by Stephen King
“Don’t float away yet. Can you describe the man?”
“A white guy with white hair. He was old.”
“Old-old, or just a little bit old?”
Barbara’s eyes are growing glassy. “Older than Dad, not as old as Grampa.”
“Sixtyish? Sixty-fiveish?”
“Yeah, I guess. Bill’s age, more or less.” Her eyes suddenly spring wide open. “Oh, guess what? I remember something. I thought it was a little weird, and so did Hilda.”
“What was that?”
“He said his name was Myron Zakim, and his card said Myron Zakim, but there were initials on his briefcase that were different.”
“Can you remember what they were?”
“No … sorry …” She’s floating away, all right.
“Will you think about that first thing when you wake up, Barb? Your mind will be fresh then, and it might be important.”
“Okay …”
“I wish Hilda hadn’t thrown hers away,” Holly says. She gets no reply, nor expects one; she often talks to herself. Barbara’s breathing has grown deep and slow. Holly begins buttoning her coat.
“Dinah has one,” Barbara says in a faraway dreaming voice. “Hers works. She plays Crossy Road on it … and Plants Vs. Zombies … also, she downloaded the whole Divergent trilogy, but she said it came in all jumbled up.”
Holly stops buttoning. She knows Dinah Scott, has seen her at the Robinson house many times, playing board games or watching TV, often staying for supper. And drooling over Jerome, as all of Barbara’s friends do.
“Did the same man give it to her?”
Barbara doesn’t answer. Biting her lip, not wanting to press her but needing to, Holly shakes Barbara by the shoulder and asks again.
“No,” Barbara says in the same faraway voice. “She got it from the website.”
“What website was that, Barbara?”
Her only answer is a snore. Barbara is gone.
25
Holly knows that the Robinsons will be waiting for her in the lobby, so she hurries into the gift shop, lurks behind a display of teddy bears (Holly is an accomplished lurker), and calls Bill. She asks if he knows Barbara’s friend Dinah Scott.
“Sure,” he says. “I know most of her friends. The ones that come to the house, anyway. So do you.”
“I think you should go to see her.”
“You mean tonight?”
“I mean right away. She’s got a Zappit.” Holly takes a deep breath. “They’re dangerous.” She can’t quite bring herself to say what she is coming to believe: that they are suicide machines.
26
In Room 217, orderlies Norm Richard and Kelly Pelham lift Brady back into bed while Mavis Rainier supervises. Norm picks up the Zappit console from the floor and stares at the swimming fish on the screen.
“Why doesn’t he just catch pneumonia and die, like the rest of the gorks?” Kelly asks.
“This one’s too ornery to die,” Mavis says, then notices Norm staring down at the swimming fish. His eyes are wide and his mouth is hung ajar.
“Wake up, splendor in the grass,” she says, and snatches the gadget away. She pushes the power button and tosses it into the top drawer of Brady’s nightstand. “We’ve got miles to go before we sleep.”
“Huh?” Norm looks down at his hands, as if expecting to see the Zappit still in them.
Kelly asks Nurse Rainier if maybe she wants to take Hartsfield’s blood pressure. “O2 looks a little low,” he says.
Mavis considers this, then says, “Fuck him.”
They leave.
27
In Sugar Heights, the city’s poshest neighborhood, an old Chevy Malibu spotted with primer paint creeps up to a closed gate on Lilac Drive. Artfully scrolled into the wrought iron are the initials Barbara Robinson failed to remember: FB. Z-Boy gets out from behind the wheel, his old parka (a rip in the back and another in the left sleeve thriftily mended with masking tape) flapping around him. He taps the correct code into the keypad, and the gates begin to swing open. He gets back into the car, reaches under the seat, and brings out two items. One is a plastic soda bottle with the neck cut off. The interior has been packed with steel wool. The other is a .32-caliber revolver. Z-Boy slips the muzzle of the .32 into this homemade silencer—another Brady Hartsfield invention—and holds it on his lap. With his free hand he pilots the Malibu up the smooth, curving driveway.
Ahead, the porch-mounted motion lights come on.
Behind, the wrought iron gates swing silently shut.
LIBRARY AL
It didn’t take Brady long to realize he was pretty much finished as a physical being. He was born stupid but didn’t stay that way, as the saying goes.
Yes, there was physical therapy—Dr. Babineau decreed it, and Brady was hardly in a position to protest—but there was only so much therapy could accomplish. He was eventually able to shamble thirty feet or so along the corridor some patients called the Torture Highway, but only with the help of Rehab Care Coordinator Ursula Haber, the bull dyke Nazi who ran the place.
“One more step, Mr. Hartsfield,” Haber would exhort, and when he managed one more step the bitch would ask for one more and one more after that. When Brady was finally allowed to collapse into his wheelchair, trembling and soaked with sweat, he liked to imagine stuffing oil-soaked rags up Haber’s snatch and setting them on fire.
“Good job!” she’d cry. “Good job, Mr. Hartsfield!”
And if he managed to gargle something that bore a passing resemblance to thank you, she would look around at whoever happened to be near, smiling proudly. Look! My pet monkey can talk!
He could talk (more and better than they knew), and he could shamble ten yards up the Torture Highway. On his best days he could eat custard without spilling too much down his front. But he couldn’t dress himself, couldn’t tie his shoes, couldn’t wipe himself after taking a shit, couldn’t even use the remote control (so reminiscent of Thing One and Thing Two back in the good old days) to watch television. He could grasp it, but his motor control wasn’t even close to good enough for him to manipulate the small buttons. If he did manage to hit the power button, he usually ended up staring at nothing but a blank screen and the SEARCHING FOR SIGNAL message. This infuriated him—in the early days of 2012, everything infuriated him—but he was careful not to show it. Angry people were angry for a reason, and gorks weren’t supposed to have reasons for anything.
Sometimes lawyers from the District Attorney’s office dropped by. Babineau protested these visits, telling the lawyers they were setting him back and therefore working against their own long-term interests, but it did no good.
Sometimes cops came with the lawyers from the DA’s office, and once a cop came on his own. He was a fat cocksucker with a crewcut and a cheerful demeanor. Brady was in his chair, so the fat cocksucker sat on Brady’s bed. The fat cocksucker told Brady that his niece had been at the ’Round Here concert. “Just thirteen years old and crazy about that band,” he said, chuckling. Still chuckling, he leaned forward over his big stomach and punched Brady in the balls.
“A little something from my niece,” the fat cocksucker said. “Did you feel it? Man, I hope so.”
Brady did feel it, but not as much as the fat cocksucker probably hoped, because everything had gone kind of vague between his waist and knees. Some circuit in his brain that was supposed to be controlling that area had burned out, he supposed. That would ordinarily be bad news, but it was good news when you had to cope with a right hook to the family jewels. He sat there, his face blank. A little drool on his chin. But he filed away the fat cocksucker’s name. Moretti. It went on his list.
Brady had a long list.
• • •
He retained a thin hold over Sadie MacDonald by virtue of that first, wholly accidental safari into her brain. (He retained an even greater hold over the idiot orderly’s brain, but visiting there was like taking a vacation in Lowtown.) On several occasions Brady was able to nudge her
toward the window, the site of her first seizure. Usually she only glanced out and then went about her work, which was frustrating, but one day in June of 2012, she had another of those mini-seizures. Brady found himself looking out through her eyes once more, but this time he was not content to stay on the passenger side, just watching the scenery. This time he wanted to drive.
Sadie reached up and caressed her breasts. Squeezed them. Brady felt a low tingle begin between Sadie’s legs. He was getting her a little hot. Interesting, but hardly useful.
He thought of turning her around and walking her out of the room. Going down the corridor. Getting a drink of water from the fountain. His very own organic wheelchair. Only what if someone talked to him? What would he say? Or what if Sadie took over again once she was away from the sunflashes, and started screaming that Hartsfield was inside of her? They’d think she was crazy. They might put her on leave. If they did that, Brady would lose his access to her.
He burrowed deeper into her mind instead, watching the thoughtfish go flashing back and forth. They were clearer now, but mostly uninteresting.
One, though … the red one …
It came into view as soon as he thought about it, because he was making her think of it.
Big red fish.
A fatherfish.
Brady snatched at it and caught it. It was easy. His body was next to useless, but inside Sadie’s mind he was as agile as a ballet dancer. The fatherfish had molested her regularly between the ages of six and eleven. Finally he had gone all the way and fucked her. Sadie told a teacher at school, and her father was arrested. He had killed himself while out on bail.
Mostly to amuse himself, Brady began to release his own fish into the aquarium of Sadie MacDonald’s mind: tiny poisonous blowfish that were little more than exaggerations of thoughts she herself harbored in the twilight area that exists between the conscious mind and the subconscious.
That she had led him on.
That she had actually enjoyed his attentions.
That she was responsible for his death.
That when you looked at it that way, it hadn’t been suicide at all. When you looked at it that way, she had murdered him.
Sadie jerked violently, hands flying up to the sides of her head, and turned away from the window. Brady felt that moment of nauseating, tumbling vertigo as he was ejected from her mind. She looked at him, her face pale and dismayed.
“I think I passed out for a second or two,” she said, then laughed shakily. “But you won’t tell, will you, Brady?”
Of course not, and after that he found it easier and easier to get into her head. She no longer had to look at the sunlight on the windshields across the way; all she had to do was come into the room. She was losing weight. Her vague prettiness was disappearing. Sometimes her uniform was dirty and sometimes her stockings were torn. Brady continued to plant his depth charges: you led him on, you enjoyed it, you were responsible, you don’t deserve to live.
Hell, it was something to do.
• • •
Sometimes the hospital got freebies, and in September of 2012 it received a dozen Zappit game consoles, either from the company that made them or from some charity organization. Admin shipped them to the tiny library next to the hospital’s nondenominational chapel. There an orderly unpacked them, looked them over, decided they were stupid and outdated, and stuck them on a back shelf. It was there that Library Al Brooks found them in November, and took one for himself.
Al enjoyed a few of the games, like the one where you had to get Pitfall Harry safely past the crevasses and poisonous snakes, but what he enjoyed most was Fishin’ Hole. Not the game itself, which was stupid, but the demo screen. He supposed people would laugh, but it was no joke to Al. When he was upset about something (his brother yelling at him about not putting out the garbage for Thursday morning pickup, or a crabby call from his daughter in Oklahoma City), those slowly gliding fish and the little tune always mellowed him out. Sometimes he lost all track of time. It was amazing.
On an evening not long before 2012 became 2013, Al had an inspiration. Hartsfield in 217 was incapable of reading, and had shown no interest in books or music on CD. If someone put earphones on his head, he clawed at them until he got them off, as if he found them confining. He would also be incapable of manipulating the small buttons below the Zappit’s screen, but he could look at the Fishin’ Hole demo. Maybe he’d like it, or some of the other demo screens. If he did, maybe some of the other patients (to his credit, Al never thought of them as gorks) would, too, and that would be a good thing, because a few of the brain-damaged patients in the Bucket were occasionally violent. If the demo screens calmed them down, the docs, nurses, and orderlies—even the janitors—would have an easier time.
He might even get a bonus. It probably wouldn’t happen, but a man could dream.
• • •
He entered Room 217 one afternoon in early December of 2012, shortly after Hartsfield’s only regular visitor had left. This was an ex-detective named Hodges, who had been instrumental in Hartsfield’s capture, although he hadn’t been the one who had actually smacked his head and damaged his brain.
Hodges’s visits upset Hartsfield. After he was gone, things fell over in 217, the water turned on and off in the shower, and sometimes the bathroom door flew open or slammed shut. The nurses had seen these things, and were sure Hartsfield was causing them, but Dr. Babineau pooh-poohed that idea. He claimed it was exactly the kind of hysterical notion that got a hold on certain women (even though several of the Bucket nurses were men). Al knew the stories were true, because he had seen manifestations himself on several occasions, and he did not think of himself as a hysterical person. Quite the opposite.
On one memorable occasion he had heard something in Hartsfield’s room as he was passing, opened the door, and saw the window-blinds doing a kind of maniacal boogaloo. This was shortly after one of Hodges’s visits. It had gone on for nearly thirty seconds before the blinds stilled again.
Although he tried to be friendly—he tried to be friendly with everyone—Al did not approve of Bill Hodges. The man seemed to be gloating over Hartsfield’s condition. Reveling in it. Al knew Hartsfield was a bad guy who had murdered innocent people, but what the hell did that matter when the man who had done those things no longer existed? What remained was little more than a husk. So what if he could rattle the blinds, or turn the water on and off? Such things hurt no one.
• • •
“Hello, Mr. Hartsfield,” Al said on that night in December. “I brought you something. Hope you’ll take a look.”
He turned the Zappit on and poked the screen to bring up the Fishin’ Hole demo. The fish began to swim and the tune began to play. As always, Al was soothed, and took a moment to enjoy the sensation. Before he could turn the console so Hartsfield could see, he found himself pushing his library cart in Wing A, on the other side of the hospital.
The Zappit was gone.
This should have upset him, but it didn’t. It seemed perfectly okay. He was a little tired, and seemed to be having trouble gathering his scattered thoughts, but otherwise he was fine. Happy. He looked down at his left hand and saw he had drawn a large Z on the back with the pen he always kept in the pocket of his tunic.
Z for Z-Boy, he thought, and laughed.
• • •
Brady did not make a decision to leap into Library Al; seconds after the old geezer looked down at the console in his hand, Brady was in. There was no sense of being an interloper in the library guy’s head, either. For now it was Brady’s body, as much as a Hertz sedan would have been his car for as long as he chose to drive it.
The library guy’s core consciousness was still there—someplace—but it was just a soothing hum, like the sound of a furnace in the cellar on a cold day. Yet he had access to all of Alvin Brooks’s memories and all of his stored knowledge. There was a fair amount of this latter, because before retiring from his full-time job at the age of fifty-eight, the ma
n had been an electrician, then known as Sparky Brooks instead of Library Al. If Brady had wanted to rewire a circuit, he could have done so easily, although he understood he might no longer have this ability once he returned to his own body.
Thinking of his body alarmed him, and he bent over the man slumped in the chair. The eyes were half-closed, showing only the whites. The tongue lolled from one corner of the mouth. Brady put a gnarled hand on Brady’s chest and felt a slow rise and fall. So that was all right, but God, he looked horrible. A skin-wrapped skeleton. This was what Hodges had done to him.
He left the room and toured the hospital, feeling a species of mad exhilaration. He smiled at everyone. He couldn’t help it. With Sadie MacDonald he had been afraid of fucking up. He still was, but not so much. This was better. He was wearing Library Al like a tight glove. When he passed Anna Corey, the A Wing head housekeeper, he asked how her husband was bearing up with those radiation treatments. She told him Ellis was doing pretty well, all things considered, and thanked him for asking.
In the lobby, he parked his cart outside the men’s bathroom, went in, sat on the toilet, and examined the Zappit. As soon as he saw the swimming fish, he understood what must have happened. The idiots who had created this particular game had also created, certainly by accident, a hypnotic effect. Not everyone would be susceptible, but Brady thought plenty of people would be, and not just those prone to mild seizures, like Sadie MacDonald.
He knew from reading he’d done in his basement control room that several electronic console and arcade games were capable of initiating seizures or light hypnotic states in perfectly normal people, causing the makers to print a warning (in extremely fine print) on many of the instruction sheets: do not play for prolonged periods, do not sit closer than three feet to the screen, do not play if you have a history of epilepsy.
The effect wasn’t restricted to video games, either. At least one episode of the Pokémon cartoon series had been banned outright when thousands of kids complained of headaches, blurred vision, nausea, and seizures. The culprit was believed to be a sequence in the episode where a series of missiles were set off, causing a strobe effect. Some combination of the swimming fish and the little tune worked the same way. Brady was surprised the company that made the Zappit consoles hadn’t been deluged with complaints. He found out later that there had been complaints, but not many. He came to believe that there were two reasons for that. First, the dumbshit Fishin’ Hole game itself did not have the same effect. Second, hardly anybody bought the Zappit game consoles to begin with. In the jargon of computer commerce, it was a brick.