by Stephen King
Happy New Year.
* * *
That was the end of 1922, and that is the end of my story; all the rest is epilogue. The emissaries crowded around this room—how the manager of this fine old hotel would scream if he saw them!—will not have to wait much longer to render their verdict. She is the judge, they are the jury, but I’ll be my own executioner.
I lost the farm, of course. Nobody, including the Farrington Company, would buy those 100 acres until the home place was gone, and when the hog-butchers finally swooped in, I was forced to sell at an insanely low price. Lester’s plan worked perfectly. I’m sure it was his, and I’m sure he got a bonus.
Oh, well; I would have lost my little toehold in Hemingford County even if I’d had financial resources to fall back on, and there is a perverse sort of comfort in that. They say this depression we are in started on Black Friday of last year, but people in states like Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska know it started in 1923, when the crops that survived the terrible storms that spring were killed in the drought that followed, a drought that lasted for 2 years. The few crops that did find their way to the big city markets and the small city agricultural exchanges brought a beggar’s price. Harlan Cotterie hung on until 1925 or so, and then the bank took his farm. I happened on that news while perusing the Bank Sales items in the World-Herald. By 1925, such items sometimes took up whole pages in the newspaper. The small farms had begun to go, and I believe that in a hundred years—maybe only 75—they’ll all be gone. Come 2030 (if there is such a year), all Nebraska west of Omaha will be one big farm. Probably it will be owned by the Farrington Company, and those unfortunate enough to live on that land will pass their existence under dirty yellow skies and wear gas masks to keep from choking on the stench of dead hogs. And every stream will run red with the blood of slaughter.
Come 2030, only the rats will be happy.
That’s pennies on the dollar, Harlan said on the day I offered to sell him Arlette’s land, and eventually I was forced to sell to Cole Farrington for even fewer on the dollar. Andrew Lester, attorney-at-law, brought the papers to the Hemingford City rooming house where I was then living, and he smiled as I signed them. Of course he did. The big boys always win. I was a fool to think it could ever be any different. I was a fool, and everyone I ever loved paid the price. I sometimes wonder if Sallie Cotterie ever came back to Harlan, or if he went to her in McCook after he lost the farm. I don’t know, but I think Shannon’s death probably ended that previously happy marriage. Poison spreads like ink in water.
Meanwhile, the rats have begun to move in from the baseboards of this room. What was a square has become a closing circle. They know that this is just the after, and nothing that comes after an irrevocable act matters much. Yet I will finish. And they won’t have me while I’m alive; the final small victory will be mine. My old brown jacket is hung on the back of the chair I’m sitting in. The pistol is in the pocket. When I’ve finished the last few pages of this confession, I’ll use it. They say suicides and murderers go to Hell. If so, I will know my way around, because I’ve been there for the last eight years.
* * *
I went to Omaha, and if it is indeed a city of fools, as I used to claim, then I was at first a model citizen. I set to work drinking up Arlette’s 100 acres, and even at pennies on the dollar, it took 2 years. When I wasn’t drinking, I visited the places Henry had been during the last months of his life: the grocery and gasoline station in Lyme Biska with the Blue Bonnet Girl on the roof (by then closed with a sign on the boarded-up door reading FOR SALE BY BANK), the pawnshop on Dodge Street (where I emulated my son and bought the pistol now in my jacket pocket), the Omaha branch of the First Agricultural. The pretty young teller still worked there, although her last name was no longer Penmark.
“When I passed him the money, he said thank you,” she told me. “Maybe he went wrong, but somebody raised him right. Did you know him?”
“No,” I said, “but I knew his family.”
Of course I went to St. Eusebia’s, but made no attempt to go in and inquire about Shannon Cotterie to the governess or matron or whatever her title may have been. It was a cold and forbidding hulk of a building, its thick stone and slit windows expressing perfectly how the papist hierarchy seems to feel in their hearts about women. Watching the few pregnant girls who slunk out with downcast eyes and hunched shoulders told me everything I needed to know about why Shan had been so willing to leave it.
Oddly enough, I felt closest to my son in an alley. It was the one next to the Gallatin Street Drug Store & Soda Fountain (Schrafft’s Candy & Best Homemade Fudge Our Specialty), two blocks from St. Eusebia’s. There was a crate there, probably too new to be the one Henry sat on while waiting for a girl adventurous enough to trade information for cigarettes, but I could pretend, and I did. Such pretense was easier when I was drunk, and most days when I turned up on Gallatin Street, I was very drunk indeed. Sometimes I pretended it was 1922 again and it was I who was waiting for Victoria Stevenson. If she came, I would trade her a whole carton of cigarettes to take one message: When a young man who calls himself Hank turns up here, asking about Shan Cotterie, tell him to get lost. To take his jazz elsewhere. Tell him his father needs him back on the farm, that maybe with two of them working together, they can save it.
But that girl was beyond my reach. The only Victoria I met was the later version, the one with the three comely children and the respectable title of Mrs. Hallett. I had stopped drinking by then, I had a job at the Bilt-Rite Clothing factory, and had reacquainted myself with razor blade and shaving soap. Given this veneer of respectability, she received me willingly enough. I told her who I was only because—if I am to be honest to the end—lying was not an option. I could see in the slight widening of her eyes that she had noted the resemblance.
“Gee, but he was sweet,” she said. “And so crazy in love. I’m sorry for Shan, too. She was a great gal. It’s like a tragedy out of Shakespeare, isn’t it?”
Only she said it trad-a-gee, and after that I didn’t go back to the Gallatin Street alley anymore, because for me Arlette’s murder had poisoned even this blameless young Omaha matron’s attempt at kindness. She thought Henry and Shannon’s deaths were like a trad-a-gee out of Shakespeare. She thought it was romantic. Would she still have thought so, I wonder, if she had heard my wife screaming her last from inside a blood-sodden burlap sack? Or glimpsed my son’s eyeless, lipless face?
* * *
I held two jobs during my years in the Gateway City, also known as the City of Fools. You will say of course I held jobs; I would have been living on the street otherwise. But men more honest than I have continued drinking even when they want to stop, and men more decent than I have ended up sleeping in doorways. I suppose I could say that after my lost years, I made one more effort to live an actual life. There were times when I actually believed that, but lying in bed at night (and listening to the rats scampering in the walls—they have been my constant companions), I always knew the truth: I was still trying to win. Even after Henry’s and Shannon’s deaths, even after losing the farm, I was trying to beat the corpse in the well. She and her minions.
John Hanrahan was the storage foreman at the Bilt-Rite factory. He didn’t want to hire a man with only one hand, but I begged for a trial, and when I proved to him that I could pull a pallet fully loaded with shirts or overalls as well as any man on his payroll, he took me on. I hauled those pallets for 14 months, and often limped back to the boardinghouse where I was staying with my back and stump on fire. But I never complained, and I even found time to learn sewing. This I did on my lunch hour (which was actually 15 minutes long), and during my afternoon break. While the other men were out back on the loading dock, smoking and telling dirty jokes, I was teaching myself to sew seams, first in the burlap shipping bags we used, and then in the overalls that were the company’s main stock-in-trade. I turned out to have a knack for it; I could even lay in a zipper, which is no mean skill on a garment assembly line. I�
��d press my stump on the garment to hold it in place as my foot ran the electric treadle.
Sewing paid better than hauling, and it was easier on my back, but the Sewing Floor was dark and cavernous, and after four months or so I began to see rats on the mountains of freshly blued denim and hunkering in the shadows beneath the hand-trucks that first brought in the piecework and then rolled it out again.
On several occasions I called the attention of my co-workers to these vermin. They claimed not to see them. Perhaps they really did not. I think it far more likely that they were afraid the Sewing Floor might be temporarily closed down so the ratcatchers could come in and do their work. The sewing crew might have lost three days’ wages, or even a week. For men and women with families, that would have been catastrophic. It was easier for them to tell Mr. Hanrahan that I was seeing things. I understood. And when they began to call me Crazy Wilf? I understood that, too. It wasn’t why I quit.
I quit because the rats kept moving in.
* * *
I had been putting a little money away, and was prepared to live on it while I looked for another job, but I didn’t have to. Only three days after leaving Bilt-Rite, I saw an ad in the paper for a librarian at the Omaha Public Library—must have references or a degree. I had no degree, but I have been a reader my whole life, and if the events of 1922 taught me anything, it was how to deceive. I forged references from public libraries in Kansas City and Springfield, Missouri, and got the job. I felt sure Mr. Quarles would check the references and discover they were false, so I worked at becoming the best librarian in America, and I worked fast. When my new boss confronted me with my deception, I would simply throw myself on his mercy and hope for the best. But there was no confrontation. I held my job at the Omaha Public Library for four years. Technically speaking, I suppose I still hold it now, although I haven’t been there in a week and have not ’phoned in sick.
The rats, you see. They found me there, too. I began to see them crouched on piles of old books in the Binding Room, or scuttering along the highest shelves in the stacks, peering down at me knowingly. Last week, in the Reference Room, I pulled out a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica for an elderly patron (it was Ra-St, which no doubt contains an entry for Rattus norvegicus, not to mention slaughterhouse) and saw a hungry gray-black face staring out at me from the vacant slot. It was the rat that bit off poor Achelois’s teat. I don’t know how that could be—I’m sure I killed it—but there was no doubt. I recognized it. How could I not? There was a scrap of burlap, bloodstained burlap, caught in its whiskers.
Snood!
I brought the volume of Britannica to the old lady who had requested it (she wore an ermine stole, and the thing’s little black eyes regarded me bleakly). Then I simply walked out. I wandered the streets for hours, and eventually came here, to the Magnolia Hotel. And here I have been ever since, spending the money I have saved as a librarian—which doesn’t matter any longer—and writing my confession, which does. I—
One of them just nipped me on the ankle. As if to say Get on with it, time’s almost up. A little blood has begun to stain my sock. It doesn’t disturb me, not in the slightest. I have seen more blood in my time; in 1922 there was a room filled with it.
And now I think I hear . . . is it my imagination?
No.
Someone has come visiting.
I plugged the pipe, but the rats still escaped. I filled in the well, but she also found her way out. And this time I don’t think she’s alone. I think I hear two sets of shuffling feet, not just one. Or—
Three? Is it three? Is the girl who would have been my daughter-in-law in a better world with them as well?
I think she is. Three corpses shuffling up the hall, their faces (what remains of them) disfigured by rat-bites, Arlette’s cocked to one side as well . . . by the kick of a dying cow.
Another bite on the ankle.
And another!
How the management would—
Ow! Another. But they won’t have me. And my visitors won’t, either, although now I can see the doorknob turning and I can smell them, the remaining flesh hanging on their bones giving off the stench of slaughtered
slaught
The gun
god where is the
stop
OH MAKE THEM STOP BITING M
From the Omaha World-Herald, April 14th, 1930
LIBRARIAN COMMITS SUICIDE IN LOCAL HOTEL
Bizarre Scene Greets Hotel Security Man
The body of Wilfred James, a librarian at the Omaha Public Library, was found in a local hotel on Sunday when efforts by hotel staff to contact him met with no response. The resident of a nearby room had complained of “a smell like bad meat,” and a hotel chambermaid reported hearing “muffled shouting or crying, like a man in pain” late Friday afternoon.
After knocking repeatedly and receiving no response, the hotel’s Chief of Security used his pass-key and discovered the body of Mr. James, slumped over the room’s writing desk. “I saw a pistol and assumed he had shot himself,” the security man said, “but no-one had reported a gunshot, and there was no smell of expended powder. When I checked the gun, I determined it was a badly maintained .25, and not loaded.
“By then, of course, I had seen the blood. I have never seen anything like that before, and never want to again. He had bitten himself all over—arms, legs, ankles, even his toes. Nor was that all. It was clear he had been busy with some sort of writing project, but he had chewed up the paper, as well. It was all over the floor. It looked like paper does when rats chew it up to make their nests. In the end, he chewed his own wrists open. I believe that’s what killed him. He certainly must have been deranged.”
Little is known of Mr. James at this writing. Ronald Quarles, the head librarian at the Omaha Public Library, took Mr. James on in late 1926. “He was obviously down on his luck, and handicapped by the loss of a hand, but he knew his books and his references were good,” Quarles said. “He was collegial but distant. I believe he had been doing factory work before applying for a position here, and he told people that before losing his hand, he had owned a small farm in Hemingford County.”
The World-Herald is interested in the unfortunate Mr. James, and solicits information from any readers who may have known him. The body is being held at the Omaha County Morgue, pending disposition by next of kin. “If no next of kin appears,” said Dr. Tattersall, the Morgue’s Chief Medical Officer, “I suppose he will be buried in public ground.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
* * *
Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes The Bill Hodges Trilogy—Mr. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel), Finders Keepers, and End of Watch—and the story collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. IT is now a major motion picture starring Bill Skarsgård. King is the recipient of the 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He and his son Owen King coauthored the novel Sleeping Beauties. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
SimonandSchuster.com
authors.simonandschuster.com/Stephen-King
ALSO BY STEPHEN KING
FICTION
Carrie
’Salem’s Lot
The Shining
Night Shift
The Stand
The Dead Zone
Firestarter
Cujo
Creepshow
Different Seasons
Cycle of the Werewolf
Christine
Pet Sematary
IT
Skeleton Crew
The Eyes of the Dragon
Misery
The Tommyknockers
The Dark Half
Four Past Midnight
Needful Things
Gerald’s Game
Dolores Claiborne
Nightma
res & Dreamscapes
Insomnia
Rose Madder
The Green Mile
Desperation
Bag of Bones
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
Hearts in Atlantis
Dreamcatcher
Everything’s Eventual
From a Buick 8
The Colorado Kid
Cell
Lisey’s Story
Duma Key
Just After Sunset
Under the Dome
Stephen King Goes to the Movies
Full Dark, No Stars
11/22/63
Doctor Sleep
Mr. Mercedes
Revival
Finders Keepers
The Bazaar of Bad Dreams
End of Watch
NOVELS IN THE DARK TOWER SERIES
The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three
The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass
The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla
The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah
The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower
The Wind Through the Keyhole: A Dark Tower Novel
BY STEPHEN KING AS RICHARD BACHMAN
Thinner
The Running Man
The Long Walk
Roadwork
The Regulators
Blaze
WITH PETER STRAUB
The Talisman
Black House
WITH OWEN KING
Sleeping Beauties
NONFICTION
Danse Macabre
On Writing (A Memoir of the Craft)
We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook.
* * *
Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP