by Stephen King
A low clink and shift as the things inside were moved.
The hands explored, pushing aside drugs and ampules and syringes with no interest at all. Now they found something and held it up. In the first dim light there was a gleam of silver.
The shadowy thing left the room.
PART THREE
Oz the Gweat and Tewwible
Jesus therefore, groaning inside of himself and full of trouble, came to the grave. It was a cave, and a stone had been raised against the mouth. "Roll away the stone," Jesus said.
Martha said, "Lord, by this time he will have begun to rot. He has been dead four days." . . .
And when he had prayed awhile, Jesus raised his voice and cried, "Lazarus, come forth!" And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes; and his face was bound about with a napkin.
Jesus said to them, "Loose him and let him go."
--JOHN'S GOSPEL (paraphrase)
"I only just thought of it," she said hysterically. "Why didn't I think of it before? Why didn't you think of it?"
"Think of what?" he questioned.
"The other two wishes," she replied rapidly. "We've only had one."
"Was that not enough?" he demanded fiercely.
"No," she cried triumphantly: "we'll have one more. Go down and get it quickly, and wish our boy alive again."
--W. W. JACOBS ("The Monkey's Paw")
58
Jud Crandall came awake with a sudden jerk, almost falling out of his chair. He had no idea how long he had slept; it could have been fifteen minutes or three hours. He looked at his watch and saw that it was five minutes of five. There was a feeling that everything in the room had been subtly shifted out of position, and there was a line of pain across his back from sleeping sitting up.
Oh you stupid old man, look what you gone and done!
But he knew better; in his heart, he knew better. It wasn't just him. He hadn't simply fallen asleep on watch; he had been put to sleep.
That frightened him, but one thing frightened him more; what had awakened him? He was under the impression that there had been some sound, some--
He held his breath, listening over the papery rustle of his heart.
Here was a sound--not the same one that had awakened him, but something. The faint creak of hinges.
Jud knew every sound in this house--which floorboards creaked, which stair levels squeaked, where along the gutters the wind was apt to hoot and sing when it was drunkenly high, as it had been last night. He knew this sound as well as any of those. The heavy front door, the one that communicated between his porch and the front hall, had just swung open. And with that information to go on, his mind was able to remember the sound that had awakened him. It had been the slow expansion of the spring on the screen door communicating between the porch and the front walk.
"Louis?" he called but with no real hope. That wasn't Louis out there. Whatever was out there had been sent to punish an old man for his pride and vanity.
Footsteps moved slowly up the hall toward the living room.
"Louis?" he tied to call again, but only a faint croak actually emerged because now he could smell the thing which had come into his house here at the end of the night. It was a dirty, low smell--the smell of poisoned tidal flats.
Jud could make out bulking shapes in the gloom--Norma's armoire, the Welsh dresser, the highboy--but no details. He tried to get to his feet on legs that had gone to water, his mind screaming that he needed more time, that he was too old to face this again without more time; Timmy Baterman had been bad enough, and Jud had been young then.
The swing door opened and let in shadows. One of the shadows was more substantial than the others.
Dear God, that stink.
Shuffling steps in the darkness.
"Gage?" Jud gained his feet at last. From one corner of his eye he saw the roll of cigarette ash in the Jim Beam ashtray. "Gage, is that y--"
A hideous mewling sound now arose, and for a moment all of Jud's bones turned to white ice. It was not Louis's son returned from the grave but some hideous monster.
No. It was neither.
It was Church, crouched in the hall doorway, making that sound. The cat's eyes flared like dirty lamps. Then his eyes moved in the other direction and fixed on the thing which had come in with the cat.
Jud began to back up, trying to catch at his thoughts, trying to hold on to his reason in the face of that smell. Oh, it was cold in here--the thing had brought its chill with it.
Jud rocked unsteadily on his feet--it was the cat, twining around his legs, making him totter. It was purring. Jud kicked at it, driving it away. It bared its teeth at him and hissed.
Think! Oh, think, you stupid old man, it mayn't be too late, even yet it mayn't be too late . . . it's back but it can be killed again . . . if you can only do it . . . if you can only think . . .
He backed away toward the kitchen, and he suddenly remembered the utensil drawer beside the sink. There was a meat cleaver in that drawer.
His thin shanks struck the swinging door that led into the kitchen and he pushed it open. The thing that had come into his house was still indistinct, but Jud could hear it breathing. He could see one white hand swinging back and forth--there was something in that hand, but he could not make out what. The door swung back as he entered the kitchen, and Jud at last turned his back and ran to the utensil drawer. He jerked it open and found the cleaver's worn hardwood handle. He snatched it up and turned toward the door again; he even took a step or two toward it. Some of his courage had come back.
Remember, it ain't a kid. It may scream or somethin when it sees you've got its number; it may cry. But you ain't gonna be fooled. You been fooled too many times already, old man. This is your last chance.
The swing door opened again, but at first only the cat came through. Jud's eye followed it for a moment and then he looked up again.
The kitchen faced east, and dawn's first light came in through the windows, faint and milky white. Not much light but enough. Too much.
Gage Creed came in, dressed in his burial suit. Moss was growing on the suit's shoulders and lapels. Moss had fouled his white shirt. His fine blond hair was caked with dirt. One eye had gone to the wall; it stared off into space with terrible concentration. The other was fixed on Jud.
Gage was grinning at him.
"Hello, Jud," Gage piped in a babyish but perfectly understandable voice. "I've come to send your rotten, stinking old soul straight to hell. You fucked with me once. Did you think I wouldn't come back sooner or later and fuck with you?"
Jud raised the cleaver. "Come on and get your pecker out then, whatever you are. We'll see who fucks with who."
"Norma's dead, and there'll be no one to mourn you," Gage said. "What a cheap slut she was. She fucked every one of your friends, Jud. She let them put it up her ass. That's how she liked it best. She's burning down in hell, arthritis and all. I saw her there, Jud. I saw her there."
It lurched two steps toward him, shoes leaving muddy tracks on the worn linoleum. It held one hand out in front of it as if to shake with him; the other hand was curled behind its back.
"Listen, Jud," it whispered--and then its mouth hung open, baring small milk teeth, and although the lips did not move, Norma's voice issued forth.
"I laughed at you! We all laughed at you! How we laaaaaauuughed--"
"Stop it!" The cleaver jittered in his hand.
"We did it in our bed, Herk and I did it, I did it with George, I did it with all of them. I knew about your whores but you never knew you married a whore and how we laughed, Jud! We rutted together and we laaaaaaaaaughed at--"
"STOP IT!" Jud screamed. He sprang at the tiny, swaying figure in its dirty burial suit, and that was when the cat arrowed out of the darkness under the butcher block where it had been crouched. It was hissing, its ears laid back along the bullet of its skull, and it tripped Jud up just as neat as you please. The cleaver flew out of his hand. It skittered across the
humped and faded linoleum, blade and handle swiftly changing places as it whirled. It struck the baseboard with a thin clang and slid under the refrigerator.
Jud realized that he had been fooled again, and the only consolation was that it was for the final time. The cat was on his legs, mouth open, eyes blazing, hissing like a teakettle. And then Gage was on him, grinning a happy black grin, eyes moon-shaped, rimmed with red, and his right hand came out from behind his back, and Jud saw that what he had been holding when he came in was a scalpel from Louis's black bag.
"Oh m' dear Jesus," Jud managed and put his right hand up to block the blow. And here was an optical illusion; surely his mind had snapped because it appeared that the scalpel was on both sides of his palm at the same time. Then something warm began to drizzle down on his face, and he understood.
"I'm gonna fuck with you, old man!" the Gage-thing chortled, blowing its poisoned breath in his face. "I'm gonna fuck with you! I'm gonna fuck with you all . . . I . . . want!"
Jud flailed and got hold of Gage's wrist. Skin peeled off like parchment in his hand.
The scalpel was yanked out of his hand, leaving a vertical mouth.
"ALL . . . I . . . WANT!"
The scalpel came down again.
And again.
And again.
59
"Try it now, ma'am," the truck driver said. He was looking into the engine cavity of Rachel's rented car.
She turned the key. The Chevette's engine roared into life. The truck driver slammed the hood down and came around to her window, wiping his hands on a big blue handkerchief. He had a pleasant, ruddy face. A Dysart's Truck-Stop cap was tilted back on his head.
"Thank you very much," Rachel said, on the verge of tears. "I just didn't know what I was going to do."
"Aw, a kid could have fixed that," the trucker said. "But it was funny. Never seen something like that go wrong on such a new car, anyway."
"Why? What was it?"
"One of your battery cables come right off. Wasn't nobody frigging with it, was there?"
"No," Rachel said, and she thought again of that feeling she'd had, that feeling of running into the rubber band of the world's biggest slingshot.
"Must have jogged her loose just ridin along, I guess. But you won't have no more trouble with your cables anyway. I tightened em up real good."
"Could I give you some money?" Rachel asked timidly.
The trucker roared with laughter. "Not me, lady," he said. "Us guys are the knights of the road, remember?"
She smiled. "Well . . . thank you."
"More'n welcome." He gave her a good grin, incongruously full of sunshine at this hour of the morning.
Rachel smiled back and drove carefully across the parking lot to the feeder road. She glanced both ways for traffic and five minutes later was back on the turnpike again, headed north. The coffee had helped more than she would have believed. She felt totally awake now, not the slightest bit dozy, her eyes as big as doorknobs. That feather of unease touched her again, that absurd feeling that she was being manipulated. The battery cable coming off the terminal post like that . . .
So she could be held up just long enough for . . .
She laughed nervously. Long enough for what?
For something irrevocable to happen.
That was stupid. Ridiculous. But Rachel began to push the little car along faster nonetheless.
At five o'clock, as Jud was trying to ward off a scalpel stolen from the black bag of his good friend Dr. Louis Creed, and as her daughter was awakening bolt-upright in bed, screaming in the grip of a nightmare which she could mercifully not remember, Rachel left the turnpike, drove the Hammond Street Cutoff close to the cemetery where a spade was now the only thing buried in her son's coffin, and crossed the Bangor-Brewer Bridge. By quarter past five, she was on Route 15 and headed for Ludlow.
*
She had decided to go directly to Jud's; she would make good on at least that much of her promise. The Civic was not in their driveway, anyway, and although she supposed it might be in the garage, their house had a sleeping, unoccupied look. No intuition suggested to her that Louis might be home.
Rachel parked behind Jud's pickup and got out of the Chevette, looking around carefully. The grass was heavy with dew, sparkling in this clear, new light. Somewhere a bird sang and then was silent. On the few occasions since her preteenage years when she had been awake and alone at dawn without some responsibility to fulfill as the reason, she had a lonely but somehow uplifted feeling--a paradoxical sense of newness and continuity. This morning she felt nothing so clean and good. There was only a dragging sense of unease which she could not entirely charge off to the terrible twenty-four hours just gone by and her recent bereavement.
She mounted the porch steps and opened the screen door, meaning to use the old-fashioned bell on the front door. She had been charmed by that bell the first time she and Louis came over together; you twisted it clockwise, and it uttered a loud but musical cry that was anachronistic and delightful.
She reached for it now, then glanced down at the porch floor and frowned. There were muddy tracks on the mat. Looking around, she saw that they led from the screen door to this one. Very small tracks. A child's tracks, by the look of them. But she had been driving all night, and there had been no rain. Wind, but no rain.
She looked at the tracks for a long time--too long, really--and discovered she had to force her hand back to the turn bell. She grasped it . . . and then her hand fell away again.
I'm anticipating, that's all. Anticipating the sound of that bell in this stillness. He's probably gone to sleep after all and it will startle him awake . . .
But that wasn't what she was afraid of. She had been nervous, scared in some deep and diffuse way ever since she had found it so hard to stay awake, but this sharp fear was something new, something which had solely to do with those small tracks. Tracks that were the size--
Her mind tried to block this thought, but it was too tired, too slow.
--of Gage's feet.
Oh stop it, can't you stop it?
She reached out and twisted the bell.
Its sound was even louder than she remembered, but not so musical--it was a harsh, choked scream in the stillness. Rachel jumped back, uttering a nervous little laugh that had absolutely no humor in it at all. She waited for Jud's footsteps, but his footsteps did not come. There was silence, and more silence, and she was beginning to debate in her own mind whether or not she could bring herself to twist that iron-butterfly shape again, when a sound did come from behind the door, a sound she would not have expected in her wildest surmises.
Waow! . . . Waow! . . . Waow!
"Church?" she asked, startled and puzzled. She bent forward, but it was of course impossible to see in; the door's glass panel had been covered with a neat white curtain. Norma's work. " 'Church, is that you?"
Waow!
Rachel tried the door. It was unlocked. Church was there, sitting in the hallway with its tail coiled neatly around its feet. The cat's fur was streaked with something dark. Mud, Rachel thought, and then saw that the beads of liquid caught in Church's whispers were red.
He raised one paw and began to lick it, his eyes never leaving her face.
"Jud?" she called out, really alarmed now. She stepped just inside the door.
The house gave back no answer, only silence.
Rachel tried to think, but all at once images of her sister Zelda had begun to creep into her mind, blurring thought. How her hands had twisted. How she used to slam her head against the wall sometimes when she was angry--the paper had been all torn there, the plaster beneath torn and broken. This was no time to think of Zelda, not when Jud might be hurt. Suppose he had fallen down? He was an old man.
Think about that, not about the dreams you had as a kid, dreams of opening the closet and having Zelda spring out at you with her blackened, grinning face, dreams of being in the bathtub and seeing Zelda's eyes peering out of the drain, dreams of
Zelda lurking in the basement behind the furnace, dreams--
Church opened his mouth, exposing his sharp teeth and cried Waow! again.
Louis was right, we never should have had him fixed, he's never seemed right since then. But Louis said it would take away all of his aggressive instincts. He was wrong about that, anyway; Church still hunts. He--
Waow! Church cried again, then turned and darted up the stairs.
"Jud?" she called again. "Are you up there?"
Waow! Church cried from the top of the stairs, as if to confirm the fact, and then he disappeared down the hall.
How did he get in, anyway? Did Jud let him in? Why?
Rachel shifted from one foot to the other, wondering what to do next. The worst of it was that all of it seemed . . . seemed somehow managed, as if something wanted her to be here, and--
And then there was a groan from upstairs, low and filled with pain--Jud's voice, surely Jud's voice. He's fallen in the bathroom or maybe tripped, broken a leg, or sprained his hip, maybe, the bones of the old are brittle, and what in the name of God are you thinking of, girl, standing down here and shifting back and forth like you had to go to the bathroom, that was blood on Church, blood. Jud's hurt and you're just standing here! What's wrong with you?
"Jud!" The groan came again, and she ran up the stairs.
She had never been up here before, and because the hall's only window faced west, toward the river, it was still very dark. The hallways ran straight and wide beside the stairwell and toward the back of the house, the cherrywood rail gleaming with mellow elegance. There was a picture of the Acropolis on the wall and
(it's Zelda all these years she's been after you and now it's her time open the right door and she'll be there with her humped and twisted back smelling of piss and death it's Zelda it's her time and finally she caught up with you)
the groan came again, low, from behind the second door on the right.
Rachel began to walk toward that door, her heels clacking on the boards. It seemed to her that she was going through some sort of warp--not a time warp or a space warp but a size warp. She was getting smaller. The picture of the Acropolis was floating higher and higher, and that cut-glass doorknob would soon be at eye level. Her hand stretched out for it . . . and before she could even touch it, the door was snatched open.
