by Stephen King
As for Meshaum’s wife, how was Frank supposed to know the man even had a wife? Although he did now. Oh, yes. Elaine made sure of that.
5
“His wife?” Frank asked. “Is that where you’re going with this? Didn’t surprise me she turned up at the shelter. Fritz Meshaum’s a son of a bitch.”
When there had first been talk around town, Elaine had asked if it was true, that he had put a hurting on Fritz Meshaum. He had made the mistake of telling her the truth, and she never let him forget it.
Elaine set aside the spoon and drank from her coffee. “No argument there.”
“I hope she finally left him,” said Frank. “Not that she’s any responsibility of mine.”
“It’s not your responsibility that her husband, once he was healed up enough to go home from the hospital after the beating you gave him, beat her within an inch of her life?”
“Nope, absolutely not. I never laid a hand on her. We’ve been over this.”
“Uh-huh. And the baby she lost,” said Elaine, “that’s not your responsibility, either, right?”
Frank sucked his teeth. He didn’t know about any baby. It was the first time Elaine had mentioned it. She’d been waiting for exactly the right moment to ambush him. Some wife, some friend.
“Pregnant, huh? And lost the baby. Gee, that’s a tough one.”
Elaine fixed him with an unbelieving look. “That’s what you call it? A tough one? Your compassion stuns me. None of it would have happened if you’d just called the police. None of it, Frank. He’d have gone to jail and Candy Meshaum would have kept her baby.”
Guilt trips were Elaine’s specialty. But if she’d seen the dog—what Fritz had done to it—she might think twice about giving him the stinkeye. The Meshaums of the world had to pay. It was the same with Dr. Flickinger . . .
Which gave him an idea.
“Why don’t I go get the Mercedes man? He’s a doctor.”
“You mean the guy who ran over that old man’s cat?”
“Yeah. He felt really bad about driving so fast. I’m sure he’d help.”
“Did you hear any of what I just said, Frank? You go crazy and it always backfires!”
“Elaine, forget about Fritz Meshaum and forget about his wife. Forget about me. Think about Nana. Maybe that doc could help.” Flickinger might even feel he owed Frank, for taking it out on his car instead of busting his way inside and taking it out on the good doctor himself.
There were more sirens. A motorcycle passed down the street, engine roaring.
“Frank, I’d like to believe that.” Her speech, slow and careful, was intended to be sincere, but it was the same cadence Elaine adopted when she explained to Nana how important it was to keep neat drawers. “Because I love you. But I know you. We were together for ten years. You beat a man half to death over a dog. God knows how you handled this Flickmuller, or whatever his name is.”
“Flickinger. His name is Garth Flickinger. Doctor Garth Flickinger.” Really, how could she be so dumb? Hadn’t they almost been trampled—or shot!—while trying to get a doctor to see their daughter?
She drank down the rest of her coffee. “Just be here with your daughter. Don’t try to fix what you don’t even understand.”
A dismal comprehension touched Frank Geary: everything would be easier once Elaine was asleep, too. But for now she was awake. So was he.
“You’re wrong,” he said.
She blinked at him. “What? What did you say?”
“You think you’re always right. Sometimes you are, but not this time.”
“Thank you for that wonderful insight. I’m going upstairs to sit with Nana. Come with me if you want, but if you go after that man—if you go anywhere else—we’re done.”
Frank smiled. He felt okay now. It was such a relief to feel okay. “We already are.”
She stared at him.
“Nana’s what matters to me now. Just her.”
6
Frank stopped on the way to his truck to look at the woodpile by the back stoop, hardwood he’d split himself. Half a cord left from the winter just past. The little Jøtul stove in the kitchen made the place homey and welcoming in the cold weather. Nana liked to sit near it in the rocker, doing her homework. When she was bent over her books with her hair curtaining her face, she looked to Frank like a little girl from the nineteenth century, back when all these man-woman things were a lot simpler. Back then, you told a woman what you were going to do, and she either agreed or kept her mouth shut. He remembered something his father had told his mother when she protested over the purchase of a new power lawnmower: You keep the house. I’ll make the money and pay the bills. If you got a problem with that, speak up.
She hadn’t. They’d had a good marriage that way. Almost fifty years. No marriage counseling, no separations, no lawyers.
There was a big tarp over the woodpile and a smaller one over the chopping block. He raised the smaller and pulled the hand-ax free from the scarred wood. Flickinger didn’t seem like much, but it never hurt to be prepared.
7
Dorothy went first. Head lolling back, mouth open, dentures slipping slightly and flecked with cookie crumbs, she snored. The other three watched the white strings float and untether, split and float, float and fall down against her skin. They layered like bandages in miniature, wrapping in crisscross patterns.
“I wish—” Margaret began, but whatever it was she wished, she didn’t seem to be able to catch hold of the thing.
“Do you think she’s suffering?” Blanche asked. “Do you think it hurts?” Though her words felt heavy in her mouth, she herself was not in any pain.
“No.” Gail tottered to her feet, her library copy of Atonement dropping to the floor with a flop of paper and crinkle of plastic sheeting. She braced herself on the furniture as she crossed the room toward Dorothy.
Blanche was hazily impressed by this effort. Along with the pills, they’d dispatched the bottle of Pinot, and Gail had drunk the most. There was an officer at the prison who competed in arm-wrestling contests. Blanche wondered if there were contests for drinking wine and taking drugs and then walking around without tripping over the chairs or running into the walls. Gail might have missed her calling!
Blanche wanted to express all this to Gail, but she found that the best she could do was, “Nice—walking—Gail.”
She watched as Gail bent down close to Dorothy’s ear, which was already layered in a thin coating of web. “Dorothy? Can you hear us? Meet me at the—” Gail stopped.
“What place do we know is in heaven, Midge? Where should I have her meet us?”
Only Margaret didn’t answer. Couldn’t. The threads were now circling and knitting around her head, too.
Blanche’s eyes, seeming to move around of their own accord, found the window, and the fire in the west. It was bigger now, not a match but a flaming bird’s head. There were still men to fight the fire, but maybe they were too busy taking care of their women to bother. What was the name of that bird, the one that changed into fire, reborn, magic bird, scary, terrible? She didn’t know. All she could remember was an old Japanese monster movie called Rodan. She had watched it as a child, and the giant bird in it had frightened her badly. She wasn’t frightened now, just . . . interested.
“We have lost my sister,” Gail announced. She had sunk to the carpet and was leaning against Dorothy’s legs.
“She’s just asleep,” Blanche said. “You didn’t lose her, honey.”
Gail nodded so emphatically that her hair fell into her eyes. “Yes, yes. You’re right, Blanche. We’ll just have to find each other. Just look for each other in heaven. Or . . . you know . . . a reasonable facsimile.” That made her laugh.
8
Blanche was the last. She crawled over to be near Gail, asleep beneath a layer of webbing.
“I had a love,” Blanche told her. “Bet you didn’t know that. We kept it . . . as the girls at the prison like to say . . . on the down-low. Had to.”<
br />
The filaments that lay over her friend’s mouth stirred as Gail exhaled. One fine thread extended itself flirtatiously in Blanche’s direction.
“I think he loved me, too, but . . .” It was hard to explain. She was young. When you were young, your brain wasn’t fully developed. You didn’t know about men. It was sad. He had been married. She had waited. They had aged. Blanche had given up the sweetest part of her soul for a man. He had made beautiful promises and kept none of them. What a waste.
“This might be the best thing that ever happened.” If Gail had been awake, these words of Blanche’s might have been too low and garbled for her to understand. Feeling had left Blanche’s tongue. “Because at least we’re all together, now, at the end.”
And if there was something else, somewhere else . . .
Before Blanche McIntyre could finish the thought, she drifted away.
9
Garth Flickinger wasn’t surprised to see Frank.
After having watched NewsAmerica for the last twelve hours or so, and smoking everything in the house except for his pet iguana (Gillies), probably nothing would have surprised him. Should Sir Harold Gillies himself, that long-dead pioneer of plastic surgery, have come wandering downstairs to the kitchen to toast a cinnamon Pop-Tart, it would have barely pushed the envelope on the phenomena that Garth had witnessed on television that day.
The shock of the violence that had broken out in Truman Mayweather’s trailer while Garth was in the john was but a prologue to what he had absorbed in the hours since, just sitting on the couch. Rioting outside the White House, a woman gnawing off the nose of a religious cultist, a huge 767 lost at sea, bloodied nursing home orderlies, elderly women swathed in webs and handcuffed to their gurneys, fires in Melbourne, fires in Manila, and fires in Honolulu. Something very fucking bad had occurred in the desert outside Reno where there was evidently some kind of secret government nuclear facility; scientists were reporting on Geiger counters spinning and seismographs jerking up and down, detecting continuing detonations. Everywhere women were falling asleep and growing cocoons and everywhere dumbfucks were waking them up. The wonderful NewsAmerica reporter, Michaela with the first-rate nose job, had vanished in the mid-afternoon and they’d promoted a stuttering intern with a lip ring to take her place. It reminded Garth of a piece of graffiti he’d seen on some men’s room wall: THERE IS NO GRAVITY, THE EARTH JUST SUCKS.
This sucked: in and out, back and forth, all the way around. Not even the meth helped. Well, it helped a little, but not as much as it should have. By the time the doorbell began ringing—cling-clong, cling-clong, went the chimes—Garth was feeling glaringly sober. He felt no particular urge to answer, not tonight. Nor did he feel compelled to rise when his visitor gave up on the bell and began knocking. Then hammering. Very energetic!
The hammering ceased. Garth had time to think his unwelcome visitor had given up before the chopping began. Chopping and splintering. The door shuddered inward, broken free of its lock, and the man who had been here earlier strode in, an ax in one hand. Garth supposed the guy was here to kill him—and he didn’t feel too sad about that. It would hurt, but hopefully not for too long.
Plastic surgery was a joke to many people. Not to Garth. What was funny about wanting to like your face, your body, your only skin? Unless you were cruel or stupid, there was nothing funny about it. Only now, it seemed, the joke was on him. What kind of life would it be with only half the species? A cruel and stupid life. Garth could see that right away. Beautiful women often arrived at his office with photographs of other beautiful women, and they asked, “Can you make me look like her?” And behind many beautiful women who wanted to tinker with their perfect faces were mean fuckers who were never satisfied. Garth didn’t want to be left alone in a world of mean fuckers, because there were so many of them.
“Don’t stand on ceremony, come on in. I’ve just been catching up on the news. You didn’t happen to see the part where the woman bit the man’s nose off his face, did you?”
“I did,” said Frank.
“I’m great with noses, and I enjoy a challenge, but if there’s nothing to work with, there’s not much you can do.”
Frank stood at the corner of the couch, a few feet from Garth. The ax was a small one, but still an ax.
“Do you plan to kill me?”
“What? No. I came—”
They were both distracted by the flatscreen, where a news camera showed a view of a burning Apple Store. On the sidewalk in front of the store, a man with a fire-blackened face moved around in a dazed little circle, a smoldering fuchsia handbag looped over his shoulder. The Apple symbol above the entrance of the store suddenly came loose of its moorings and crashed to the ground.
A quick cut brought the viewing audience back to George Alderson. George’s color was a wind-stripped gray, and his voice was gravelly. He’d been on all day. “I just received a call from my—ah, son. He went to my house to check on my wife. Sharon and I have been married for—” The anchor dropped his head and traced the knot of his pink tie. There was a coffee stain on the tie. Garth thought this the most disturbing signal yet of the unprecedented nature of the situation. “—for forty-two years now. Timothy, my son, he . . . he says . . .” George Alderson began to sob. Frank picked up the controller from the side table and turned him off.
“Is your mind clear enough to understand what’s going on, Dr. Flickinger?” Frank indicated the pipe on the side table.
“Of course.” Garth felt a tick of curiosity. “You really aren’t here to kill me?”
Frank pinched the bridge of his nose. Garth had the impression he was watching the outside of a serious internal monologue.
“I’m here to ask a favor. You do it, and we’re all square. It’s my daughter. She’s the only good thing in my life anymore. And now she’s got it. The Aurora. I need you to come and look at her and . . .” His mouth opened and closed a few times, but that was the end of his words.
A thought of his own daughter, of Cathy, came to Garth’s mind.
“Say no more,” Garth said, snipping the thought off and letting it flutter away, a bit of ribbon in a stiff wind.
“Yeah? Really?”
Garth held out a hand. He might have surprised Frank Geary, but he hadn’t surprised himself. There were so many things that couldn’t be helped. Garth was always glad when he could. And it would be interesting to see this Aurora business up close.
“Of course. Help me up, would you?”
Frank got him on his feet, and after a few steps Garth was fine. The doctor excused himself for a moment, stepping into a sideroom. When he emerged he carried a small black case and a medical bag. They went outside into the night. Garth brushed his hand through the branches of the lilac tree protruding from the back left passenger window of his Mercedes as they went to Frank’s truck, but refrained from comment.
10
The fox limped away from the grassfire the burning woman had started, but he carried a fire inside him. It was burning inside his lower back. This was bad, because he couldn’t run fast now, and he could smell his own blood. If he could smell his blood, other things could, as well.
A few mountain lions still remained in these woods, and if one caught wind of his bloody back and haunch, he was finished. It had been a long time since he had seen a mountain lion, not since his mother was full of milk and his four littermates were alive (all dead now, one from drinking bad water, one from eating a poison bait, one taken in a trap that tore her leg as she squealed and cried, one disappeared in the night), but there were also wild pigs. The fox feared them more than the mountain lions. They had escaped some farmer’s pen and bred in the woods. Now there were lots of them. Ordinarily, the fox would have had no problem escaping them and might even have enjoyed teasing them a bit; they were very clumsy. Tonight, though, he could hardly run. Soon he would not even be able to trot.
The woods ended at a metal house that smelled of human blood and human death. Yellow strips hung
around it. There were metal man-things in the weeds and lying on the crushed stone in front. Mixed in with the death scents was another, something he had never smelled before. Not a human smell, exactly, but like a human smell.
And female.
Putting aside his fear of the wild pigs, the fox moved away from the metal house, limping and occasionally collapsing on his side while he panted and waited for the pain to subside. Then he went on. He had to go on. That scent was exotic, both sweet and bitter at the same time, irresistible. Perhaps it would take him to a place of safety. It didn’t seem likely, but the fox was desperate.
That exotic smell grew stronger. Mixed into it was another female smell, but this one was fresher and clearly human. The fox paused to sniff at one of Lila’s shoe prints in the loam, then a patch of white stuff in the shape of a bare human foot.
A small bird fluttered down to a low-hanging branch. Not a hawk this time. This was a kind of bird the fox had never seen before. It was green. A scent drifted from it, humid and tangy, for which the fox had no context. It fluffed its wings self-importantly.
“Please don’t sing,” the fox said.
“All right,” the green bird said. “I rarely do at night, anyway. I see you are bleeding. Does it hurt?”
The fox was too tired to dissemble. “Yes.”
“Roll in the web. It will stop the pain.”
“It will poison me,” the fox said. His back was burning, but he knew about poison, oh yes. The humans poisoned everything. It was their best talent.
“No. The poison is leaving these woods. Roll in the web.”
Perhaps the bird was lying, but the fox saw no other recourse. He fell on his side, then rolled onto his back, as he sometimes did in deer scat, to confuse his scent. Blessed coolness doused the pain in his back and haunch. He rolled once more, then sprang to his feet, looking up at the branch with bright eyes.