by Stephen King
LAINE
Come on, Cap’n. I done saved you the nicest tent in the bivouac. Wait’ll you see it.
He shoves the dazed and defeated CANDY toward the jail, SHERIFF STREETER is watching them go with a grin, and does not at first see the batwing doors of the Lady Bay Saloon open as MAJOR MURDOCK pushes out onto the sidewalk. For once, MURDOCK’S trademark grin is gone.
SCENE CONTINUES
MURDOCK
You think puttin’ Candy in jail’s gonna solve your problems, Sheriff?
STREETER turns toward him. MURDOCK pulls his mud-splattered cavalry duster back, freeing the butt of his Army-issue Colt.
STREETER (smiles)
Could be I just arrested my first ghost. Where are the rest of your regulators holed up? Desatoya Canyon? Skate Rock? You ready to tell me yet?
MURDOCK
You’re crazy as a snakebit varmit!
STREETER
That so? Well, we’ll see. I’m guessing there won’t be any ghosts riding tonight without Captain Candell to hand out the sheets.
Still smiling, STREETER turns toward the jail again.
SCENE CONTINUES
MURDOCK
Suppose I told you the regulators were a lot closer than Desatoya Mountain or Skate Rock? Suppose I told you they were right outside of town, just waitin’ for the first gunshot? How would you like that, you damn Yankee?
STREETER
I think I’d like it just fine.
He looks up, raises his fingers to his mouth, and whistles.
EXT. MAIN STREET ROOFTOPS, STREET POV
MEN start appearing from behind every sign, chimney, and false front. Formerly terrified TOWNSMEN, now looking grim and carrying rifles. They’re on the Chinese laundry, the Owl County Store, Worrell’s Mercantile, even Craven’s Undertaking Parlors. Among them we see PREACHER YEOMAN and LAWYER BRADLEY. YEOMAN, no longer concerned that the regulators are a supernatural visitation meant to punish the town for its sins raises one hand to the SHERIFF in a salute.
SCENE CONTINUES
RESUME MAIN STREET, WITH STREETER AND MURDOCK
STREETER returns YEOMAN’S salute with a flick of his hand, then turns back to MURDOCK, who looks furious and confused. A dangerous combination!
STREETER
Yep, bring ’em on, if that’s your pleasure.
MURDOCK’S face tightens. He drops his hand until it hovers just above the butt of his Colt. Neither of them sees LAURA push her way out of the saloon from behind murdock. She’s wearing one of her spangly outfits and carrying her derringer.
MURDOCK
You want to try me, Sheriff?
STREETER
Why don’t we just stand down? Think this thing over?
But he knows it’s too late, he’s pushed MURDOCK too far. STREETER drops his own hand to just above the butt of his gun,
MURDOCK
Time for talking’s done, Sheriff.
SCENE CONTINUES
STREETER
Wellnow, if that’s the way you want it.
MURDOCK
You could have stood aside and nobody would have got hurt.
STREETER
That’s not the way we do things around here. We—(sees LAURA)
STREETER
Laura, no!
While he’s distracted, MURDOCK GOES FOR HIS GUN. LAURA darts between the two men, pointing the DERRINGER at MURDOCK. She pulls the trigger, but there’s only a CLICK. MISFIRE! A split second later, MURDOCK fires his cavalry Colt, and the bullet meant for STREETER hits LAURA instead. She CRUMPLES.
EXT. ROOFTOPS
The TOWNSMEN raise their guns to fire.
RESUME MAIN STREET IN FRONT OF THE SALOON
MURDOCK sees what’s about to happen and dives back through the batwings
SCENE CONTINUES
and info the relative safety of the lady Day, STREETER chases him with a couple of shots, then runs to LAURA and kneels beside her.
RESUME ROOFTOPS
FLIP MORAN, the hostler, lets go with a round. A couple of others follow suit, but only a couple, luckily.
RESUME MAIN STREET IN FRONT OF THE SALOON
A BULLET WHINES off one of the batwing doors, knocking a splinter out.
STREETER
Don’t shoot, he’s gone!
RESUME ROOFTOPS
The men lower their guns. FLIP MORAN looks confused and ashamed of himself.
EXT. STREETER AID LAURA, CLOSE
The SHERIFF’S hard shell is temporarily gone—smashed. He looks down at the DYING DANCEHALL GIRL and realizes he loves her!
STREETER
Laura!
SCENE CONTINUES
LAURA (coughing)
Gun misfired . . . you always said . . . never trust . . . a hideout gun . . .
She breaks down coughing.
STREETER
Don’t talk. I’ll send Joe Prudum for the doc—
LAURA (coughing)
Too . . . too late. Just hold me!
STREETER does. She looks up at him CURIOUSLY.
LAURA
Why, Sheriff! . . . are you crying?
EXT. REAR OF THE LADY DAY
MURDOCK comes bursting out. SERGEANT MATHIS is still there, holding the horses.
SARGE
What happened? I heard shootin’!
MURDOCK (swings up on his horse)
SCENE CONTINUES
Never mind. It’s time to get the boys.
SARGE
You mean—?!
Suddenly MURDOCK’S insanity breaks free His eyes BLAZE. His lips pull back in a snarl that looks almost like a grin. It is the grin of a cornered ANIMAL!
MURDOCK
We’re gonna wipe this town off the map!
They wheel their horses away to join the rest of the regulators.
CHAPTER 9
1
There was no need for Steve and Collie to hop the fence at the far end of Doc’s yard; there was a gate, although they had to tear out a fair amount of well-entrenched ivy before they could use it. They exchanged words only twice before reaching the path. The first time it was Steve who spoke. He looked around at the trees—scrubby, weedy-looking things, for the most part, now mysterious with the rustle of rainwater dripping off the leaves—and then asked: “Are these poplars?”
Collie, who had been working his way around a particularly vicious clump of thornbushes, looked back at him. “Say what?”
“I asked if these trees are poplars. Since Poplar Street is where we came from, I just wondered.”
“Oh.” Collie looked around doubtfully, swapping the .30–.06 from one hand to the other and then running an arm across his forehead. It was very hot in the greenbelt. “I don’t know if they’re poplars or pines or goddam eucalyptuses, to tell you the truth. Botany was never my thing. That one over there is a skinny-ass birch, and that’s about all I know on the subject.” With that, he started off again.
Five minutes later (Steve wondering by now if there really was a path back here, or only wishful thinking), Collie stopped. He looked back past Steve, his eyes so intense that Steve himself turned to see what he was looking at. He saw nothing but the tangled greenery through which they had already made their way. No sign of Old Doc’s house; the Jacksons’, either. He could see a tiny wedge of red that he thought might be the chimney atop the Carver house, but that was all. They almost could have been a hundred miles from the nearest human habitation. Thinking that—and realizing it was a true thought—gave Steve a chill.
“What?” he asked, thinking the cop would ask him why they couldn’t hear any cars, not even some kid’s glasspack-equipped low-rider, or a single bass-powered sound-system, or a motorcycle, or a horn, or a shout, or anything.
Instead, Collie said: “We’re losing the light.”
“We can’t be. It’s only—” Steve looked at his watch, but it had stopped. The battery had given out, probably; he’d never replaced it since his sister had given it to him for Ch
ristmas a couple of years ago. It was odd, though, that it should have stopped just past four o’clock, which had to be not long after the time he had first wheeled into this marvellous little neighborhood.
“Only what?”
“I can’t say exactly, my watch has stopped, but just think about it. It can’t be much more than five-thirty, five forty-five. Maybe even earlier. Don’t they say you overestimate elapsed time when you’re in a crisis situation?”
“I don’t even know who ‘they’ are, never have,” Collie said. “But look at the light. The quality of the light.”
Steve did, and yes, the cop had a point. Steve didn’t like to admit it, but he did. The light slanted through the tangle (and that was the proper word for it, not greenbelt) in hot red shafts. Red sun at night, sailor’s delight, he thought, and suddenly, as if that was a trigger, it all tried to crash in on him, all the things that were wrong, and he couldn’t stand it. He raised his hands and clapped them over his eyes, whacking himself a damned good one on the side of the head with the butt of the .22 he was carrying, feeling his bladder go loose, knowing he was close to watering his underwear and not caring. He staggered backward and—from a distance, it seemed—heard Collie Entragian asking if he was okay. With what felt like the greatest effort of his life, Steve said that he was and forced himself to lower his hands, to look into that delirious red light again.
“Let me ask you a very personal question,” Steve said. He thought his voice did not sound even remotely like his own. “How scared are you?”
“Very.” The big guy armed more sweat off his forehead. It was very hot in here, but in spite of the dripping, rustling leaves, the heat felt strangely dry to Steve, not in the least greenhouse-ish. The smells were that way, too. Not unpleasant, but dry. Egyptian, almost. “Don’t lose hope, though. I see the path, I think.”
It was indeed the path, they stepped onto it less than a minute after getting moving again, and Steve saw signs—comforting ones, under the circumstances—of the animals which had used this particular game-trail: a potato-chip bag, the wrapper from a pack of baseball cards, a couple of double-A batteries which had maybe been pried out of some kid’s Walkman after they went dead, initials carved on a tree.
He saw something far less comforting on the other side of the track: a misshapen growth, prickly and virulent green, amid the sumac and scrub trees. Two more stood behind it, their lumpy arms sticking stiffly up like the arms of alien traffic cops.
“Holy shit, do you see those?” Steve asked.
Collie nodded. “They look like cactuses. Or cacti. Or whatever you say for more than one.”
Yes, Steve thought, but only in the way that women painted by Picasso during his Cubist phase looked like real women. The simplicity of the cactuses and their lack of symmetry—like the bird with the mismatched wings—gave them a surreal aspect that hurt his head. It was like looking at something that wouldn’t quite come into focus.
It does look a little like a buzzard, Old Doc had said. As a child might draw it.
Things were starting to group together in his mind. Not fit together, at least not yet, but forming themselves naturally into what they had been taught to call a set back in Algebra I. The vans, which looked like props from a kids’ Saturday matinee. The bird. Now these violent green cactuses, like something you’d see in an energetic first-grader’s picture.
Collie approached the one closest to the path and stuck out a tentative finger.
“Man, don’t do that, you’re nuts!” Steve said.
Collie ignored him. Reached the finger farther. Closer. And closer yet, until—
“Ouch! You mother!”
Steve jumped. Collie yanked his hand back and peered at it like a kid with an interesting new scrape. Then he turned to Steve and held it out. A bead of blood, small and dark and perfect, was forming on the pad of his index finger. “They’re real enough to poke,” he said. “This one is, anyway.”
“Sure. And what if it poisons you? Like something from the Congo Basin, something like that?”
Collie shrugged as if to say too late now, pal, and started along the path. It was headed south at this point, toward Hyacinth. With the red-orange sunlight flooding through the trees from the right, it was at least impossible to become disoriented. They started down the hill. As they went, Steve saw more and more of the misshapen cacti in the woods to the east of the path. They were actually crowding out the trees in places. The underbrush was thinning, and for a very good reason: the topsoil was also thinning, being replaced by a grainy gray sandbed that looked like . . . like . . .
Sweat ran in Steve’s eyes, stinging. He wiped it away. So hot, and the light so strong and red. He felt sick to his stomach.
“Look.” Collie pointed. Twenty yards ahead, another clump of cacti guarded a fork in the path. Jutting out from them like the prow of a ship was an overturned shopping cart. In the dying light, the metal basket-rods looked as if they had been dipped in blood.
Collie jogged down to the fork. Steve hurried to keep up, not wanting to get separated from the other even by a few yards. As Collie reached the fork, howls rose in the strange air, sharp and yet somehow sickeningly sweet, like bad barbershop-quartet harmony: Whoooo! Whoooo! Wh-Wh-Whooooo! There was a pause and then they came again, more of them this time, mingling and yipping, bringing gooseflesh to every square inch of Steve’s skin. My children of the night, he thought, and in his mind’s eye saw Bela Lugosi, a spook in black and white, spreading his cloak. Maybe not such a great image, under the circumstances, but sometimes your mind went where it wanted.
“Christ!” Collie said, and Steve thought he meant those howls—coyotes howling somewhere to the east of them, where there were supposed to be houses and stores and five different kinds of McBurger restaurants—but the big cop wasn’t looking that way. He was looking down. Steve followed his gaze and saw a man sitting beside the beached shopping cart. He was propped against a cactus, stuck to its spines like a grotesque human memo which had been left here for them to find.
Wh-Wh-Whoooo . . .
He reached out, not thinking about it, and found the cop’s hand. Collie felt his touch and grabbed back. It was a hard grip, but Steve didn’t mind.
“Oh shit, I’ve seen this guy,” Collie said.
“How in Christ’s name can you tell?” Steve asked.
“His clothes. His cart. He’s been on the street two or three times since the start of the summer. If I saw him again, I was going to warn him off. Probably harmless, but—”
“But what?” Steve, who had been on the bum a time or two in his life, didn’t know whether to be pissed or amused. “What’d you think he was going to do? Steal someone’s favorite velvet Elvis painting? Try to hit that guy Soderson up for a drink?”
Collie shrugged.
The man pinned to the cactus was dressed in patched khaki pants and a tee-shirt even older, dirtier, and more ragged than the one Billingsley had found for Collie. His elderly sneakers were bound together with electrical tape. They were the clothes of a bum, and the possessions which had spilled out of the cart when it overturned suggested the same: an old pair of airtip dress shoes, a length of frayed rope, a Barbie doll, a blue jacket with BUCKEYE LANES printed on the back in gold thread, a bottle of wine, half full, stoppered with what looked like the finger of a lady’s evening glove, and a boombox radio which had to be at least ten years old. Its plastic case had been mended with airplane glue. There were also at least a dozen plastic bags, each carefully rolled up and secured with twine.
A dead bum in the woods. But how in God’s name had he died? His eyes had popped out of their sockets and hung on his cheeks from dried optic nerves. Both looked deflated, as if the force that had pushed them out had also split them. His nose had bled copiously over his lips and the salt-and-pepper stubble on his chin. The blood didn’t obscure his mouth, though—Steve only wished it had. It was distended in a huge, loopy grin that seemed to have dragged the corners of the bum’s mouth halfway t
o his grimy ears. Something—some force—had swatted him into the cactus-grove and killed him hard enough to shove his eyeballs clear out onto his face. Yet the same force had left him grinning.
Collie’s hand was gripping harder than ever. Crushing his fingers.
“Can you let up?” Steve asked. “You’re breaking my—”
He looked up the east-tending fork of the path, the one that was supposed to lead them out onto Anderson Avenue and help. It ran on for about ten yards and then opened like the mouth of a funnel into a nightmare desert world. That it bore no resemblance to Ohio made no impression on Steven Ames, for the simple reason that it bore no resemblance to any landscape he had ever seen in his life. Or glimpsed in his dreams.
Beyond the last few sane, green trees was a broad expanse of whitish hardpan running toward a troubled horizon of sawtooth mountain peaks. They had no shading or texture, no folds or outcrops or valleys. They were the dead black Crayola mountains of a child.
The path didn’t disappear but widened out, became a kind of cartoon road. There was a half-buried wagon-wheel on the left. Beyond it was a stony ravine filled with shadows. On the right was a sign, black letters on bleached white board.
it said. The signpost was topped with a cow-skull as misshapen as the cacti. Beyond the sign, the road ran straight to the horizon in an artificially diminishing perspective that made Steve think of movie posters for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There were already stars in the sky above the mountains, impossible stars that were much too big. They didn’t seem to twinkle but to blink on and off like Christmas-tree lights. The howls rose again, this time not a trio or a quartet but a whole choir. Not from the foothills; there were no foothills. Just flat white desert, green blobs of cactus, the road, the ravine, and, in the distance, the sharktooth necklace of the mountains.
Collie whispered, “What in God’s name is this?”
Before Steve could reply—Some child’s mind, he would have said, given the chance—a low growl came from the ravine. To Steve it sounded almost like the idle of a powerful boat engine. Then two green eyes opened in the shadows and he took a step back, his mouth drying. He lifted the Mossberg, but his hands felt like blocks of wood and the gun looked puny, useless. The eyes (they floated like comic-strip eyes in a dark room) looked the size of goddam footballs, and he didn’t think he wanted to see how big the animal that went with them might be. “Can we kill it?” he asked. “If it comes at us, do you think—”