by Stephen King
She opened the box and laid it on my desk so I could look inside. I wasn't surprised at what I saw. It was a plain gold wedding ring.
"I'll do what's necessary," she said. "I am staying in what Mrs. Kelly would undoubtedly call 'a respectable boarding house.' My landlady has been kind and friendly ... but Mrs. Kelly was kind and friendly, too. I think she may ask me to leave at any time now, and I suspect that if I say anything about the rent-balance due me, or the damage deposit I paid when I moved in, she'll laugh in my face."
"My dear young woman, that would be quite illegal. There are courts and lawyers to help you answer such--"
"The courts are men's clubs," she said steadily, "and not apt to go out of their way to befriend a woman in my position. Perhaps I could get my money back, perhaps not. Either way, the expense and the trouble and the ... the unpleasantness ... hardly seem worth the forty-seven dollars or so. I had no business mentioning it to you in the first place. It hasn't happened yet, and maybe it won't. But in any case, I intend to be practical from now on."
She raised her head, and her eyes flashed at mine.
"I've got my eye on a place down in the Village--just in case. It's on the third floor, but it's clean, and it's five dollars a month cheaper than where I'm staying now." She picked the ring out of the box. "I wore this when the landlady showed me the room."
She put it on the third finger of her left hand with a small moue of disgust of which I believe she was unaware. "There. Now I'm Mrs. Stansfield. My husband was a truck-driver who was killed on the Pittsburgh-New York run. Very sad. But I am no longer a little roundheels strumpet, and my child is no longer a bastard."
She looked up at me, and the tears were in her eyes again. As I watched, one of them overspilled and rolled down her cheek.
"Please," I said, distressed, and reached across the desk to take her hand. It was very, very cold. "Don't, my dear."
She turned her hand--it was the left--over in my hand and looked at the ring. She smiled, and that smile was as bitter as gall and vinegar, gentlemen. Another tear fell--just that one.
"When I hear cynics say that the days of magic and miracles are all behind us, Dr. McCarron, I'll know they're deluded, won't I? When you can buy a ring in a pawnshop for two dollars and that ring will instantly erase both bastardy and licentiousness, what else would you call that but magic? Cheap magic."
"Miss Stansfield ... Sandra, if I may ... if you need help, if there's anything I can do--"
She drew her hand away from me--if I had taken her right hand instead of her left, perhaps she would not have done. I did not love her, I've told you, but in that moment I could have loved her; I was on the verge of falling in love with her. Perhaps, if I'd taken her right hand instead of the one with that lying ring on it, and if she had allowed me to hold her hand only a little longer, until my own warmed it, perhaps then I should have.
"You're a good, kind man, and you've done a great deal for me and my baby ... and your Breathing Method is a much better kind of magic than this awful ring. After all, it kept me from being jailed on charges of willful destruction, didn't it?"
She left soon after that, and I went to the window to watch her move off down the street toward Fifth Avenue. God, I admired her just then! She looked so slight, so young, and so obviously pregnant--but there was still nothing timid or tentative about her. She did not scutter up the street; she walked as if she had every right to her place on the sidewalk.
She left my view and I turned back to my desk. As I did so, the framed photograph which hung on the wall next to my diploma caught my. eye, and a terrible shudder worked through me. My skin--all of it, even the skin on my forehead and the backs of my hands--crawled up into cold knots of gooseflesh. The most suffocating fear of my entire life fell on me like a horrible shroud, and I found myself gasping for breath. It was a precognitive interlude, gentlemen. I do not take part in arguments about whether or not such things can occur; I know they can, because it has happened to me. Just that once, on that hot early September afternoon. I pray to God I never have another.
The photograph had been taken by my mother on the day I finished medical school. It showed me standing in front of White Memorial, hands behind my back, grinning like a kid who's just gotten a full-day pass to the rides at Palisades Park. To my left the statue of Harriet White can be seen, and although the photograph cuts her off at about mid-shin, the pedestal and that queerly heartless inscription--There is no comfort without pain; thus we define salvation through suffering--could be clearly seen. It was at the foot of the statue of my father's first wife, directly below that inscription, that Sandra Stansfield died not quite four months later in a senseless accident that occurred just as she arrived at the hospital to deliver her child.
She exhibited some anxiety that fall that I would not be there to attend her during her labor--that I would be away for the Christmas holidays or not on call. She was partly afraid that she would be delivered by some doctor who would ignore her wish to use the Breathing Method and who would instead give her gas or a spinal block.
I assured her as best I could. I had no reason to leave the city, no family to visit over the holidays. My mother had died two years before, and there was no one else except a maiden aunt in California ... and the train didn't agree with me, I told Miss Stansfield.
"Are you ever lonely?" she asked.
"Sometimes. Usually I keep too busy. Now, take this." I jotted my home telephone number on a card and gave it to her. "If you get the answering service when your labor begins, call me here."
"Oh, no, I couldn't--"
"Do you want to use the Breathing Method, or do you want to get some sawbones who'll think you're mad and give you a capful of ether as soon as you start to 'locomotive'?"
She smiled a little. "All right. I'm convinced."
But as the autumn progressed and the butchers on Third Avenue began advertising the per-pound price of their "young and succulent Toms," it became clear that her mind was still not at rest. She had indeed been asked to leave the place where she had been living when I first met her, and had moved to the Village. But that, at least, had turned out quite well for her. She had even found work of a sort. A blind woman with a fairly comfortable income had hired her to do some light housework, and then to read to her from the works of Gene Stratton Porter and Pearl Buck. She lived on the first floor of Miss Stansfield's building. She had taken on that blooming, rosy look that most healthy women come to have during the final trimester of their pregnancies. But there was a shadow on her face. I would speak to her and she would be slow to answer ... and once, when she didn't answer at all, I looked up from the notes I was making and saw her looking at the framed photograph next to my diploma with a strange, dreamy expression in her eyes. I felt a recurrence of that chill ... and her response, which had nothing to do with my question, hardly made me feel easier.
"I have a feeling, Dr. McCarron, sometimes quite a strong feeling, that I am doomed."
Silly, melodramatic word! And yet, gentlemen, the response that rose to my own lips was this: Yes; I feel that, too. I bit it off, of course; a doctor who would say such a thing should immediately put his instruments and medical books up for sale and investigate his future in the plumbing or carpentry business.
I told her that she was not the first pregnant woman to have such feelings, and would not be the last. I told her that the feeling was indeed so common that doctors knew it by the tongue-in-cheek name of The Valley of the Shadow Syndrome. I've already mentioned it tonight, I believe.
Miss Stansfield nodded with perfect seriousness, and I remember how young she looked that day, and how large her belly seemed. "I know about that," she said. "I've felt it. But it's quite separate from this other feeling. This other feeling is like ... like something looming up. I can't describe it any better than that. It's silly, but I can't shake it."
"You must try," I said. "It isn't good for the--"
But she had drifted away from me. She was looking at the ph
otograph again.
"Who is that?"
"Emlyn McCarron," I said, trying to make a joke. It sounded extraordinarily feeble. "Back before the Civil War, when he was quite young."
"No, I recognized you, of course," she said. "The woman. You can only tell it is a woman from the hem of the skirt and the shoes. Who is she?"
"Her name is Harriet White," I said, and thought: And hers will be the first face you see when you arrive to deliver your child. The chill came back--that dreadful drifting formless chill. Her stone face.
"And what does it say there at the base of the statue?" she asked, her eyes still dreamy, almost trancelike.
"I don't know," I lied. "My conversational Latin is not that good."
That night I had the worst dream of my entire life--I woke up from it in utter terror, and if I had been married, I suppose I would have frightened my poor wife to death.
In the dream I opened the door to my consulting room and found Sandra Stansfield in there. She was wearing the brown pumps, the smart white linen dress with the brown edging, and the slightly out-of-date cloche hat. But the hat was between her breasts, because she was carrying her head in her arms. The white linen was stained and streaked with gore. Blood jetted from her neck and splattered the ceiling.
And then her eyes fluttered open--those wonderful hazel eyes--and they fixed on mine.
"Doomed," the speaking head told me. "Doomed. I'm doomed. There's no salvation without suffering. It's cheap magic, but it's all we have."
That's when I woke up screaming.
Her due date of December 10th came and went. I examined her on December 17th and suggested that, while the baby would almost certainly be born in 1935, I no longer expected the child to put in his or her appearance until after Christmas. Miss Stansfield accepted this with good grace. She seemed to have thrown off the shadow that had hung over her that fall. Mrs. Gibbs, the blind woman who had hired her to read aloud and do light housework, was impressed with her--impressed enough to tell her friends about the brave young widow who, in spite of her recent bereavement and delicate condition, was facing her own future with such determined good cheer. Several of the blind woman's friends had expressed an interest in employing her following the birth of her child.
"I'll take them up on it, too," she told me. "For the baby. But only until I'm on my feet again, and able to find something steady. Sometimes I think the worst part of this--of everything that's happened--is that it's changed the way I look at people. Sometimes I think to myself, 'How can you sleep at night, knowing that you've deceived that dear old thing?' and then I think, 'If she knew, she'd show you the door, just like all the others.' Either way, it's a lie, and I feel the weight of it on my heart sometimes."
Before she left that day she took a small, gaily wrapped package from her purse and slid it shyly across the desk to me. "Merry Christmas, Dr. McCarron."
"You shouldn't have," I said, sliding open a drawer and taking out a package of my own. "But since I did, too--"
She looked at me for a moment, surprised ... and then we laughed together. She had gotten me a silver tie-clasp with a caduceus on it. I had gotten her an album in which to keep photographs of her baby. I still have the tie-clasp; as you see, gentlemen, I am wearing it tonight. What happened to the album, I cannot say.
I saw her to the door, and as we reached it, she turned to me, put her hands on my shoulders, stood on tiptoe, and kissed me on the mouth. Her lips were cool and firm. It was not a passionate kiss, gentlemen, but neither was it the sort of kiss you might expect from a sister or an aunt.
"Thank you again, Dr. McCarron," she said a little breathlessly. The color was high in her cheeks and her hazel eyes glowed lustrously. "Thank you for so much."
I laughed--a little uneasily. "You speak as if we'd never meet again, Sandra." It was, I believe, the second and last time I ever used her Christian name.
"Oh, we'll meet again," she said. "I don't doubt it a bit." And she was right--although neither of us could have foreseen the dreadful circumstances of that last meeting.
Sandra Stansfield's labor began on Christmas Eve, at just past six P.M. By that time, the snow which had fallen all that day had changed to sleet. And by the time Miss Stansfield entered mid-labor, not quite two hours later, the city streets were a dangerous glaze of ice.
Mrs. Gibbs, the blind woman, had a large and spacious first-floor apartment, and at six-thirty P.M. Miss Stansfield worked her way carefully downstairs, knocked at her door, was admitted, and asked if she might use the telephone to call a cab.
"Is it the baby, dear?" Mrs. Gibbs asked, fluttering already.
"Yes. The labor's only begun, but I can't chance the weather. It will take a cab a long time."
She made that call and then called me. At that time, six-forty, the pains were coming at intervals of about twenty-five minutes. She repeated to me that she had begun everything early because of the foul weather. "I'd rather not have my child in the back of a Yellow," she said. She sounded extraordinarily calm.
The cab was late and Miss Stansfield's labor was progressing more rapidly than I would have predicted--but as I have said, no two labors are alike in their specifics. The driver, seeing that his fare was about to have a baby, helped her down the slick steps, constantly adjuring her to "be careful, lady." Miss Stansfield only nodded, preoccupied with her deep inhale-exhales as a fresh contraction seized her. Sleet ticked off streetlights and the roofs of cars; it melted in large, magnifying drops on the taxi's yellow dome-light. Mrs. Gibbs told me later that the young cab driver was more nervous than her "poor, dear Sandra," and that was probably a contributing cause to the accident.
Another was almost certainly the Breathing Method itself.
The driver threaded his hack through the slippery streets, working his way slowly past the fender-benders and inching through the clogged intersections, slowly closing on the hospital. He was not seriously injured in the accident, and I talked to him in the hospital. He said the sound of the steady deep breathing coming from the back seat made him nervous; he kept looking in the rearview mirror to see if she was "dine or sumpin." He said he would have felt less nervous if she had let out a few healthy bellows, the way a woman in labor was supposed to do. He asked her once or twice if she was feeling all right and she only nodded, continuing to "ride the waves" in deep inhales and exhales.
Two or three blocks from the hospital, she must have felt the onset of labor's final stage. An hour had passed since she had entered the cab--traffic was that snarled--but this was still an extraordinarily fast labor for a woman having her first baby. The driver noticed the change in the way she was breathing. "She started pantin like a dog on a hot day, doc," he told me. She had begun to "locomotive."
At almost the same time the cabbie saw a hole open in the crawling traffic and shot through it. The way to White Memorial was now open. It was less than three blocks ahead. "I could see the statue of that broad," he said. Eager to be rid of his panting, pregnant passenger, he stepped down on the gas again and the cab leaped forward, wheels spinning over the ice with little or no traction.
I had walked to the hospital, and my arrival coincided with the cab's arrival only because I had underestimated just how bad driving conditions had become. I believed I would find her upstairs, a legally admitted patient with all her papers signed, her prep completed, working her way steadily through her mid-labor. I was mounting the steps when I saw the sudden sharp convergence of two sets of headlights reflected from the patch of ice where the janitors hadn't yet spread cinders. I turned just in time to see it happen.
An ambulance was nosing its way out of the Emergency Wing rampway as Miss Stansfield's cab came toward the hospital. The cab was simply going too fast to stop. The cabbie panicked and stamped down on the brake-pedal rather than pumping it. The cab slid, then began to turn broadside. The pulsing dome-light of the ambulance threw moving stripes and blotches of blood-colored light over the scene, and, freakishly, one of these illuminated the face o
f Sandra Stansfield. For that one moment it was the face in my dream, the same bloody, open-eyed face that I had seen on her severed head.
I cried out her name, took two steps down, slipped, and fell sprawling. I cracked my elbow a paralyzing blow but somehow managed to hold on to my black bag. I saw the rest of what happened from where I lay, head ringing, elbow smarting.
The ambulance braked, and it also began to fishtail. Its rear end struck the base of the statue. The loading doors flew open. A stretcher, mercifully empty, shot out like a tongue and then crashed upside down in the street with its wheels spinning. A young woman on the sidewalk screamed and tried to run as the two vehicles approached each other. Her feet went out from under her after two strides and she fell on her stomach. Her purse flew out of her hand and shot down the icy sidewalk like a weight in a pinball bowling game.
The cab swung all the way around, now travelling backwards, and I could see the cabbie clearly. He was spinning his wheel madly, like a kid in a Dodgem Car. The ambulance rebounded from Harriet White's statue at an angle ... and smashed broadside into the cab. The taxi spun around once in a tight circle and was slammed against the base of the statue with fearful force. Its yellow light, the letters ON RADIO CALL still flashing, exploded like a bomb. The left side of the cab crumpled like tissue-paper. A moment later I saw that it was not just the left side; the cab had struck an angle of the pedestal hard enough to tear it in two. Glass sprayed onto the slick ice like diamonds. And my patient was thrown through the rear right-side window of the dismembered cab like a rag-doll.
I was on my feet again without even knowing it. I raced down the icy steps, slipped again, caught at the railing, and kept on. I was only aware of Miss Stansfield lying in the uncertain shadow cast by that hideous statue of Harriet White, some twenty feet from where the ambulance had come to rest on its side, flasher still strobing the night with red. There was something terribly wrong with that figure, but I honestly don't believe I knew what it was until my foot struck something with a heavy enough thud to almost send me sprawling again. The thing I'd kicked skittered away--like the young woman's purse, it slid rather than rolled. It skittered away and it was only the fall of hair--bloodstreaked but still recognizably blonde, speckled with bits of glass--that made me realize what it was. She had been decapitated in the accident. What I had kicked into the frozen gutter was her head.
