Sleeping Beauties: A Novel

by Stephen King

  “What do you think?” Coates had lingered outside the box to smoke. (Cigarettes, wrapped in foil and cellophane, were another of the things that had lasted quite well.) The warden—former warden—had grown her hair out, allowing it to go white. The way it spread down to her narrow shoulders gave her a prophetic look—as if she had been wandering in the desert in search of her tribe. Lila thought it suited her.

  “I like what you’ve done with your hair.”

  “Thanks, but I was referring to the woman who ought to be here, but suddenly isn’t.”

  Candy Meshaum was one of four women who had lately vanished, counting Essie. Lila had interviewed a number of other women who lived in the neighboring pods. Candy had been seen happily rocking in her chair, knitting, and ten minutes afterward, she was nowhere. The pod was on the second floor of the storage complex, close to the middle, and yet not a single person had seen her slip away, a good-sized woman with a bad limp. It wasn’t inconceivable that she’d managed such a disappearance, but it was improbable.

  Her neighbors described Candy as cheerful and happy. One of them, who had known her before, in the old world, used the word reborn. She evinced great pride in her crafts, and in her pretty little decorated box of a home. More than one person mentioned that she referred to her home as “the apartment of her dreams” without a crumb of irony.

  “I don’t see anything definitive. Nothing I’d want to take to court,” Lila said. She guessed, however, that what had happened was what had occurred with Essie: there one second, gone the next. Poof. Abracadabra.

  “Same thing, isn’t it?” Janice, who had been looking right at Essie, reported seeing a tiny flash—no bigger than a lighter flame—and then nothing. The space that the woman had filled was empty. Janice’s eyes had failed to detect the transformation, or disintegration, or whatever phenomenon had occurred. It was too quick for the eye. It was, the warden said, as if Essie had been turned off like a light bulb, except not even a filament dimmed that quickly.

  “Could be,” Lila said. God, she sounded like her lost husband.

  “She’s dead,” Janice said. “In the other world. Don’t you think so?”

  A moth perched on the wall above the rocking chair. Lila held out her hand. The moth fluttered to it, landing on the fingernail of her index finger. Lila smelled a faint odor of burn.

  “Could be,” she repeated. For the moment, this Clint-ism was all she dared to say. “We ought to go back and see the ladies off.”

  “Crazy idea,” Janice grumbled. “We’ve got enough to do without exploring.”

  Lila smiled. “Does that mean you wish you were going?”

  Mimicking Lila, ex–Warden Coates said, “Could be.”

  2

  On Main Street, a patrol was about to set off for a look at the world beyond Dooling. There were a half-dozen women in the group, and they’d packed a pair of the golf carts with supplies. Millie Olson, an officer from the prison, had volunteered to take the lead. To this point, no one had ventured much beyond the old town lines. No airplanes or helicopters had flown overhead, no fires had burned in the distance, and no voices had surfaced on the bands of the emergency radios they’d cranked up. It reinforced in Lila that sense of incompleteness she’d felt from the beginning. The world they inhabited now seemed like a reproduction. Almost like a scene inside a snow globe, only without the snow.

  Lila and Janice arrived in time to watch the final preparations. A former prisoner named Nell Seeger crouched on the ground by one of the golf carts, humming to herself as she checked the air pressure on the tires. Millie was sifting through the packs loaded onto a trailer hitched to the back, making last minute double-checks of the supplies: sleeping bags, freeze-dried food, clean water, clothes, a couple of toy walkie-talkies that had been found sealed in plastic and actually functioned (somewhat), a couple of rifles that Lila herself had cleaned up, first aid kits. There was an atmosphere of excitement and good humor; there were laughter and high-fives. Someone asked Millie Olson what she’d do if they ran into a bear.

  “Tame it,” she deadpanned, not glancing up from the pack she was digging through. This earned a round of laughs from the onlookers.

  “Did you know her?” Lila asked Janice. “You know, before?” They were under a sidewalk awning, shoulder to shoulder in winter coats. Their breath steamed.

  “Shit, I was her damn boss.”

  “Not Millie, Candy Meshaum.”

  “No. Did you?”

  “Yes,” said Lila.

  “And?”

  “She was a domestic abuse victim. Her husband beat her. A lot. That’s why she limped. He was a total asshole, a mechanic who made his real money selling guns. Ran a bit with the Griners. Or so it was rumored—we never managed to clip him for anything. He used his tools on her. They lived out on West Lavin in a house that was falling down around their ears. I’m not surprised she didn’t want to try to fix the place up, wouldn’t have been any point. Neighbors called us out more than once, heard her screaming, but she wouldn’t give us a word. Afraid of reprisals.”

  “Lucky he never killed her.”

  “I think he probably did.”

  The warden squinted at Lila. “Do you mean what I think you mean?”

  “Walk with me.”

  They strolled along the ruins of the sidewalk, stepping over weed-choked fissures, detouring around asphalt chunks. The little park that faced the broken remains of the Municipal Building had been salvaged, trimmed and swept. Here the only sign of time’s passage was the toppled statue of some long-deceased town dignitary. A massive elm branch—storm-tossed, surely—had knocked him off his perch. The branch had been dragged away and chipped, but the dignitary was so heavy no one had done anything about him yet. He had gone down at an acute angle from the plinth, his top hat dug into the ground and his boots to the sky; Lila had seen little girls run up him, using his backside like a ramp, laughing wildly.

  Janice said, “You think her son-of-a-bitch husband torched her in her cocoon.”

  Lila didn’t answer directly. “Has anyone mentioned feeling dizzy to you? Nauseated? Comes on very suddenly, and then after a couple of hours it goes?” Lila had felt this herself a couple of times. Rita Coombs had mentioned a similar experience; so had Mrs. Ransom, and Molly.

  “Yes,” said Janice. “Just about everyone I know has mentioned it. Like being spun around without being spun. I don’t know if you know Nadine Hicks, wife of my colleague at the prison—”

  “Met her at a couple of community potlucks,” said Lila, and wrinkled her nose.

  “Yeah, she hardly ever missed. And wasn’t missed when she did, if you know what I mean. Anyway, she claims to have that vertigo thing just about all the time.”

  “Okay, keep that in mind. Now think about the mass burnings. You know about those?”

  “Not personally. I’m like you, I came relatively early. But I’ve heard the newer arrivals talk about seeing it on the news: men burning women in their cocoons.”

  “There you go,” Lila said.

  “Oh,” Janice replied, getting the drift. “Oh shit.”

  “Oh shit covers it, all right. At first I thought—hoped—that maybe it was some sort of misinterpretation on the part of the newer arrivals. They’d been sleep-deprived, of course, and distressed, and maybe they saw something on television that they thought was cocoons being burned, but was actually something else.” Lila inhaled deeply of the late fall air. It was so crisp and clean it made you feel taller. No exhaust smells. No coal trucks. “That instinct, to doubt what women say, it’s always there. To find some reason not to take their word. Men do it . . . but we do, too. I do it.”

  “You’re too hard on yourself.”

  “And I saw it coming. I talked about it with Terry Coombs not more than three or four hours before I fell asleep in the old world. Women reacted when their cocoons were torn. They were dangerous. They fought. They killed. It doesn’t surprise me that a lot of men might see the situation as an opport
unity, or a precaution, or the pretext they’d always wanted to light a few people on fire.”

  Janice offered a slanted smile. “And I get accused of taking a less than sunny view of the human race.”

  “Someone burned Essie, Janice. Back in our world. Who knows who. And someone burned Candy Meshaum. Was her hubby upset because his punching bag fell asleep on him? He’d definitely be the first person I’d question, if I was there.”

  Lila sat down on the fallen statue. “And the dizziness? I’m pretty sure that’s also because of what’s happening back there. Someone moving us. Moving us around like furniture. Right before Essie was burned, she was in a low mood. I’m guessing that maybe someone moved her a bit before lighting her up and it was the vertigo that had her down.”

  “Pretty sure you’ve got your ass on Dooling’s first mayor,” said Janice.

  “He can take it. Someone washed his underwear for him. This is our new honorary bench.” Lila realized she was furious. What had Essie or Candy Meshaum ever done, except finally find a few months of happiness out of the entirety of their rotten lives? Happiness that had come at the price of nothing more than a few dolls and a converted storage space with no windows.

  And men had burned them. She was sure of it. That was how their story ended. When you died there, you died here, too. Men had ripped them right out of the world—right out of two worlds. Men. There seemed to be no escape from them.

  Janice must have read her thoughts . . . or, more likely, her face. “My husband Archie was a good guy. Supported everything I ever did.”

  “Yeah, but he died young. You might not have felt that way if he’d stuck around.” It was an awful thing to say, but Lila didn’t regret it. For some reason, an old Amish saying occurred to her: KISSIN’ DON’T LAST, COOKIN’ DO. You could say that about a lot of things when it came to the wedded state. Honesty. Respect. Simple kindness, even.

  Coates gave no sign of offense. “Clint was that bad a husband?”

  “He was better than Candy Meshaum’s.”

  “Low bar,” Janice said. “Never mind. I’ll just sit here and treasure the gilded memory of my husband, who had the decency to pop off before he became a shit.”

  Lila let her head loll back. “Maybe I deserved that.” It was another sunny day, but there were gray clouds to the north, miles of them.

  “Well? Was he that bad a husband?”

  “No. Clint was a good husband. And a good father. He pulled his weight. He loved me. I never doubted that. But there was a lot he never told me about himself. Things I shouldn’t have had to find out in ways that made me feel bad about myself. Clint talked the talk, about openness and support, talked until his face turned blue, but when you got below the surface, he was your basic Marlboro Man. It’s worse, I think, than being lied to. A lie indicates a certain degree of respect. I’m pretty sure he was carrying a bag of stuff, real heavy stuff, that he thought I was just too delicate to help him with. I’d rather be lied to than condescended to.”

  “What do you mean by a bag of stuff . . . ?”

  “He grew up rough. I think he fought his way out, and I mean that literally. I’ve seen the way he rubs his knuckles when he’s preoccupied or upset. But he doesn’t talk about it. I’ve asked, and he does the Marlboro Man thing.” Lila glanced at Coates, and read some variety of unease in her expression.

  “You know what I mean, don’t you? From being around him.”

  “I suppose I do. Clint has—another side. A harder side. Angrier. I didn’t come to see it clearly until recently.”

  “It pisses me off. But you know what’s worse? It’s left me feeling kind of . . . disheartened.”

  Janice was using a twig to poke bits of caked mud off the face of the statue. “I can see how that would dishearten a person.”

  The golf carts started to move away, followed by their small, tarp-draped trailers of supplies. The procession moved out of sight and then reappeared for a couple of minutes where the road ascended to higher ground before disappearing for good.

  Lila and Janice switched to other topics: the ongoing repairs to the houses on Smith; the two beautiful horses that had been corralled and taught—or perhaps re-taught—how to take riders; and the wonder Magda Dubcek and those two former prisoners claimed to be on the verge of bringing to fruition. If they could get more juice, more solar panels, clean running water seemed to be a foreseeable possibility. Indoor plumbing, the American dream.

  It was dusk before they were talked out, and never once did the subject of Clint, of Jared, of Archie, of Candy Meshaum’s husband, of Jesus Christ, or of any other man, again arise to trouble their discourse.

  3

  They didn’t talk about Evie, but Lila had not forgotten her. She had not forgotten about the suggestive timing of Eve Black’s appearance in Dooling, or her strange, knowing talk, or the webbed tracks in the woods near Truman Mayweather’s trailer. She had not forgotten about where those tracks had brought her, either, to the Amazing Tree, driving up into the sky on its countless roots and intertwined trunks. As for the animals that had appeared from around the Tree—the white tiger, the snake, the peacock, and the fox—Lila remembered them, too.

  Her mental picture of the spiraling roots of the Tree, like the cords for a giant’s sneakers, the way they wound around each other, recurred often. It was so perfect, so majestic, the plan of its being so right.

  Had Evie come from the Tree? Or had the Tree come from Evie? And the women of Our Place—were they dreamers, or were they the dream?

  4

  Icy rain pelted Our Place for forty-eight hours, snapping tree branches, pouring chilly slop through the holes in roofs, filling the streets and walks with cloudy puddles. Lila, stretched in her tent, occasionally put aside the book she was reading to kick at the walls and break off the frozen coating that had formed on the vinyl. The sound was like breaking glass.

  Before, she’d switched from paper books to an e-reader, little suspecting that the world would break down and make such things obsolete. There were still books in her house, though, and a few of them weren’t moldy. When she finished the one she was reading, she ventured from her tent in the front yard to the wreckage of her home. It was too depressing—too redolent of her son and husband—for Lila to imagine living in it, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to move away.

  The slicks of rain sliding down the interior walls glistened in the beam of her crank flashlight. The rain sounded like an ocean being stirred. From a shelf at the back of the living room, Lila picked out a damp mystery novel, and started to return the way she had come. The beam caught an odd, parchment-colored leaf, lying on the rotted seat of a stool by the kitchen counter. Lila picked it up. It was a note from Anton: the information for his “tree guy,” to deal with the Dutch Elm in the backyard.

  She studied the note for a long time, stunned by it, by the sudden closeness of that other life—her real life? her previous life?—which appeared like a child darting out between parked cars and into traffic.

  5

  The exploration party had been gone a week when Celia Frode returned on foot, splattered in mud from head to toe. She was alone.

  6

  Celia said that beyond Dooling Correctional, in the direction of the little neighboring town of Maylock, the roads had become impassable; every tree they cleared from the highway only got them a few yards before they came to the next one. It was easier to leave the golf carts and hike.

  There was no one in Maylock when they got there, and no sign of recent life. The buildings and houses were like the ones in Dooling—overgrown, in states of greater and lesser disrepair, a few burned by fires—and the road above Dorr’s Hollow Stream, which was now a swollen river with sunken cars for shoals, had collapsed. Probably they should have turned around then, Celia conceded. They’d scavenged useful supplies from the grocery store and other businesses in Maylock. But they got to talking about the movie theater in the small town of Eagle that was another ten miles off, and how
great it would be for the kids if they came back with a film projector. Magda had assured them that their big generator would be up to such tasks.

  “They still had that new Star Wars movie playing there,” Celia said, and added, wryly, “You know, Sheriff, the one where the girl’s the hero.”

  Lila didn’t correct the “Sheriff.” It had turned out to be remarkably difficult to quit being a cop. “Go on, Celia.”

  The exploring party crossed the Dorr’s Hollow Stream at a bridge that was still intact, and picked up a mountain road called Lion Head Way that seemed to offer a shortcut to Eagle. The map they’d been using—borrowed from the remains of the Dooling Public Library—showed an old, unnamed coal company road curling off near the top of the mountain. The company road could take them to the interstate, and from there the going would be easy. But the map turned out to be outdated. Lion Head Way now dead-ended at a plateau, where stood that dreary place of male incarceration called Lion Head Prison. The company road they had been hoping to find had been plowed under during the construction of the prison.

  Because it was late in the day, rather than attempt to backtrack the narrow, broken decline off the mountain in the dark, they had decided to camp at the prison, and start fresh in the morning.

  Lila was all too familiar with Lion Head Prison; it was the maximum security facility where she had anticipated the Griner brothers would spend the next twenty-five or so years.

  Janice Coates, also present for Celia’s retelling, had a brief verdict on the prison. “That place. Nasty.”

  The Head, as it was called by the men imprisoned there, had been in the media a great deal before Aurora, a rare story of successful land reclamation on the site of a mountaintop removal. After Ulysses Energy Solutions finished deforesting and blasting away the top of the mountain to mine the coal beneath, it “restored” the land by pulling debris up and flattening it out. The oft-promoted idea was that, instead of viewing the mountaintops as “destroyed,” the public ought to see them as having been “opened up.” Newly flattened land was newly buildable land. Although the majority of the state’s population supported the coal industry, few failed to recognize this for the bunkum it was. These wonderfully useful new plateaus were generally situated in the middle of nowhere and often came attended by impoundments of slurry waste or chemical containment ponds, which were not the sort of neighbors anyone wanted.