by Stephen King
“Psychic powers? Really?”
“Yes, and the conspiracy. Do you know about the conspiracy, son?”
“Sort of,” Luke said.
“George Allman’s show is called The Outsiders. People call in, but mostly it’s just him talking. He doesn’t say it’s aliens, or the government, or the government working with aliens, he’s careful because he doesn’t want to disappear or get shot like Jack and Bobby, but he talks about the black cars all the time, and the experiments. Things that would turn your hair white. Did you know that Son of Sam was a walk-in? No? Well, he was. Then the devil that was inside him walked back out, leaving only a shell. Raise your head, son, that blood’s all down your neck, and if it dries before I can get it, I’ll have to scrub.”
3
The Beeman boys, a pair of great hulking teenagers from the trailer park south of town, showed up at quarter past noon, well into what was usually Tim’s lunch hour. By then most of the stuff for Fromie’s Small Engine Sales and Service was on the cracked concrete of the station tarmac. If it had been up to Tim, he would have fired the Beemans on the spot, but they were related to Mr. Jackson in some complicated southern way, so that wasn’t an option. Besides, he needed them.
Del Beeman got the big truck with the stake sides backed up to the door of the Carolina Produce boxcar by twelve-thirty, and they began loading in crates of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and summer squash. Hector and his secondman, interested not in fresh veggies but only in getting the hell out of South Carolina, pitched in. Norb Hollister stood in the shade of the depot overhang, doing some heavy looking-on but nothing else. Tim found the man’s continued presence a trifle peculiar—he’d shown no interest in the arrivals and departures of the trains before—but was too busy to consider it.
An old Ford station wagon pulled into the station’s small parking lot at ten to one, just as Tim was forklifting the last crates of produce into the back of the truck that would deliver them to the DuPray Grocery . . . assuming that Phil Beeman got it there all right. It was less than a mile, but this morning Phil’s speech was slow and his eyes were as red as those of a small animal trying to stay ahead of a brushfire. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce he’d been indulging in a bit of wacky tobacky. He and his brother both.
Doc Roper got out of his station wagon. Tim tipped him a wave and pointed to the warehouse where Mr. Jackson kept his office/apartment. Roper waved back and headed in that direction. He was old-school, almost a caricature; the kind of doctor who still survives in a thousand poor-ass rural areas where the nearest hospital is forty or fifty miles away, Obamacare is looked upon as a libtard blasphemy, and a trip to Walmart is considered an occasion. He was overweight and over sixty, a hardshell Baptist who carried a Bible as well as a stethoscope in a black bag which had been handed down, father to son, for three generations.
“What’s with that kid?” the train’s secondman asked, using a bandanna to mop his forehead.
“I don’t know,” Tim said, “but I intend to find out. Go on, you guys, rev it up and go. Unless you want to leave me one of those Lexuses, Hector. Happy to roll it off myself if you do.”
“Chupa mi polla,” Hector said. Then he shook Tim’s hand and headed back to his engine, hoping to make up time between DuPray and Brunswick.
4
Stackhouse intended to make the trip on the Challenger with the two extraction teams, but Mrs. Sigsby overruled him. She could do that because she was the boss. Nevertheless, Stackhouse’s expression of dismay at this idea bordered on insulting.
“Wipe that look off your face,” she said. “Whose head do you think will roll if this goes pear-shaped?”
“Both of our heads, and it won’t stop with us.”
“Yes, but whose will come off first and roll the farthest?”
“Julia, this is a field operation, and you’ve never been in the field before.”
“I’ll have both Ruby and Opal teams with me, four good men and three tough women. We’ll also have Tony Fizzale, who’s ex-Marines, Dr. Evans, and Winona Briggs. She’s ex-Army, and has some triage skills. Denny Williams will be in charge once the operation begins, but I intend to be there, and I intend to write my report from a ground-level perspective.” She paused. “If there needs to be a report, that is, and I’m starting to believe there will be no way to avoid it.” She glanced at her watch. Twelve-thirty. “No more discussion. We need to get this on wheels. You run the place, and if all goes well, I’ll be back here by two tomorrow morning.”
He walked with her out the door and down to the gated dirt road that eventually led to two-lane blacktop three miles east. The day was hot. Crickets sang in the thick woods through which the fucking kid had somehow found his way. A Ford Windstar soccer-mom van was idling in front of the gate, with Robin Lecks behind the wheel. Michelle Robertson was sitting beside her. Both women wore jeans and black tee-shirts.
“From here to Presque Isle,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “Ninety minutes. From Presque Isle to Erie, Pennsylvania, another seventy minutes. We pick up Opal Team there. From Erie to Alcolu, South Carolina, two hours, give or take. If all goes well, we’ll be in DuPray by seven this evening.”
“Stay in touch, and remember that Williams is in charge once you go hot. Not you.”
“I will.”
“Julia, I really think this is a mistake. It ought to be me.”
She faced him. “Say it again, and I’ll haul off on you.” She walked to the van. Denny Williams unrolled the side door for her. Mrs. Sigsby started to get in, then turned to Stackhouse. “And make sure Avery Dixon is well dunked and in Back Half by the time I return.”
“Donkey Kong doesn’t like the idea.”
She gave him a terrifying smile. “Do I look like I care?”
5
Tim watched the train pull out, then returned to the shade of the depot’s overhang. His shirt was soaked with sweat. He was surprised to see Norbert Hollister still standing there. As usual, he was wearing his paisley vest and dirty khakis, today cinched with a braided belt just below his breastbone. Tim wondered (and not for the first time) how he could wear pants that high and not squash the hell out of his balls.
“What are you still doing here, Norbert?”
Hollister shrugged and smiled, revealing teeth Tim could have done without viewing before lunch. “Just passing the time. Afternoons ain’t exactly busy back at the old ranchero.”
As if mornings or evenings were, Tim thought. “Well, why don’t you put an egg in your shoe and beat it?”
Norbert pulled a pouch of Red Man from his back pocket and stuffed some in his mouth. It went a long way, Tim thought, to explaining the color of his teeth. “Who died and made you Pope?”
“I guess that sounded like a request,” Tim said. “It wasn’t. Go.”
“Fine, fine, I can take a hint. You have a good day, Mr. Night Knocker.”
Norbert ambled off. Tim looked after him, frowning. He sometimes saw Hollister in Bev’s Eatery, or down at Zoney’s, buying boiled peanuts or a hardboiled egg out of the jar on the counter, but otherwise he rarely left his motel office, where he watched sports and porn on his satellite TV. Which, unlike the ones in the rooms, worked.
Orphan Annie was waiting for Tim in Mr. Jackson’s outer office, sitting behind the desk and thumbing through the papers in Jackson’s IN/OUT basket.
“That’s not your business, Annie,” Tim said mildly. “And if you mess that stuff up, I’ll be the one in trouble.”
“Nothing in’dresting, anyway,” she said. “Just invoices and schedules and such. Although he does have a meal punch-card for that topless café down Hardeeville. Two more punches and he gets a free buffet lunch. Although eating lunch while looking at some woman’s snatchola . . . brrr.”
Tim had never thought of it that way, and now that he had, wished he hadn’t. “The doc’s in with the kid?”
“Yeah. I stopped the bleeding, but he’ll have to wear his hair long from now on because that ear is never gon
na look the same. Now listen to me. That boy’s parents were murdered and he was kidnapped.”
“Part of the conspiracy?” He and Annie had had many conversations about the conspiracy on his night-knocker rounds.
“That’s right. They came for him in the black cars, count on it, and if they trace him to here, they’ll come for him here.”
“Noted,” he said, “and I’ll be sure to discuss it with Sheriff John. Thanks for cleaning him up and watching him, but now I think you better head out.”
She got up and shook out her serape. “That’s right, you tell Sheriff John. You-all need to be on your guard. They’re apt to come locked and loaded. There’s a town in Maine, Jerusalem’s Lot, and you could ask the people who lived there about the men in the black cars. If you could find any people, that is. They all disappeared forty or more years ago. George Allman talks about that town all the time.”
“Got it.”
She went to the door, serape swishing, then turned. “You don’t believe me, and I ain’t a bit surprised. Why would I be? I been the town weirdo for years before you came, and if the Lord doesn’t take me, I’ll be the town weirdo years after you’re gone.”
“Annie, I never—”
“Hush.” She stared at him fiercely from beneath her sombrero. “It’s all right. But pay attention, now. I’m telling you . . . but he told me. That boy. So that’s two of us, all right? And you remember what I said. They come in black cars.”
6
Doc Roper was putting the few tools of examination he’d used back into his bag. The boy was still sitting in Mr. Jackson’s easy chair. His face had been cleaned of blood and his ear was bandaged. He was raising a good bruise down the right side of his face from his argument with the signal-post, but his eyes were clear and alert. The doc had found a bottle of ginger ale in the little fridge, and the boy was making short work of it.
“Sit there easy, young man,” Roper said. He snapped his bag shut and walked over to Tim, who was standing just inside the door to the outer office.
“Is he okay?” Tim asked, keeping his voice low.
“He’s dehydrated, and he’s hungry, hasn’t had much to eat in quite awhile, but otherwise he seems fine to me. Kids his age bounce back from worse. He says he’s twelve, he says his name is Nick Wilholm, and he says he got on that train where it started, way up in northern Maine. I ask him what he was doing there, he says he can’t tell me. I ask him for his address, he says he can’t remember. Plausible, a hard knock on the head can cause temporary disorientation and scramble memory, but I’ve been around the block a few times, and I can tell the difference between amnesia and reticence, especially in a kid. He’s hiding something. Maybe a lot.”
“Okay.”
“My advice? Promise to feed him a big old meal at the café, and you’ll get the whole story.”
“Thanks, Doc. Send me the bill.”
Roper waved this away. “You buy me a big old meal someplace classier than Bev’s, and we’ll call it square.” In the doc’s thick Dixie accent, square came out squarr. “And when you get his story, I want to hear it.”
When he was gone, Tim closed the door so it was just him and the boy, and took his cell phone from his pocket. He called Bill Wicklow, the deputy who was scheduled to take over the night knocker’s job after Christmas. The boy watched him closely, finishing the last of his cold drink.
“Bill? This is Tim. Yeah, fine. Just wondering if you’d like a little dry run on the night-knocking job tonight. This is usually my time to sleep, but something’s come up down at the trainyard.” He listened. “Excellent. I owe you one. I’ll leave the time clock at the cop-shop. Don’t forget you have to wind it up. And thanks.”
He ended the call and studied the boy. The bruises on his face would bloom, then fade in a week or two. The look in his eyes might take longer. “You feeling better? Headache going away?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Never mind the sir, you can call me Tim. Now what do I call you? What’s your real name?”
After a brief hesitation, Luke told him.
7
The poorly lit tunnel between Front Half and Back Half was chilly, and Avery began to shiver immediately. He still had on the clothes he’d been wearing when Zeke and Carlos had hauled his small unconscious body out of the immersion tank, and he was soaked. His teeth began to chatter. Still, he held onto what he had learned. It was important. Everything was important now.
“Stop with the teeth,” Gladys said. “That’s a disgusting sound.” She was pushing him in a wheelchair, her smile nowhere in evidence. Word of what this little shit had done was everywhere now, and like all the other Institute employees, she was terrified and would remain so until Luke Ellis was hauled back and they could all breathe a sigh of relief.
“I c-c-c-can’t h-h-help ih-it,” Avery said. “I’m so c-c-cold.”
“Do you think I give a shit?” Gladys’s raised voice echoed back from the tile walls. “Do you have any idea of what you did? Do you have any idea?”
Avery did. In fact, he had many ideas, some of them Gladys’s (her fear was like a rat running on a wheel in the middle of her head), some of them entirely his own.
Once they were through the door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, it was a little warmer, and in the tatty lounge where Dr. James was waiting for them (her white lab coat misbuttoned, her hair in disarray, a big goofy smile on her face), it was warmer still.
Avery’s shivering slowed, then ceased, but the colored Stasi Lights came back. That was all right, because he could make them go away any time he wanted. Zeke had nearly killed him in that tank, in fact before Avery passed out he thought he was dead, but the tank had also done something to him. He understood that it did stuff to some of the other kids who went into it, but he thought this was something more. TK as well as TP was the least of it. Gladys was terrified of what might happen because of Luke, but Avery had an idea that he, Avery, could terrify her of him, if he wanted.
But this wasn’t the time.
“Hello, young man!” Dr. James cried. She sounded like a politician on a TV ad, and her thoughts were flying around like scraps of paper caught in a strong wind.
Something is really, really wrong with her, Avery thought. It’s like radiation poisoning, only in her brain instead of her bones.
“Hello,” Avery said.
Dr. Jeckle threw back her head and laughed as if Hello were the punchline of the funniest joke she’d ever heard. “We weren’t expecting you so soon, but welcome, welcome! Some of your friends are here!”
I know, Avery thought, and I can’t wait to see them. And I think they’ll be glad to see me.
“First, though, we need to get you out of those wet clothes.” She gave Gladys a reproachful look, but Gladys was busy scratching at her arms, trying to get rid of the buzz running over her skin (or just under it). Good luck with that, Avery thought. “I’ll have Henry take you to your room. We have nice caretakers here. Can you walk on your own?”
“Yes.”
Dr. Jeckle did some more laughing, head back and throat working. Avery got out of the wheelchair, and gave Gladys a long, measuring look. She stopped scratching and now she was the one who shivered. Not because she was wet, and not because she was cold. It was because of him. She felt him, and she didn’t like it.
But Avery did. It was sort of beautiful.
8
Because there was no other chair in Mr. Jackson’s living room, Tim brought one in from the outer office. He considered putting it in front of the boy, then decided that would be too much like the set-up in a police interrogation room. He slid it beside the La-Z-Boy instead, sitting next to the boy the way you’d sit with a friend, maybe to watch a favorite TV show. Only Mr. Jackson’s flatscreen was blank.
“Now, Luke,” he said. “According to Annie, you were kidnapped, but Annie isn’t always . . . completely on the beam, let’s say.”
“She’s on the beam about that,” Luke said.
�
�Okay, then. Kidnapped from where?”
“Minneapolis. They knocked me out. And they killed my parents.” He swiped a hand across his eyes.
“These kidnappers took you from Minneapolis to Maine. How did they do that?”
“I don’t know. I was unconscious. Probably in a plane. I really am from Minneapolis. You can check that out, all you have to do is call my school. It’s called the Broderick School for Exceptional Children.”
“Which would make you a bright boy, I’m assuming.”
“Oh, sure,” Luke said, with no pride in his voice. “I’m a bright boy. And right now I’m a very hungry boy. I haven’t had anything for a couple of days but a sausage biscuit and a fruit pie. I think a couple of days. I’ve kind of lost track of time. A man named Mattie gave them to me.”
“Nothing else?”
“A piece of doughnut,” Luke said. “It wasn’t very big.”
“Jesus, let’s get you something to eat.”
“Yes,” Luke said, then added, “Please.”
Tim took his cell phone from his pocket. “Wendy? This is Tim. I wonder if you could do me a favor.”
9
Avery’s room in Back Half was stark. The bed was your basic cot. There were no Nickelodeon posters on the walls, and no G.I. Joes on the bureau to play with. That was okay with Avery. He was only ten, but now he had to be a grownup, and grownups didn’t play with toy soldiers.
Only I can’t do it alone, he thought.
He remembered Christmas, the year before. It hurt to think about that, but he thought about it, anyway. He had gotten the Lego castle he’d asked for, but when the pieces were spread out before him, he didn’t know how to get from that scatter to the beautiful castle on the box, with its turrets and gates and the drawbridge that went up and down. He’d started to cry. Then his father (dead now, he was sure of it) knelt down beside him and said, We’ll follow the instructions and do it together. One step at a time. And they had. The castle had stayed on his bureau in his room with his G.I. Joes guarding it, and that castle was one thing they hadn’t been able to duplicate when he woke up in Front Half.