by Stephen King
Speaking very slowly, Stu said: "Well, I got my superstitions. I been laughed at for it, but I got em. I know it don't make any difference if a guy lights two cigarettes on a match or three, but two don't make me nervous and three does. I don't walk under ladders and I never care to see a black cat cross my path. But to live with no science ... worshipping the sun, maybe ... thinking monsters are rolling bowling balls across the sky when it thunders ... I can't say any of that turns me on very much, baldy. Why, it seems like a kind of slavery to me."
"But suppose those things were true?" Glen said quietly.
"What?"
"Assume that the age of rationalism has passed. I myself am almost positive that it has. It's come and gone before, you know; it almost left us in the 1960s, the so-called Age of Aquarius, and it took a damn near permanent vacation during the Middle Ages. And suppose ... suppose that when rationalism does go, it's as if a bright dazzle has gone for a while and we could see ..." He trailed off, his eyes looking inward.
"See what?" Fran asked.
He raised his eyes to hers; they were gray and strange, seeming to glow with their own inner light.
"Dark magic," he said softly. "A universe of marvels where water flows uphill and trolls live in the deepest woods and dragons live under the mountains. Bright wonders, white power. 'Lazarus, come forth.' Water into wine. And ... and just maybe ... the casting out of devils."
He paused, then smiled.
"The lifetrip."
"And the dark man?" Fran asked quietly.
Glen shrugged. "Mother Abagail calls him the Devil's Imp. Maybe he's just the last magician of rational thought, gathering the tools of technology against us. And maybe there's something more, something much darker. I only know that he is, and I no longer think that sociology or psychology or any other ology will put an end to him. I think only white magic will do that ... and our white magician is out there someplace, wandering and alone." Glen's voice nearly broke, and he looked down quickly.
Outside there was only dark, and a breeze coming down from the mountains threw a fresh spatter of rain against the glass of Stu and Fran's living room. Glen was lighting his pipe. Stu had taken a random handful of change from his pocket and was shaking the coins up and down, then opening his hands to see how many had come up heads, how many tails. Nick was making elaborate doodles on the top sheet of his pad, and in his mind he saw the empty streets of Shoyo and heard--yes, heard--a voice whisper: He's coming for you, mutie. He's closer now.
After a while Glen and Stu kindled a blaze in the fireplace and they all watched the flames without saying much.
After they were gone, Fran felt low and unhappy. Stu was also in a brown study. He looks tired, she thought. We ought to stay home tomorrow, just stay home and talk to each other and have a nap in the afternoon. We ought to take it easy. She looked at the Coleman gaslamp and wished for electric light instead, bright electric light you got by just flicking a wall switch.
She felt her eyes sting with tears. She told herself angrily not to start, not to add that to their problems, but the part of herself which controlled the waterworks did not seem inclined to listen.
Then, suddenly, Stu brightened. "By golly! I damn near forgot, didn't I?"
"Forgot what?"
"I'll show you! Stay right here!" He went out the door and clattered down the hall stairs. She went to the doorway and in a moment she could hear him coming back up. He had something in his hand and it was a ... a ...
"Stuart Redman, where did you get that?" she asked, happily surprised.
"Folk Arts Music," he said, grinning.
She picked up the washboard and tilted it this way and that. The gleam of light spilled off its bluing. "Folk--?"
"Down Walnut Street aways."
"A washboard in a music store?"
"Yeah. There was a helluva good washtub, too, but somebody had already poked a hole through it and turned it into a bass."
She began to laugh. She put the washboard down on the sofa, came to him, and hugged him tight. His hands came up to her breasts and she hugged him tighter still. "The doctor said give him jug band music," she whispered.
"Huh?"
She pressed her face against his neck. "It seems to make him feel just fine. That's what the song says, anyway. Can you make me feel fine, Stu?"
Smiling, he picked her up. "Well," he said, "I guess I could give it a try."
At quarter past two the next afternoon, Glen Bateman burst straight into the apartment without knocking. Fran was at Lucy Swann's house, where the two women were trying to get a sourdough sponge started. Stu was reading a Max Brand Western. He looked up and saw Glen, his face pale and shocked, his eyes wide, and tossed the book on the floor.
"Stu," Glen said. "Oh, man, Stu. I'm glad you're here."
"What's wrong?" he asked Glen sharply. "Is it ... did someone find her?"
"No," Glen said. He sat down abruptly as if his legs had just given out. "It's not bad news, it's good news. But it's very strange."
"What? What is?"
"It's Kojak. I took a nap after lunch and when I got up, Kojak was on the porch, fast asleep. He's beat to shit, Stu, he looks like he's been through a Mixmaster with a set of blunt blades, but it's him."
"You mean the dog? That Kojak?"
"That's who I mean."
"Are you sure?"
"Same dog-tag that says Woodsville, N.H. Same red collar. Same dog. He's really scrawny, and he's been fighting. Dick Ellis--Dick was overjoyed to have an animal to work on for a change--he says he's lost one eye for good. Bad scratches on his sides and belly, some of them infected, but Dick took care of them. Gave him a sedative and taped up his belly. Dick said it looked like he'd tangled with a wolf, maybe more than one. No rabies, anyhow. He's clean." Glen shook his head slowly, and two tears spilled down his cheeks. "That damn dog came back to me. I wish to Christ I hadn't left him behind to come on his own, Stu. That makes me feel so friggin bad."
"It couldn't have been done, Glen. Not with the motorcycles."
"Yes, but ... he followed me, Stu. That's the kind of thing you read about in Star Weekly... Faithful Dog Follows Master Two Thousand Miles. How could he do a thing like that? How?"
"Maybe the same way we did. Dogs dream, you know--sure they do. Didn't you ever see one lying fast asleep on the kitchen floor, paws twitching away? There was an old guy in Arnette, Vic Palfrey, and he used to say dogs had two dreams, the good dream and the bad one. The good one's when the paws twitch. The bad one's the growling dream. Wake a dog up in the middle of the bad dream, the growling dream, and he's apt to bite you, like as not."
Glen shook his head in a dazed way. "You're saying he dreamed -- "
"I'm not sayin anything funnier than what you were talking last night," Stu reproached him.
Glen grinned and nodded. "Oh, I can talk that stuff for hours on end. I'm one of the great all-time bullshitters. It's when something actually happens. "
"Awake at the lectern and asleep at the switch."
"Fuck you, East Texas. Want to come over and see my dog?"
"You bet."
Glen's house was on Spruce Street, about two blocks from the Boulderado Hotel. The climbing ivy on the porch trellis was mostly dead, as were all the lawns and most of the flowers in Boulder--without daily watering from the city mains, the arid climate had triumphed.
On the porch was a small round table holding up a gin and tonic. ("Ain't that pretty horrible stuff without ice?" Stu asked, and Glen answered, "You don't notice much one way or the other after the third one.") Beside the drink was an ashtray with five pipes in it, copies of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Ball Four, and My Gun Is Quick -- all of them open to different places. There was also an open bag of Kraft Cheese Kisses.
Kojak was lying on the porch, his tattered snout laid peacefully on his forepaws. The dog was rack-thin and pitifully chewed, but Stu recognized him, even on short acquaintance. He squatted and began to stroke Kojak's head. Kojak woke up and
looked happily at Stu. In the way that dogs have, he seemed to grin.
"Say, that's a good dog," Stu said, feeling a ridiculous lump in his throat. Like a deck of cards swiftly dealt with the faces up, he seemed to see every dog he'd had since his mom had given him Old Spike, when Stu was only five years old. A lot of dogs. Maybe not one for every card in the deck, but still a lot of dogs. A dog was a good thing to have, and so far as he knew, Kojak was the only dog in Boulder. He glanced up at Glen and glanced down quickly. He guessed even old bald sociologists who read three books at a whack didn't like to get caught leaking around the eyes.
"Good dog," he repeated, and Kojak thumped his tail against the porch boards, presumably agreeing that he was, indeed, a good dog.
"Going inside for a minute," Glen said thickly. "Got to use the bathroom."
"Yeah," Stu said, not looking up. "Hey, good boy, say, ole Kojak, wasn't you a good boy? Ain't you a one?"
Kojak's tail thumped agreeably.
"Can you roll over? Play dead, boy. Roll over."
Kojak obediently rolled over on his back, rear legs splayed out, front paws in the air. Stu's face grew concerned as he ran his hand gently over the stiff white concertina of bandage Dick Ellis had put on. Farther up, he could see red and puffy-looking scratches that undoubtedly deepened to gores under the bandages. Something had been at him, all right, and it hadn't been some other wandering dog. A dog would have gone for the muzzle or the throat. What had happened to Kojak was the work of something lower than a dog. More sneaking. Wolfpack, maybe, but Stu doubted if Kojak could have gotten away from a pack. Whatever, he had been lucky not to be disemboweled.
The screen banged as Glen came back out on the porch.
"Whatever it was got at him didn't miss his vitals by much," Stu said.
"The wounds were deep and he lost a lot of blood," Glen agreed. "I just can't get over thinking that I was the one who let him in for that."
"And Dick said wolves."
"Wolves or maybe coyotes ... but he thought it was unlikely coyotes would have done such a job, and I agree."
Stu patted Kojak on the rump and Kojak rolled back onto his belly. "How is it almost all the dogs are gone and there's still enough wolves in one place--and east of the Rockies, at that--to set on a good dog like this?"
"I guess we'll never know," Glen said. "Any more than we'll know why the goddamned plague took the horses but not the cows and most of the people but not us. I'm not even going to think about it. I'm just going to lay in a big supply of Gainesburgers and keep him fed."
"Yeah." Stu looked at Kojak, whose eyes had slipped closed. "He's tore up, but his doings are still intact--I saw that when he rolled over. We could do worse than to keep our eye out for a bitch, you know it?"
"Yes, that's so," Glen said thoughtfully. "Want a warm gin and tonic, East Texas?"
"Hell, no. I may never have gone any further than one year of vocational-technical school, but I'm no fucking barbarian. Got a beer?"
"Oh, I think I can scare up a can of Coors. Warm, though."
"Sold." He started to follow Glen into the house, then paused with the screen door in his hand to look back at the sleeping dog. "You sleep good, ole boy," he told the dog. "Good to have you here."
He and Glen went inside.
But Kojak wasn't asleep.
He lay somewhere between, where most living things spend a good deal of time when they are hurt badly, but not badly enough to be in the mortal shadow. A deep itch lay in his belly like heat, the itch of healing. Glen would have to spend a good many hours trying to distract him from that itch so he wouldn't scratch off the bandages, reopen the wounds, and reinfect them. But that was later. Just now Kojak (who still thought of himself occasionally as Big Steve, which had been his original name) was content to drift in the place in between. The wolves had come for him in Nebraska, while he was still sniffing dejectedly around the house on jacklifters in the little town of Hemingford Home. The scent of THE MAN--the feel of THE MAN--had led to this place and then stopped. Where had he gone? Kojak didn't know. And then the wolves, four of them, had come out of the corn like ragged spirits of the dead. Their eyes blazed at Kojak, and their lips wrinkled back from their teeth to let out the low, ripping growls of their intent. Kojak had retreated before them, growling himself, his paws stiff-out and digging at the dirt of Mother Abagail's dooryard. To the left hung the tire-swing, casting its depthless round shadow. The lead wolf had attacked just as Kojak's hindquarters slipped into the shadow cast by the porch. It came in low, going for the belly, and the others followed. Kojak sprang up and over the leader's snapping muzzle, giving the wolf his underbelly, and as the leader began to bite and scratch, Kojak fastened his own teeth in the wolf's neck, his teeth sinking deep, letting blood, and the wolf howled and tried to struggle away, its courage suddenly gone. As it pulled away, Kojak's jaws closed with lightning speed on the wolf's tender muzzle, and the wolf uttered a howling, abject scream as its nose was laid open to the nostrils and pulled to strings and tatters. It fled yipping with agony, shaking its head crazily from side to side, spraying droplets of blood to the left and right, and in the crude telepathy that all animals of like kind share, Kojak could read its over-and-over thought clearly enough:
(wasps in me o the wasps the wasps in my head wasps are up my head o)
And then the others hit him, one from the left and another from the right like huge blunt bullets, the last of the trio submarining in low, grinning, snapping, ready to pull out his intestines. Kojak had broken to the right, baying hoarsely, wanting to deal with that one first so he could get under the porch. If he could get under the porch he could stand them off, maybe forever. Lying on the porch now he relived the battle in a kind of slow motion: the growls and howls, the strikes and withdrawals, the smell of blood that had gotten into his brain and gradually turned him into a kind of fighting machine, unaware of his own wounds until later. He sent the wolf that had been on his right the way of the first, one of its eyes dead and a huge, gouting, and probably mortal wound in the side of its throat. But the wolf had done its own damage in return; most of it was superficial, but two of the gores were extremely deep, wounds that would heal to hard and twisting scar-tissue like a scrawling lowercase t. Even when he was an old, old dog (and Kojak lived another sixteen years, long after Glen Bateman died), those scars would pain and throb on wet days. He had fought free, had scrambled under the porch, and when one of the two remaining wolves, overcome with bloodlust, tried to wriggle in after him, Kojak sprang on it, pinned it, and ripped its throat out. The other retreated almost to the edge of the corn, whining uneasily. If Kojak had come out to do battle, it would have fled with its tail between its legs. But Kojak didn't come out, not then. He was done in. He could only lie on his side, panting rapidly and weakly, licking his wounds and growling deep in his chest whenever he saw the shadow of the remaining wolf draw near. Then it was dark, and a misty halfmoon rode the sky over Nebraska. And each time the last wolf heard Kojak alive and presumably still ready to fight, it shied away, whining. Sometime after midnight it left, leaving Kojak alone to see if he would live or die. In the early morning hours he had felt the presence of some other animal, something that terrified him into a series of soft whimpers. It was a thing in the corn, a thing walking in the corn, hunting for him, perhaps. Kojak lay shivering, waiting to see if this thing would find him, this horrible thing that felt like a Man and a Wolf and an Eye, some dark thing like an ancient crocodile in the corn. Some unknown time later, after the moon went down, Kojak felt that it was gone. He fell asleep. He had lain up under the porch for three days, coming out only when hunger and thirst drove him out. There was always a puddle of water gathered below the lip of the handpump in the yard, and in the house there were all sorts of rich scraps, many of them from the meal Mother Abagail had cooked for Nick's party. When Kojak felt he could go on, he knew where to go. It was not a scent that told him; it was a deep sense of heat that had come out of his own deep and mortal time, a glo
wing pocket of heat to the west of him. And so he came, limping most of the last five hundred miles on three legs, the pain always gnawing at his belly. From time to time he was able to smell THE MAN, and thus knew he was on the right track. And at last he was here. THE MAN was here. There were no wolves here. Food was here. There was no sense of that dark Thing ... the Man with the stink of a wolf and the feel of an Eye that could see you over long miles if it happened to turn your way. For now, things were fine. And so thinking (so far as dogs can think in their careful relating to a world seen almost wholly through feelings), Kojak drifted down deeper, now into real sleep, now into a dream, a good dream of chasing rabbits through the clover and timothy grass that was belly-high and wet with soothing dew. His name was Big Steve. This was the north forty. And oh the rabbits are everywhere this gray and endless morning--
As he dreamed, his paws twitched.
CHAPTER 53
Excerpts from the Minutes of the Ad Hoc Committee Meeting
August 17, 1990
This meeting was held at the home of Larry Underwood on South Forty-second Street in the Table Mesa area. All members of the committee were present ...
