Sleeping Beauties: A Novel

by Stephen King

  Angel yanked Jeanette back so hard she almost fell. “Shut up, Jeanie. This ain’t about your boy.” She reached into the soft cell and grabbed Evie by the admirably filled front of her coverall. “How’re you stayin awake? Tell me or I’ll put a hurtin on you like you never had. I’ll make your cunt and your asshole swap places.”

  Evie gave a jolly laugh. “That would be a medical marvel, wouldn’t it? Why, I’d have to learn how to go to the bathroom all over again.”

  Angel flushed. “You want to play with me? You want to? You think just because you’re in that cell, I cain’t get at you?”

  Evie looked down at the hands on her. Just looked. But Angel screamed and staggered back. Her fingers were turning red.

  “Burned me! Bitch burned me somehow!”

  Evie turned to Jeanette. She was smiling, but Jeanette thought there was sadness as well as good humor in those dark eyes. “The problem is more complex than it first might appear—I see that. I do. There are feminists who like to believe that all the world’s problems go back to men. To the innate aggressiveness of men. They have a point, a woman never started a war—although, trust me, some were definitely about them—but there are some bad, bad chickadees out there. I can’t deny it.”

  “What is this shit you’re spouting?”

  She looked back to Angel.

  “Dr. Norcross has his suspicions about you, Angel. About the landlord you killed in Charleston, for one thing.”

  “I didn’t kill nobody!” But the color had drained from Angel’s face, and she took a step backward, bumping the coffee wagon. Her reddened hands were pressed to her chest.

  Evie redirected to Jeanette, speaking in low tones of confidence. “She’s killed five men. Five.” And now she turned again to Angel. “It was a kind of hobby for awhile there, wasn’t it, Angel? You out hitchhiking to nowhere in particular, with a knife in your purse and a little .32 in the side pocket of that rawhide jacket you always used to wear. But that’s not all, is it?”

  “Shut up! Shut up!”

  Back to Jeanette those amazing eyes went. Her voice was quiet but warm. It was the voice of a woman in a television ad, the one that told her friend that she also used to have problems with grass stains on her children’s pants, only this new detergent had changed everything.

  “She got pregnant when she was seventeen. Covered it up with big loose layers of clothes. Hitchhiked to Wheeling—didn’t kill anyone that time, good for her—and took a room. Had the baby—”

  “SHUT UP, I SAID!”

  Someone with a video monitor had taken note of the confrontation: Rand Quigley and Millie Olson were pounding down the corridor, Quigley with Mace in hand, Olson with a Taser set on medium power.

  “Drowned it in the sink, dropped the body down the incinerator chute.” Evie grimaced, blinked a couple of times, and added, softly, “Pop goes the weasel.”

  Quigley tried to grab Angel. She whirled instantly at his touch, threw a punch, and overturned the cart, coffee, juice, and all. A brown wash—no longer scalding, but still hot—poured over Millie Olson’s legs. She screamed in pain, and fell on her behind.

  Jeanette watched in amazement as Angel went full Hulk Hogan on Quigley, grasping his neck with one hand and clawing away the Mace with the other. The can hit the floor and rolled through the bars of the soft cell. Evie bent, picked it up, offered it to Jeanette.

  “Want this?”

  Jeanette accepted it unthinkingly.

  Officer Olson was paddling around in a brown puddle, trying to get out from under the overturned coffee wagon. Officer Quigley was trying to keep from being choked out. Although Angel was skinny and Quigley outweighed her by at least fifty pounds, Angel shook him like a dog with a snake in its jaws, and tossed him into the coffee wagon just as Millie Olson was getting up, and they went down together with a thump and a splash. Angel whirled back to the soft cell, her eyes huge and glittering in her narrow little face.

  Evie spread her arms as wide as the bars would allow and held them out to Angel, like a lover beckoning her beloved. Angel held her own arms out, her fingers bent into claws, and rushed at her, screaming.

  Only Jeanette saw what happened next. The two officers were still trying to untangle themselves from the overturned coffee wagon, and Angel was lost in a world of fury. Jeanette had time to think, I’m not just seeing bad temper; this is a full-blown psychotic episode. Then Evie’s mouth yawned open so widely that the entire bottom half of her face seemed to disappear. From her mouth came a flock—no, a flood—of moths. They swirled around Angel’s head, and some caught in the peroxided up-spout of her hair. She screamed and began to beat at them.

  Jeanette rapped Angel on the back of the head with the can of Mace. I am going to make an enemy here, she thought, but hey, maybe she’ll go to sleep before she can come back on me.

  The moths flew toward the caged overhead lights of A Wing and into the main prison. Angel turned, still tearing at her head (although all the insects in her hair now seemed to have joined their fellows), and Jeanette triggered the Mace directly into the screaming woman’s face.

  “You see how complex the problem is, don’t you, Jeanette?” Evie said as Angel blundered into the wall, howling and furiously rubbing her eyes. “I think it might be time to erase the whole man-woman equation. Just hit delete and start over. What do you think?”

  “That I want to see my son,” Jeanette said. “I want to see my Bobby.” She dropped the can of Mace and began to cry.

  4

  While this was happening, Claudia “the Dynamite Body-a” Stephenson emerged from the delousing station and decided to seek climes more serene and vistas new. Just too noisy in A Wing this evening. Too upsetting. That special coffee was spilled everywhere, too, and it smelled really bad. You didn’t want to go and attempt to parlay with the devil when your nerves were jumbled, that was common sense. She could talk to the lady in A-10 later. She passed the Booth and walked into B Wing. She left her top behind.

  “Inmate!” Van Lampley leaned out of the Booth, where she had seen the fight about to break out. (Angel with her fucking Super Coffee; Van was too bushed to castigate herself, but she should never have consented to the plan.) She had sent Quigley and Olson to defuse the situation, and was about to rush out to join them when Stephenson passed through.

  Claudia made no reply, just kept walking.

  “You forgot something, didn’t you? This is a prison, not a strip joint. Talking to you, Stephenson! Where do you think you’re going?”

  But did she, Van, really care? Lots of them were wandering now, probably just trying to stay awake, and meanwhile, there was a fuckaree going on down at the far end of A Wing. That was where she was needed.

  She started that way, but then Millie Olson—splashed with coffee all down her front—waved her back. “Under control,” Millie said. “Got that crazy bitch Fitzroy locked up. Situation back to normal.”

  Van, thinking that nothing was under control and nothing was normal, nodded.

  She looked around for Stephenson and didn’t see her. She returned to the Booth and called up the first floor of B Wing on one of the monitors in time to see Claudia entering B-7, the cell occupied by Dempster and Sorley. Only Sorley was still in A Wing, and Van hadn’t seen Dempster in quite awhile. Inmates were not above a bit of petty theft if they found a cell empty (the favorite targets of opportunity were the two Ps—pills and panties), and such depredations inevitably caused trouble. She didn’t have any reason to suspect Claudia, who was no nuisance in spite of being big enough to cause plenty of hassle, would do such a thing. Nonetheless, it was Van’s job to be suspicious. It wouldn’t do to have a rhubarb break out over a case of stolen property. Not with everything else that was going wrong.

  Van decided to make a quick check. It was just a feeling, but she hadn’t liked the way Claudia was walking, with her head down, her hair in her face, and her smock top cast off God knew where. It would only take a minute, and she could stand to stretch her legs.
Get the blood flowing again.

  5

  Claudia didn’t have theft on her mind. All she wanted was a bit of calm conversation. It would pass the time until A Wing settled down and she could speak to the new woman and find out how she, Claudia, could also go to sleep and wake up like on any other day. The new woman might not tell her, but then again, she might. The devil was unpredictable. He had been an angel once.

  Ree was on her bunk with her face turned to the wall. Claudia noted for the first time, and not without pity, that Ree’s hair was starting to turn gray. That was true of Claudia as well, but she dyed hers. When she couldn’t afford the real stuff (or when none of her few visitors could be persuaded to bring her some Nutrisse Champagne Blonde, her favorite), she used ReaLemon from the kitchen. It worked pretty well, but didn’t last very long.

  She reached out to touch Ree’s hair, then jerked back with a little cry when some of the gray stuck to her fingers. The threads wavered in the air for a second or two, then melted away to nothing.

  “Oh, Ree,” Claudia mourned. “Not you, too.”

  But maybe it wasn’t too late; there were only a few strands of that cocoon stuff in Ree’s hair. Maybe God had sent Claudia to B-7 while there was still time. Maybe this was a test. She took Ree by the shoulder and rolled her onto her back. The webbing was spiraling out of Ree’s cheeks and her poor scarred forehead, strands of it were emerging from her nostrils and eddying in her breath, but her face was still there.

  Well, mostly.

  Claudia used one hand to begin scrubbing the crap from Ree’s cheeks, going from one side to the other, not neglecting the whitish threads emerging from her mouth and strapping themselves across her lips. With her other hand, Claudia grabbed Ree’s shoulder and began to shake her.

  “Stephenson?” From down the hallway. “Inmate, what are you doing in there? That’s not your cell.”

  “Wake up!” Claudia cried, shaking harder. “Wake up, Ree! Before you can’t!”

  Nothing.

  “Inmate Stephenson? I’m talking to you.”

  “That’s Officer Lampley,” said Claudia, still shaking and still scraping at the relentless white threads—God, it was hard to stay ahead of them. “I like her, don’t you? Don’t you, Ree?” Claudia began to cry. “Don’t go away, honey, it’s too soon to go away!”

  And at first she thought the woman on the bunk appeared to agree with that, because her eyes snapped open and she began to smile.

  “Ree!” Claudia said. “Oh, thank God! I thought you were—”

  Only the smile continued to spread, the lips drawing back until it wasn’t a smile at all but a teeth-baring snarl. Ree sat up and clamped her hands around Claudia’s neck and bit off one of Claudia’s favorite earrings, a little plastic kitten-face. Claudia screamed. Ree spat out the earring along with the attached scrap of earlobe, and went for Claudia’s throat.

  Claudia outweighed the diminutive Ree Dempster by seventy pounds, and she was strong, but Ree had gone insane. Claudia was barely able to hold her off. Ree’s fingers slipped from Claudia’s neck and her fingernails dug into the larger woman’s bare shoulders, bringing blood.

  Claudia staggered from the bunk and toward the open cell door, Ree clinging to her like a limpet, snarling and gnashing and jerking from side to side, trying to break Claudia’s hold on her so she could move in and do real damage. Then they were in the hall and inmates were shouting, Officer Lampley was bellowing, and those sounds were in another galaxy, another universe, because Ree’s eyes were bulging and Ree’s teeth were chomping inches from Claudia’s face and then, oh God, her feet tangled and Claudia went sprawling in the B Wing corridor with Ree on top of her.

  “Inmate!” Van shouted. “Inmate, let loose!”

  Women were screaming. Claudia did not, at least to begin with. Screaming took strength, and she needed hers to hold the lunatic—the demon—away from her. Only it wasn’t working. That snapping mouth was closing in. She could smell Ree’s breath and see drops of Ree’s spittle, with tiny white filaments dancing in each drop.

  “Inmate, I have drawn my weapon! Don’t make me fire it! Please don’t make me do that!”

  “Shoot her!” someone screamed, and Claudia realized the someone was her. It seemed she had enough strength, after all. “Please, Officer Lampley!”

  There was a huge bang in the hallway. A large black hole appeared high in Ree’s forehead, right in the middle of the grid of scar tissue. Her eyes swiveled up, as if she were trying to see where she’d been shot, and warm blood spattered across Claudia’s face.

  With a final galvanic effort, Claudia pushed Ree away. Ree hit the corridor with a limp thud. Officer Lampley stood with her legs braced and her service weapon held out before her in both hands. The smoke curling from the muzzle reminded Claudia of the white threads that had stuck to her fingers when she had brushed Ree’s hair. Officer Lampley’s face was dead pale save for the purple pouches under her eyes.

  “She was going to kill me,” Claudia gasped.

  “I know,” Van said. “I know.”

  CHAPTER 17

  1

  Halfway to town, Clint Norcross had a thought that caused him to pull into the lot of the Olympia Diner and park beside the easel sign reading MY OH MY, TRY OUR EGG PIE. He pulled out his phone and searched HICKS. He didn’t have his number, which said everything about his relationship with Dooling Correctional’s assistant warden. He scrolled further and found LAMPLEY.

  Lampley picked up on the second ring. She sounded out of breath.

  “Van? You okay?”

  “Yeah, but you left before the fireworks. Listen, Doc, I had to shoot someone.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Ree Dempster. She’s dead.” Van explained what had happened. Clint listened, aghast.

  “Jesus,” he said when she was finished. “Are you all right, Van?”

  “Physically unhurt. Emotionally fucked to the sky, but you can psychoanalyze me later.” Van made a vast watery honking sound, blowing her nose on something. “There’s more.”

  She told Clint about the violent confrontation between Angel Fitzroy and Evie Black. “I wasn’t there, but I saw part of it on the monitors.”

  “Good thing you did. And Claudia. Sounds like you saved her life.”

  “It wasn’t a good thing for Dempster.”

  “Van—”

  “I liked Dempster. If you’d asked me, I would have said she was the last woman in here to go postal.”

  “Where’s her body?”

  “In the janitor’s closet.” Van sounded ashamed. “It was all we could think of.”

  “Of course.” Clint rubbed his forehead, eyes squeezed shut. He felt he ought to say more to comfort Lampley, but the words weren’t there. “And Angel? What about her?”

  “Sorley, of all people, got hold of a Mace can and blasted her. Quigley and Olson bullrushed her into a cell in A Wing. She’s currently beating on the walls and yelling for a doctor. Claims she’s blind, which is bullshit. She’s also claiming there are moths in her hair, which might not be bullshit. We’ve got an infestation of the bastards. You need to get back here, Doc. Hicks is having a meltdown. He asked me to surrender my weapon, which I refused to do, even though I suppose it’s protocol.”

  “You did the right thing. Until things settle down, protocol’s out the window.”

  “Hicks is useless.”

  Don’t I know it, Clint thought.

  “I mean, he always was, but under these circumstances, he could actually be dangerous.”

  Clint searched for a thread. “You said Evie was egging Angel on. What exactly was she saying?”

  “I don’t know, and neither do Quigley or Millie, either. Sorley might. She was the one who slowed Angel’s roll. Chick deserves a medal. If she doesn’t crash out, you can get the whole story from her when you come back. Which will be soon, right?”

  “ASAP,” said Clint. “Listen, Van, I know you’re upset, but I need to be clear on one thing. Angel s
tarted in on Evie because Evie wasn’t in one of those cocoons?”

  “That’s my sense. I just saw her whacking on the bars with a lid from one of the coffee urns, and yelling her head off. Then I had my own fish to fry.”

  “But she woke up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Evie woke up.”

  “Yeah. Fitzroy woke her up.”

  Clint tried to make something coherent of this, and couldn’t. Maybe after he got some sleep himself—

  The idea caused a flush of guilt to heat his face. A wild idea came to him: What if Evie Black was male? What if his wife had arrested a guy in drag?

  But no. When Lila arrested her, Evie had been buck naked. Presumably the female officers supervising her intake had seen her that way, too. And what would explain all her bruises and scrapes healing in less than half a day?

  “I need you to pass on what I’m about to say to Hicks and the other officers who are still there.” Clint had come back around to the thought that had occurred to him in the first place, why he had pulled into the diner parking lot and called the prison.

  “Won’t take long,” she said. “Billy Wettermore and Scott Hughes just came in, which is good news, but still, to call this a skeleton crew would be an insult to skeletons. We’ve got just seven warm bodies, counting Hicks. You’ll make eight.”

  Clint ignored this broad hint. “It struck me as I was driving into town, this stuff about Eve Black being different from the rest of the women, on top of what you’ve told me now—I just don’t know what to make of it. But I know that we can’t let it leave the prison, not yet. True or false. It could cause a riot. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  “Um . . .”

  That um gave Clint a bad feeling. “What is it?”

  “Well . . .”

  He liked that well even less.

  “Just tell me.”

  There was another wet honk. “I saw Hicks using his cell phone after the free-for-all in A Wing was over, and after I refused to give him my weapon. Also, after Millie updated Scott and Billy, they were both using their phones.”