Sleeping Beauties: A Novel

by Stephen King

  Now, Frank had to admit, the man was getting closer to something. Elaine could never cut him any slack. It was always her way, her call. To find himself warming to this bumpkin’s homily gave Frank a sick feeling—but he couldn’t deny it. Nor was he alone. The whole barroom congregation was listening closely, their mouths agape. Except for Howland, who was grinning like a guy watching a monkey do a dance on a street corner.

  “They can dress like men, that’s what proves it! A hundred years ago, a woman wouldn’t have been caught dead in pants unless she was ridin a hoss, and now they wear em everywhere!”

  “What you got against long legs in tight pants, asshole?” a woman called, and there was general laughter.

  “Nuthin!” the trucker/preacher shot back. “But do you think a man—a natural man, not one of those New York trannies—would be caught dead on the streets of Dooling in a dress? No! They’d be called crazy! They’d be laughed at! But the women, now they get to have it both ways! They forgot what the Bible says about how a woman should follow her husband in all things, and sew, and cook, and have the kiddies, and not be out in public wearing hot pants! Get even with men, they mighta been left alone! But that wasn’t enough! They had to get ahead! Had to make us second best! They flew too close to the sun and God put em to sleep!”

  He blinked and rubbed a hand over his beard-scratchy face, seeming to realize where he was and what he was doing—spewing his private thoughts to a barroom filled with staring people.

  “Ike-a-rus,” he said, and abruptly sat down.

  “Thank you, Mr. Carson Struthers, from RFD 2.” That was Pudge Marone, bartender and owner of the Squeak, hollering out from behind his bar. “Our own local celebrity, folks: ‘Country Strong’ Struthers. Watch out for the right hook. Carson’s my ex-brother-in-law.” Pudge was a would-be comedian with saggy Rodney Dangerfield cheeks. Not all that funny, but he gave a fair pour. “That was some real food for thought, Carson. I look forward to discussing all this with my sister at Thanksgiving dinner.”

  There was more laughter at that.

  Before the general conversation could start up again, or before someone could plug in the juke and reanimate Mr. Tritt, Howland stood up, holding a hand in the air. History professor, Frank suddenly remembered. That’s what he said he was. Said he was going to name his new dog Tacitus, after his favorite Roman historian. Frank had thought it was a lot of name for a bichon frise.

  “My friends,” the professor said in rolling tones, “with all that has happened today, it is easy to understand why we haven’t yet thought of tomorrow, and all the tomorrows to come. Let us put morals and morality and hot pants aside for a moment and consider the practicalities.”

  He patted Carson “Country Strong” Struthers’s burly shoulder.

  “This gentleman has a point; women have indeed surpassed men in certain aspects, at least in western society, and I submit that they have done so in ways rather more important than their freedom to shop at Walmart ungirdled and with their hair in rollers. Suppose this—let’s call it a plague, for want of a better word—suppose this plague had gone the other way, and it was the men falling asleep and not waking up?”

  Utter silence in the Squeaky Wheel. Every eye trained on Howland, who seemed to enjoy the attention. His delivery was not that of a backwoods Bible-thumper, but it was still mesmerizing: unhesitating and practiced.

  “The women could re-start the human race, could they not? Of course they could. There are millions of sperm donations—frozen babies-in-waiting—stored in facilities all across this great country of ours. Tens and tens of millions across the world! The result would be babies of both sexes!”

  “Assuming the new male babies didn’t also grow cocoons as soon as they stopped crying and fell asleep for the first time,” a very pretty young woman said. She had appeared alongside Flickinger. It occurred to Frank that the trucker/preacher/ex-boxer had missed one thing in his oration: women just naturally looked better than men. More finished, somehow.

  “Yes,” Howland agreed, “but even if that were the case, women could continue to reproduce for generations, possibly until Aurora ran its course. Can men do that? Gentlemen, where will the human race be in fifty years, if the women don’t wake up? Where will it be in a hundred?”

  Now the silence was broken by a man who began to bawl in great, noisy blabbers.

  Howland ignored him. “But perhaps the question of future generations is moot.” He raised a finger. “History suggests an extremely uncomfortable idea about human nature, my friends, one that may explain why, as this gentleman here has so passionately elucidated, women have got ahead. The idea, baldly stated, is this: women are sane, but men are mad.”

  “Bullshit!” someone called. “Fuckin bullshit!”

  Howland was not deterred; he actually smiled. “Is it? Who makes up your motorcycle gangs? Men. Who comprises the gangs that have turned neighborhoods in Chicago and Detroit into free-fire zones? Boys. Who are the ones in power who start the wars and who are the ones who—with the exception of a few female helicopter pilots and such—fight those wars? Men. Oh, and who suffers as collateral damage? Women and children, mostly.”

  “Yeah, and who shakes their asses, egging em on?” Don Peters shouted. His face was red. Veins were standing out on the sides of his neck. “Who’s pulling the motherfucking strings, Mr. Egghead Smartboy?”

  There was a spatter of applause. Michaela rolled her eyes and was about to speak. Full of meth, blood pressure redlining, she felt like she could go on for perhaps six hours, the length of a Puritan sermon. But before she could start, Howland was off again.

  “Thoughtfully put, sir, the contribution of a true intellectual, and a belief that many men advance, usually ones with a certain sense of inferiority when it comes to the fairer s—”

  Don started to rise. “Who are you calling inferior, jackwad?”

  Frank pulled him down, wanting to keep this one close. If Fritz Meshaum had really gotten hold of something, he needed to talk to Don Peters about it. Because he was pretty sure Don worked at the prison.

  “Let me go,” Don snarled.

  Frank slid his hand up to Don’s armpit and squeezed. “You need to calm down.”

  Don grimaced, but didn’t say anything more.

  “Here is an interesting fact,” Howland continued. “During the second half of the nineteenth century, most deep-mining operations, including those right here in Appalachia, employed workers called coolies. No, not Chinese peons; these were young men, sometimes boys as young as twelve, whose job it was to stand next to machinery that had a tendency to overheat. The coolies had a barrel of water, or a pipe, if there was a spring nearby. Their task was to pour water over the belts and pistons, to keep them cool. Hence the name coolies. I would submit that women have historically served the same function, restraining men—at least when possible—from their very worst, most abhorrent acts.”

  He looked around at his audience. The smile had left his face.

  “But now it seems the coolies are gone, or going. How long before men—soon to be the only sex—fall on each other with their guns and bombs and nuclear weapons? How long before the machine overheats and explodes?”

  Frank had heard enough. It wasn’t the future of the entire human race he cared about. If it could be saved, that would be a side-effect. What he cared about was Nana. He wanted to kiss her sweet face, and to apologize for stretching her favorite shirt. Tell her he would never do it again. He could not do those things unless she was awake.

  “Come on,” he said to Don. “Outside. I want to talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  Frank leaned close to Peters’s ear. “Is there really a woman at the prison who can sleep without growing webs and then wake up?”

  Don craned around to look at Frank. “Hey, you’re the town dogcatcher, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right.” Frank let the dogcatcher bullshit slide. “And you’re Don who works at the prison.”

  “Yeah
,” said Don. “That’s me. So let’s talk.”

  8

  Clint and Lila had gone out to the back porch, the overhead light turning them into actors on a stage. They were looking toward the pool where Anton Dubcek had been skimming for dead bugs less than twenty-four hours earlier. Clint wondered idly where Anton was now. Sleeping, likely as not. Dreaming of willing young women rather than preparing for an unpleasant conversation with his wife. If so, Clint envied him.

  “Tell me about Sheila Norcross, honey. The girl you saw at the basketball game.”

  Lila favored him with an ugly smile of which he would have thought her incapable. It showed all of her teeth. Above it, her eyes—deep in their sockets now, with dark brown circles beneath them—glittered. “As if you don’t know. Honey.”

  Put on your therapist’s hat, he told himself. Remember that she’s high on dope and running on fumes. Exhausted people can slip very easily into paranoia. But it was hard. He saw the outline of it; she thought that some girl he’d never heard of was his daughter by Shan Parks. But it was impossible, and when your wife accused you of something impossible, and everything else in the world was, by any rational standard, more important and immediate, it was very, very hard to keep from losing your temper.

  “Tell me what you know. Then I’ll tell you what I know. But let’s begin with one simple fact. That girl is not my daughter, whether she has my name or not, and I have never broken our marriage vows.” She turned as if to go back inside. He caught her by the arm. “Please. Tell me before—”

  Before you go to sleep and we lose whatever chance we have to square this, he thought.

  “Before it can fester any more than it already has.”

  Lila shrugged. “Does it even matter, with everything else?”

  His very thought a moment ago, but he could have said it matters to you. He kept his mouth closed instead. Because in spite of all that was happening in the wider world, it mattered to him, too.

  “You know I never even wanted this pool, don’t you?” Lila asked.

  “What?” Clint was baffled. What did the pool have to do with anything?

  “Mom? Dad?” Jared was standing inside the screen door, listening.

  “Jared, go back inside. This is between your mother and m—”

  “No, let him listen,” Lila said. “If you insist on going through this, we will. Don’t you think he should know about his half-sister?” She turned to Jared. “She’s a year younger than you, she has blond hair, she’s a talented basketball player, and she’s as pretty as a picture. As you would be, if you were a girl. Because, see, she looks like you, Jere.”

  “Dad?” His brow was furrowed. “What’s she talking about?”

  Clint gave up. It was too late to do anything else. “Why don’t you tell us, Lila? Start from the beginning.”

  9

  Lila went through it, starting with the Curriculum Committee, and what Dorothy Harper had said to her afterward, how she hadn’t really thought much of it, but did an Internet search the next day. The search had brought her to the article, which included a mention of Shannon Parks, whom Clint had spoken of once before, and a striking photograph of Sheila Norcross. “She could almost be your twin, Jared.”

  Jared slowly turned to his father.

  The three of them now sat at the kitchen table.

  Clint shook his head, but couldn’t help wondering what his face was showing. Because he felt guilty. As if there had really been something to feel guilty about. It was an interesting phenomenon. That night in 2002 what he’d whispered in Shannon’s ear was, “You know, I’ll always be there if you need me.” When she’d responded, “What if I needed you tonight?” Clint had said that was the one thing he couldn’t do. If he had slept with her, there would have been something to feel guilty about, but he’d refused her, so it was all good. Wasn’t it?

  Maybe, but why had he never told Lila about the encounter? He couldn’t remember and he wasn’t required to defend what happened fifteen years before. She might as well demand that he explain why he’d knocked Jason down in the Burtells’ backyard for nothing more than a chocolate milkshake.

  “Is that it?” Clint asked. He couldn’t resist adding, “Tell me that’s not all, Lila.”

  “No, that’s not all,” she said. “Are you going to tell me that you didn’t know Shannon Parks?”

  “You know I did,” Clint said. “I’m sure I’ve mentioned her name.”

  “In passing,” Lila said. “But it was a little more than a passing acquaintance, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. It was. We were both caught in the foster system. For awhile we kept each other afloat. Otherwise one or both of us would have drowned. It was Shannon who got me to stop fighting. She said if I didn’t, I was apt to kill someone.” He took Lila’s hands across the table. “But that was years ago.”

  Lila pulled her hands away. “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Fifteen years ago!” Clint cried. It was ridiculous.

  “Sheila Norcross is fifteen.”

  “A year younger than me . . .” Jared said. If she’d been older—eighteen or nineteen—her birth would have pre-dated his parents’ marriage. But younger . . .

  “And her father’s name,” Lila said, breathing hard, “is Clinton Norcross. It says so right on her school enrollment.”

  “How did you get her enrollment?” Clint asked. “I didn’t know those documents were available to the general public.”

  For the first time his wife looked uncomfortable rather than angry . . . and thus somehow less like a stranger.

  “You make it sound sleazy.” Lila’s cheeks had flushed. “Okay, maybe it was sleazy. But I had to know the father’s name. Your name, as it turns out. So then I went to see her play. That’s where I was last night, in the Coughlin High gym, at an AAU game, watching your daughter play hoops. And it’s not just your face and your name she has.”

  10

  The horn blasted and the Tri-Counties AAU team jogged over to the sideline. Lila broke away from searching the stands for a sign of Shannon.

  She saw Sheila Norcross nod at one of her teammates, a taller girl. They did an elaborate handshake: bumped fists, locked thumbs, and clapped hands over their heads.

  It was the Cool Shake.

  That was it, that was when Lila’s heart broke. Her husband was a man in a beguiling mask. All her doubts and dissatisfactions suddenly made sense.

  The Cool Shake. She had seen Clint and Jared do it a hundred times. A thousand times. Bump, lock, clap-clap. There was a precious slideshow in her head of Jared, growing taller with each click of the wheel, filling out, hair darkening, doing the Cool Shake with his father. Clint had taught it to all the boys on Jared’s Little League team.

  He’d taught her, too.

  CHAPTER 20

  1

  Around midnight central time, a fracas broke out between a small group of Crips and a much larger contingent of Bloods at a Chicago bar called Stoney’s Big Dipper. It spread from there, becoming a city-wide gang war that Internet news sites described variously as apocalyptic, unprecedented, and “fucking humungous.” No one would ever know which member of which gang actually lit the match that ignited what became known as the Second Great Chicago Fire, but it started in West Englewood and spread from there. By dawn, large parts of the city were in flames. Police and fire department response was nearly nonexistent. Most of the cops and hose-jockeys were at home, either trying to keep their wives and daughters awake, or watching over their cocooned bodies while they slept, hoping against hope.

  2

  “Tell me what you saw,” Frank said. He and Don Peters were standing in back of the Squeaky Wheel, where things had finally begun to wind down—probably because Pudge Marone’s supply of alcohol was running low. “Exactly what you saw.”

  “I was in the Booth, right? That’s the prison’s nerve-center. We got fifty different cameras. I was looking into what they call the soft cell, which is where they put the new on
e. She’s down as Eve Black, although I don’t know if that’s her real name or just—”

  “Never mind that now. What did you see?”

  “Well, she was in a red top, like all the new intakes are, and she was falling asleep. I was interested to see the webs come out of her skin, because I knew about it but hadn’t seen it. Only they didn’t.” Don grasped the sleeve of Frank’s shirt. “You hear what I’m saying? No webs. Not a single thread, and by then she was asleep. Only she woke up—her eyes snapped wide open—and she stared right into the camera. Like she was staring at me. I think she was staring at me. I know that sounds crazy, but—”

  “Maybe she wasn’t really asleep. Maybe she was faking.”

  “All relaxed and sprawled out like she was? No way. Trust me.”

  “How come she’s there? Why not in the lockup downtown?”

  “Because she’s as crazy as a shithouse mouse, that’s why. Killed a couple of meth cookers with her bare fucking hands!”

  “Why aren’t you at the prison tonight?”

  “Because a couple of ratfucks framed me!” Don burst out. “Fucking framed me and then fucking canned me! Warden Coates and her buddy the headshrinker, the sheriff’s husband! Being married to her is how he probably got the job at the prison in the first place! Had to be a fucking political deal, because he doesn’t know his ass from a doorknob!”

  Don plunged into the story of his innocent crucifixion, but Frank didn’t care what Coates and Norcross claimed this Peters had done. At that moment Frank’s mind was a frog on hot rocks, leaping from one idea to the next. Leaping high.

  An immune woman? Right here in Dooling? It seemed impossible, but he now had a report of her waking from two people. If there was a Patient Zero, she had to be somewhere, right, so why not here? And who was to say there weren’t other immunes scattered around the country and the world? The important thing was that if it was true, this Eve Black might offer a cure. A doctor (maybe even his new buddy Garth Flickinger, if Flickinger could get straight and sober) might be able to find something about her blood that was different, and that might lead to . . . well . . .