by Stephen King
They had taken shelter in the remains of Mrs. Ransom’s house, not trying anything from the dusty canned goods in the pantry because Lila was afraid of botulism. They subsisted for the next two weeks primarily on berries they picked from the bushes in their former suburban neighborhood, and tiny ears of wild corn, tough and almost tasteless, but at least edible. May was too early for berries and corn, but there it was.
From this Lila drew a conclusion, shaky at first but growing more solid: the version of Dooling where they found themselves was moving at a different pace in time from the Dooling they had been in before. Time felt the same, but it wasn’t. Mrs. Ransom confirmed that she had been alone for several days before Molly appeared. The hours in the old place (before?), were days in the new one (now?). Maybe more than days.
This concern with the differing time-streams most often occupied Lila in the loose minutes before sleep took her. Many of the places they slept were open to the sky—fallen trees had punched holes in some roofs, wind had snatched others away altogether—and Lila blinked at the stars as she drifted off. The stars were the same, but their glare was shocking. They were hot-white welding sparks. Was it even real, this world without men? Was it heaven? Purgatory? An alternate universe on an alternate time-stream?
More women and girls arrived. The population began to snowball, and although Lila didn’t want the job, she found herself in charge. By default, it seemed.
Dorothy Harper of the Curriculum Committee, and her friends, three cheerful, white-haired women in their seventies, who introduced themselves as book club chums, emerged from the scrub forest that had risen around a condo. They made a great fuss over Molly, who enjoyed being fussed over. Janice Coates arrived strolling down Main Street, a leaf stuck in the ruins of her perm, accompanied by three women in prison red tops. Janice and the three former inmates—Kitty McDavid, Celia Frode, and Nell Seeger—had needed to hack their way through a thicket to get out of Dooling Correctional.
“Good afternoon, ladies,” Janice said, after embracing first Blanche McIntyre, then Lila. “Forgive our appearance. We just broke jail. Now which one of you nicked your finger on a spindle and created this mess?”
Some of the old dwellings were habitable and salvageable. Others were fabulously overgrown or crumbled or both. On Main Street they gaped at the high school, which had been an outmoded building even in the old Dooling. In this new one, it was literally split down the middle, each half of the structure leaning to opposite sides, and open air in between jagged brick edges. Birds perched on the cliffs of classroom lino that jutted out into space. The Municipal Building, which had included the town and sheriff’s department offices, was half-collapsed. A sinkhole had opened on Malloy. A car sat at the bottom, submerged to the windshield in coffee-colored water.
A woman named Kayleigh Rawlings joined the colony, and volunteered her experience as an electrician. It was no surprise to the former warden, who knew that Kayleigh had gone to vocational school to learn about wiring and voltage. That Kayleigh and her education had emerged from inside the fence of Dooling Correctional was not an issue. The woman had never committed a crime in this new place, under these too-bright stars.
Kayleigh managed to resurrect a solar-powered generator attached to what had once been a rich doctor’s house, and they cooked rabbit on his electric stovetop and listened to old records on his vintage Rock-Ola jukebox.
In the evenings they talked. Most of the women had, like Lila in the cruiser in Mrs. Ransom’s driveway, awakened in the places where they had fallen asleep. A few others, however, remembered finding themselves in the dark, hearing nothing but wind and birdsong and—perhaps—distant voices. When the sun had risen these women had picked their way west through woods and come out either on Ball’s Hill Road or West Lavin. To Lila, the picture they drew of those early moments was of a world being formed, as if the surroundings of their existence was an act of collective imagination. That, she thought, was as likely as anything else.
3
Day followed day and night followed night. Exactly how many from the first day no one was sure, but weeks certainly, and then months.
A hunting and gathering group was formed. There was a great deal of game—deer and rabbit, especially—as well as plenty of wild fruits and vegetables. They never came close to starving. There was a farming group, a construction group, a healthcare group, and an education group to teach the children. Each morning a different girl stood out in front of the little school, ringing a cowbell. The sound carried for miles. Women taught; some of the older girls did, too.
No viruses afflicted them, though there were many cases of poison ivy to deal with and more than a few cuts and bruises, even broken bones brought about by the perils inherent in long-abandoned structures—sharp edges and bucklings and hidden traps. If this world was an act of imagination, Lila sometimes thought as she drifted toward sleep, it was a remarkably strong one if it could make people bleed.
In the basement of the high school, where some variety of mold had made a feast of the filing cabinets full of decades-old school board transcripts, Lila unearthed a mimeograph machine that had probably not been used since the mid-sixties. It was packed neatly away in a plastic crate. Some of the erstwhile prison inmates turned out to be remarkably crafty. They helped Molly Ransom make fresh ink from swamp redcurrants, and the girl founded a single-sheet newspaper called Dooling Doings. The first headline was SCHOOL REOPENS! and she quoted Lila Norcross as saying, “It’s nice to see the kids getting back into their routine.” Molly asked Lila what her title was, Dooling Chief of Police or plain Sheriff. Lila said to just to call her “a local.”
And there were the Meetings. These took place once a week initially, then twice, and lasted an hour or two. Although they turned out to be extremely important to the health and well-being of the women living in Our Place, they came about almost by accident. The first attendees were the ladies who had called themselves the First Thursday Book Club in the old world. In this new one, they got together in the Shopwell supermarket, which had held up remarkably well. And they had enough to talk about without a book to get them started. Blanche, Dorothy, Margaret, and Margaret’s sister Gail sat on folding chairs at the front of the store, chatting about all the things they missed. These included fresh coffee and orange juice, air conditioning, television, garbage pickup, the Internet, and being able to just power up a phone and call a friend. Mostly, though—they all agreed on this—they missed men. Younger women began to drift in, and were welcomed. They talked about the gaps in their lives, places of absence that had once been filled by their sons, nephews, fathers, grandfathers . . . and their husbands.
“Let me tell you girls something,” Rita Coombs said at a Meeting toward the end of that first summer—by then there were almost four dozen ladies in attendance. “It may be too frank for some of you, but I don’t care. I miss a good old Friday night fuck. Terry was too quick on the trigger at the start of our relationship, but once I got him trained, he was fine. I had nights when I could pop off two little ones and one big one before he fired his gun. And afterward? Slept like a baby!”
“Don’t your fingers work?” someone asked, to general laughter.
“Yes, they do!” Rita retorted. She was also laughing, her cheeks as red as apples. “But darlin, they are not the same!”
This earned her a hearty round of applause, although a few women—Fritz Meshaum’s mousy wife, Candy, for one—abstained.
The two big questions came up, of course, in a hundred different ways. First, how had they come to be here, in Our Place? And why?
Was it magic? Was it some scientific experiment gone wrong? Was it the will of God?
Was their continued existence a reward or a punishment?
Why them?
Kitty McDavid was a frequent speaker when the discussion turned in this direction; Kitty’s memory of her Aurora’s eve nightmare—of the dark figure that she’d somehow recognized as a queen, and the cobwebs that had flowed from the qu
een’s hair—remained vivid, haunting her still. “I don’t know what to do, if I should pray for forgiveness or what,” she said.
“Oh, fuck it,” Janice Coates had advised her. “You can do what you want since the pope’s not here to make a ruling, but I’m just going to keep doing my best. What else is there to do, honestly, that we know for sure can make a difference?” This had been another crowdpleaser.
The question, however—What the fuck had happened?—was renewed again and again. Without lasting satisfaction.
At one Meeting (it was at least three months after what Janice Coates liked to call the Great Displacement), a new attendee crept in, and settled on a fifty-pound bag of fertilizer at the back of the room. She kept her head down during the lively discussion of life as it was now lived, and news of a wonderful discovery at the local UPS shipping office: nine boxes of Lunapads, which were reusable sanitary napkins.
“No more cutting up tee-shirts to stuff in my underwear at that time of the month!” Nell Seeger exulted. “Hallelujah!”
Toward the end of the Meeting, talk turned—as it always did—to those things they missed. These discussions almost always occasioned tears for the boys and men, but most of the women said they felt at least temporarily unburdened. Lighter.
“Are we done, ladies?” Blanche asked on this particular day. “Does anyone have a burning desire to share before we get back to work?”
A small hand went up, the fingers dusted with many different colors of chalk.
“Yes, dear,” Blanche said. “You’re new, aren’t you? And very short! Would you care to stand?”
“Welcome,” the women chorused, turning to see.
Nana Geary got to her feet. She brushed her hands down the front of her shirt, which was now very worn and raggedy at the sleeves . . . but still her favorite.
“My mom doesn’t know I’m here,” she said, “so I hope no one will tell her.”
“Honey,” said Dorothy Harper, “this is like Vegas. What goes on in Women’s Hour stays in Women’s Hour.”
This brought a murmur of laughter, but the little girl in the faded pink tee-shirt did not even smile. “I just want to say I miss my daddy. I went into Pearson’s Barber Shop and found some of his aftershave—Drakkar Noir, it’s called—and I smelled it, and it made me cry.”
The front of the supermarket was dead silent except for a few sniffles. It would turn out later that Nana hadn’t been the only one to visit the aftershave shelves at Pearson’s.
“I guess that’s all,” Nana said. “Just . . . I miss him, and I wish I could see him again.”
They applauded her.
Nana sat down and put her hands over her face.
4
Our Place was no utopia. There were tears, more than a few arguments, and during the first summer, a murder-suicide that shocked them all, mostly because it was utterly senseless. Maura Dunbarton, another refugee from the Dooling Correctional of the previous world, strangled Kayleigh Rawlings, then took her own life. It was Coates who fetched Lila to see.
Maura was hanging from a noose knotted to the rusty crossbar of a backyard swing set. Kayleigh had been discovered in the room the lovers had shared, dead in her sleeping bag, her face gray and the sclera of her open eyes filigreed with hemorrhages. She had been strangled, then stabbed at least a dozen times. Maura had left a note, penciled on a scrap of envelope.
This world is different, but I am the same. You will be better off without me. I have killed Kayleigh for no reason. She did not aggravate me or start anything. I still loved her, like in prison. I know she was useful to you. I could not help myself. It came on to me to kill her so I did. I was sorry I did it afterwards.—Maura
“What do you think?” asked Lila.
Janice said, “I think it’s a mystery, like everything else here. I think it’s a goddam shame that when it came on to the crazy bitch to kill someone, she picked the only one in Our Place who understood how to wire a circuit and make it hot. Now I’ll hold her legs while you climb up and cut her down.”
Coates walked over and, without any ceremony, wrapped her arms around Maura Dunbarton’s short legs. She looked over at Lila. “Come on, then, don’t make me wait. Smells like she loaded her pants. Suicide is so glamorous.”
They buried both the killer and her hapless victim outside the sagging ring of fencing that surrounded the prison. It was summer again by then, bright and hot, with chiggers popping around the grass tops. Coates spoke a few words about Kayleigh’s contribution to the community and Maura’s puzzling act of homicide. A chorus of the children sang “Amazing Grace.” Their little girl voices made Lila weep.
She had salvaged a number of photographs of Jared and Clint from their home, and she sometimes attended the Meetings, but as time passed, her son and husband began to seem less real. At night, in her tent—Lila preferred to camp out as long as the weather was clement—she wound her crank flashlight, and scanned their faces in the beam. Who would Jared become? There was still that softness at the edges of his face, even in the most recent of the pictures. It hurt her not to know.
She looked at her husband’s image, his wry smile and graying hair, and missed him, though not as much as she missed Jere. Her suspicions of Clint on that horrible last day and night embarrassed her; her lies and the pointless fears made her ashamed. But Lila also found herself regarding her husband differently now that she saw him through the lens of memory. She thought about how carefully he’d bricked up his past, the way he’d used his authority as a doctor to bolster the concealment and ward her off. Had Clint thought that only he could handle that kind of pain? That it was too much for her little mind and puny spirit to absorb? Or was it a kind of egotism masquerading as strength? She knew men were taught (primarily by other men, of course) that they were to keep their pain to themselves, but she also knew marriage was supposed to undo some of that teaching. That hadn’t been the case with Clint.
And there was the pool. It still made her mad. And how he’d quit his job without a moment’s notice all those years ago. And a million tiny decisions in between, taken by him, and for her to live with. It made her feel like a Stepford Wife, even with her husband in some other world.
Owls hooted in the dark, and dogs, run feral after who knew how many canine generations, howled. Lila zipped the flap of her tent. The moon shone blue through the yellow fabric. Remembering all that domestic soap opera depressed her, her parts and his parts, back and forth, he slams one door, she slams the other. The histrionic crap she had always looked down on in other people’s marriages. Condescension, thy name was Lila, she thought, and had to laugh.
5
The hedges that once framed the prison had flourished into dense mounds. Lila entered through the gouge in the foliage that Coates and the other women who had awakened there had hacked out. Entry to the prison itself was through a hole in the south wall. Something—Lila was guessing the industrial gas stove in the kitchen—had exploded, blowing out the concrete as easily as a child huffing out a birthday candle. Going in, she half-expected to emerge in yet another place—a white beach, a cobbled thoroughfare, a rocky mountaintop, Oz—but when she arrived, it was only a wing of former cells. The walls were half-crumbled, some of the barred doors blown right off their hinges. She thought that the detonation must have been a doozy. Weeds grew from the floor and mold crawled across the ceiling.
She walked through the ruined wing and emerged into the central hall of the prison, what Clint called Broadway. Things looked better here. Lila followed the red line painted down the middle of the corridor. The various gates and barriers were unlocked; the wire-reinforced windows that gave onto the prison’s facilities—cafeteria, library, the Booth—were fogged over. Where Broadway reached the front doors there was another section that showed signs of an explosion: busted cinderblocks, dusty shards of glass, the steel door separating the entry area from the prison proper crumpled inward. Lila skirted the junk.
Farther down Broadway she passed the open d
oor to the staff lounge. Inside, mushrooms sprouted from the wall-to-wall carpeting. The air reeked of enthusiastic plant-life.
She eventually came to Clint’s office. The corner window was blown out and a mass of overgrown shrubbery poured in, flowering with white blooms. A rat was rummaging around in the stuffing of a torn couch cushion. It gawked at Lila for a moment and darted for the safety of a pile of crumbled drywall.
The Hockney print behind her husband’s desk hung askew, cocked at eleven and five. She straightened it. The picture showed a plain, sandy-colored building with rows of identically curtained windows. At ground level, the building had two doors. One door was blue, the other red: examples of Hockney’s famous colors, bright like the feelings aroused by good memories, even if the memories themselves were thin—and the interpretative possibilities had appealed to Lila. She had given it to Clint all those years ago, thinking that he might point to it and say to his patients: “See? Nothing is closed to you. There are doors to a healthier, happier life.”
The irony was as glaring as the metaphor. Clint was in another world. Jared was in another world. For all she knew, one or both of them might be dead. The Hockney print belonged to the rats and mold and weeds of this world. It was a broken world, emptied out and forgotten, but it was the one they had. It was, God save us, Our Place. Lila left the office and retraced her steps through the dead world of the prison to the hole in the foliage. She wanted out.
6
Throughout those months, more women continued to appear from what James Brown had once called a man’s, man’s, man’s world. They reported that in Dooling, when they’d fallen asleep, the Aurora crisis was still fresh; there, only two or three days had passed. The violence and confusion and desperation they talked about seemed unreal to the earlier arrivals in this new place. More—it seemed almost unimportant. The women of this world had their own problems and concerns. One of them was the weather. Summer waned. After the fall, the winter would follow.