by Stephen King
“The parlor tricks of Pilate’s descendants are no match for the Lord we serve!”
“Praise God,” murmured one of the militiamen.
“That’s right! Praise Him. Yessir.” Mr. Brightleaf clapped his hands. “So let’s get this stuff off my missus.”
One of his men passed him a set of poultry shears. Kinsman bent and began to carefully snip at the webbing that coated his wife’s face. Frank leaned forward in his chair.
He felt an uh-oh coming.
6
When he entered the bedroom and saw Magda lying under the covers, masked in what looked sort of like Marshmallow Fluff, Anton dropped to his knees beside her, banged the jar with his shake down on the nightstand and, spying the trimmers—probably she had been clipping her eyebrows using her iPhone camera again—went right to work cutting it off.
Had someone done this to her? Had she done it to herself? Was it some kind of bizarre accident? An allergic reaction? Some crazy beauty treatment gone wrong? It was confounding, it was scary, and Anton didn’t want to lose his mother.
Once the webbing was sliced open, he cast the bathroom trimmers aside, and dug his fingers into the opening in the material. It was sticky, but the stuff peeled, stretching and separating from Magda’s cheeks in gummy white whorls. Her worn face with its choppy wrinkles around the eyes, her dear face that Anton had momentarily been certain would be melted beneath the weird white coating (it was kind of like the fairy handkerchiefs he saw glistening in the grass in the dawn yards of the first couple of pools each day), emerged unharmed. The skin was a bit flushed and warm to the touch, but otherwise she appeared no different than before.
A low grumble began to come from inside her throat, almost a snore. Her eyelids were working, trembling from the movement of her eyes beneath the skin. Her lips opened and shut. A little spittle dripped from the corner of her mouth.
“Mama? Mama? Can you wake up for me?”
It seemed she could, because her eyes opened. Blood clouded the pupils, wafting across the sclera. She blinked several times. Her gaze shifted around the room.
Anton slipped an arm under his mother’s shoulders and raised her to a sitting position in the bed. The noise from her throat grew louder; not a snore now but more like a growl.
“Mama? Should I call an ambulance? You want an ambulance? You want me to get a glass of water for you?” The questions came out in a rush. Anton was relieved, though. She continued to look around the bedroom, seeming to regain her bearings.
Her gaze stopped on the nightstand: faux Tiffany lamp, half-drunk jar of power shake, Bible, iPhone. The growling noise was louder. It was like she was building up to a yell or maybe a scream. Was it possible she didn’t recognize him?
“That’s my drink, Mama,” Anton said, as she reached out and grabbed hold of the jar with the shake. “No thanks to you, ha-ha. You forget to make it, you goose.”
She swung it, belting him across the side of his head, the connection a dull bonk of plastic finding bone. Anton tumbled backward, feeling pain and wet and bafflement. He landed on his knees. His sight focused on a green splatter on the beige carpet beneath him. Red dripped into the green. What a mess, he thought, just as his mother hit him with the jar again, this time flush against the back of his skull. There was a sharper crack upon impact—the thick plastic of the blender jar splitting. Anton’s face slammed forward into the shake splatter on the bristly mat of the beige carpet. He inhaled blood and shake and carpet fiber, and threw out a hand to pull himself away, but every part of him, every wonderful muscle, had gone heavy and limp. A lion was roaring behind him and if he was going to help his mother get away from it, he needed to get up and find the back of his head.
He tried to call for Magda to run but what came out was a gurgle and his mouth was full of carpet.
A weight fell on his spine and as this new pain added itself to the old pain, Anton hoped that his mother had heard him, that she might yet escape.
7
A homeless dog started barking in one of the holding cages, and two others joined in. The nameless mongrel at his feet—so like the one Fritz Meshaum had smashed up—whined. It was now sitting up. Frank absently ran a hand along its spine, calming it. His eyes stayed locked on the screen. One of the young men attending Kinsman Brightleaf—not the one who’d handed him the poultry shears, the other one—grabbed his shoulder. “Dad? Maybe you shouldn’t do it.”
Brightleaf shrugged the hand away. “God says come into the light! Susannah—Kinswoman Brightleaf—God says come into the light! Come into the light!”
“Come into the light!” echoed the man who’d passed the shears, and Brightleaf’s son reluctantly joined in. “Come into the light! Kinswoman Brightleaf, come into the light!”
Kinsman Brightleaf slid his hands into the cut cocoon covering his wife’s face and thundered, “God says come into the light!”
He pulled. There was a ripping sound that reminded Frank of a Velcro strip letting go. The face of Mrs. Susannah Kinsman Brightleaf appeared. Her eyes were closed but her cheeks were flushed, and the threads at the edges of the cut fluttered with her breath. Mr. Brightleaf leaned close, as if to kiss her.
“Don’t do that,” Frank said, and although the TV sound wasn’t high and he had spoken barely above a whisper, all the caged dogs—half a dozen of them this afternoon—were now barking. The mongrel made a low, worried sound. “Buddy, don’t do that.”
“Kinswoman Brightleaf, awake!”
She awoke, all right. And how. Her eyes flew open. She lunged upward and battened on her husband’s nose. Kinsman Brightleaf screamed something that was bleeped out, but Frank thought it might have been motherfucker. Blood sprayed. Kinswoman Brightleaf fell back onto the table with a sizable chunk of her husband’s beak caught in her teeth. Blood dotted the bodice of her nightie.
Frank recoiled. The back of his head struck the file cabinet crammed in behind his desk. One thought—irrelevant but very clear—filled his mind: the news network had bleeped out motherfucker but had permitted America to see a woman tear off a goodly portion of her husband’s nose. Something in those priorities was badly screwed up.
Cacophony in the room where the nose-amputation had occurred. Shouts off-camera, and then the camera tipped over, showing nothing but a wooden floor upon which a spatter of blood droplets was accumulating. Then it was back to Michaela Morgan, who looked grave.
“Again, we apologize for the disturbing nature of this footage, and I want to repeat that we have not absolutely confirmed its authenticity, but we have late word that the Bright Ones have opened their gates, and the siege is over. This would seem to confirm that what you just saw really happened.” She shook her head, as if to clear it, listened to something coming from the little plastic button in her ear, then said, “We are going to repeat this footage again on top of every hour, not out of sensationalism—”
Yeah, right, Frank thought. As if.
“—but as a public service. If this is happening, people need to know one thing: if you have a loved one or a friend in one of these cocoons, do not attempt to remove it. Now back to George Alderson in the studio. I’ve been told he has a very special guest who may be able to shed a bit more light on this terrible—”
Frank used the remote to kill the TV. What now? What the fuck now?
In Frank’s little holding compound, dogs that had yet to be shipped to the Harvest Hills Animal Shelter continued to bark madly at the moth that fluttered and danced in the narrow corridor between their cages.
Frank stroked the mongrel by his feet. “It’s okay,” he said. “Everything’s all right.” The dog stilled. Not knowing any better, it believed him.
8
Magda Dubcek sat astride her son’s corpse. She had finished him off by sliding a green-streaked shard of the blender jar into the side of his neck, and made sure of it by driving another shard into the opening of his ear and all the way down his auditory canal until it buried itself in his brain. Blood continued to sp
urt from the wound in his neck, soaking the beige carpet in a larger and larger pool.
Tears began to roll down her cheeks. Magda, at some strange distance, was dimly aware of them. Why is that woman crying? she asked herself, not certain who it was that was crying, or where. Come to think of it, where was Magda herself? Hadn’t she been watching television and decided to have a rest?
She wasn’t in her bedroom now. “Hello?” she asked the darkness that surrounded her. There were others in that darkness, many others, she thought she sensed them, but she couldn’t see them—maybe over here? Over there? Somewhere. Magda probed outward.
She needed to find them. She couldn’t be alone in here. If there were others, maybe they could help her get back home, to her son, to Anton.
Her body rose from the corpse, elderly knees cracking. She stumbled to the bed and flopped down on it. Her eyes closed. New white filaments began to unfurl from her cheeks, wavering, then falling gently down to the skin.
She slept.
She searched for the others, in that other place.
CHAPTER 6
1
It was a hot afternoon, one that felt more like summer than spring, and all across Dooling telephones were beginning to ring, as some of those who had been keeping up with the news called friends and relatives who had not. Others held back, sure the whole thing would turn out to be a tempest in a teapot, like Y2K, or an outright hoax, like the Internet rumor that Johnny Depp was dead. As a result, many women who preferred music to TV put their infants and toddlers down for their afternoon naps, as always, and once their fussing had ceased, they lay down themselves.
To sleep, and dream of other worlds than their own.
Their female children joined them in these dreams.
Their male children did not. The dream was not for them.
When those hungry little boys awakened an hour or two later to find their mothers still slumbering, their loving faces enveloped in a sticky white substance, they would scream and claw, and tear through the cocoons—and that would rouse the sleeping women.
Ms. Leanne Barrows of 17 Eldridge Street, for example: wife of Deputy Reed Barrows. It was her habit to lie down for a nap with her two-year-old son Gary around eleven each day. That’s just what she must have done on the Thursday of Aurora.
A few minutes after two o’clock, Mr. Alfred Freeman, the Barrowses’ neighbor at 19 Eldridge Street, a retired widower, was spraying his curbside hostas with deer repellant. The door of 17 Eldridge banged open and Mr. Freeman observed Ms. Barrows as she staggered from her front door, carrying young Gary under her arm, like a piece of siding. The boy, wearing only a diaper, was screaming and waving his arms. An opaque white mask covered most of his mother’s face, except for a flap of material hanging loose from one corner of her mouth to her chin. It can be presumed that it was this rip that awakened the boy’s mother and gained her far-from-pleasant attention.
Mr. Freeman did not know what to say as Ms. Barrows made a beeline for him, as he stood thirty feet away just on the other side of the property line. For most of that morning he had been gardening; he had not seen or heard the news. His neighbor’s face—or absence of it—shocked him to silence. For some reason, at her approach, he removed his Panama hat and pressed it against his chest, as if the National Anthem were about to be played.
Leanne Barrows dropped her bawling child into the plants at Alfred Freeman’s feet, then swung around and returned across the lawn the way she had come, swaying drunkenly. White bits, like shreds of tissue paper, trailed from her fingertips. She reentered her home and closed the door behind her.
This phenomenon proved to be one of the most curious and most analyzed enigmas of Aurora—the so-called “Mother’s Instinct” or “Foster Reflex.” While reports of violent interactions between sleepers and other adults ultimately numbered in the millions, and unreported interactions millions more, few if any occurrences of aggression between a sleeper and her pre-adolescent child were ever confirmed. Sleepers handed over their male infants and toddlers to the closest person they could find, or simply put them out of doors. They then returned to their places of slumber.
“Leanne?” Freeman called.
Gary rolled around on the ground, weeping and kicking the leaves with his fat pink feet. “Mama! Mama!”
Alfred Freeman looked at the boy, then at the hosta he had sprayed, and asked himself, do I bring him back?
He was not a fan of children; he’d had two, and the feeling was mutual. He certainly had no use for Gary Barrows, an ugly little terrorist whose social graces seemed to extend no farther than waving around toy rifles and yelling about Star Wars.
Leanne’s face, screened in that white crap, made it seem that she wasn’t really human at all. Freeman decided he would hang onto the kid until Leanne’s deputy husband could be contacted to take charge.
This was a life-saving choice. Those who challenged the “Mother’s Instinct” regretted it. Whatever disposed Aurora mothers to peacefully cede their young male offspring, it was not receptive to questions. Tens of thousands learned this to their detriment, and then learned no more.
“Sorry, Gary,” Freeman said. “I think you might be stuck with old Uncle Alf for a little bit.” He lifted the inconsolable child up by his armpits and brought him inside. “Would it be too much to ask you to behave?”
2
Clint stayed with Evie through most of the intake process. Lila did not. He wanted her with him, wanted to keep emphasizing that she couldn’t go to sleep, even though he’d started in on her as soon as she’d stepped out of her car in the prison parking lot. He’d told her half a dozen times already, and Clint knew his concern was testing her patience. He also wanted to ask her where she’d been the previous night, but that would have to wait. Considering developments both here and in the wider world, he wasn’t sure it even mattered. Yet he kept coming back to it, like a dog licking a sore paw.
Assistant Warden Lawrence “Lore” Hicks arrived shortly after Evie was escorted into lockdown. Warden Coates left Hicks to handle the new intake’s paperwork while she worked the phone, seeking guidance from the Bureau of Corrections and putting in calls to everybody on the off-duty roster.
As it happened, there wasn’t much to handle. Evie sat with her hands chained to the interview room table, still dressed (for the moment) in the County Browns Lila and Linny Mars had given her. Though her face was battered from repeated collisions with the mesh guard in Lila’s cruiser, her eyes and mood were incongruously merry. To questions about her current address, relatives, and medical history, she gave back only silence. When asked for her last name, she said, “I’ve been thinking about that. Let’s say Black. Black will do. Nothing against Doe, a deer, a female deer, but Black seems a better one for black times. Call me Evie Black.”
“So it’s not your real name?” Fresh from the dentist, Hicks spoke from a mouth that was still mushy from Novocain.
“You couldn’t even pronounce my real name. Names.”
“Give it to me anyway,” Hicks invited.
Evie only looked at him with those merry eyes.
“How old are you?” tried Hicks.
Here, the woman’s cheerful expression drooped into what appeared to Clint to be a look of sorrow. “No age have I,” she said—but then gave the assistant warden a wink, as if to apologize for something so orotund.
Clint spoke up. There would be time for a full interview later, and in spite of everything that was going on, he could hardly wait. “Evie, do you understand why you are here?”
“To know God, to love God, and to serve God,” Evie replied. Then she raised her cuffed hands as far as the chain would allow, made a show of crossing herself, and laughed. She would say no more.
Clint went to his office where Lila had said she’d wait for him.
He found her talking into her shoulder mic. She replaced it and nodded at Clint. “I’ve got to go. Thanks for taking her.”
“I’ll walk you out.”
&n
bsp; “Don’t want to stick with your patient?” Lila was already headed down the hall to the inner main door and lifting her face so Officer Millie Olson’s monitors could see she was a citizen—Joan Law, in fact—and not an inmate.
Clint said, “The strip search and delousing is ladies only. Once she’s dressed, I’ll rejoin.”
But you know all this, he thought. Are you too tired to remember, or do you just not want to talk to me?
The door buzzed, and they went into the airlock-sized room between the prison and the foyer, a space so small it always gave Clint a mild case of claustrophobia. Another buzz, and they re-entered the land of free men and women, Lila leading.
Clint caught up with her before she could go outside. “This Aurora—”
“Tell me again that I have to stay awake, and I may scream.” She was trying to look good-humored about it, but Clint knew when she was struggling to keep her temper. It was impossible to miss the lines of strain around her mouth and the bags under her eyes. She had picked a spectacularly luckless time to work the night shift. If luck had anything to do with it.
He followed her to the car, where Reed Barrows was leaning with his arms folded across his chest.
“You’re not just my wife, Lila. When it comes to law enforcement in Dooling County, you’re the big kahuna.” He held out a hand with a piece of folded paper. “Take this, and get it filled before you do anything else.”
Lila unfolded the piece of paper. It was a prescription. “What’s Provigil?”
He put an arm over her shoulder and held her close, wanting to be certain Reed didn’t overhear their conversation. “It’s for sleep apnea.”
“I don’t have that.”
“No, but it’ll keep you awake. I’m not screwing around, Lila. I need you awake, and this town needs you awake.”