by Stephen King
She bent and kissed the white cocoon that had buried Kayleigh’s face. The taste was sour on her lips, but she didn’t mind, because Kayleigh was beneath. Her Kay.
“Along the banks . . . of the Royal Canal.”
Maura leaned back, closed her eyes, and prayed for sleep. It did not come.
2
Richland Lane curved gently to the left before dead-ending at a small park. The first thing Lila saw when she came around this curve was a couple of garbage cans lying overturned in the street. The second was a knot of yelling neighbors in front of the Elway house.
A teenage girl in a tracksuit sprinted toward the cruiser. In the light of the flashing jackpots, her face was a stuttering picture of dismay. Lila hammered on the brake and opened the door, unsnapping the strap over the butt of her pistol.
“Come quick!” the girl screamed. “She’s killing him!”
Lila ran for the house, kicking one of the garbage cans aside and pushing past a couple of men. One of them held up a bleeding hand. “I tried to stop her, and the bitch bit me. She was like a rabid dog.”
Lila stopped at the end of the driveway, her gun hanging down beside her right thigh, trying to process what she was seeing: a woman in a frog-squat on the asphalt. She appeared to be swathed in a muslin nightgown, at once form-fitting and ragged, leaking countless loose threads. Decorative bricks, patriotically painted in red, white, and blue, lined the drive on both sides. The woman held one in her left hand and one in her right. She was chopping them down, edge first, on the body of a man wearing a blood-drenched Dooling Sheriff’s Department uniform. Lila thought it must be Roger, although it would take fingerprints or a DNA test to be sure; except for a remnant of broad chin, his face was gone, cratered like a stomped ground-apple. Blood ran down the driveway in creeks, flashing blue each time her cruiser’s jackpot lights strobed.
The woman crouched over Roger was snarling. Her flushed face—Jessica Elway’s face—was visible, only partially screened by the tatters of the webs that her husband must have made the lethal mistake of removing. The hands on the plunging bricks were gloved in red.
That’s not Jessica Elway, Lila thought. It can’t be, can it?
“Stop!” Lila shouted. “Stop it right now!”
For a wonder, the woman did. She looked up, her bloodshot eyes so wide they seemed to fill half her face. She stood, holding a dripping brick in each hand. One red, one blue. God bless America. Lila saw a couple of Roger’s teeth stuck in the cocoon material hanging down from her chin.
“Watch out, Sheriff,” one of the men said. “She sure does look ray-bid to me.”
“Drop them!” She raised her Glock. Lila had never been so tired, but her arm was steady. “Drop the bricks!”
Jessica dropped one, and appeared to consider. Then she raised the other brick and ran, not at Lila but at one of the men who had crept closer for a better look. And, hard as it was for Lila to believe, to take a picture. The man’s cell phone was raised at Jessica. As she approached, he squealed and turned tail, head down and shoulders hunched. He knocked the girl in the tracksuit sprawling.
“Drop it drop it drop it!”
The Jessica-thing paid no attention. She leaped over the girl in the tracksuit and raised the remaining brick. There was no one behind her, all the neighbors had scattered. Lila fired twice, and Jessica Elway’s head exploded. Chunks of scalp with yellow hair still attached flew backward.
“Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.” It was the fallen girl.
Lila helped the girl to her feet. “Go home, hon.” And when the girl started to look toward Jessica Elway, Lila turned her head away. She raised her voice. “All of you, go home! In your houses! Now!”
The man with the cell phone was creeping back, looking for a good angle, one where he could capture every bit of the carnage. He wasn’t a man, though. Beneath his sandy hair his features were soft and teenage. She recognized him from the local newspaper, some high school kid, she didn’t know his name, some kind of sports star, probably. Lila pointed a shaking finger at him. “You take a picture with that thing and I’ll stuff it down your motherfucking throat.”
The kid—it was Eric Blass’s friend Curt McLeod—stared at her, brows furrowing together. “It’s a free country, isn’t it?”
“Not tonight,” Lila said. Then she screamed, shocking herself as much as the cluster of neighbors. “Get out! Get out! GO!”
Curt and the others went, a few snatching glances back over their shoulders, as if afraid she might come flying after them, as crazy as the woman she’d just shot down in the street.
“I knew they had no business putting in a lady sheriff!” one man called over his shoulder.
Lila restrained the urge to give him the finger and walked back to her cruiser. When a lock of hair fell in her eyes, she brushed it back with a panicky shudder, thinking it was that stuff, trying to spin out of her skin again. She leaned against the door, took a couple of deep breaths, keyed her mic.
“Linny?”
“I’m here, boss.”
“Is everyone coming in?”
A pause. Then Linny said, “Well. I got five. Both Wittstocks, Elmore, Vern, and Dan Treat. And Reed’s coming back soon, too. His wife—fell asleep. I guess his neighbor’s going to look after little Gary, the poor kid . . .”
Lila did the addition and it came to eight officers, not much when you were hoping to fend off anarchy. None of Dooling’s three female deputies had responded to Linny’s calls. It made Lila wonder how they were doing at the prison. She closed her eyes, started to drift, and forced them open again.
Linny was onto the subject of the countless emergency calls. There had been more than a dozen from men like Reed Barrows who suddenly found themselves the sole guardians of small male children. “Several of these feckless fools wanted me to explain to them how to feed their own children! This one idiot asks me if FEMA is setting up a facility to take care of kids because he’s got tickets for a—”
“Any of them at the station yet?”
“Who? FEMA?”
“No, Linny. Any of the deputies.” Not Terry, though. Please not him. Lila didn’t want Terry to see what was left of the man he’d most often partnered with for the last five years.
“Afraid not. The only person here is that old guy from Adopt-A-Highway and the VFD. Wanted to know if he could do anything. He’s outside, smoking his pipe.”
It took a few seconds for her exhausted, shocked brain to process this. Willy Burke, who knew about fairy handkerchiefs, and who drove a rattletrap Ford pickup.
“I want him.”
“That guy? Really?”
“Yes. I’m at 65 Richland Lane.”
“Isn’t that—”
“Yes. It’s bad, Linny. Very. Jessica killed Roger. He must have cut open the stuff on her face. She chased him outside and—she came at a kid with a brick, some little asshole, he was trying to take her fucking picture. She was out of her mind.” What mind? Lila thought. “I warned her to stop, and when she didn’t, I shot her. She’s dead. There was no choice.”
“Roger’s dead?” Nothing about his wife being dead. Lila wasn’t surprised. Linny had always had a soft spot for Roger.
“Send Willy out here. Tell him we’ll be transporting two bodies to the hospital morgue. He should bring a tarp. Hold the deputies there at the station. I’ll come as soon as I can. Out.”
She lowered her head and prepared to cry. No tears came. She wondered if a person could be too tired to cry. It seemed possible. Today, anything seemed possible.
Her cell phone rang in its little holster on her utility belt. It was Clint.
“Hello, Clint,” she answered. “This isn’t really the best time to talk.”
“Are you all right?” he asked. “You don’t sound all right.”
Lila wasn’t sure where to begin. With Roger and Jessica Elway, dead in the yard? With the hallucination she’d had out by the power lines in the woods behind the rubble of Truman Mayweather’s
meth shack? With Sheila Norcross? With Shannon Parks? With the day Clint shut down his practice with no advance warning? With their marriage vows?
“You’re not falling asleep, are you? Lila?”
“No, I’m right here.”
“Janice is—out of commission. Long story. Hicks has gone off. Somehow I’ve ended up in charge of this place.”
Lila said she was sorry. It was a difficult situation, no question about it. But maybe it would look better once he had some sleep. Her husband could do that: go to sleep, and then wake up again.
He said he was going home to check on their son. Jared had said he’d hurt his knee and it was nothing serious, but Clint wanted to see it for himself. Did Lila want to meet him there?
“I’ll try.” But Lila didn’t know when she’d be able to get away. All she knew was that it looked like it was going to be another late one.
3
“Do you hear that?” A woman had found Kayleigh Rawlings in the dark. The woman smelled like booze and had a soft arm. Magda, she said her name was. “Singing, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” It was Maura singing. Maura’s voice wasn’t worth a shit; her sense of a tune was all seasick, up and down and creaky and broken; and to Kayleigh right then, it was incomparably sweet, carrying off the silly old words of that dirty old air.
“. . . Royal Canal . . .”
The singing stopped.
“Where was it coming from?”
“I don’t know.”
Somewhere far away, that was about the only thing Kayleigh could tell for sure. Had it drifted all the way from Dooling? Where was Dooling? This was definitely not Dooling. Or was it? Hard to tell. Impossible, really.
A gentle wind circled through the darkness. The air was fresh and good and under her feet the ground felt not like cement or sticky tile, but like grass. She squatted down and touched: yes, it was grass, or weeds, about knee high. Birds chattered faintly somewhere. Kayleigh had awakened feeling strong and young and well rested.
Correctional had taken twelve years from her, the better part of her thirties, the first couple of years of her forties, and it had a claim on another ten. Maura was the best part of those lost years. It wasn’t something that could ever have worked outside the walls, of course, the deal they had, but in prison you made do. If Kayleigh had been suddenly shoved out the doors of Dooling Correctional she would have remembered Maura fondly and gratefully, and moved on. You didn’t carry a torch for a triple-murderer no matter how strangely charming you found them. The woman was nuts, Kayleigh had no illusions about that. She loved Kayleigh wholly, though, and Kayleigh loved to be loved. And you know, maybe she, Kayleigh, was a little nuts, too.
There had been no heedless love in the time before prison. No love of any kind, really, not since she was a little child.
On one job—not the one they clipped her for—Kayleigh and her boyfriend had knocked over a pill shop in back of an hourly motel. In the room there’d been a teenage kid in a rocking chair. The rocking chair had been nice, polished to a glow, totally out of place in the fleabag motel, a throne amid garbage. The kid who sat in it had a massive, volcanic hole in his cheek. It was a glossy, swirling mix of red and pitch black; a hot mess from which came the wafting smell of rotting flesh. How had it happened? Had it started with a scratch, a scrape, a tiny infection? Or had someone cut him with a dirty blade? Was it a disease? Kayleigh felt lucky not to have to know or care.
She put the kid at about sixteen. He scratched his pale belly and watched as she and her boyfriend kicked around, searching for the stash. What else was wrong with him that he just sat there calm as could be and watched them with no fear?
Kayleigh’s boyfriend found what he was hunting for under the mattress and stuffed it into his jacket. He turned to the kid. “Your face is putrid,” he said. “You know that?”
“I know,” the kid said.
“Good. Now get the fuck out of the chair, son.”
The kid didn’t give any trouble. He got up from the chair and dropped onto the sprung bed, lying there and scratching his stomach. They took the rocking chair along with the money and the drugs. They could do that because the boyfriend had a panel truck.
That was the kind of life she led in those days, one where she had stood by and helped the man she slept with steal the very chair a kid was sitting in. A ruined kid. And guess what? It was a life where the kid did nothing about it. He just lay down and pointed his ruined face at the ceiling and scratched his belly and did fuck-all else. Maybe because he was stoned. Maybe because he didn’t give a shit. Maybe both.
There was a floral scent on the breeze.
Kayleigh felt a pang for Maura, but at the same time, she was stirred by an intuition: that this was a better place, better than prison, better than the world outside prison. It felt boundless, and there was earth beneath her feet.
“Whoever you are, I got to tell you I’m scared,” said Magda. “And I’m worried about Anton.”
“Don’t be scared,” said Kayleigh. “I’m sure Anton’s fine.” Not knowing who that was, nor caring. She felt for Magda’s hand and found it. “Let’s walk toward the birdsong.” They edged forward in the blackness, finding themselves moving down a gentle grade, among trees.
And was that a glimmer of a light there? Was that a crack of sun in the sky?
It was blazing dawn when they came to the overgrown remains of a trailer. From there, they were able to follow the ghost of a dirt lane to the time-shattered pavement of Ball’s Hill Road.
CHAPTER 15
1
Leaving Old Essie’s den behind, the fox cut a zigzag path through the surrounding woods, pausing to rest in the damp below an overgrown shed. In his sleep he dreamed that his mother brought him a rat, but it was rotten and poison, and he realized that his mother was sick. Her eyes were red and her mouth hung crooked and her tongue lolled to the ground. That was when he remembered that she was gone, his mother was many seasons gone. He had seen her lie down in tall grass, and the next day, she still lay in the same place, but was no longer his mother.
“There’s poison in the walls,” said the dead rat in his dead mother’s mouth. “She says the earth is made of our bodies. I believe her, and oh, the pain doesn’t end. Even death hurts.”
A cloud of moths descended on the fox’s dead mother and the dead rat.
“Don’t stop, child,” said the mother fox. “You have work.”
The fox jerked up out of his sleep and felt a sharp pain as he struck his shoulder against the edge of something jutting down, a nail or glass or a shard of board. It was early evening.
From close by came a thunderous crash: metal and wood, a gasp of steam, the tearing sound of fire catching. The fox darted from under the overgrown shed, breaking hard for the road. Beyond the road loomed the bigger woods and, he hoped, safer ground.
At the side of the road, a car was buckled against a tree. A woman on fire was dragging a man from the front seat of the car. The man was screaming. The sound the burning woman made was a dog sound. The fox understood what it meant: I will kill you, I will kill you, I will kill you. Tendrils of burning web fluttered away from her body.
Here was a moment of decision. High among the fox’s catalog of personal statutes was Thou Shalt Not Cross the Road in Daylight. There were more cars in the day, and cars could not be intimidated or warned off, let alone defeated. As they zoomed over the pavement, they made a sound, too, and if you listened (a fox should always listen), that sound was words, and the words were I want to kill you, I want to kill you, I want to kill you. The hot and leaking remains of animals that had failed to heed these words had provided the fox with many excellent snacks.
On the other hand, a fox that wanted to survive needed to maintain a fluid approach to danger. He needed to balance the threat of a car that wanted to kill you with a woman cloaked in fire declaring that she was going to kill you.
The fox bolted. As he passed her, the heat of the burning woman was in his fur and i
n the cut on his back. The burning woman had started to pound the man’s head against the pavement and the roar of her anger grew louder, but it faded as the fox scrambled down the embankment on the opposite side of the road.
In the big woods he slowed his pace. The cut in his lower back made his rear right leg hurt every time he pushed off. It was night. Last year’s leaves crackled under the fox’s pads. He stopped to drink from a stream. Oil swirled in the water, but he was thirsty and had to take what he could get. A hawk perched on a stump by the stream. It picked at the belly of a squirrel.
“Let me have some?” the fox called. “I could be a friend to you.”
“A fox has no friends,” said the hawk.
It was true, but the fox would never admit it. “What liar told you that?”
“You’re bleeding, you know,” the hawk said.
The fox didn’t care for the bird’s chipper tone.
The fox thought it wise to change the subject. “What’s going on? Something has changed. What’s happened to the world?”
“There’s a tree further on. A new tree. A Mother Tree. It appeared at dawn. Very beautiful. Very tall. I tried to fly to the top, but although I could see the crown, it was beyond my wings.” A bright red knot of intestine snapped free of the squirrel’s body and the hawk gulped it down.
The hawk tilted its head. A second later a smell twitched the fox’s nostrils: smoke. It had been a dry season. If the burning woman had crossed the road, a few steps into the brush would have been enough to make it all go up.
The fox needed to get moving again. He panted. He was afraid and he was hurt—but he still had his wits.
“Your eyes will make a fine meal for some lucky animal,” the hawk said, and took flight, the limp squirrel locked in its talons.
2
As was hardly uncommon, the First Thursday Book Club had begun to drift away from that month’s text, which happened to be Atonement, by Ian McEwan. The novel’s story followed two lovers, sundered from one another almost before their relationship had begun, by the false accusation of a preternaturally imaginative young girl named Briony.