewhere close to even.”
He said, “Your kind heart makes me ashamed of my own,” and rose to his feet. The terrible color was fading from his cheeks. He looked at the thing on the rug, casting its grotesquely misshapen shadow up the wall in the firelight. Looked
around at the close little hut with its ancient fixtures and flickering electric bulbs.
“What he fed us was all right,” he said. It was as if he’d read her mind and seen the worst fear that it held. “He’d never poison what he meant to…eat.”
She was holding his gun out to him, butt first. He took it and reloaded the two empty chambers before dropping it back into the holster. The hut’s door was still open and snow came blowing in. It had already created a white delta in the little entryway, where their makeshift hide coats hung. The room was a little cooler now, a little less like a sauna.
“How did you know?” he asked.
She thought back to the hotel where Mia had left Black Thirteen. Later on, after they’d left, Jake and Callahan had been able to get into Room 1919 because someone had left them a note and
(dad-a-chee)
a key. Jake’s name and This is the truth had been written on the envelope in a hybrid of cursive script and printing. She was sure that if she had that envelope with its brief message and compared it to the message she’d found in the bathroom, she would find the same hand made both.
According to Jake, the desk-clerk at the New York Plaza–Park Hotel had told them the message had been left by a man named Stephen King.
“Come with me,” she said. “Into the bathroom.”
Three
Like the rest of the hut, the bathroom was smaller now, not much more than a closet. The tub was old and rusty, with a thin layer of dirt in the bottom. It looked like it had last been used…