by Stephen King
He shifted in the overstuffed client's chair, moved his hand, and I saw the cigarette burn Ardis McGill had put in the over-stuffed arm was also gone. He voiced a bitterly cold laugh.
`Ànd I was right,'' he said. `Ìt couldn't get any better, but it could get a whole hell of a lot worse. And did. About three months after I started How Like a Fallen Angel, Danny--our little boy--fell out of a swing in the park and bashed his head. Cold-conked himself, in your parlance.'‘
A brief smile, every bit as cold and bitter as the laugh had been, crossed his face. It came and went at the speed of grief.
``He bled a lot--you've seen enough head-wounds in your time to know how they are--and it scared the crap out of Linda, but the doctors were good and it did turn out to be only a concussion; they got him stabilized and gave him a pint of blood to make up for what he'd lost. Maybe they didn't have to--and that haunts me--but they did. The real problem wasn't with his head, you see; it was with that pint of blood. It was infected with AIDS.'‘
``Come again?'‘
`Ìt's something you can thank your God you don't know about,'' Landry said. `Ìt doesn't exist in your time, Clyde. It won't show up until the mid-seventies. Like Aramis cologne.'‘
``What does it do?’
`Èats away at your immune system until the whole thing collapses like the wonderful one-hoss shay. Then every bug circling around out there, from cancer to chicken pox, rushes in and has a party.'‘
``Good Christ!'‘
His smile came and went like a cramp. `Ìf you say so. AIDS is primarily a sexually transmitted disease, but every now and then it pops up in the blood supply. I suppose you could say my kid won big in a very unlucky version of la lotería.'‘
`Ì'm sorry,'' I said, and although I was scared to death of this thin man with the tired face, I meant it. Losing a kid to something like that . . . what could be worse? Probably something, yeah--there's always something--but you'd have to sit down and think about it, wouldn't you?
``Thanks,'' he said. ``Thanks, Clyde. It went fast for him, at least. He fell out of the swing in May. The first purple blotches--Kaposi's sarcoma--showed up in time for his birthday in September. He died on March 18, 1991. And maybe he didn't suffer as much as some of them do, but he suffered. Oh yes, he suffered.'‘
I didn't have the slightest idea what Kaposi's sarcoma was, either, and decided I didn't want to ask. I knew more than I wanted to already.
``You can maybe understand why it slowed me down a little on your book,'' he said.
``Can't you, Clyde?'‘
I nodded.
`Ì pushed on, though. Mostly because I think make-believe is a great healer. Maybe I have to believe that. I tried to get on with my life, too, but things kept going wrong with it--it was as if How Like a Fallen Angel was some kind of weird bad-luck charm that had turned me into Job. My wife went into a deep depression following Danny's death, and I was so concerned with her that I hardly noticed the red patches that had started breaking out on my legs and stomach and chest. And the itching. I knew it wasn't AIDS, and at first that was all I was concerned with. But as time went on and things got worse . . . have you ever had shingles, Clyde?’
Then he laughed and clapped the heel of his hand to his forehead in a what-a-dunce-Iam gesture before I could shake my head.
`Òf course you haven't--you've never had more than a hangover. Shingles, my shamus friend, is a funny name for a terrible, chronic ailment. There's some pretty good medicine available to help alleviate the symptoms in my version of Los Angeles, but it wasn't helping me much; by the end of 1991 I was in agony. Part of it was general depression over what had happened to Danny, of course, but most of it was the agony and the itching. That would make an interesting book title about a tortured writer, don't you think? The Agony and the Itching, or, Thomas Hardy Faces Puberty.'' He voiced a harsh, distracted little laugh.
``Whatever you say, Sam.'‘
`Ì say it was a season in hell. Of course it's easy to make light of it now, but by Thanksgiving of that year it was no joke--I was getting three hours of sleep a night, tops, and I had days when it felt like my skin was trying to crawl right off my body and run away like The Gingerbread Man. And I suppose that's why I didn't see how bad it was getting with Linda.'‘
I didn't know, couldn't know . . . but I did. ``She killed herself.'‘
He nodded. `Ìn March of 1992, on the anniversary of Daniel's death. Over two years ago now.'‘
A single tear tracked down his wrinkled, prematurely aged cheek, and I had an idea that he had gotten old in one hell of a hurry. It was sort of awful, realizing I had been made by such a bush-league version of God, but it also explained a lot. My shortcomings, mainly.
``That's enough,'' he said in a voice which was blurred with anger as well as tears.
``Get to the point, you'd say. In my time we say cut to the chase, but it comes to the same. I finished the book. On the day I discovered Linda dead in bed--the way the police are going to find Gloria Demmick later today, Clyde--I had finished one hundred and ninety pages of manuscript. I was up to the part where you fish Mavis's brother out of Lake Tahoe. I came home from the funeral three days later, fired up the word-processor, and got started right in on page one-ninety-one. Does that shock you?’
``No,'' I said. I thought about asking him what a word-processor might be, then decided I didn't have to. The thing in his lap was a word-processor, of course. Had to be.
``You're in a decided minority,'' Landry said. `Ìt shocked what few friends I had left, shocked them plenty. Linda's relatives thought I had all the emotion of a warthog. I didn't have the energy to explain that I was trying to save myself.
Frog them, as Peoria would say. I grabbed my book the way a drowning man would grab a life-ring. I grabbed you, Clyde. My case of the shingles was still bad, and that slowed me down--to some extent it kept me out, or I might have gotten here sooner--but it didn't stop me. I started getting a little better-physically, at least--right around the time I finished the book. But when I had finished, I fell into what I suppose must have been my own state of depression. I went through the edited script in a kind of daze. I felt such a feeling of regret . . . of loss . . .'' He looked directly at me and said, ``Does any of this make any sense to you?'‘
`Ìt makes sense,'' I said. And it did. In a crazy sort of way.
``There were lots of pills left in the house,'' he said. ``Linda and I were like the Demmicks in a lot of ways, Clyde--we really did believe in living better chemically, and a couple of times I came very close to taking a couple of double handfuls. The way the thought always came to me wasn't in terms of suicide, but in terms of wanting to catch up to Linda and Danny. To catch up while there was still time.'‘
I nodded. It was what I'd thought about Ardis McGill when, three days after we'd said toodle-oo to each other in Blondie's, I'd found her in that stuffy attic room with a small blue hole in the center of her forehead. Except it had been Sam Landry who had really killed her, and who had accomplished the deed with a kind of flexible bullet to the brain.
Of course it had been. In my world Sam Landry, this tired-looking man in the hobo's pants, was responsible for everything. The idea should have seemed crazy, and it did . . . but it was getting saner all the time.
I found I had just energy enough to swivel my chair and look out my window. What I saw somehow did not surprise me in the least: Sunset Boulevard and all that surrounded it had frozen solid. Cars, buses, pedestrians, all stopped dead in their tracks. It was a Kodak snapshot world out there, and why not? Its creator could not be bothered with animating much of it, at least for the time being; he was still caught in the whirlpool of his own pain and grief. Hell, I was lucky to still be breathing myself.
``So what happened?' I asked. ``How did you get here, Sam? Can I call you that? Do you mind?’
``No, I don't mind. I can't give you a very good answer, though, because I don't exactly know. All I know for sure is that every time I thought of the pills, I
thought of you. What I thought specifically was, `Clyde Umney would never do this, and he'd sneer at anyone who did. He'd call it the coward's way out.' '‘
I considered that, found it fair enough, and nodded. For someone staring some horrible ailment in the face--Vernon's cancer, or the misbegotten nightmare that had killed this man's son--I might make an exception, but take the pipe just because you were depressed? That was for pansies.
``Then I thought, `But that's Clyde Umney, and Clyde is make-believe . . . just a figment of your imagination.' That idea wouldn't live, though. It's the dumbbells of the world--politicians and lawyers, for the most part--who sneer at imagination, and think a thing isn't real unless they can smoke it or stroke it or feel it or fuck it. They think that way because they have no imagination themselves, and they have no idea of its power. I knew better. Hell, I ought to--my imagination has been buying my food and paying the mortgage for the last ten years or so.
`Àt the same time, I knew I couldn't go on living in what I used to think of as `the real world,' by which I suppose we all mean `the only world.' That's when I started to realize there was only one place left where I could go and feel welcome, and only one person I could be when I got there. The place was here--Los Angeles, in 1930-something. And the person was you.'‘
I heard that faint whirring sound coming from inside his gadget again, but I didn't turn around.
Partly because I was afraid to.
And partly because I no longer knew if I could.
VI. Umney's Last Case.
On the street seven stories below, a man was frozen with his head half-turned to look at the woman on the corner, who was climbing up the step of the eight-fifty bus headed downtown. She had exposed a momentary length of beautiful leg, and this was what the man was looking at. A little farther down the street a boy was holding out his battered old baseball glove to catch the ball frozen in mid-air just above his head. And, floating six feet above the street like a ghost called up by a third-rate swami at a carnival seance, was one of the newspapers from Peoria Smith's overturned table.
Incredibly, I could see the two photographs on it from up here: Hitler above the fold, the recently deceased Cuban bandleader below it.
Landry's voice seemed to come from a long way off.
`Àt first I thought that meant I'd be spending the rest of my life in some nut-ward, thinking I was you, but that was all right, because it would only be my physical self locked up in the funny-farm, do you see? And then, gradually, I began to realize that it could be a lot more than that . . . that maybe there might be a way I could actually . . . well . . . slip all the way in. And do you know what the key was?’
``Yes,'' I said, not looking around. That whir came again as something in his gadget revolved, and suddenly the newspaper frozen in mid-air flapped off down the frozen Boulevard. A moment or two later an old DeSoto rolled jerkily through the intersection of Sunset and Fernando. It struck the boy wearing the baseball glove, and both he and the DeSoto sedan disappeared. Not the ball, though. It fell into the street, rolled halfway to the gutter, then froze solid again.
``You do?' He sounded surprised.
``Yeah. Peoria was the key.'‘
``That's right.'' He laughed, then cleared his throat--nervous sounds, both of them.
`Ì keep forgetting that you're me.'‘
It was a luxury I didn't have.
`Ì was fooling around with a new book, and not getting anywhere. I'd tried Chapter One six different ways to Sunday before realizing a really interesting thing: Peoria Smith didn't like you.'‘
That made me swing around in a hurry. ``The hell you say!'‘
`Ì didn't think you'd believe it, but it's the truth, and I'd somehow known it all along. I don't want to convene the lit class again, Clyde, but I'll tell you one thing about my trade--writing stories in the first person is a funny, tricky business. It's as if everything the writer knows comes from his main character, like a series of letters or dispatches from some far-off battle zone. It's very rare for the writer to have a secret, but in this case I did. It was as if your little part of Sunset Boulevard were the Garden of Eden--'‘
`Ì never heard it called that before,'' I remarked.
``--and there was a snake in it, one I saw and you didn't. A snake named Peoria Smith.'‘
Outside, the frozen world that he'd called my Garden of Eden continued to darken, although the sky was cloudless. The Red Door, a nightclub reputedly owned by Lucky Luciano, disappeared. For a moment there was just a hole where it had been, and then a new building filled it--a restaurant called Petit Déjeuner with a window full of ferns. I glanced up the street and saw that other changes were going on--new buildings were replacing old ones with silent, spooky speed.
They meant I was running out of time; I knew this. Unfortunately, I knew something else, as well--there was probably not going to be any nick in this bundle of time. When God walks into your office and tells you He's decided he likes your life better than His own, what the hell are your options?
`Ì junked all the various drafts of the novel I'd started two months after my wife's death,'' Landry said. `Ìt was easy--poor crippled things that they were. And then I started a new one. I called it .
. . can you guess, Clyde?'‘
``Sure,'' I said, and swung around. It took all my strength, but what I suppose this geek would call my ``motivation'‘
was good. Sunset Strip isn't exactly the Champs Elysees or Hyde Park, but it's my world. I didn't want to watch him tear it apart and rebuild it the way he wanted it. `Ì suppose you called it Umney's Last Case.'‘
He looked faintly surprised. ``You suppose right.'‘
I waved my hand. It was an effort, but I managed. `Ì didn't win the Shamus of the Year Award in 1934 and '35 for nothing, you know.'‘
He smiled at that. ``Yes. I always did like that line.'‘
Suddenly I hated him--hated him like poison. If I could have summoned the strength to lunge across the desk and choke the life out of him, I would have done it. He saw it, too. The smile faded.
``Forget it, Clyde--you wouldn't have a chance.'‘
``Why don't you get out of here?'' I grated at him. ``Just get out and let a working stiff alone?’
``Because I can't. I couldn't even if I wanted to . . . and I don't.'' He looked at me with an odd mixture of anger and pleading. ``Try to look at it from my point of view, Clyde--'‘
``Do I have any choice? Have I ever?'‘
He ignored that. ``Here's a world where I'll never get any older, a year where all the clocks are stopped at just about eighteen months before World War II, where the newspapers always cost three cents, where I can eat all the eggs and red meat I want and never have to worry about my cholesterol level.'‘
`Ì don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.'‘
He leaned forward earnestly. ``No, you don't! And that's exactly the point, Clyde!
This is a world where I can really do the job I dreamed about doing when I was a little boy--I can be a private eye. I can go racketing around in a fast car at two in the morning, shoot it out with hoodlums--knowing they may die but I won't--and wake up eight hours later next to a beautiful chanteuse with the birds twittering in the trees and the sun shining in my bedroom window. That clear, beautiful California sun.'‘
``My bedroom window faces west,'' I said.
``Not anymore,'' he replied calmly, and I felt my hands curl into strengthless fists on the arms of my chair. ``Do you see how wonderful it is? How perfect? In this world, people don't go half-mad with itching caused by a stupid, undignified disease called shingles. In this world, people don't go gray, let alone bald.'‘
He looked at me levelly, and in his gaze I saw no hope for me. No hope at all.
`Ìn this world, beloved sons never die of AIDS and beloved wives never take overdoses of sleeping pills. Besides, you were always the outsider here, not me, no matter how it might have felt to you. This is my world, born in my imagination and maintai
ned by my effort and ambition. I loaned it to you for awhile, that's all . . . and now I'm taking it back.'‘
``Finish telling me how you got in, will you do that much? I really want to hear.'‘
`Ìt was easy. I tore it apart, starting with the Demmicks, who were never much more than a lousy imitation of Nick and Nora Charles, and rebuilt it in my own image. I took away all the beloved supporting characters, and now I'm removing all the old landmarks. I'm pulling the rug out from under you a strand at a time, in other words, and I'm not proud of it, but I am proud of the sustained effort of will it's taken to pull it off.'‘
`What's happened to you back in your own world?' I was still keeping him talking, but now it was nothing but habit, like an old milk-horse finding his way back to the barn on a snowy morning. He shrugged. ``Dead, maybe. Or maybe I really have left a physical self--a husk-sitting catatonic in some mental institution. I don't think either of those things is really the case, though--all of this feels too real. No, I think I made it all the way, Clyde. I think that back home they're looking for a missing writer . . . with no idea that he's disappeared into the storage banks of his own word-processor. And the truth is I really don't care.'‘
`Ànd me? What happens to me?’
``Clyde,'' he said, `Ì don't care about that, either.'‘
He bent over his gadget again.