by Stephen King
5
Ursula’s Corolla was equipped with satellite radio, and after fiddling with the buttons for awhile, Michaela found NewsAmerica. The news was not so terrific. There were unconfirmed reports of an “incident” involving the vice-president’s wife that had caused the Secret Service to be summoned to Number One, Observatory Circle. Animal rights activists had set free the inhabitants of the National Zoo; multiple witnesses had seen a lion devouring what looked like a human being on Cathedral Avenue. Hard right conservatives on talk radio were proclaiming the Aurora virus as proof that God was angry with feminism. The pope had asked everyone to pray for guidance. The Nationals had canceled their weekend interleague series against the Orioles. Michaela sort of understood this last one, but sort of didn’t; all the players (the umpires, too) were men, weren’t they?
In the passenger seat, the cotton-ball-headed creature that had been Ursula Whitman-Davies mimicked the rhythm of the interstate, lolling gently with the stretches of smooth macadam, jittering around when the tires found grooved, unfinished paving. She was either the absolute best or absolute worst traveling companion in the history of the world.
For awhile Michaela had dated a girl who was devoted to crystals, who believed that, with calm focus and sincere belief, you could take the form of light. That sweet, earnest girl was probably asleep now, swathed in white. Michaela thought of her own late father: good old Dad, who used to sit beside her bed when she was scared at night—or at least, that’s what her mother had told her. Michaela had been three when he’d died. She couldn’t remember him as a living man. Michaela—despite her nose job, despite her fake last name—was a true reporter. She knew the facts, and the one fact about Archie Coates that she did know well, was that he had been placed in a coffin and planted in the soil of the Shady Hills Cemetery in the town of Dooling, and was there still. He had not become light. She did not allow herself to fantasize that she was soon to meet her dad in some afterlife. The deal was simply this: the world was ending and a poodle-strangling woman clothed in webs was swaying beside Michaela and all she wanted was to have a few hours with her mother before sleep took them both.
At Morgantown she had to refill the Corolla’s tank. It was full-service. The young guy who pumped the gas apologized; the credit card machines were down. Michaela paid him from a wad in Ursula’s purse.
The guy had a short blond beard, wore a plain white tee-shirt and blue jeans. She had never been especially attracted to men, but she liked the look of this lean Viking.
“Thank you,” she said. “You hanging in there?”
“Oh,” he said, “forget about me, lady. You don’t need to be worrying about me. You know how to use that?”
She followed the tilt of his chin to Ursula’s purse, which rested at the hip of the cocooned woman. The grip of a revolver protruded from its unzipped mouth. It seemed that Ms. Whitman-Davies had fancied firearms as well as canines.
“Not really,” she admitted. “My girlfriend knew I was making a long drive and loaned it to me.”
He gave her a stern look. “Safety’ll be on the side. Make sure it’s switched off if you see trouble coming. Point it at the middle of Mr. Trouble’s body—center mass—and pull the trigger. Don’t let go or get hit in the boob when it recoils. Can you remember that?”
“Yeah,” said Michaela. “Center mass. Don’t let go or get hit in the boob. Gotcha. Thanks.” And rolled out. She heard the Viking call, “Hey, you on TV, maybe?”
Around one o’clock on Friday morning, she finally arrived on the outskirts of Dooling. Drifts of smoke from the fire in the woods rolled across West Lavin as she piloted the Corolla toward the long, low outline of the prison in the dark. The smoke made Michaela press a hand over her mouth to keep from inhaling the reek of ash.
At the gate, she stepped from the car, and punched the red call button.
6
Maura Dunbarton sat in her B Wing cell with what remained of Kayleigh, not dead but dead to this world. Did she dream inside her shroud?
Maura sat with her hand on Kayleigh’s chest, feeling the gentle rise and fall of her respiration and watching the white mat of fibrous gunk first puffing out, then pulling back in, outlining Kayleigh’s open mouth with each inhalation. Twice Maura had set her nails into that thick and slightly sticky material, on the verge of ripping it open and setting Kayleigh free. Both times she thought of what the TV news had been reporting and took her hands away.
In a closed society like Dooling Correctional, both rumors and cold germs spread fast. But what had happened an hour ago in A Wing was no rumor. Angel Fitzroy was caged up, eyes swollen from Mace. Raving about how the new woman was a fucking witch.
This to Maura seemed perfectly possible, especially after Claudia Stephenson crept through B Wing, wearing bruises on her neck and deep scratches on her shoulders, telling all and sundry how Ree almost killed her, and all she had seen and overheard before that. Claudia claimed the new woman had known Jeanette and Angel’s names, but that was only the least of it. She also knew—knew!—that Angel had killed at least five men and a newborn baby.
“The woman’s name is Evie, like Eve in the Garden of Eden,” Claudia said. “Think about that! Then Ree tried to kill me, and I bet the witch knew that was going to happen, just like she knew them others’ names, and about Angel’s baby.”
Claudia was not what anyone would call a reliable witness, but it still made sense. Only a witch could know such things.
Two stories came together in Maura’s head and combined there to make a certainty. One was about a beautiful princess who was cursed by a wicked witch and fell into a deep sleep when she pricked her finger on a spindle. (Maura wasn’t sure what a spindle was, but it must be sharp.) After countless years, a kiss awakened the princess from her slumber. The other was the story of Hansel and Gretel. Captured by a witch, they kept their cool and escaped after burning the hag alive in her own oven.
Stories were only stories, but the ones that survived over hundreds of years must contain nuggets of truth. The truth in these two could be: spells could be broken; witches could be destroyed. Popping off the witch-woman in A Wing might not wake up Kayleigh and all the other women in the world. On the other hand, it might. It really might. Even if it didn’t, the woman named Evie had to have something to do with this plague. Why else would she be able to sleep and wake normally? How else could she know things she had no way of knowing?
Maura had been in prison for decades. She had done a lot of reading, and even made her way through the Bible. It had seemed like a fairly worthless stack of paper at the time, men creating laws and women begetting beget-me-nots, but she remembered a compelling line: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
A plan assembled itself in Maura’s mind. She would need a bit of luck to execute it. But with half the guards AWOL and the prison’s ordinary nighttime routine all shot to hell, maybe not too much. Angel Fitzroy hadn’t been able to do it, because all of Angel’s rage was on the surface, for anyone to see. That was why she was currently in a locked cell. Maura’s rage, on the other hand, was a deeply banked fire, its glowing coals masked with ashes. Which was why she was a trustee, with the run of the prison.
“I’ll be back, honey,” she said, patting Kayleigh’s shoulder. “Unless she kills me, that is. If she’s a real witch, I guess she might.”
Maura lifted her mattress and felt for the tiny slit she’d made. She reached in and brought out a toothbrush. The hard plastic handle had been sharpened to a point. She slid it into the elastic waistband of her pants at the small of her back, bloused her baggy top over it, and left her cell. In the B Wing corridor, she turned back, and blew her faceless cellmate a kiss.
7
“Inmate, what are you doing?”
It was Lawrence Hicks, standing in the doorway of Dooling Correctional’s small but surprisingly well-stocked library. He normally favored three-piece suits and dark ties, but tonight both his jacket and vest were gone, and the tie was pulled down s
o that the end flapped over the top of his fly, like an arrow pointing to his no doubt shriveled junk.
“Hello, Mr. Hicks,” Maura said, continuing to load paperbacks onto a rolling library cart. She gave him a smile, her one gold tooth sparkling in the overhead fluorescents. “I’m going on a book run.”
“Isn’t it a little late for that, inmate?”
“I don’t think so, sir. No lights-out tonight, I don’t think.”
She spoke respectfully and continued to smile. That was the way you did it; you smiled and looked harmless. It’s just old, gray Maura Dunbarton, beaten down by years of prison routine and happy to lick the shoes of anyone whose shoes needed licking, whatever harpy that had possessed her to kill those people long since exorcised. That was a grift the Angel Fitzroys of the world never learned. You had to keep your powder dry in case you ever needed it.
He came in to inspect her cart, and she could almost feel sorry for him—face all pale, beard-speckled jowls hanging like dough, what little hair he had mussed up—but if he tried to stop her, she’d stick him in his fat gut. She had to save Kayleigh if she possibly could. Sleeping Beauty had been saved with a kiss; Maura might be able to save her girl with a shiv.
Don’t get in my way, Hicksie, she thought. Not unless you want a hole in your liver. I know right where it is.
Hicks was examining the paperbacks Maura had culled from the shelves: Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Joe Hill.
“These are all horror stories!” Hicks exclaimed. “We let inmates read this stuff?”
“This and the romances is about all they do read, sir,” Maura told him, not adding, Which you’d know if you knew anything about the way this place works, you weasel. She refreshed her smile. “I figure horror stories are what will keep the ladies awake tonight, if anything will. Besides, ain’t none of this stuff real; all vampires and werewolves and such. They’re like fairy tales.”
For a moment he seemed to hesitate, maybe getting ready to tell her to go back to her cell. Maura reached around to the small of her back, as if scratching an itch there. Then he puffed out his cheeks in a sigh. “Go on. At least it’ll keep you awake.”
This time her smile was genuine. “Oh, don’t worry about me, Mr. Hicks. I suffer from insomnia.”
8
Michaela had ceased pressing the button and now just held it down. Light blazed from the glassed-in front area of the prison, and there were cars parked in the lot; someone was awake in there.
“What?” The male voice that answered was the definition of weary; it was a voice with a ten o’clock shadow. “This is Officer Quigley. Cut it out with the damn button.”
“My name is Michaela Morgan.” A second later she remembered that her TV name meant nothing here.
“So?” The voice was not impressed.
“I used to be Michaela Coates. My mother is the warden. I would like to see her, please.”
“Uh . . .”
Silence, except for a faint buzz on the line. She straightened up, her patience exhausted. She thumbed the call button as hard as she could. “I’ll also have you know that I work for NewsAmerica. Do I need to do an exposé on you, or can I speak with my mother?”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Coates. She fell asleep.”
Now it was Michaela’s turn to be silent. She was too late. She sagged against the chainlink. The headlights of the Corolla bounced back from the front of the gate, and dazzled her swollen eyes.
“I’m sorry,” came the voice. “She was a good boss.”
“What do I do now?” Michaela asked. She wasn’t pressing the call button so the question was only directed to the night and the smoke leaking from the woods.
Officer Quigley came back with the answer, as if he had heard. “Go on into town, why don’t you? Get a room. Or . . . I hear the Squeaky Wheel’s got an open bar tonight and they’re not closing till the sun rises or the beer runs out.”
9
Maura rolled her cart down B Wing, going slow, not wanting anyone to think she had any particular goal in mind.
“Books?” she inquired at each occupied cell—at least at those where the occupants weren’t covered in white shit. “Want to read some scary stuff? I got nine different flavors of boogeyman.”
She had few takers. Most of them were watching the news, which was a horror story in itself. Officer Wettermore stopped her near B Wing to have a look at the titles on her cart. Maura wasn’t that surprised to see him here tonight, because Officer Wettermore was as gay as New Orleans on the first night of Mardi Gras. If he had any womenfolk at home, she’d be astounded.
“That looks like a bunch of garbage to me,” he said. “Go on and get out of here, Maura.”
“Okay, Officer. Going down A Wing now. A couple of the ladies down there, Dr. Norcross has got them in the Prozac Posse, but they still like to read.”
“Fine, but keep your distance from both Fitzroy and the soft cell at the end, right?”
Maura gave him her biggest smile. “Absolutely, Officer Wettermore. And thank you! Thank you very much!”
Other than the new one—the witch—there were only two wakeful women in A Wing, plus the sleeping heap that had been Kitty McDavid.
“No,” said the woman in A-2. “Can’t read, can’t read. The meds Norcross has me on screw up my eyes. Can’t read, no. Been shouting in here. I don’t like shouting.”
The other woman, in A-8, was Angel. She looked at Maura with puffy what-the-fuck-happened-to-me eyes. “Keep rolling, Mo-Mo,” she warned when Maura, in spite of Officer Wettermore’s admonition, offered her a couple of the books. That was okay. Maura was almost at the end of the corridor now. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Wettermore with his back to her, in deep conversation with Officer Murphy, the one the girls called Tigger, like in the Pooh stories.
“Maura . . .”
It was only a whisper, but penetrating. Resonant, somehow.
It was the new one. Evie. Eve. Who in the Bible had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and gotten both her and her hubby banished into this world of pain and perplexity. Maura knew banishment, knew it well. She had been banished to Dooling for banishing her husband and her two kids (not to mention Slugger) to the vastness of eternity.
Evie stood at the barred door of the soft cell, gazing at Maura. And smiling. Maura had never seen such a beautiful smile in her life. A witch, maybe, but gorgeous. The witch put a hand through the bars and beckoned with one long and elegant finger. Maura rolled her cart onward.
“No further, inmate!” That was Officer Tig Murphy. “Stop right there!”
Maura kept going.
“Get her, stop her!” Murphy yelled, and she heard the clatter-clap of their hard shoes on the tiles.
Maura turned the cart sideways and pitched it over, creating a temporary roadblock. Tattered paperbacks flew and skidded.
“Stop, inmate, stop!”
Maura hustled for the soft cell, reaching around to the small of her back and whipping out the toothbrush shiv. The witch-woman still beckoned. She doesn’t see what I got for her, Maura thought.
She drew her arm back along her hip, meaning to piston it forward into the witch-woman’s midsection. Into her liver. Only those dark eyes first slowed her, then stopped her. It wasn’t evil Maura saw in them, but chilly interest.
“You want to be with her, don’t you?” Evie asked in a rapid whisper.
“Yes,” Maura said. “Oh my God, so much.”
“You can be. But first you must sleep.”
“I can’t. Insomnia.”
Wettermore and Murphy were coming. There were only seconds to stick the witch-woman and end this plague. Only Maura didn’t. The stranger’s dark eyes held her fast and she found that she did not wish to struggle against that hold. They weren’t eyes at all, Maura saw, but gaps, openings into a new darkness.
The witch-woman pressed her face against the bars, her eyes never leaving Maura’s. “Kiss me quick. While there’s still time.”
Maura didn’t think. S
he dropped the sharpened toothbrush and pressed her own face to the bars. Their lips met. Eve’s warm breath slipped into Maura’s mouth and down her throat. Maura felt blessed sleep rising from the bottom of her brain, as it had when she was a child, safe in her own bed with Freddy the Teddy curled in one arm and Gussie the stuffed dragon curled in the other. Listening to a cold wind outside and knowing she was safe and warm inside, bound for the land of dreams.
When Billy Wettermore and Tig Murphy reached her, Maura was lying on her back outside Evie’s cell, the first strands spinning out of her hair, out of her mouth, and from beneath the closed lids of her dreaming eyes.
CHAPTER 18
1
Frank expected another heaping helping of bullshit from Elaine when he returned to the house, but it turned out to be a zero-bullshit situation. Like nothing else that day—or, for that matter, in the days to come—his problems solved themselves the easy way. So why didn’t he feel at all cheered?
His estranged wife lay asleep in their daughter’s bed with her right arm looped over Nana’s shoulder. The cocoon around her face was thin, a tight first coating of papier maché, but a complete coating nonetheless. A note on the bedside table read, I prayed for you, Frank. I hope you will pray for us.—E.
Frank crumpled the note and threw it in the trashcan beside the bed. Tiana, the black Disney princess, danced across the side of the bin in her glittering green dress, followed by a parade of magical animals.
“There are no adequate words.” Garth Flickinger had followed him upstairs and now stood behind Frank in the doorway to Nana’s room.
“Yeah,” said Frank. “I guess that’s right.”
There was a framed photo of Nana and her parents on the bedside table. Nana was holding up her prize bookmark. The doctor picked up the photo and studied it. “She has your cheekbones, Mr. Geary. Lucky girl.”