The Institute

by Stephen King

  They watched, fascinated and a little afraid, as Luke raised his hands to the sides of his narrow, intense face. The pizza pan was now not just shivering but rattling. Like the plates sometimes did in the cupboards.

  “. . . and all those things in the darkness will come floating up. I know it.”

  The pizza pan skated across the table and banged on the floor. Herb and Eileen barely noticed. Such things happened around Luke when he was upset. Not often, but sometimes. They were used to it.

  “I understand,” Herb said.

  “Bullshit he does,” Eileen said. “Neither of us do. But you should go ahead and start the paperwork. Take the SATs. You can do those things and still change your mind. If you don’t change it, if you stay committed . . .” She looked at Herb, who nodded. “We’ll try to make it happen.”

  Luke grinned, then picked up the pizza pan. He looked at Richie Rocket. “I used to dance with him like that when I was little.”

  “Yes,” Eileen said. She needed to use the napkin again. “You sure did.”

  “You know what they say about the abyss, don’t you?” Herb asked.

  Luke shook his head, either because it was the rare thing he didn’t know, or because he didn’t want to spoil his father’s punchline.

  “When you stare into it, it stares back at you.”

  “You bet it does,” Luke said. “Hey, can we get dessert?”

  4

  With the essay included, the SAT test lasted four hours, but there was a merciful break in the middle. Luke sat on a bench in the high school’s lobby, munching the sandwiches his mother had packed for him and wishing for a book. He had brought Naked Lunch, but one of the proctors appropriated it (along with his phone and everyone else’s), telling Luke it would be returned to him later. The guy also riffled through the pages, looking either for dirty pictures or a crib sheet or two.

  While he was eating his Snackimals, he became aware of several other test-takers standing around him. Big boys and girls, high school juniors and seniors.

  “Kid,” one of them asked, “what the hell are you doing here?”

  “Taking the test,” Luke said. “Same as you.”

  They considered this. One of the girls said, “Are you a genius? Like in a movie?”

  “No,” Luke said, smiling, “but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.”

  They laughed, which was good. One of the boys held up his palm, and Luke slapped him five. “Where are you going? What school?”

  “MIT, if I get in,” Luke said. Which was disingenuous; he had already been granted provisional admission to both schools of his choice, contingent on doing well today. Which wasn’t going to be much of a problem. So far, the test had been a breeze. It was the kids surrounding him that he found intimidating. In the fall, he would be in classes filled with kids like these, kids much older and about twice his size, and of course they would all be looking at him. He had discussed this with Mr. Greer, saying he’d probably seem like a freak to them.

  “It’s what you feel like that matters,” Mr. Greer said. “Try to keep that in mind. And if you need counseling—just someone to talk to about your feelings—for God’s sake, get it. And you can always text me.”

  One of the girls—a pretty redhead—asked him if he’d gotten the hotel question in the math section.

  “The one about Aaron?” Luke asked. “Yeah, pretty sure I did.”

  “What did you say was the right choice, can you remember?”

  The question had been how to figure how much some dude named Aaron would have to pay for his motel room for x number of nights if the rate was $99.95 per night, plus 8% tax, plus an additional one-time charge of five bucks, and of course Luke remembered because it was a slightly nasty question. The answer wasn’t a number, it was an equation.

  “It was B. Look.” He took out his pen and wrote on his lunch bag: 1.08(99.95x) + 5.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “I had A.” She bent, took Luke’s bag—he caught a whiff of her perfume, lilac, delicious—and wrote: (99.95 + 0.08x) + 5.

  “Excellent equation,” Luke said, “but that’s how the people who make these tests screw you at the drive-thru.” He tapped her equation. “Yours only reflects a one-night stay. It also doesn’t account for the room tax.”

  She groaned.

  “It’s okay,” Luke said. “You probably got the rest of them.”

  “Maybe you’re wrong and she’s right,” one of the boys said. It was the one who’d slapped Luke five.

  She shook her head. “The kid’s right. I forgot how to calculate the fucking tax. I suck.”

  Luke watched her walk away, her head drooping. One of the boys went after her and put an arm around her waist. Luke envied him.

  One of the others, a tall drink of water wearing designer glasses, sat down next to Luke. “Is it weird?” he asked. “Being you, I mean?”

  Luke considered this. “Sometimes,” he said. “Usually it’s just, you know, life.”

  One of the proctors leaned out and rang a hand bell. “Let’s go, kids.”

  Luke got up with some relief and tossed his lunch sack in a trash barrel by the door to the gym. He looked at the pretty redhead a final time, and as he went in, the barrel shimmied three inches to the left.

  5

  The second half of the test was as easy as the first, and he thought he did a passable job on the essay. Kept it short, anyway. When he left the school he saw the pretty redhead, sitting on a bench by herself and crying. Luke wondered if she’d bricked the test, and if so, how badly—just not-gonna-get-your-first-choice badly, or stuck-with-community-college badly. He wondered what it was like to have a brain that didn’t seem to know all the answers. He wondered if he should go over there and try to comfort her. He wondered if she’d accept comfort from a kid who was still your basic pipsqueak. She’d probably tell him to make like an amoeba and split. He even wondered about the way the trashcan had moved—that stuff was eerie. It came to him (and with the force of a revelation) that life was basically one long SAT test, and instead of four or five choices, you got dozens. Including shit like some of the time and maybe so, maybe not.

  His mom was waving. He waved back and ran to the car. When he was in and belted up, she asked him how he thought he’d done.

  “Aced it,” Luke said. He gave her his sunniest grin, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the redhead. The crying was bad, but the way her head drooped when he pointed out the mistake in her equation—like a flower in a dry spell—had somehow been worse.

  He told himself not to think about it, but of course you couldn’t do that. Try not to think of a polar bear, Fyodor Dostoyevsky once said, and you will see the cursed thing come to mind every minute.

  “Mom?”

  “What?”

  “Do you think memory is a blessing or a curse?”

  She didn’t have to think about it; God only knew what she was remembering. “Both, dear.”

  6

  At 2 AM on a morning in June, while Tim Jamieson was night-knocking his way up DuPray’s main street, a black SUV turned onto Wildersmoot Drive in one of the suburbs on the north side of Minneapolis. It was a crazy name for a street; Luke and his friend Rolf called it Wildersmooch Drive, partly because it made the name even crazier and partly because they both longed to smooch a girl, and wildly.

  Inside the SUV were a man and two women. He was Denny; they were Michelle and Robin. Denny was driving. Halfway along the curving, silent street, he shut off the lights, coasted to the curb, and killed the engine. “You’re sure this one isn’t TP, right? Because I didn’t bring my tinfoil hat.”

  “Ha ha,” Robin said, perfectly flat. She was sitting in the backseat.

  “He’s just your average TK,” Michelle said. “Nothing to get your undies in a bunch about. Let’s get this thing going.”

  Denny opened the console between the two front seats and took out a cell phone that looked like a refugee from the nineties: blocky rectangular body and short
stubby antenna. He handed it to Michelle. While she punched in a number, he opened the console’s false bottom and took out thin latex gloves, two Glock Model 37s, and an aerosol can which, according to the label, contained Glade air freshener. He handed back one of the guns to Robin, kept one for himself, and passed the aerosol can to Michelle.

  “Here we go, big team, here we go,” he chanted as he gloved up. “Ruby Red, Ruby Red, that’s what I said.”

  “Quit the high school shit,” Michelle said. Then, into the phone, crooked against her shoulder so she could put on her own gloves: “Symonds, do you copy?”

  “Copy,” Symonds said.

  “This is Ruby Red. We’re here. Go on and kill the system.”

  She waited, listening to Jerry Symonds on the other end of the call. In the Ellis home, where Luke and his parents slept, the DeWalt alarm consoles in the front hall and the kitchen went dark. Michelle got the go-ahead and gave her teammates a thumbs-up. “Okay. All set.”

  Robin slung the go-bag, which looked like a medium-sized ladies’ purse, over her shoulder. No interior lights went on when they exited the SUV, which had Minnesota State Patrol plates. They walked single file between the Ellis house and the Destin house next door (where Rolf was also sleeping, perchance to dream of smooching wildly) and entered through the kitchen, Robin first because she had the key.

  They paused by the stove. From the go-bag, Robin brought out two compact silencers and three sets of lightweight goggles on elastic straps. The goggles gave their faces an insectile look, but rendered the shadowy kitchen bright. Denny and Robin screwed on the silencers. Michelle led the way through the family room into the front hall, then to the stairs.

  They moved slowly but with a fair amount of confidence along the upstairs hall. There was a rug runner to muffle their steps. Denny and Robin stopped outside the first closed door. Michelle continued to the second. She looked back at her partners and tucked the aerosol under her arm so she could raise both hands with the fingers spread: give me ten seconds. Robin nodded and returned a thumbs-up.

  Michelle opened the door and entered Luke’s bedroom. The hinges squeaked faintly. The shape in the bed (nothing showing but a tuft of hair) stirred a little, then settled. At two in the morning the kid should have been dead to the world, in the deepest part of his night’s sleep, but he clearly wasn’t. Maybe genius kids didn’t sleep the same as regular ones, who knew? Certainly not Michelle Robertson. There were two posters on the walls, both daylight-visible viewed through the goggles. One was of a skateboarder in full flight, knees bent, arms outstretched, wrists cocked. The other was of the Ramones, a punk group Michelle had listened to way back in middle school. She thought they were all dead now, gone to that great Rockaway Beach in the sky.

  She crossed the room, keeping mental count as she did so: Four . . . five . . .

  On six, her hip struck the kid’s bureau. There was a trophy of some kind on it, and it fell over. The noise it made wasn’t loud, but the kid rolled onto his back and opened his eyes. “Mom?”

  “Sure,” Michelle said. “Whatever you want.”

  She saw the beginnings of alarm in the boy’s eyes, saw him open his mouth to say something else. She held her breath and triggered the aerosol can two inches from his face. He went out like a light. They always did, and there was never a hangover when they woke up six or eight hours later. Better living through chemistry, Michelle thought, and counted seven . . . eight . . . nine.

  On ten, Denny and Robin entered Herb and Eileen’s room. The first thing they saw was a problem: the woman wasn’t in bed. The door to the bathroom was open, casting a trapezoid of light on the floor. It was too bright for the goggles. They stripped them off and dropped them. The floor in here was polished hardwood, and the double clack was clearly audible in the silent room.

  “Herb?” Low, from the bathroom. “Did you knock over your water glass?”

  Robin advanced to the bed, taking her Glock from the waistband of her slacks at the small of her back while Denny walked to the bathroom door, making no attempt to muffle his footfalls. It was too late for that. He stood beside it, gun raised to the side of his face.

  The pillow on the woman’s side was still indented from the weight of her head. Robin put it over the man’s face and fired into it. The Glock made a low coughing sound, no more than that, and discharged a little brown smut onto the pillow from its vents.

  Eileen came out of the bathroom, looking worried. “Herb? Are you all r—”

  She saw Denny. He seized her by the throat, put the Glock to her temple, and pulled the trigger. There was another of those low coughing sounds. She slid to the floor.

  Meanwhile, Herb Ellis’s feet were kicking aimlessly, making the coverlet he and his late wife had been sleeping under puff and billow. Robin fired twice more into the pillow, the second shot a bark instead of a cough, the third one even louder.

  Denny took the pillow away. “What, did you see The Godfather too many times? Jesus, Robin, his head’s halfway gone. What’s an undertaker supposed to do with that?”

  “I got it done, that’s what matters.” The fact was, she didn’t like to look at them when she shot them, the way the light went out of them.

  “You need to man up, girl. That third one was loud. Come on.”

  They picked up the goggles and went down to the boy’s room. Denny hoisted Luke into his arms—no problem there, the kid didn’t weigh more than ninety pounds—and gave his chin a jerk for the women to go ahead of him. They left the way they had come, through the kitchen. There were no lights on in the adjacent house (even the third shot hadn’t been that loud), and no soundtrack except for the crickets and a faraway siren, maybe all the way over in St. Paul.

  Michelle led the way between the two houses, checked the street, and motioned for the others to come ahead. This was the part Denny Williams hated. If some guy with insomnia looked out and saw three people on his neighbor’s lawn at two in the morning, that would be suspicious. If one of them was carrying what looked like a body, that would be very suspicious.

  But Wildersmoot Drive—named after some long-gone Twin Cities bigwig—was fast asleep. Robin opened the SUV’s curbside back door, got in, and held out her arms. Denny handed the boy in and she pulled Luke against her, his head lolling on her shoulder. She fumbled for her seatbelt.

  “Uck, he’s drooling,” she said.

  “Yes, unconscious people do that,” Michelle said, and closed the rear door. She got in the shotgun seat and Denny slid back behind the wheel. Michelle stowed the guns and the aerosol as Denny cruised slowly away from the Ellis house. As they approached the first intersection, Denny put the headlights back on.

  “Make the call,” he said.

  Michelle punched in the same number. “This is Ruby Red. We have the package, Jerry. Airport ETA in twenty-five minutes. Wake up the system.”

  In the Ellis home, the alarms came back on. When the police finally arrived, they would find two dead, one gone, the kid the most logical suspect. He was said to be brilliant, after all, and those were the ones that tended to be a little wonky, weren’t they? A little unstable? They’d ask him when they found him, and finding him was only a matter of time. Kids could run, but even the brilliant ones couldn’t hide.

  Not for long.

  7

  Luke woke up remembering a dream he’d had—not exactly a nightmare, but definitely of the not-so-nice variety. Some strange woman in his room, leaning over his bed with her blond hair hanging around the sides of her face. Sure, whatever you want, she’d said. Like a chick in one of the porno clips he and Rolf sometimes watched.

  He sat up, looked around, and at first thought this was another dream. It was his room—same blue wallpaper, same posters, same bureau with his Little League trophy on it—but where was the window? His window looking out at Rolf’s house was gone.

  He shut his eyes tight, then sprang them open. No change; the windowless room remained windowless. He considered pinching himself, but that w
as such a cliché. He popped his fingers against his cheek instead. Everything stayed the same.

  Luke got out of bed. His clothes were on the chair, where his mom had put them the night before—underwear, socks, and tee-shirt on the seat, jeans folded over the back. He put them on slowly, looking at where the window should have been, then sat down to put on his sneakers. His initials were on the sides, LE, and that was right, but the middle horizontal stroke of the E was too long, he was sure of it.

  He turned them over, looking for street grit, and saw none. Now he was completely sure. These were not his sneaks. The laces were wrong, too. They were too clean. Nevertheless, they fit perfectly.

  He went to the wall and laid his hands against it, pressing, feeling for the window underneath the wallpaper. It wasn’t there.

  He asked himself if maybe he’d gone crazy, just snapped, like a kid in a scary movie written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Weren’t kids with high-functioning minds supposed to be prone to breakdowns? But he wasn’t crazy. He was as sane as he’d been last night when he went to sleep. In a movie, the crazy kid would think he was sane—that would be the Shyamalan twist—but according to the psychology books Luke had read, most crazy people understood they were crazy. He wasn’t.

  As a little kid (five as opposed to twelve), he’d gone through a craze of collecting political buttons. His dad had been happy to help him build his collection, because most of the buttons were really cheap on eBay. Luke had been especially fascinated (for reasons he could not explain, even to himself) with the buttons of presidential candidates who had lost. The fever had eventually passed, and most of the buttons were probably stored in the attic crawlspace or in the cellar, but he had saved one as a kind of good-luck talisman. It had a blue plane on it, surrounded by the words WINGS FOR WILLKIE. Wendell Willkie ran for president against Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 but lost badly, winning only ten states for a total of eighty-two electoral votes.