by Stephen King
A couple of other things that they both knew to be true: 1) it was a violation of policy for an officer to be screwing around with his phone while on deck in the middle of the day; and 2) Clint had been trying to get Peters transferred or outright fired for months. Four different inmates had personally complained of sexual harassment to the doctor, but only in his office, under the seal of confidentiality. None of them were willing to go on record. They were afraid of payback. Most of these women had experienced a lot of payback, some inside the walls, even more outside them.
“So McDavid’s got this stuff, too, huh? From the news? Any reason I need to be personally concerned here? Everything I’m seeing says it’s ladies only, but you’re the doc.”
As he’d predicted to Coates, a half-dozen attempts to get through to the CDC had failed—nothing but a busy signal. “I don’t have any more particulars than you, Don, but yes, so far, to the best of my knowledge, there’s no indication that any man has contracted the virus—or whatever it is. I need to talk to the inmate.”
“Right, right,” Peters said.
The officer unlocked the upper and lower bolts, then buttoned his mic. “Officer Peters, letting the doc into A-10, over.” He swung the cell door wide.
Before stepping out of Clint’s way, Peters pointed at the inmate seated on the foam bunk against the back wall. “I’m going to be right here, so it would be unwise to try anything on the doc, all right? That clear? I don’t want to use force on you, but I will. We clear?”
Evie didn’t look at him. Her attention was fixed on her hair; she was dragging her fingers through it, picking at the tangles. “I understand. Thank you for being such a gentleman. Your mother must be very proud of you, Officer Peters.”
Peters hung in the doorway, trying to decide if he was being dicked with. Of course his mother was proud of him. Her son served on the frontlines of the war on crime.
Clint tapped him on the shoulder before he could figure it out. “Thanks, Don. I’ll take it from here.”
4
“Ms. Black? Evie? I’m Dr. Norcross, the psychiatric officer at this facility. Are you feeling calm enough to have a talk? It’s important that I get a sense of where your head is at, how you’re feeling, whether you understand what’s going on, what’s happening, if you have any questions or concerns.”
“Sure. Let’s chat. Roll the old conversational ball.”
“How are you feeling?”
“I feel pretty good. I don’t like the way this place smells, though. There’s a certain chemical aroma. I’m a fresh air person. A Nature Girl, you could say. I like a breeze. I like the sun. Earth under my feet. Cue the soaring violins.”
“I understand. Prison can feel very close. You understand that you’re in a prison, right? This is the Correctional Facility for Women in the town of Dooling. You haven’t been charged with any crime, let alone convicted, you’re just here for your own safety. Do you follow all that?”
“I do.” She lowered her chin to her chest and dropped her voice to a whisper. “But that guy, Officer Peters. You know about him, don’t you?”
“Know what about him?”
“He takes things that don’t belong to him.”
“What makes you say that? What sort of things?”
“I’m just rolling the conversational ball. I thought you wanted to do that, Dr. Norcross. Hey, I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but aren’t you supposed to sit behind me, where I can’t see you?”
“No. That’s psychoanalysis. Let’s get back to—”
“The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’ ”
“Freud, yes. He pioneered psychoanalysis. You’ve read about him?”
“I think most women, if you asked them, if they were truly honest, what they would say is, they want a nap. And possibly earrings that go with everything, which is impossible, of course. Anyhow, big sales today, Doc. Fire sales. In fact, I know of a trailer, it’s a little banged up—there’s a little hole in one wall, have to patch that—but I bet you could have the place for free. Now that’s a deal.”
“Are you hearing voices, Evie?”
“Not exactly. More like—signals.”
“What do the signals sound like?”
“Like humming.”
“Like a tune?”
“Like moths. You need special ears to hear it.”
“And I don’t have the right ears to hear the moths humming?”
“No, I’m afraid you don’t.”
“Do you remember hurting yourself in the police car? You hit your face against the safety grill. Why did you do that?”
“Yes, I remember. I did it because I wanted to go to prison. This prison.”
“That’s interesting. Why?”
“To see you.”
“That’s flattering.”
“But it gets you nowhere, you know. Flattery, I mean.”
“The sheriff said you knew her name. Was that because you’ve been arrested before? Try and remember. Because it would really help if we could find out a little more about your background. If there’s an arrest record, that could lead us to a relative, a friend. You could use an advocate, don’t you think, Evie?”
“The sheriff is your wife.”
“How did you know that?”
“Did you kiss her goodbye?”
“Beg your pardon?”
The woman who called herself Eve Black leaned forward, looking at him earnestly. “Kiss: an osculation requiring—hard to believe, I know—a hundred and forty-seven different muscles. Goodbye: a word of parting. Do you need any further elucidation?”
Clint was thrown. She was really, really disturbed, going in and out of coherence, as if her brain were in the neurological equivalent of an ophthalmologist’s chair, seeing the world through a series of flicking lenses. “No need of elucidation. If I answer your question, will you tell me something?”
“Deal.”
“Yes. I kissed her goodbye.”
“Oh, that’s sweet. You’re getting old, you know, not quite The Man anymore, I get that. Probably having some doubts now and then. ‘Do I still have it? Am I still a powerful ape?’ But you haven’t lost your desire for your wife. Lovely. And there are pills. ‘Ask your doctor if it’s right for you.’ I sympathize. Really. I can relate! If you think getting old is tough for men, let me tell you, it’s no picnic for women. Once your tits fall, you become pretty much invisible to fifty percent of the population.”
“My turn. How do you know my wife? How do you know me?”
“Those are the wrong questions. But I’m going to answer the right one for you. ‘Where was Lila last night?’ That’s the right question. And the answer is: not on Mountain Rest Road. Not in Dooling. She found out about you, Clint. And now she’s getting sleepy. Alas.”
“Found out about what? I have nothing to hide.”
“I think you believe that, which shows how well you’ve hidden it. Ask Lila.”
Clint rose. The cell was hot and he was sticky with sweat. This exchange had gone nothing at all like any introductory talk with an inmate in his entire career. She was schizophrenic—had to be, and some of them were very good at picking up cues and clues—but she was unnervingly quick in a way that was unlike any schizophrenic he had ever met.
And how could she know about Mountain Rest Road?
“You wouldn’t have happened to be on Mountain Rest Road last night, would you, Evie?”
“Could be.” She winked at him. “Could be.”
“Thank you, Evie. We’ll talk again soon, I’m sure.”
“Of course we will, and I look forward to it.” Through their conversation her focus on him had been unfaltering—again, nothing like any unmedicated schizophrenic he’d ever dealt with—but she now returned to pulling haphazardly at her hair. She drew down, grunting at a knot that came loose with an audible tearing s
ound. “Oh, Dr. Norcross—”
“Yes?”
“Your son’s been injured. I’m sorry.”
CHAPTER 9
1
Dozing in the shade of a sycamore, his head propped on his balled-up yellow fire jacket, faintly smoldering pipe resting on the chest of his faded workshirt, Willy Burke, the Adopt-A-Highway man, was a picture. Well known for his poaching of fish and game on public lands as well as for the potency of his small-batch moonshine, renowned for never having been caught poaching fish and game or cooking corn, Willy Burke was a perfect human evocation of the state motto, a fancy Latin phrase that translated as mountaineers are always free. He was seventy-five. His gray beard fluffed up around his neck and a ratty Cason with a couple of lures snagged in the felt rested on the ground beside him. If someone else wanted to try to catch him for his various offenses, that was life, but Lila turned a blind eye. Willy was a good man who worked a lot of town services for free. He’d had a sister who had died of Alzheimer’s, and before she’d passed, Willy had cared for her. Lila used to see them at firehouse chicken dinners; even as Willy’s sister had stared off with her glazed eyes, Willy had kept up a patter, talking to her about this and that while he cut up her chicken and fed her bites.
Now Lila stood over him and watched his eyes move under the lids. It was nice to see that at least one person wasn’t about to allow a worldwide crisis to disturb his afternoon. She just wished she could lie down under a neighboring tree and take a snooze herself.
Instead of doing that, she nudged one of his rubber boots. “Mr. Van Winkle. Your wife filed a missing persons report. She says you’ve been gone for decades.”
Willy’s lids parted. He blinked a couple of times and picked his pipe off his chest and levered himself upright. “Sheriff.”
“What were you dreaming about? Starting a forest fire?”
“I been sleeping with a pipe on my chest since I was a boy. It’s perfectly safe if you’ve mastered the skill. I was dreaming about a new pickup, for your information.” Willy’s truck, a rusty dinosaur from the Vietnam era, was parked at the edge of the gravel apron in front of Truman Mayweather’s trailer. Lila had drawn her cruiser up beside it.
“What’s the story here?” She chinned at the surrounding woods, the trailer surrounded by yellow tape. “Fires all out? Just you?”
“We sprayed down the meth shack that exploded. Also watered down the pieces. Lotta pieces. It’s not too dry here, which was lucky. Be awhile before the smell goes, though. Everyone else split. Thought I’d better wait, preserve the scene and whatnot.” Willy groaned as he got to his feet. “Do I even want to know why there’s a hole the size of a bowling ball in the side of that trailer?”
“No,” said Lila. “Give you nightmares. You can go on, Willy. Thanks for making sure the fire didn’t spread.”
Lila crunched across the gravel to the trailer. The blood caked around the hole in its side had darkened to maroon. Beneath the smell of burn and ozone from the explosion, there was the turned-over tang of living tissue left to cook in the sun. Before ducking under the police tape, Lila shook out a handkerchief and pressed it over her nose and mouth.
“All right, then,” said Willy, “I’ll get. Must be past three. Ought to get a bite. Oh, one other thing. Might be some chemical reaction going on up there beyond what’s left of that shed. That’s all I can figure.” Willy seemed in no hurry to go, despite his avowed intention of doing so; he was packing a new pipe, selecting cuts from his front shirt pocket.
“What do you mean?”
“Look in the trees. On the ground. Fairy handkerchiefs, it looks like to me, but, well, it’s also sticky. Tacky. Thick, too. Fairy handkerchiefs aren’t like that.”
“No,” Lila said. She had no idea what he was talking about. “Of course they’re not. Listen, Willy, we’ve got someone in custody for the murders—”
“Yep, yep, heard it on my scanner. Hard to believe a woman could’ve killed those men and torn up that trailer like she did, but the women are getting stronger, that’s my opinion. Stronger and stronger. Just look at that Ronda Rousey, for instance.”
Lila had no idea who Ronda Rousey was, either. The only unusually physically strong woman she knew from these parts was Vanessa Lampley, who supplemented her income at the prison with competitive arm-wrestling. “You know these parts . . .”
“Well, not like the back of my hand, but I know em a-country fair,” he agreed, tamping the fresh load in his pipe with a nicotine-yellowed thumb.
“That woman had to get here somehow, and I doubt if she walked. Can you think of anyplace she might have parked a car? Somewhere off the road?”
Willy set a match to his pipe and considered. “Well, you know what? The Appalachian Power Company lines go through about half a mile yonder.” He pointed up the hill in the direction of the meth shed. “Run all the way to Bridger County. Someone with a four-wheel drive might could get into that cut from Pennyworth Lane, though I wouldn’t try it in any vehicle I’d paid for myself.” He glanced up at the sun. “Time for me to roll. If I hurry back to the station, I’ll be in time for Dr. Phil.”
2
There was nothing to see in the trailer that Terry Coombs and Roger Elway would not have already photographed, and nothing which might have helped to place Evie Black at the scene. No purse, no wallet.
Lila wandered through the wreckage until she heard the sound of Willy’s pickup rattling down to the main highway. Then she crossed the relic-laden gravel in front of the trailer, ducked under the yellow tape, and walked back to the meth shed.
Half a mile yonder, Willy had said, and although the overgrowth was too thick for Lila to see the power pylons from where she was standing (and wishing for an air mask; the reek of chemicals was still strong), she could hear the steady bzzz they made as they carried their high-voltage load to the homes and businesses of this little corner of the Tri-Counties. People who lived near those pylons claimed they caused cancer, and from what Lila had read in the papers there was some convincing evidence. What about the sludge from the strip mines and the holding ponds that had polluted the ground water, though? Maybe one of those was the culprit. Or was it a kind of poison casserole, the various man-made spices combining into various flavorful illnesses, cancers, lung diseases, and chronic headaches?
And now a new illness, she thought. What had brought this one about? Not coal effluent, if it was happening all over the world.
She started toward the bzzz sound, and hadn’t gone half a dozen steps before she saw the first of the fairy handkerchiefs, and understood what Willy had been talking about. You saw them in the morning, mostly, spiderwebs jeweled with dew. She dropped to one knee, reached for the patch of filmy whiteness, then thought better of it. She picked up a twig and poked it with that, instead. Thin strands stuck to the end of the twig and seemed to either evaporate or melt into the wood. Which was impossible, of course. A trick of her tired eyes. There could be no other explanation.
She thought about the cocoons that were growing on women who fell asleep, and wondered if this could possibly be the same stuff. One thing seemed obvious, even to a woman as exhausted as she was: it looked like a footprint.
“At least it does to me,” she said out loud. She took her phone from her belt and photographed it.
There was another beyond the first, then another and another. No doubt about it now. They were tracks, and the person who’d made them had been walking toward the meth shed and the trailer. White webbing also clung to a couple of tree trunks, each forming the vague outline of a hand, as if someone had either touched them going by or leaned against them to rest or to listen. What, exactly, was this shit? If Evie Black had left webwork tracks and handprints out here in the woods, how come there was no sign of the stuff in Lila’s cruiser?
Lila followed the tracks up a rise, then down into the sort of narrow dip that country fellows like Willy Burke called a brake or a holler, then up another hill. Here the trees were thicker—scrub pines f
ighting for space and sunlight. The webby stuff hung from some of the branches. She took a few more pictures with her phone and pushed on toward the power pylons and the bright sunlight ahead. She ducked under a low-hanging branch, stepped into the clearing, and just stared. For a moment all her tiredness was swept away by amazement.
I am not seeing this, she thought. I’ve fallen asleep, maybe in my cruiser, maybe in the late Truman Mayweather’s trailer, and I’m dreaming it. I must be, because nothing like this exists in the Tri-Counties, or east of the Rockies. Nothing like this exists anywhere, actually, not on earth, not in this epoch.
Lila stood frozen at the edge of the clearing, her neck craned, staring upward. Flocks of moths fluttered around her, brown in the shade, seeming to turn an iridescent gold in the late afternoon sunshine.
She had read somewhere that the tallest tree on earth—a redwood—was just under four hundred feet high. The tree in the center of the clearing looked taller than that, and it was no redwood. It was like no tree she’d ever seen. The closest she could come to a comparison were the banyan trees she and Clint had seen in Puerto Rico on their honeymoon. This . . . thing . . . stood on a great gnarled podium of roots, the largest of them looking twenty or thirty feet thick. The trunk was comprised of dozens of intertwined boles, rising into huge branches with fern-like leaves. The tree seemed to glow with its own light, a surrounding aura. That was probably an illusion caused by the way the westering sun flashed through the gaps in the twisting sections of the trunk, but . . .
But the whole thing was an illusion, wasn’t it? Trees did not grow to a height of five hundred feet, and even if this one had—supposing it was real—she would have seen it from Mayweather’s trailer. Terry and Roger would have seen it. Willy Burke would have seen it.
From the cloud of ferny leaves far above her, a flock of birds exploded into the sky. They were green, and at first Lila thought they were parrots, only they were too small. They flocked west, forming a V—like ducks, for Christ’s sake—and were gone.