by Stephen King
I put the shells in my pants pocket and took out my lighter. It was one of those Scripto see-through jobs. I don’t smoke myself, but the lighter had kind of caught my fancy. I snapped a light to it, squatted, and set the crap in the bottom of my locker on fire.
The flames licked up greedily from my gym trunks to the lunch bags and candy wrappers to the ruins of my books, carrying a sweaty, athletic smell up to me.
Then, figuring that I had gotten it on as much as I could by myself, I shut the locker door. There were little vents just above where my name was Con-Tact-papered on, and through them I could hear the flames whooshing upward. In a minute little orange flecks were glaring in the darkness beyond the vents, and the gray locker paint started to crack and peel.
A kid came out of Mr. Johnson’s room carrying a green bathroom pass. He looked at the smoke belching merrily out of the vents in my locker, looked at me, and hurried down to the bathroom. I don’t think he saw the pistol. He wasn’t hurrying that fast.
I started down to Room 16. I paused just as I got there, my hand on the doorknob, looking back. The smoke was really pouring out of the vents now, and a dark, sooty stain was spreading up the front of my locker. The Con-Tact paper had turned brown. You couldn’t see the letters that made my name anymore.
I don’t think there was anything in my brain fight then except the usual background static-the kind~you get on your radio when it’s turned up all the way and tuned to no station at all. My brain had checked to the power, so to speak; the little guy wearing the Napoleon hat inside was showing aces and betting them.
I turned back to Room 16 and opened the door. I was hoping, but I didn’t know what.
CHAPTER 9
“… So you understand that when we increase the number of variables, the axioms themselves never change. For example-”
Mrs. Underwood looked up alertly, pushing her harlequin glasses up on her nose. “Do you have an office pass, Mr. Decker?”
“Yes,” I said, and took the pistol out of my belt. I wasn’t even sure it was loaded until it went off. I shot her in the head. Mrs. Underwood never knew what hit her, I’m sure. She fell sideways onto her desk and then rolled onto the floor, and that expectant expression never left her face.
CHAPTER 10
Sanity:
You can go through your whole life telling yourself that life is logical, life is prosaic, life is sane. Above all, sane. And I think it is. I’ve had a lot of time to think about that. And what I keep coming back to is Mrs. Underwood’s dying declaration: So you understand that when we increase the number of variables, the axioms themselves never change.
I really believe that.
I think; therefore I am. There are hairs on my face; therefore I shave. My wife and child have been critically injured in a car crash; therefore I pray. It’s all logical, it’s all sane. We live in the best of all possible worlds, so hand me a Kent for my left, a Bud for my right, turn on Starsky and Hutch, and listen to that soft, harmonious note that is the universe turning smoothly on its celestial gyros. Logic and sanity. Like Coca-Cola, it’s the real thing.
But as Warner Brothers, John D. MacDonald, and Long Island Dragway know so well, there’s a Mr. Hyde for every happy Jekyll face, a dark face on the other side of the mirror. The brain behind that face never heard of razors, prayers, or the logic of the universe. You turn the mirror sideways and see your face reflected with a sinister left-hand twist, half mad and half sane. The astronomers call that line between light and dark the terminator.
The other side says that the universe has all the logic of a little kid in a Halloween cowboy suit with his guts and his trick-or-treat candy spread all over a mile of Interstate 95. This is the logic of napalm, paranoia, suitcase bombs carried by happy Arabs, random carcinoma. This logic eats itself. It says life is a monkey on a stick, it says life spins as hysterically and erratically as the penny you flick to see who buys lunch.
No one looks at that side unless they have to, and I can understand that. You look at it if you hitch a ride with a drunk in a GTO who puts it up to one-ten and starts blubbering about how his wife turned him out; you look at it if some guy decides to drive across Indiana shooting kids on bicycles; you look at it if your sister says “I’m going down to the store for a minute, big guy” and then gets killed in a stickup. You look at it when you hear your dad talking about slitting your mom’s nose.
It’s a roulette wheel, but anybody who says the game is rigged is whining. No matter how many numbers there are, the principle of that little white jittering ball never changes. Don’t say it’s crazy. It’s all so cool and sane.
And all that weirdness isn’t just going on outside. It’s in you too, right now, growing in the dark like magic mushrooms. Call it the Thing in the Cellar. Call it the Blow Lunch Factor. Call it the Loony Tunes File. I think of it as my private dinosaur, huge, slimy, and mindless, stumbling around in the stinking swamp of my subconscious, never finding a tarpit big enough to hold it.
But that’s me, and I started to tell you about them, those bright college-bound students that, metaphorically speaking, walked down to the store to get milk and ended up in the middle of an armed robbery. I’m a documented case, routine grist for the newspaper mill. A thousand newsboys hawked me on a thousand street corners. I had fifty seconds on Chancellor-Brinkley and a column and a half in Time. And I stand here before you (metaphorically speaking, again) and tell you I’m perfectly sane. I do have one slightly crooked wheel upstairs, but everything else is ticking along just four-o, thank you very much.
So, them. How do you understand them? We have to discuss that, don’t we?
“Do you have an office pass, Mr. Decker?” she asked me.
“Yes,” I said, and took the pistol out of my belt. I wasn’t even sure it was loaded until it went off. I shot her in the head. Mrs. Underwood never knew what hit her, I’m sure. She fell sideways onto her desk and then rolled onto the floor, and that expectant expression never left her face.
I’m the sane one: I’m the croupier, I’m the guy who spins the ball against the spin of the wheel. The guy who lays his money on odd/even, the girl who lays her money on black/red… what about them?
There isn’t any division of time to express the marrow of our lives, the time between the explosion of lead from the muzzle and the meat impact, between the impact and the darkness. There’s only barren instant replay that shows nothing new.
I shot her; she fell; and there was an indescribable moment of silence, an infinite duration of time, and we all stepped back, watching the ball go around and around, ticking, bouncing, lighting for an instant, going on, heads and tails, red and black, odd and even.
I think that moment ended. I really do. But sometimes, in the dark, I think that hideous random moment is still going on, that the wheel is even yet in spin, and I dreamed all the rest.
What must it be like for a suicide coming down from a high ledge? I’m sure it must be a very sane feeling. That’s probably why they scream all the way down.
CHAPTER 11
If someone had screamed something melodramatic at that precise moment, something like Oh, my God, he’s going to kill us all! it would have been over right there. They would have bolted like sheep, and somebody aggressive like Dick Keene would have belted me over the head with his algebra book, thereby earning a key to the city and the Good Citizenship Award.
But nobody said a word. They sat in utter stunned silence, looking at me attentively, as if I had just announced that I was going to tell them how they could all get passes to the Placerville Drive-In this Friday night.
I shut the classroom door, crossed the room, and sat behind the big desk. My legs weren’t so good. I was almost to the point of sit down or fall down. I had to push Mrs. Underwood’s feet out of the way to get my own feet into the kneehole. I put the pistol down on her green blotter, shut her algebra book, and put it with the others that were stacked neatly on the desk’s corner.
That was when Irma Bates broke t
he silence with a high, gobbling scream that sounded like a young tom turkey getting its neck wrung on the day before Thanksgiving. But it was too late; everyone had taken that endless moment to consider the facts of life and death. Nobody picked up on her scream, and she stopped, as if ashamed at screaming while school was in session, no matter how great the provocation. Somebody cleared his throat. Somebody in the back of the room said “Hum!” in a mildly judicial tone. And John “Pig Pen” Dano slithered quietly out of his seat and slumped to the floor in a dead faint.
They looked up at me from the trough of shock.
“This,” I said pleasantly, “is known as getting it on.”
Footsteps pounded down the hall, and somebody asked somebody else if something had exploded in the chemistry lab. While somebody else was saying he didn’t know, the fire alarm went off stridently. Half the kids in the class started to get up automatically.
“That’s all right,” I said. “It’s just my locker. On fire. I set it on fire, that is. Sit down.”
The ones that had started to get up sat down obediently. I looked for Sandra Cross. She was in the third row, fourth seat, and she did not seem afraid. She looked like what she was. An intensely exciting Good Girl.
Lines of students were filing out onto the grass; I could see them through the windows. The squirrel was gone, though. Squirrels make lousy innocent bystanders.
The door was snatched open, and I picked up the gun. Mr. Vance poked his head in. “Fire alarm,” he said. “Everybody… Where’s Mrs. Underwood?”
“Get out,” I said.
He stared at me. He was a very porky man, and his hair was neatly crew cut. It looked as if some landscape artist had trimmed it carefully with hedge clippers. “What? What did you say?”
“Out.” I shot at him and missed. The bullet whined off the upper edge of the door, chipping wood splinters.
“Jesus,” somebody in the front row said mildly.
Mr. Vance didn’t know what was happening. I don’t think any of them did. It all reminded me of an article I read about the last big earthquake in California. It was about a woman who was wandering from room to room while her house was being shaken to pieces all around her, yelling to her husband to please unplug the fan.
Mr. Vance decided to go back to the beginning. “There’s a fire in the building. Please-”
“Charlie’s got a gun, Mr. Vance,” Mike Gavin said in a discussing-the-weather tone. “I think you better-”
The second bullet caught him in the throat. His flesh spread liquidly like water spreads when you throw a rock in it. He walked backward into the hall, scratching at his throat, and fell over.
Irma Bates screamed again, but again she had no takers. If it had been Carol Granger, there would have been imitators galore, but who wanted to be in concert with poor old Irma Bates? She didn’t even have a boyfriend. Besides, everyone was too busy peeking at Mr. Vance, whose scratching motions were slowing down.
“Ted,” I said to Ted Jones, who sat closest to the door. “Shut that and lock it.-
“What do you think you’re doing?” Ted asked. He was looking at me with a kind of scared and scornful distaste.
“I don’t know all the details just yet,” I said. “But shut the door and lock it, okay?”
Down the hall someone was yelling: “It’s in a locker! It’s in a Vance’s had a heart attack! Get some water! Get…”
Ted Jones got up, shut the door, and locked it. He was a tall boy wearing wash-faded Levi’s and an army shirt with flap pockets. He looked very fine. I had always admired Ted, although he was never part of the circle I traveled in. He drove last year’s Mustang, which his father had given him, and didn’t get any parking tickets, either. He combed his hair in an out-of-fashion DA, and I bet his was the face that Irma Bates called up in her mind when she sneaked a cucumber out of the refrigerator in the wee hours of the night. With an all-American name like Ted Jones he couldn’t very well miss, either. His father was vice-president of the Placerville Bank and Trust.
“Now what?” Hannon Jackson asked. He sounded bewildered.
“Um.” I put the pistol down on the blotter again. “Well, somebody try and bring Pig Pen around. He’ll get his shirt dirty. Dirtier, I mean.”
Sarah Pasterne started to giggle hysterically and clapped her hand over her mouth. George Yannick, who sat close to Pig Pen, squatted down beside him and began to pat his cheeks. Pig Pen moaned, opened his eyes, rolled them, and said, “He shot Book Bags.”
There were several hysterical laughs this time. They went off around the room like popping corn. Mrs. Underwood had two plastic briefcases with tartan patterns on them, which she carried into each class. She had also been known as Two-Gun Sue.
Pig Pen settled shakily into his seat, rolled his eyes again, and began to cry.
Somebody pounded up to the door, rattled the knob, and yelled, “Hey! Hey in there!” It looked like Mr. Johnson, who had been talking about the Hessians. 1 picked up the pistol and put a bullet through the chicken-wired glass. It made a neat little hole beside Mr. Johnson’s head, and Mr. Johnson went out of sight like a crash-diving submarine. The class (with the possible exception of Ted) watched all the action with close interest, as if they had stumbled into a pretty good movie by accident.
“Somebody in there’s got a gun!” Mr. Johnson yelled. There was a faint bumping sound as he crawled away. The fire alarm buzzed hoarsely on and on.
“Now what?” Harmon Jackson asked again. He was a small boy, usually with a big cockeyed grin on his face, but now he looked helpless, all at sea.
I couldn’t think of an answer to that, so I let it pass. Outside, kids were milling restlessly around on the lawn, talking and pointing at Room 16 as the grapevine passed the word among them. After a little bit, some teachers-the men teachers-began shooing them back toward the gymnasium end of the building.
In town the fire whistle on the Municipal Building began to scream, rising and falling in hysterical cycles.
“It’s like the end of the world,” Sandra Cross said softly.
I had no answer for that, either.
CHAPTER 12
No one said anything for maybe five minutes-not until the fire engines got to the high school. They looked at me, and I looked at them. Maybe they still could have bolted, and they’re still asking me why they didn’t. Why didn’t they cut and run, Charlie? What did you do to them? Some of them ask that almost fearfully, as if I had the evil eye. I don’t answer them. I don’t answer any questions about what happened that morning in Room 16. But if I told them anything, it would be that they’ve forgotten what it is to be a kid, to live cheek-by-jowl with violence, with the commonplace fistfights in the gym, brawls at the PAL hops in Lewiston, beatings on television, murders in the movies. Most of us had seen a little girl puke pea soup all over a priest right down at our local drive-in. Old Book Bags wasn’t much shakes by comparison.
I’m not taking on any of those things, hey, I’m in no shape for crusades these days. I’m just telling you that American kids labor under a huge life of violence, both real and make-believe. Besides, I was kind of interesting: Hey, Charlie Decker went apeshit today, didja hear? No! Did he? Yeah. Yeah. I was there. It was just like Bonnie and Clyde, except Charlie’s got zitzes and there wasn’t any popcorn.
I know they thought they’d be all right. That’s part of it. What I wonder about is this: Were they hoping I’d get somebody else?
Another shrieking sound had joined the fire siren, this one getting closer real fast. Not the cops. It was that hysterical yodeling note that is all the latest rage in ambulances and paramedic vehicles these days. I’ve always thought the day will come when all the disaster vehicles will get smart and stop scaring the almighty shit out of everyone they’re coming to save. When there’s a fire or an accident or a natural disaster like me, the red vehicles will rush to the scene accompanied by the amplified sound of the Darktown Strutters playing “Banjo Rag.” Someday. Oh, boy.
C
HAPTER 13
Seeing as how it was the school, the town fire department went whole hog. The fire chief came first, gunning into the big semicircular school driveway in his blue bubble-topped Ford Pinto. Behind him was a hook-and-ladder trailing firemen like battle banners. There were two pumpers behind that.
“You going to let them in?” Jack Goldman asked.
“The fire’s out there,” I said. “Not in here.”
“Did you shut ya locka door?” Sylvia Ragan asked. She was a big blond girl with great soft cardiganed breasts and gently rotting teeth.
“Yes.”
“Prolly out already, then.”
Mike Gavin looked at the scurrying firemen and snickered. “Two of ’em just ran into each other,” he said. “Holy moly.”
The two downed firemen untangled themselves, and the whole group was preparing to charge into the inferno when two suit-coated figures ran over to them. One was Mr. Johnson, the Human Submarine, and the other was Mr. Grace. They were talking hard and fast to the fire chief.
Great rolls of hose with shiny nozzles were being unreeled from the pumpers and dragged toward the front doors. The fire chief turned around and yelled, “Hold it!” They stood irresolutely on the lawn, their nozzles gripped and held out before them like comic brass phalluses.
The fire chief was still in conference with Mr. Johnson and Mr. Grace. Mr. Johnson pointed at Room 16. Thomas Denver, the Principal with the Amazing Overshaved Neck, ran over and joined the discussion. It was starting to look like a pitcher’s mound conference in the last half of the ninth.
