by Stephen King
From Audrey Wyler’s journal
October 31, 1995
Journal again. Never thought I’d resume, probably never will on a full-time basis, but it can be so comforting.
Seth came to me this morning & managed to ask, with a combination of words & grunts, if he could go out trick or treating, like the other kids in the neighborhood. There was no sign of Tak, and when he is just Seth, I find him all but impossible to refuse. It isn’t hard for me to remember that Seth’s not the one responsible for everything that’s happened; it’s quite easy, in fact. In a way, that’s what makes it all so horrible. It seals off all my exits. I don’t suppose anyone else could understand what I mean. I’m not sure I understand myself. But I feel it. Oh God, do I.
I told him okay, I’d take him trick or treating, it would be fun. I said I could probably put together a little cowboy outfit for him, if he’d like that, but if he wanted to go as a MotoKop, we’d have to go out to Payless and buy a store outfit.
He was shaking his head before I’d even finished, big back-and-forth shakes. He didn’t want to go as a cowboy, and not as a MotoKop, either. There was something in the violence of his head shaking that was close to horror. He might be getting tired of cowboys and police from the future, I think.
I wonder if the other one knows?
Anyway, I asked him what he did want to dress as, if not a cowboy or Snake Hunter or Major Pike. He waved one arm & jumped around the room. After a little bit of this pantomime, I realized he was pretending to be in a swordfight.
“A pirate?” I asked, & his whole face lit up in his sweet Seth Garin smile.
“Pi-ut!” he said, then tried harder and said it right “Pi-rate!”
So I found an old silk kerchief to tie over his head, and gave him a clip-on gold hoop to put in his ear, and unearthed an old pair of Herb’s pj’s for pantaloons. I used elastic bands on the bottoms & they belled out just right. With a mascara beard, an eyeliner scar, and an old toy sword (borrowed from Cammie Reed next door, a golden oldie from her twins’ younger years), he looked quite fierce. And, when I took him out around four o’clock to “do” our block of Poplar Street and two blocks of Hyacinth, he looked no different than all the other goblins and witches and Barneys and pirates. When we got back he spread out all his candy on the living-room floor (he hasn’t been in the den to watch TV all day, Tak must be sleeping deeply, I wish the bastard was dead but that’s too much to hope for) & gloated over it as if it really were a pirate’s treasure. Then he hugged me and kissed my neck. So happy.
Fuck you, Tak. Fuck you.
Fuck you and I hope you die.
March 16, 1996
The last week has been horror, complete horror, Tak in charge almost completely and goose-stepping. Dishes everywhere, glasses filmed with chocolate milk, the house a mess. Ants! Christ, ants in March! It looks like a house where lunatics live, and is that so wrong?
My nipples on fire from all the pinching it’s made me do. I know why, of course; it’s angry because it can’t do what it wants with its version of Cassandra Styles. I feed it, I buy the new MotoKops toys it wants (and the comic books, of course, which I must read to it because Seth doesn’t have that skill for it to draw on), but for that other purpose I am useless.
As much of the week as I could, I spent with Jan.
Then, today, while I was trying to clean up a little (mostly I’m too exhausted and dispirited to even try), I broke my mother’s favorite plate, the one with the Currier & Ives sledding scene on it. Tak had nothing to do with it; I picked it up off the mantel shelf in the dining room where I keep it displayed, wanting to give it a little dusting, & it simply slipped through my stupid fingers & broke on the floor. At first I thought my heart had broken with it. It wasn’t the plate, of course, as much as I have always liked it. All at once it was like it was my life I was looking at instead of an old china plate smashed to shit on the dining-room floor. Cheap symbolism, Peter Jackson from across the street would probably say. Cheap & sentimental. Probably true, but when we are in pain we are rarely creative.
I got a plastic garbage bag from the kitchen & began picking up the pieces, sobbing all the while I did it. I didn’t even hear the TV go off—Tak & Seth had been having a MotoKops 2200 festival most of the day—but then a shadow fell over me and I looked up and there he was.
At first I thought it was Tak—Seth has been mostly gone this last week, or lying Low—but then I saw the eyes. They both use the same set, you’d think they wouldn’t change, couldn’t, but they do. Seth’s are lighter, and have a range of emotion Tak can never manage.
“I broke my mother’s plate,” I said. “It was all I had of her, and it slipped through my fingers.”
It came on worse than ever then. I put my arms around my knees, put my face down on them, & just cried. Seth came closer, put his own arms around my neck, & hugged me. Something wonderful happened when he did. I can’t explain it, exactly, but it was so good that it made visiting with Jan at Mohonk seem ordinary in comparison. Tak can made me feel bad—terrible, in fact, as if the whole world is nothing but a ball of mud squirming with worms just like me. Tak likes it when I feel bad. He licks those bad feelings right off my skin, like a kid with a candy cane. I know he does.
This was the opposite . . . and more. My tears stopped, & my feelings of sadness were replaced by such a sense of joy and . . . not ecstasy, exactly, but like that. Serenity & optimism all mixed together, as if everything couldn’t help but turn out all right. As if everything was already all right, & I just couldn’t see that in my ordinary state of mind. I was filled up, the way good food fills you up when you’re hungry. I was renewed.
Seth did that. He did it when he hugged me. And he did it, I think (know), in exactly the same way, Tak makes me feel the bad things and the sad things. Maroon is what I call it. When Tak wants to, it makes me feel maroon. But it can only do it because it has Seth’s power to draw on. & I think that when Seth took away my sadness this afternoon, he was able to do it because he had Tak’s power to draw on. And I don’t think Tak knew he was doing that, or it would have made him stop.
Here’s something that’s never occurred to me until today: Seth may be stronger than Tak knows.
Much stronger.
CHAPTER 13
1
Johnny didn’t know how long he sat in the kitchen chair, head down, body racked with sobs as strong as shivers, tears pouring out of his eyes, before he felt a soft hand on the back of his neck and looked up to see the girl from the market, the one with the schizo hair. Steve was no longer with her. Johnny looked through the living-room picture window—the angle was just right for him to be able to do that from where he was—and saw him standing on the dispirited grass of the Wyler lawn and looking down the street. Some of the sirens had died as the vehicles they belonged to reached the street and stopped; others were still whooping like Indians as they approached.
“You okay, Mr. Marinville?”
“Yeah.” He tried to say more, but what came out instead of words was a hitching half-sob. He wiped snot off his nose with the back of his hand and then tried to smile. “Cynthia, isn’t it?”
“Cynthia, yep.”
“And I’m Johnny. Just Johnny.”
“ ’Kay.” She was looking down at the entwined bodies. Audrey’s head was thrown back, her eyes closed, her face as still and serene as a deathmask. And the boy still looked like an infant in his fragile nakedness. One that had died in childbirth.
“Look at them,” Cynthia said softly. “His arms around her neck like that. He must have loved her such a lot.”
“He killed her,” Johnny said flatly.
“That can’t be!”
He sympathized with the shock on her face, but it didn’t change what he knew. “It is, though. He called Cammie in on her.”
“Called her in? What do you mean, called her in?”
He nodded as if she had offered agreement. “He did it the same way C.O.s in the bush used to call i
n artillery fire on enemy ’villes in Vietnam. He called her in on both of them, in fact. I heard him do it.” He tapped his temple.
“You’re saying Seth told Cammie to kill them?”
He nodded.
“The other one, maybe. You might have heard him . . . it—”
Johnny shook his head. “Nope. It was Seth, not Tak. I recognized his voice.” He paused, looking down at the dead child, then looked back up at Cynthia. “Even in my head, he was a mouth-breather.”
2
The houses had returned to what they really were, Steve saw, but that didn’t mean they had returned to normal. They had clearly taken one hell of a pasting. The Hobart place was no longer burning, there was that much; the downpour had tamped the fire to a kind of sullen fume, like a volcano after the main eruption. The old veterinarian’s bungalow was more fully involved, with flames leaping from the windows and black, charry patches spreading along the eaves and bubbling the paint. Between them, the house of Peter and Mary Jackson was a tumbled, shot-up ruin.
There were two fire engines on the street and more coming. Already hoses lay tangled on the lawns over there, looking like fat beige pythons. There were police-cars, too. Three were parked in front of Entragian’s place, where the newsboy’s body (and that of Hannibal, couldn’t forget him) lay under plastic which was now puddled with water from the downpour. The cruisers’ red lights swung and flashed. Two more cruisers were parked at the top of the street, blocking the Bear Street end off entirely.
That won’t do any good if they come back, Steve thought. If the regulators come back, boys, they’ll blow your little roadblock right over the nearest ice cap.
Except they wouldn’t be back. That was what the sunlight meant, what the retreating thunder meant. It had all really happened—Steve only had to look at the burning houses and those that were all shot up to know that—but it had happened in some weird fistula of time that these cops would never know about, or want to know about. He looked down at his watch and wasn’t surprised to see it was running again. 5:18, it said, and he guessed that was as close to the real time as his Timex was ever going to get.
He looked back down the street at the cops. Some of them had their guns out; some did not. Not one of them looked clear on how he or she was supposed to be behaving. Steve could understand that. They were looking at a shooting gallery, after all, and probably no one on the surrounding blocks had even heard any shots. Thunder, maybe, but shotguns that sounded like mortar shells? Nope.
They saw him on the lawn, and one of them beckoned. At the same time, two others were gesturing for him to go back into the Wyler house. They looked like a pretty mindfucked posse, all in all, and Steve didn’t blame them. Something had gone on here, they could see that, but what?
You’ll be awhile figuring it out, Steve thought, but you’ll get something you can live with in the end. You guys always do. Whether it’s a crashed flying saucer in Roswell, New Mexico, an empty ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, or a suburban Ohio street turned into a fire-corridor, you always come up with something. You guys’re never going to catch anyone, I’d bet my far-from-considerable life savings on that, and you won’t believe a single goddam word any of us say (in fact, the less we say the easier it’ll probably be for us), but in the end you’ll find something that will allow you to re-holster your guns . . . and to sleep at night. And you know what I say to that?
NO PROBLEM,
that’s what!
NO . . . FUCKING . . . PROBLEM!
One of the cops was now pointing a bullhorn at him. Steve wasn’t crazy about that, but better a bullhorn than a gun, he supposed.
“ARE YOU A HOSTAGE?” Mr. Bullhorn boomed. “ARE YOU A HOSTAGE-TAKER?”
Steve grinned, cupped his hands around his mouth and called back, “I’m a Libra! Friendly with strangers, loves good conversation!”
A pause. Mr. Bullhorn conferred with several of his mates. There was a good deal of head-shaking, then he turned back to Steve and raised the bullhorn again. “WE DIDN’T GET THAT, WILL YOU REPEAT?”
Steve didn’t. He’d spent most of his life in show-business—well, sort of—and he knew how easy it was to run a joke into the ground. More cops were arriving; whole convoys of black-and-whites with strobing red light-bars. More fire engines. Two ambulances. What looked like an armored assault vehicle. The cops were only letting the fire trucks through, at least for the time being, although thanks to the rain, neither blaze looked like much shakes to Steve.
Across from where he stood, Dave Reed and Susi Geller came out of the Carver house, arms around each other. They stepped carefully over the dead girl on the stoop and walked down to the sidewalk. Behind them came Brad and Belinda Josephson, shepherding the Carver children and shielding them from the sight of their father, still lying in his driveway and still as dead as ever. Behind them came Tom Billingsley. He had what looked like a linen tablecloth in his gnarled hands. This he shook out over the dead girl’s corpse, taking no notice of the man down the block who was trying to hail him with the bullhorn.
“Where’s my mom?” Dave called to Steve. His eyes looked simultaneously wild and exhausted. “Have you seen my mom?”
And Steve Ames, whose life’s motto had been
NULLO IMPEDIMENTUM,
hadn’t the slightest idea of what to say.
3
Johnny got into the living room, walking on tiptoe and stepping over as much of the mess Cammie had left as he could. Once past that obstacle, he started for the door with more speed and confidence. He had brought his tears under control, at least for the time being, and he supposed that was good. He didn’t know why, but he supposed it was. He looked at the clock standing on the mantel. It said 5:21, and that felt about right.
Cynthia caught his arm. He turned to her, feeling a bit impatient. Through the picture window he could see the other Poplar Street survivors clustering in the middle of the street. So far they were ignoring the hails from the cops, who didn’t seem to know if they should come up or hold their positions, and Johnny wanted to join his neighbors before they made up their minds one way or the other.
“Is it gone?” she asked. “Tak—that red thing whatever it was—is it gone?”
He looked back into the kitchen. It hurt him almost physically to do this, but he managed. There was plenty of red in there—the walls were painted with it, the ceiling too, for that matter—but no sign of the glowing, embery thing that had tried to find a safe harbor for itself in Cammie Reed’s head after its primary host had been killed.
“Did it die when she did?” The girl was looking at him with pleading eyes. “Say it did, okay? Make me feel good and say it did.”
“It must have,” Johnny said. “If it hadn’t, I imagine it would be trying one of us on for size right now.”
She let out air in a gusty rush. “Yeah. That makes sense.”
So it did, but Johnny didn’t believe it. Not for a second. I know you all, it had said. I’ll find you all. I’ll hunt you down. Maybe it would. And maybe it would have a slightly more strenuous fight on its hands than it had bargained for, should it try. In any case, there was no sense in worrying about it now.
Tak ah wan! Tak ah lah! Mi him en tow!
“What is it?” Cynthia asked. “What’s wrong?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re shivering.”
Johnny smiled. “I guess a goose just walked over my grave.” He took her hand off his arm and folded his fingers through hers. “Come on. Let’s go out and see how everyone’s doing.”
4
They were almost to the street and the others when Cynthia came to a stop. “Oh my God,” she said in a soft, strengthless voice. “Oh my God, look.”
Johnny turned. The storm had moved on, but there was one isolated thunderhead just west of them. It hung over downtown Columbus, connected to Ohio by a gauzy umbilicus of rain, and it made the shape of a gigantic cowboy galloping on a storm-colored stallion. The horse’s grotesq
uely elongated snout pointed east, toward the Great Lakes; its tail stretched out long toward the prairies and deserts. The cowboy appeared to have his hat in one hand, perhaps waving it in a hooraw, and as Johnny watched, open-mouthed and transfixed, the man’s head flickered with lightning.
“A ghost rider,” Brad said. “Holy shit, a goddam ghost rider in the sky. Do you see it, Bee?”
Cynthia moaned through the hand she’d pressed to her mouth. Looked up at the cloud-shape, eyes bulging, head shaking from side to side in a useless gesture of negation. The others were looking now, as well—not the firemen and not the cops, who would break out of their indecision soon and come on up here to join the block party, but the Poplar Street folk who had survived the regulators.
Steve took Cynthia by her thin arms and drew her gently away from Johnny. “Stop it,” he said. “It can’t hurt us. It’s just a cloud and it can’t hurt us. It’s going away already. See?”
It was true. The flank of the skyhorse was tearing open in some places, melting in others, letting the sun through in long, hazy rays. It was just a summer afternoon again, the very rooftree of summer, all watermelon and Kool-Aid and foul tips off the end of the bat.
Steve glanced down the street and saw a police car begin rolling, very slowly, up the hill toward them, running over the tangled firehoses as it came. He looked back at Johnny. “Yo.”
“Yo what?”
“Did he commit suicide, that kid?”
“I don’t know what else you’d call it,” Johnny said, but he supposed he knew why the hippie had asked; it hadn’t felt like suicide, somehow.
The police cruiser stopped. The man who got out was wearing a khaki uniform which came equipped with roughly one ton of gold braid. His eyes, a very sharp blue, were almost lost in a complex webwork of wrinkles. His gun, a big one, was in his hand. He looked like someone Johnny had seen before, and after a moment it came to him: the late Ben Johnson, who had played saintly ranchers (usually with beautiful daughters) and satanic outlaws with equal grace and ability.