by Stephen King
"Did you get her?" Paula asked timidly, coming to the door.
"No. She doesn't answer, the town constable doesn't answer, I think the whole fucking town went to Bermuda. Jesus!" She blew a lock of hair off her sweaty forehead.
"Perhaps if you called one of her friends--"
"What friends? The loony she's shacked up with?"
"Sissy! You don't know--"
"I know who answered the phone the one time I did get through," she returned grimly. "After living in this family, it's easier for me to tell when a man's drunk by his voice."
Her mother said nothing; she had been reduced to wet-eyed, trembling silence, one hand hovering at the collar of her black dress, and that was just how Anne liked her.
"No, he's there, and they both know I'm trying to get through and why, and they're going to be sorry they fucked with me."
"Sissy, I do so wish you wouldn't use that lang--"
"Shut up!" Anne screamed at her, and of course her mother did.
Anne picked up the telephone again. This time when she dialed directory assistance, she asked for the number of the Haven mayor. They didn't have one of those either. There was something called a town manager, whatever the fuck that was.
Muffled little clicks, like rats' claws on glass, as the operator looked things up on her computer screen. Her mother had fled. From the other room came the theatrically overblown sobs and wails of Irish grief. Like a V-2 rocket, Anne thought, an Irish wake was powered by liquid fuel, and in both cases the liquid was the same. Anne closed her eyes. Her head thumped. She ground her teeth together--it produced a bitter, metallic taste. She closed her eyes and imagined how good, how wonderful it would be to perform a little surgery on Bobbi's face with her fingernails.
"Are you still there, honey," she asked without opening her eyes, "or did you suddenly run off to the W.C.?"
"Yes, I have a I--"
"Give it to me."
The operator was gone. A robot recited a number in odd, herky-jerky cadences. Anne dialed it. She fully expected no answer, but the phone was picked up promptly. "Selectmen's. Newt Berringer here."
"Well, it's good to know someone's there. My name's Anne Anderson. I'm calling from Utica, New York. I tried to call your constable, but apparently he's gone fishing."
Berringer's voice was even. "He's a she, Miss Anderson. She died unexpectedly last month. The office hasn't been filled. Probably won't be until next town meeting."
This stopped Anne for only an instant. She focused instead on something which interested her more.
"Miss Anderson? How did you know I was a Miss, Berringer?"
There was no pause. Berringer said, "Ain't you Bobbi's sister? If you are, and if you were married, you wouldn't be Anderson, would you?"
"You know Bobbi then, do you?"
"Everyone in Haven knows Bobbi, Miss Anderson. She's our resident celebrity. We're real proud of her."
It went through the meat of Anne's brain like a sliver of glass. Our resident celebrity. Oh dear bleeding Christ.
"Good job, Sherlock. I've been trying to reach her on whatever passes for phones up there in Moosepaw County to tell her her father died yesterday and he's going to be buried tomorrow."
She had expected some conventional sentiment from this faceless official--after all, he knew Bobbi--but there was none. "Been some trouble with the phones out her way," was all Berringer said.
Anne was again put momentarily off-pace (very momentarily; Anne was never put off-pace for very long). The conversation was not going as she had expected. The man's responses were a little strange, too reserved even for a Yankee. She tried to picture him and couldn't. There was something very odd in his voice.
"Could you have her call me? Her mother is crying her eyes out in the other room, she's near collapse, and if Roberta doesn't get here in time for the funeral, I think she will collapse."
"Well, I can't make her call you, Miss Anderson, can I?" Berringer returned with infuriating, drawly slowness.
"She's a grown woman. But I'll surely pass the message along."
"Maybe I'd better give you the number," Anne said through clenched teeth. "I mean, we're still here at the same old stand, but she calls so seldom these days, she might have forgotten it. It's--"
"No need," Berringer interrupted. "If she don't remember, or have it written down, there's always d'rect'ry assistance, ain't there? I guess that's how you must have gotten this'un."
Anne hated the telephone because it allowed only a fraction of the full, relentless force of her personality to come through. She thought she had never hated it so much as she did at this moment. "Listen!" she cried. "I don't think you understand--"
"Think I do," Berringer said. This was the second interruption, and the conversation was not three minutes old. "I'll go out 'fore I have m'dinner and pass it on. Thanks for calling, Miss Anderson."
"Listen--"
Before she could finish, he did the thing she hated the most.
Anne hung up, thinking she could cheerfully stand by and watch as the jag-off to whom she'd just been speaking was eaten alive by wild dogs.
She had been grinding her teeth together madly.
10
Bobbi didn't return her call that afternoon. Nor that early evening, as the V-2 of the wake entered the boozosphere. Nor that late evening as it went into orbit. Nor in the two hours past midnight as the last of the wakers stumbled blearily out to their cars, with which they would menace other drivers on their way home.
Anne lay sleepless and ramrod straight in her bed most of the night, wired up on speed like a suitcase bomb, alternately grinding her teeth and digging her nails into her palms, planning revenge.
You'll come back, Bobbi, oh yes you will. And when you do--
When she still hadn't called the next day, Anne put the funeral off in spite of her mother's weak wailings that it wasn't fitting. Finally Anne whirled on her and snarled,
"I'll say what's fitting and what isn't. What's fitting is that that little whore should be here and she hasn't even bothered to call. Now leave me alone!"
Her mother slunk away.
That night she tried first Bobbi's number, then the selectmen's office. At the first number the sirening sound continued. At the second, she got a recorded message. She waited patiently until the beep and then said, "It's Bobbi's sis again, Mr. Berringer, cordially hoping that you'll be afflicted with syphilis that won't be diagnosed until your nose falls off and your balls turn black."
She called directory assistance back and asked for three Haven numbers--the number of Newt Berringer, a Smith ("Any Smith, dear, in Haven they're all related"), and a Brown (the number she received in response to this last request was, by virtue of alphabetical order, Bryant's). She got the same siren howl at each number.
"Shit!" Anne yelled, and threw the phone at the wall.
Upstairs in bed, her mother cringed and hoped Bobbi would not come home ... at least not until Anne was in a better mood.
11
She had put the funeral and interment off yet another day.
The relatives began to rumble, but Anne was more than equal to them, thank you. The funeral director took one look at her and decided the old mick could rot in his pine box before he got involved. Anne, who spent the whole day on the phone, would have congratulated him on making a wise decision. Her fury was rapidly passing all previous bounds. Now all the phones into Haven seemed out of service.
She could not delay the funeral another day longer and she knew it. Bobbi had won this battle; all right, so be it. But not the war. Oh no. If she thought that, the bitch had several more things coming--and all of them would be painful.
Anne bought her plane tickets angrily but confidently--one from upstate New York to Bangor ... and two returns.
12
She would have flown to Bangor the following day--that was when the ticket was for--but her idiotic mother fell down the back stairs and broke her hip. Sean O'Casey had once said that when you lived
with the Irish you marched in a fool's parade, and oh how right he had been. Her mother's screams brought Anne in from the back yard, where she had been lying on a chaise longue soaking up some sun and going over her strategy for keeping Bobbi in Utica once she had gotten her here. Her mother was sprawled at the bottom of the narrow staircase, bent at a hideous angle, and Anne's first thought was that for a row of pins she would gladly have left the stupid old bitch there until the anesthetic effects of the claret began to wear off. The new widow smelled like a winery.
In that angry, dismayed moment Anne knew that all of her plans would have to be changed, and she thought that their mother might actually have done it on purpose-- gotten drunk to nerve herself up and then not just fallen but jumped downstairs. Why? To keep her from Bobbi, of course.
But you won't, she had thought, going to the phone. You won't; if I want a thing to be, if I mean a thing to be, that thing will be; I am going to Haven and I am going to cut a wide swath there. I'm going to bring Bobbi back, and they're going to remember me for a long time. Especially the hayseed dork who hung up on me.
She picked up the phone and punched the Medix number--it had been pasted to the phone ever since her father's first stroke--with quick, angry stabs of her forefinger. She was grinding her teeth.
13
Thus it was the ninth of August before she could finally get away. In the caesura, there was no call from Bobbi, and Anne didn't try to get her again, or the hick town manager, or Bobbi's drunk fuck in Troy. He had apparently moved in so he could poke her full-time. Okay. Let them both fall into a lull. That would be very fine.
Now she was here, in Bangor's Cityscape Hotel, sleeping badly ... and grinding her teeth.
She had always ground her teeth. Sometimes it was so loud it awoke her mother in the night ... on a few occasions even her father, who slept like a brick. Her mother mentioned it to the family doctor when Anne was three. That fellow, a venerable upstate New York G.P. whom Doc Warwick would have felt right at home with, looked surprised. He considered a moment, then said: "I think you must be imagining that, Mrs. Anderson."
"If I am, it must be catching," Paula had said. "My husband's heard it too."
They looked toward Anne, who was building a shaky tower of blocks, one on top of the other. She worked with grim, unsmiling concentration. As she added a sixth block, the tower fell down ... and as she started to rebuild it, they both heard the grim, skeletal sound of Anne grinding her baby teeth together.
"She also does that in her sleep?" the doctor asked.
Paula Anderson nodded.
"Well, it'll probably go away," the doctor said. "It's harmless." But of course it didn't go away and it wasn't harmless; it was bruxism, a malady which, along with heart attacks, strokes, and ulcers, often afflicts driven, self-assertive people. The first of Anne's baby teeth to fall out was noticeably eroded. Her parents commented on it ... then forgot it. By then Anne's personality had begun to assert itself in more gaudy and startling ways. By six and a half she was already ruling the Anderson family in some strange way you could never quite put your finger on. And they had all gotten used to the thin, slightly gruesome whisper of Anne's teeth grinding together in the night.
The family dentist had noticed the problem wasn't going away but getting worse by the time Anne was nine, but it wasn't treated until she was fifteen, when it began to cause her actual pain. By then she had worn her teeth down to the live nerves. The dentist fitted her with a rubber mouth-splint taken from a mold of her teeth, then an acrylic one. She wore these appliances, which are called "night-guards," to bed every night. At eighteen she was fitted with all-metal crowns on most of her top and bottom teeth. The Andersons couldn't afford it, but Anne insisted. They had allowed the problem to slide, and she was not going to allow her skinflint father to turn around when she was twenty-one and say, "You're a grownup now, Anne; it's your problem. If you want crowns, you pay the bill."
She had wanted gold, but that really was beyond their means.
For several years thereafter, Anne's infrequent smiles had a glittery, mechanized look that was extremely startling. People often actually recoiled from that grin. She took a grim enjoyment from these reactions, and when she had seen the villain Jaws in one of the later James Bond movies, she had laughed until she thought her sides would split--this unaccustomed burst of amusement had left her feeling dizzy and ill. But she had understood exactly why, when that huge man first bared his stainless-steel teeth in a sharklike grin, people had recoiled from her, and she almost wished she hadn't finally had porcelain fused over the metal. Yet, she thought, it was perhaps better not to show oneself so clearly--it could be as unwise to wear your personality on your sleeve as it was to wear your heart there. Maybe you didn't have to look as though you could chew your way through a door made of oak planks to get what you wanted as long as you knew you could.
Bruxism aside, Anne also had had a lot of cavities both as a child and as an adult, in spite of Utica's fluoridated water and her own strictly observed regimen of oral hygiene (she often flossed her teeth until her gums bled). This was also due in large part to her personality rather than her physiology. Drive and the urge to dominate afflict both the softest parts of the human body--stomach and vitals--and the hardest, the teeth. Anne had a chronic case of dry-mouth. Her tongue was nearly white. Her teeth were dry little islands. Without a steady flow of saliva to wash away crumbs of food, cavities began quickly. By this night when she lay sleeping uneasily in Bangor, Anne had better than twelve ounces of silver-amalgam fillings in her mouth--on infrequent occasions she had set off airport metal detectors.
In the last two years she had begun to lose teeth in spite of her fanatic efforts to save them: two on the top right, three on the bottom left. In both cases she had opted for the most expensive dental bridgework available--she had to travel to New York City to have the work done. The dental surgeon removed the rotting husks, flayed her gums to the dull white of the jawbone, and implanted tiny titanium screws. The gums were sewn back together and healed nicely--some people reject metal implants in the bone, but Anne Anderson had no trouble at all accepting them--leaving two little titanium posts sticking out of the flesh. The bridgework was placed over the metal anchors after the flesh around them had healed.
She didn't have as much metal in her head as Gard did (Gard's plate always set off airport metal detectors), but she had a lot.
So she slept without knowing that she was a member of an extremely exclusive club: those people who could enter Haven as it was now with a bare chance of surviving.
14
She left for Haven in her rental car at eight the following morning. She made one wrong turn, but still arrived at the Troy-Haven town line by nine-thirty.
She had awakened feeling as nervous and randy-dandy as a thoroughbred dancing her way into the starting gate. But somewhere, in the last fifteen or twenty miles before she reached the Haven town line--the land around her nearly empty, dreamingly ripe in the breathless summer heat-hush--that fine feeling of anticipation and wire-thin nervy readiness had bled away. Her head began to ache. At first it was just a minor throb, but it quickly escalated into the familiar pounding of one of her near-migraines.
She drove past the town line into Haven.
By the time she got to Haven Village, she was hanging on to herself by force of will and not much more. The headache came and went in sickish waves. Once she thought she had heard a burst of hideously distorted music coming out of her mouth, but that must have been imagination, something brought on by the headache. She was faintly aware of people on the streets in the little village, but not of the way they all turned to look at her ... her, then each other.
She could hear machinery throbbing in the woods somewhere--the sound was distant and dreamlike.
The Cutlass began to weave back and forth on the deserted road. Images doubled, trebled, came reluctantly back together, then began doubling and trebling again.
Blood trickled from the corner
s of her mouth unnoticed. She held hard to one thought: It's on this road, Route 9, and her name will be on the mailbox. It's on this road, Route 9, and her name will be on the mailbox. It's on this road--
The road was mercifully deserted. Haven slept in the morning sun. Ninety percent of out-of-town traffic had been rerouted now, and this was a good thing for Anne, whose car pitched and yawed wildly, left-hand wheels now spuming dust from one shoulder, right-hand wheels spuming dust from the other a few moments later. She knocked down a turn sign without being aware of it.
Young Ashley Ruvall saw her coming and pulled his bike a prudent distance off the road and stood astride it in Justin Hurd's north pasture until she was gone.
(a lady there's a lady and I can't hear her except her pain)
A hundred voices answered him, soothing him.
(we know Ashley it's all right ... shhh ... shhh)
Ashley grinned, exposing his pink, baby-smooth gums.
15
Her stomach revolted.
Somehow she was able to pull over and shut off the engine before her breakfast bolted up and out a moment after she managed to claw the driver's door open. For a moment she just hung there with her forearms propped un the open window of the half-open door, bent awkwardly outward, consciousness no more than a single spark which she maintained by her determination that it should not go out. At last she was able to straighten up and pull the door closed.
She thought in a dim and confused way that it must have been breakfast--headaches she was used to, but she almost never threw up. Breakfast in the restaurant of that fleabag that was supposed to be Bangor's best hotel. The bastards had poisoned her.
I may be dying... oh God yes, it really feels as if I might be dying. But if I'm not, I am going to sue them from here to the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court. If I live, I'll make them wish their mothers never met their fathers.
Perhaps it was the bracing quality of this thought which made Anne feel strong enough to get the car moving again. She crept along at thirty-five, looking for a mailbox with ANDERSON written on it. A terrible idea came to her. Suppose Bobbi had painted out her name on the mailbox? It wasn't so crazy when you really thought about it. She might well suspect Sissy would turn up, and the spineless little twat had always been afraid of her. She was in no shape to stop at every farm along the way, inquiring after Bobbi (not that she'd get much help from Bobbi's hayseed neighbors if the donkey she'd spoken to on the phone was any indication), and--
