The Institute

by Stephen King

  Not like me, in other words, Luke thought, and realized embarrassment didn’t accurately describe what he was feeling. The right word for that was shame.

  “I saw waterboarding, and I saw men—women, too, a couple—standing in basins of water with electrodes on their fingers or up their rectums. I saw toenails pulled out with pliers. I saw a man shot in the kneecap when he spit in an interrogator’s face. I was shocked at first, but after awhile I wasn’t. Sometimes, when it was men who’d planted IEDs on our boys or sent suicide bombers into crowded markets, I was glad. Mostly I got . . . I know the word . . .”

  “Desensitized,” Tim said.

  “Desensitized,” Maureen said.

  “Christ, like she heard you,” Deputy Burkett said.

  “Hush,” Wendy said, and something about that word made Luke shiver. It was as if someone else had said it just before her. He turned his attention back to the video.

  “—never took part after the first two or three, because they gave me another job. When they wouldn’t talk, I was the kindly noncom who came in and gave them a drink or snuck them something to eat out of my pocket, a Quest Bar or a couple of Oreos. I told them the interrogators had all gone off on a break or to eat a meal, and the microphones were turned off. I said I felt sorry for them and wanted to help them. I said that if they didn’t talk, they would be killed, even though it was against the rules. I never said against the Geneva Convention, because most of them didn’t know what that was. I said if they didn’t talk, their families would be killed, and I really didn’t want that. Usually it didn’t work—they suspected—but sometimes when the interrogators came back, the prisoners told them what they wanted to hear, either because they believed me or wanted to. Sometimes they said things to me, because they were confused . . . disoriented . . . and because they trusted me. God help me, I had a very trustworthy face.”

  I know why she’s telling me this, Luke thought.

  “How I wound up at the Institute . . . that story’s too long for a tired, sick woman to go into. Someone came to see me, leave it at that. Not Mrs. Sigsby, Luke, and not Mr. Stackhouse. Not a government man, either. He was old. He said he was a recruiter. He asked me if I wanted a job when my tour was over. Easy work, he said, but only for a person who could keep her lip buttoned. I’d been thinking about re-upping, but this sounded better. Because the man said I’d be helping my country a lot more than I ever could in sandland. So I took the job, and when they put me in housekeeping, I was okay with that. I knew what they were doing, but at first I was okay with that, too, because I knew why. Good for me, because the Institute is like what they say about the mafia—once you’re in, you can’t get out. When I came up short on money to pay my husband’s bills, and when I started to be afraid the vultures would take the money I’d saved for my boy, I asked for the job I’d been doing downrange, and Mrs. Sigsby and Mr. Stackhouse let me try.”

  “Tattling,” Luke murmured.

  “It was easy, like slipping on an old pair of shoes. I was there for twelve years, but only snitched the last sixteen months or so, and by the end I was starting to feel bad about what I was doing, and I’m not just talking about the snitching part. I got desensitized in what we called the black houses, and I stayed desensitized in the Institute, but eventually that started to wear off, the way a wax shine will wear off a car if you don’t put on a fresh coat every now and then. They’re just kids, you know, and kids want to trust a grownup who’s kind and sympathetic. It wasn’t as if they had ever blown anybody up. They were the ones who got blown up, them and their families. But maybe I would have kept on with it, anyway. If I’m going to be honest—and it’s too late to be anything else—I guess I probably would have. But then I got sick, and I met you, Luke. You helped me, but that’s not why I helped you. Not the only reason, anyway, and not the main reason. I saw how smart you were, way beyond any of the other kids, way beyond the people who stole you away. I knew they didn’t care about your fine mind, or your little sense of humor, or how you were willing to help an old sick bag like me, even though you knew it might get you in trouble. To them you were just another cog in the machine, to be used until it wore out. In the end you would have gone the way of all the others. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands, going all the way back to the beginning.”

  “Is she crazy?” George Burkett asked.

  “Shut up!” Ashworth said. He was leaning forward over his belly, eyes fixed on the screen.

  Maureen had stopped to take a drink of water and then to rub her eyes, which were sunk deep in their hollows of flesh. Sick eyes. Sad eyes. Dying eyes, Luke thought, staring eternity right in the face.

  “It was still a hard decision, and not just because of what they might do to me or to you, Luke. It was hard because if you do get away, if they don’t catch you in the woods or in Dennison River Bend, and if you can find someone to believe you . . . if you get past all those ifs, you might be able to drag what’s been going on here for fifty or sixty years out into the open. Bring it all down on their heads.”

  Like Samson in the temple, Luke thought.

  She leaned forward, looking directly into the lens. Directly at him.

  “And that might mean the end of the world.”

  21

  The westering sun turned the railroad tracks running close to State Route 92 into pinkish-red lines of fire, and seemed to spotlight the sign just ahead:

  WELCOME TO DuPRAY, S.C.

  FAIRLEE COUNTY SEAT

  POPULATION 1,369

  A NICE PLACE TO VISIT & A NICER PLACE TO LIVE!

  Denny Williams pulled the lead van onto the dirt shoulder. The others followed. He spoke to those in his own van—Mrs. Sigsby, Dr. Evans, Michelle Robertson—then went to the other two. “Radios off, earpieces out. We don’t know what frequencies the locals or the Staties might be listening to. Cell phones off. This is now a sealed operation and will remain so until we are back at the airfield.”

  He returned to the lead van, got back behind the wheel, and turned to Mrs. Sigsby. “All good, ma’am?”

  “All good.”

  “I am here under protest,” Dr. Evans said again.

  “Shut up,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “Denny? Let’s go.”

  They rolled into Fairlee County. There were barns and fields and stands of pine on one side of the road; railroad tracks and more trees on the other. The town itself was now just two miles away.

  22

  Corinne Rawson was standing in front of the screening room, shooting the shit with Jake “the Snake” Howland and Phil “the Pill” Chaffitz. Abused as a child by both her father and two of her four older brothers, Corinne had never had a problem with her work in Back Half. She knew the kiddos called her Corinne the Slapper, and that was okay. She had been slapped plenty in the Reno trailer park where she had grown up, and the way she looked at it, what goes around comes around. Plus, it was for a good cause. What you called your basic win-win situation.

  Of course there were drawbacks to working in Back Half. For one thing, your head got jammed up with too much information. She knew that Phil wanted to fuck her and Jake didn’t because Jake only liked women with double-wide racks in front and extra junk in the trunk. And she knew that they knew she didn’t want anything to do with either of them, at least not in that way; since the age of seventeen, she had batted strictly for the other side.

  Telepathy always sounded great in stories and movies, but it was annoying as fuck in real life. It came with the hum, which was a drawback. And it was cumulative, which was a major drawback. The housekeepers and janitors swapped back and forth between Front Half and Back Half, which helped, but the red caretakers worked here and nowhere else. There were two teams, Alpha and Beta. Each worked four months on, then had four months off. Corinne was almost at the end of her current four-month swing. She would spend a week or two decompressing in the adjacent staff village, recovering her essential self, and then would go to her little house in New Jersey, where she lived with Andrea, who believed
her partner worked in a top-secret military project. Top-secret it was; military it was not.

  The low-level telepathy would fade during her time in the village, and by the time she got back to Andrea, it would be gone. Then, a few days into her next swing, it would start to creep back. If she had been able to feel sympathy (a sensibility that had been mostly beaten out of her by the age of thirteen), she would have felt it for Dr. Hallas and Dr. James. They were here almost all of the time, which meant they were almost constantly exposed to the hum, and you could see what it was doing to them. She knew that Dr. Hendricks, the Institute’s chief medical officer, gave the Back Half docs injections that were supposed to limit the constant erosion, but there was a big difference between limiting a thing and halting it.

  Horace Keller, a red caretaker with whom she was friendly, called Heckle and Jeckle high-functioning crazies. He said that eventually one or both of them would freak out, and then the topsiders would have to find fresh medical talent. That was nothing to Corinne. Her job was to make sure the kids ate when they were supposed to eat, went into their rooms when they were supposed to go to their rooms (what they did in there was also no concern of hers), attended the movies on movie nights, and didn’t get out of line. When they did, she slapped them down.

  “The gorks are restless tonight,” Jake the Snake said. “You can hear them in there. Tasers at the ready when we do the eight o’clock feeding, right?”

  “They’re always worse at night,” Phil said. “I don’t . . . hey, what the fuck?”

  Corinne felt it, too. They were used to the hum, the way you got used to the sound of a noisy fridge or a rattling air conditioner. Now, suddenly, it ramped up to the level they had to endure on movie nights that were also sparkler nights. Only on movie nights it mostly came from behind the closed and locked doors of Ward A, also known as Gorky Park. She could feel it coming from there now, but it was also coming from another direction, like the push of a strong wind. From the lounge, where those kids had gone to spend their free time when the show was over. First one bunch went down there, those who were still high-functioning, then a couple Corinne thought of as pre-gorks.

  “What the fuck are they doing?” Phil shouted. He put his hands to the sides of his head.

  Corinne ran for the lounge, pulling her zap-stick. Jake was behind her. Phil—perhaps more sensitized to the hum, maybe just scared—stayed where he was, palms pressed to his temples as if to keep his brains from exploding.

  What Corinne saw when she got to the door was almost a dozen children. Even Iris Stanhope, who would certainly go to Gorky Park after tomorrow’s movie, was there. They were standing in a circle, hands joined, and now the hum was strong enough to make Corinne’s eyes water. She thought she could even feel her fillings vibrating.

  Get the new one, she thought. The shrimp. I think he’s the one driving this. Zap him and it might break the circuit.

  But even as she thought it, her fingers opened and her zap-stick dropped to the carpet. Behind her, almost lost in the hum, she heard Jake shouting for the kids to stop whatever they were doing and go to their rooms. The black girl was looking at Corinne, and there was an insolent smile on her lips.

  I’ll slap that look right off you, missy, Corinne thought, and when she raised her hand, the black girl nodded.

  That’s right, slap.

  Another voice joined Kalisha’s: Slap!

  Then all the others: Slap! Slap! Slap!

  Corinne Rawson began to slap herself, first with her right hand, then with her left, back and forth, harder and harder, aware that her cheeks were first hot and then burning, but that awareness was faint and far away, because now the hum wasn’t a hum at all but a huge BWAAAAAA of internal feedback.

  She was knocked to her knees as Jake rushed past her. “Stop whatever you’re doing, you fucking little—”

  His hand swept up and there was a crackle of electricity as he zapped himself between the eyes. He jerked backward, legs first splaying out and then coming together in a funky dance floor move, eyes bulging. His mouth dropped open and he plugged the barrel of his zap-stick into it. The crackle of electricity was muffled, but the results were visible. His throat swelled like a bladder. Momentary blue light shone from his nostrils. Then he fell forward on his face, cramming the zap-stick’s slim barrel into his mouth all the way to the butt, his finger still convulsing on the trigger.

  Kalisha led them into the resident corridor with their hands linked, like first-graders on a school outing. Phil the Pill saw them and cringed back, holding his zap-stick in one hand and gripping one of the screening room doors in the other. Farther down the corridor, between the cafeteria on one side and Ward A on the other, stood Dr. Everett Hallas, with his mouth hanging open.

  Now fists began to hammer on Gorky Park’s locked double doors. Phil dropped his zap-stick and raised the hand that had been holding it, showing the oncoming children that it was empty.

  “I won’t be a problem,” he said. “Whatever you mean to do, I won’t be a prob—”

  The screening room doors slammed shut, cutting off his voice and also three of his fingers.

  Dr. Hallas turned and fled.

  Two other red caretakers emerged from the staff lounge beyond the stairway to the crematorium. They ran toward Kalisha and her makeshift cadre, both with drawn zap-sticks. They stopped outside the locked doors of Ward A, zapped each other, and dropped to their knees. There they continued to exchange bolts of electricity until both of them collapsed, insensible. More caretakers appeared, either saw or felt what was happening, and retreated, some few down the stairs to the crematorium (a dead end in more ways than one), others back to the staff lounge or the doctors’ lounge beyond it.

  Come on, Sha. Avery was looking down the hall, past Phil—howling over the spouting stumps of his fingers—and the two dazed caretakers.

  Aren’t we getting out?

  Yes. But we’re letting them out, first.

  The line of children began to walk down the hall to Ward A, into the heart of the hum.

  23

  “I don’t know how they pick their targets,” Maureen was saying. “I’ve often wondered about that, but it must work, because no one has dropped an atomic bomb or started a world-wide war in over seventy-five years. Think about what a fantastic accomplishment that is. I know some people say God is watching out for us, and some say it’s diplomacy, or what they call MAD, mutual assured destruction, but I don’t believe any of that. It’s the Institute.”

  She paused for another drink of water, then resumed.

  “They know which kids to take because of a test most children have at birth. I’m not supposed to know what that test is, I’m just a lowly housekeeper, but I listen as well as snitch. And I snoop. It’s called BDNF, which stands for brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Kids with a high BDNF are targeted, followed, and eventually taken and brought to the Institute. Sometimes they’re as old as sixteen, but most are younger. They grab those with really high BDNF scores as soon as possible. We’ve had kids here as young as eight.”

  That explains Avery, Luke thought. And the Wilcox twins.

  “They’re prepared in Front Half. Part of the prep is done with injections, part of it with exposure to something Dr. Hendricks calls the Stasi Lights. Some of the kids who come in here have telepathic ability—thought-readers. Some are telekinetics—mind over matter. After the injections and exposure to the Stasi Lights, some of the kids stay the same, but most get at least a little stronger in whatever ability they were taken for. And there are a few, what Hendricks calls pinks, who get extra tests and shots and sometimes develop both abilities. I heard Dr. Hendricks say once that there might be even more abilities, and discovering them could change everything for the better.”

  “TP as well as TK,” Luke murmured. “It happened to me, but I hid it. At least I tried to.”

  “When they’re ready to . . . to be put to work, they’re moved from Front Half into Back Half. They see movies that show the same
person over and over. At home, at work, at play, at family get-togethers. Then they get a trigger image that brings back the Stasi Lights and also binds them together. You see . . . the way it works . . . when they’re alone, their powers are small even after the enhancements, but when they’re together, their strength increases in a way . . . there’s a math word for it . . .”

  “Exponentially,” Luke said.

  “I don’t know the word. I’m tired. The important thing is these children are used to eliminate certain people. Sometimes it looks like an accident. Sometimes it looks like suicide. Sometimes like murder. But it’s always the kids. That politician, Mark Berkowitz? That was the kids. Jangi Gafoor, that man who supposedly blew himself up by accident in his bomb-making factory in Kunduz Province two years ago? That was the kids. There have been plenty of others, just in my time at the Institute. You’d say there was no rhyme or reason to any of it—six years ago it was an Argentinian poet who swallowed lye—and there’s none that I can see, but there must be, because the world is still here. I once heard Mrs. Sigsby, she’s the big boss, say that we were like people constantly bailing out a boat that would otherwise sink, and I believe her.”

  Maureen once more scrubbed at her eyes, then leaned forward, looking intently into the camera.

  “They need a constant supply of children with high BDNF scores, because Back Half uses them up. They have headaches that get worse and worse, and each time they experience the Stasi Lights, or see Dr. Hendricks with his sparkler, they lose more of their essential selves. By the end, when they get sent to Gorky Park—that’s what the staff calls Ward A—they’re like children suffering from dementia or advanced Alzheimer’s disease. It gets worse and worse until they die. It’s usually pneumonia, because they keep Gorky Park cold on purpose. Sometimes it’s like . . .” She shrugged. “Oh God, like they just forget how to take the next breath. As for getting rid of the bodies, the Institute has a state-of-the-art crematorium.”