Later

by Stephen King

  The newspapers played it big for a week or so, especially the tabloids, partly because Marsden was a “drug kingpin” but mostly because of the pictures found in his panic room. And Liz came off as sort of a hero, weird but true. EX-COP DIES AFTER SLAYING TORTURE PORN DON, blared the Daily News. No mention that she’d lost her job as the result of an IAD investigation and a positive drug test, but the fact that she’d been instrumental in locating Thumper’s last bomb before it could kill a bunch of shoppers was mentioned. The Post must have gotten a reporter inside Marsden’s house (“Cockroaches get in everywhere,” Mom said), or maybe they had pix of the Renfield place on file, because their headline read INSIDE DONNIE BIGS’ HOUSE OF HORRORS. My mother actually laughed at that one, saying that the Post’s understanding of the apostrophe was a nice parallel for their grasp of American politics.

  “Not Bigs-apostrophe,” she said when I asked. “Bigs-apostrophe-S.”

  Okay, Mom. Whatever.

  68

  Before long, other news drove Donnie Bigs’s House of Horrors from the front pages of the tabs, and my renown at school faded. It was like Liz said about Chet Atkins, how soon they forget. I found myself once more faced with the problem of talking to girls instead of waiting for them to come up to my locker, all round-eyed with mascara and pursed up with lip gloss, to talk to me. I played tennis and tried out for the class play. I ended up only getting a part with two lines, but I put my heart into them. I played video games with my friends. I took Mary Lou Stein to the movies and kissed her. She kissed me back, which was excellent.

  Cue the montage, complete with flipping calendar pages. It got to be 2016, then 2017. Sometimes I dreamed I was on that country road and would wake up with my hands over my mouth thinking Did I whistle? Oh God, did I whistle? But those dreams came less frequently. Sometimes I saw dead folks, but not too often and they weren’t scary. Once my mother asked me if I still saw them and I said hardly ever, knowing it would make her feel better. That was something I wanted, because she had been through a hard time, too, and I got that.

  “Maybe you’re growing out of it,” she said.

  “Maybe I am,” I agreed.

  This brings us to 2018, with our hero Jamie Conklin over six feet tall, able to grow a goatee (which my mother fucking loathed), accepted at Princeton, and almost old enough to vote. I would be old enough when the elections came around in November.

  I was in my room, hitting the books for finals, when my phone buzzed. It was Mom, calling from the back of another Uber, this time on her way to Tenafly, where Uncle Harry was now residing.

  “It’s pneumonia again,” she said, “and I don’t think he’s going to get better this time, Jamie. They told me to come, and they don’t do that unless it’s very serious.” She paused, then said: “Mortal.”

  “I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

  “You don’t have to do that.” The subtext being that I’d never really known him anyway, at least not when he was a smart guy building a career for himself and his sister in the world of tough New York publishing. Which can be a tough world indeed. Now that I was also working in the office—only a few hours a week, mostly filing—I knew that was true. And it was true that I had only vague memories of a smart guy who should have stayed smart a lot longer, but it wasn’t him I’d be going for.

  “I’ll take the bus.” Which I could do with ease, because the bus was how we’d always gone to New Jersey in the days when Ubers and Lyfts were beyond our budget.

  “Your tests…you have to study for your finals…”

  “Books are a uniquely portable magic. I read that somewhere. I’ll bring ’em. See you there.”

  “We may have to stay overnight,” she said. “Are you sure?”

  I said I was.

  I don’t know exactly where I was when Uncle Harry died. Maybe in New Jersey, maybe still crossing the Hudson, maybe even while I could see Yankee Stadium from my bird-beshitted bus window. All I know is that Mom was waiting for me outside the care home—his final care home—on a bench under a shade tree. She was dry-eyed, but she was smoking a cigarette and I hadn’t seen her do that in a long time. She gave me a good strong hug and I gave it right back to her. I could smell her perfume, that old sweet smell of La Vie est Belle, which always took me back to my childhood. To that little boy who thought his green hand-turkey was just the cat’s ass. I didn’t have to ask.

  “Not ten minutes before I got here,” she said.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes. Sad, but also relieved that it’s finally over. He lasted much longer than most people who suffer from what he had. You know what, I was sitting here thinking about three flies, six grounders. Do you know what that is?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “The other boys didn’t want to let me play because I was a girl, but Harry said if they wouldn’t let me play, he wouldn’t play, either. And he was popular. Always the most popular. So I was, as they say, the only girl in the game.”

  “Were you good?”

  “I was terrific,” she said, and laughed. Then she wiped at one of her eyes. Crying after all. “Listen, I need to talk to Mrs. Ackerman—she’s the boss-lady here—and sign some papers. Then I need to go down to his room and see if there’s anything I need to take right away. I can’t imagine there is.”

  I felt a stirring of alarm. “He’s not still…?”

  “No, honey. There’s a funeral home they use here. I’ll make arrangements tomorrow about getting him to New York and the…you know, final stuff.” She paused. “Jamie?”

  I looked at her.

  “You don’t…you don’t see him, do you?”

  I smiled. “No, Ma.”

  She grabbed my chin. “How many times have I told you not to call me that? Who says maa?”

  “Baby sheep,” I said, then added, “Yeah yeah yeah.”

  That made her laugh. “Wait for me, hon. This won’t take long.”

  She went inside and I looked at Uncle Harry, who was standing not ten feet away. He’d been there all along, wearing the pajamas he’d died in.

  “Hey, Uncle Harry,” I said.

  No reply. But he was looking at me.

  “Have you still got the Alzheimer’s?”

  “No.”

  “So you’re okay now?”

  He looked at me with the merest glint of humor. “I suppose so, if being dead fits into your definition of okay.”

  “She’s going to miss you, Uncle Harry.”

  No reply, and I didn’t expect one because it wasn’t a question. I did have one, though. He probably didn’t know the answer, but there’s an old saying that goes if you never ask, you never get.

  “Do you know who my father is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who? Who is it?”

  “I am,” Uncle Harry said.

  69

  Almost done now (and I remember when I thought thirty pages was a lot!), but not quite, so don’t give up before you check this out:

  My grandparents—my only set of grandparents, as it turns out—died on their way to a Christmas party. A guy full of too much Christmas cheer swerved across three lanes of a four-lane highway and hit them head-on. The drunk survived, as they so often do. My uncle (also my father, as it turns out) was in New York when he got the news, making the rounds of several Christmas parties, schmoozing publishers, editors, and writers. His agency was brand-new then, and Uncle Harry (dear old dad!) was kind of like a guy in the deep woods, tending a tiny pile of burning twigs and hoping for a campfire.

  He came home to Arcola—that’s a small town in Illinois—for the funeral. After it was over, there was a reception at the Conklins’. Lester and Norma had been well liked, so lots of people came. Some brought food. Some brought booze, which serves as godfather to a great many surprise babies. Tia Conklin, at that time not long out of college and working at her first job in an accounting firm, drank a good deal. So did her brother. Uh-oh, right?

  After everybody goes home, Harr
y finds her in her room, lying on her bed in her slip, crying her heart out. Harry lies down beside her and takes her in his arms. Just for comfort, you understand, but one kind of comfort leads to another. Just that once, but once is enough, and six weeks later Harry—back in New York—gets a phone call. Not long after that, my pregnant mother joins the firm.

  Would the Conklin Literary Agency have succeeded in that tough, competitive field without her, or would my father/uncle’s little pile of twigs and leaves have fizzled out in a little runner of white smoke before he could begin to add the first bigger pieces of wood? Hard to say. When things took off, I was lying around in a bassinet, peeing in my Pampers and going goo-goo. But she was good at the job, that I know. If she hadn’t been, the agency would have gone under later, when the bottom fell out of the financial markets.

  Let me tell you, there are a lot of bullshit myths about babies born of incest, especially when it comes to father-daughter and sister-brother. Yes, there can be medical problems, and yes, the chances of those are a little higher when it comes to incest, but the idea that the majority of those babies are born with feeble minds, one eye, or club feet? Pure crap. I did find out that one of the most common defects in babies from incestuous relationships is fused fingers or toes. I have scars on the insides of my second and third fingers on my left hand, from a surgical procedure to separate them when I was an infant. The first time I asked about those scars—I couldn’t have been more than four or five—Mom told me the docs had done it before she brought me home from the hospital. “Easy-peasy,” she said.

  And of course there’s that other thing I was born with, which might have something to do with the fact that once upon a time, while suffering from grief and alcohol, my parents got a little closer than a brother and sister should have done. Or maybe seeing dead people has nothing at all to do with that. Parents who can’t carry a tune in a tin pail can produce a singing prodigy; illiterates can produce a great writer. Sometimes talent comes from nowhere, or so it seems.

  Except, hold it, wait one.

  That whole story is fiction.

  I don’t know how Tia and Harry became the parents of a bouncing baby boy named James Lee Conklin, because I never asked Uncle Harry for any of the details. He would have told me—the dead can’t lie, as I think we have established—but I didn’t want to know. After he said those two words—I am—I turned away and walked back into the care home to find my mother. He didn’t follow, and I never saw him again. I thought he might come to his funeral, or turn up at the graveside ceremony, but he didn’t.

  On the way back to the city (on the bus, just like old times), Mom asked me if something was wrong. I said there wasn’t, that I was just trying to get used to the idea that Uncle Harry was really gone. “It feels like when I lost one of my baby teeth,” I said. “There’s a hole in me and I keep feeling it.”

  “I know,” she said, hugging me. “I feel the same way. But I’m not sad. I didn’t expect to be, and I’m not. Because he’s really been gone for a long time.”

  It was good to be hugged. I loved my mom and I love her still, but I lied to her that day, and not just by omission. It wasn’t like losing a tooth; what I’d found out was like growing another tooth, one there wasn’t room for in my mouth.

  Certain things make the story I just told you seem more likely. Lester and Norma Conklin were killed by a drunk driver while on their way to a Christmas party. Harry did come back to Illinois for their funeral; I found an article in the Arcola Record Herald that says he gave the eulogy. Tia Conklin did quit her job and go to New York to help her brother in his new literary agency early the next year. And James Lee Conklin did make his debut nine months or so after the funeral, in Lenox Hill Hospital.

  So yeah yeah yeah and right right right, it could all be just the way I told it. It has a fair amount of logic going for it. But it also could have been some other way, which I would like a lot less. The rape of a young woman who’d drunk herself unconscious, for instance, said act committed by her drunken, horny older brother. The reason I didn’t ask is simple: I didn’t want to know. Do I wonder if they discussed abortion? Sometimes. Am I worried that I have inherited more from my uncle/father than the dimples that show up when I smile, or the fact that I’m showing the first traces of white in my black hair at the tender age of twenty-two? To come right out and say it, am I worried that I may start to lose my mind at the still-tender age of thirty, or thirty-five, or forty? Yes. Of course I am. According to the Internet, my father-uncle suffered from EOFAD: early-onset familial Alzheimer’s disease. It bides its time on genes PSEN1 and PSEN2, and so there’s a test for it: spit in a test-tube and wait for your answer. I suppose I will take it.

  Later.

  Here’s a funny thing—looking back over these pages, I see that the writing got better as I went along. Not trying to say I’m up there with Faulkner or Updike; what I am saying is that I improved by doing, which I suppose is the case with most things in life. I’ll just have to hope I’ll be better and stronger in other ways when I again meet the thing that took over Therriault. Because I will. I’ve not glimpsed it since that night in Marsden’s house when whatever Liz saw in that mirror drove her insane, but it’s still waiting. I sense that. Know it, actually, although I don’t know what it is.

  It doesn’t matter. I won’t live my life with the pending question of whether or not I’m going to lose my mind in middle age, and I won’t live it with the shadow of that thing hanging over me, either. It has drained the color from too many days. The fact that I am a child of incest seems laughably unimportant compared to the black husk of Therriault with the deadlight shining out from the cracks in its skin.

  I have done a lot of reading in the years since that thing asked me for a do-over contest, another Ritual of Chüd, and I’ve come across a lot of strange superstitions and odd legends—stuff that never made it into Regis Thomas’s Roanoke books or Stoker’s Dracula—and while there are plenty concerning the possession of the living by demons, I have never yet found one about a creature able to possess the dead. The closest I’ve come are stories about malevolent ghosts, and that’s really not the same at all. So I have no idea what I’m dealing with. All I know is that I must deal with it. I’ll whistle for it, it will come, we will join in a mutual hug instead of the ritual tongue-biting thing, and then…well. Then we’ll see, won’t we?

  Yes we will. We’ll see.

  Later.

  From the Author of LATER…

  Don’t Miss Stephen King’s

  JOYLAND

  College student Devin Jones took the summer job at Joyland hoping to forget the girl who broke his heart. But he wound up facing something far more terrible: the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and dark truths about life—and what comes after—that would change his world forever.

  A riveting story about love and loss, about growing up and growing old—and about those who don’t get to do either because death comes for them before their time—JOYLAND is Stephen King at the peak of his storytelling powers. With all the emotional impact of King masterpieces such as The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption, JOYLAND is at once a mystery, a horror story, and a bittersweet coming-of-age novel, one that will leave even the most hard-boiled reader profoundly moved.

  “Immensely appealing.”

  — Washington Post

  “Tight and engrossing…a prize worth all your tokens and skeeball tickets.”

  — USA Today

  Read on for a preview—

  or get a copy today

  from your favorite

  local or online bookseller!

  I had a car, but on most days in that fall of 1973 I walked to Joyland from Mrs. Shoplaw’s Beachside Accommodations in the town of Heaven’s Bay. It seemed like the right thing to do. The only thing, actually. By early September, Heaven Beach was almost completely deserted, which suited my mood. That fall was the most beautiful of my life. Even forty years later I can say that. And I was never s
o unhappy, I can say that, too. People think first love is sweet, and never sweeter than when that first bond snaps. You’ve heard a thousand pop and country songs that prove the point; some fool got his heart broke. Yet that first broken heart is always the most painful, the slowest to mend, and leaves the most visible scar. What’s so sweet about that?

  * * *

  Through September and right into October, the North Carolina skies were clear and the air was warm even at seven in the morning, when I left my second-floor apartment by the outside stairs. If I started with a light jacket on, I was wearing it tied around my waist before I’d finished half of the three miles between the town and the amusement park.

  I’d make Betty’s Bakery my first stop, grabbing a couple of still-warm croissants. My shadow would walk with me on the sand, at least twenty feet long. Hopeful gulls, smelling the croissants in their waxed paper, would circle overhead. And when I walked back, usually around five (although sometimes I stayed later—there was nothing waiting for me in Heaven’s Bay, a town that mostly went sleepybye when summer was over), my shadow walked with me on the water. If the tide was in, it would waver on the surface, seeming to do a slow hula.

  Although I can’t be completely sure, I think the boy and the woman and their dog were there from the first time I took that walk. The shore between the town and the cheerful, blinking gimcrackery of Joyland was lined with summer homes, many of them expensive, most of them clapped shut after Labor Day. But not the biggest of them, the one that looked like a green wooden castle. A boardwalk led from its wide back patio down to where the seagrass gave way to fine white sand. At the end of the boardwalk was a picnic table shaded by a bright green beach umbrella. In its shade, the boy sat in his wheelchair, wearing a baseball cap and covered from the waist down by a blanket even in the late afternoons, when the temperature lingered in the seventies. I thought he was five or so, surely no older than seven. The dog, a Jack Russell terrier, either lay beside him or sat at his feet. The woman sat on one of the picnic table benches, sometimes reading a book, mostly just staring out at the water. She was very beautiful.