Desperation

by Stephen King

  Steve asked, "If that doesn't matter, what does?"

  "That he took us and let other people go. He thinks he took us at random, like a little kid in a supermarket, just pulling any can that catches his eye off the shelf and dropping it into his mom's cart, but that's not what happened."

  "It's like the Angel of Death in Egypt, isn't it?" Cynthia said in a curiously flat voice. "Only in reverse. We had a mark on us that told our Angel of Death--this guy Entragian--to stop and grab instead of just going on by."

  David nodded. "Yeah. He didn't know it then, but he does now--mi him en tow, he'd say--our God is strong, our God is with us."

  "If this is an example of God being with us, I hope I never attract his attention when he's in a snit," Johnny said.

  "Now Tak wants us to go," David said, "and he knows that we can go. Because of the free-will covenant. That's what Reverend Martin always called it. He ... he ..."

  "David?" Ralph asked. "What is it? What's wrong?"

  David shrugged. "Nothing. It doesn't matter. What matters is that God never makes us do what he wants us to do. He tells us, that's all, then steps back to see how it turns out. Reverend Martin's wife came in and listened for awhile while he was talking about the free-will covenant. She said her mother had a motto: 'God says take what you want, and pay for it.' Tak's opened the door back to Highway 50 ... but that isn't where we're supposed to go. If we do go, if we leave Desperation without doing what God sent us here to do, we'll pay the price."

  He glanced at the circle of faces around him once again, and once again he finished by looking directly at Johnny Marinville.

  "I'll stay no matter what, but to work, it really has to be all of us. We have to give our will over to God's will, and we have to be ready to die. Because that's what it might come to."

  "You're insane, my boy," Johnny said. "Ordinarily I like that in a person, but this is going a little too far, even for me. I haven't survived this long in order to be shot or pecked to death by buzzards in the desert. As for God, as far as I'm concerned, he died in the DMZ back in 1969. Jimi Hendrix was playing 'Purple Haze' on Armed Services Radio at the time."

  "Listen to the rest, okay? Will you do that much?"

  "Why should I?"

  "Because there's a story." David drank more Jolt, grimacing as he swallowed. "A good one. Will you listen?"

  "Story-hour's over. I told you that."

  David didn't reply.

  There was silence in the back of the truck. Steve was watching Johnny closely. If he showed any sign of moving toward the Ryder's back door and trying to run it up, Steve meant to grab him. He didn't want to--he had spent a lot of years in the savagely hierarchical world of backstage rock, and knew that doing such a thing would make him feel like Fletcher Christian to Johnny's Captain Bligh--but he would if he had to.

  So it was a relief when Johnny shrugged, smiled, hunkered down next to the kid, and selected his own bottle of Jolt. "Okay, so story-hour's extended. Just for tonight." He ruffled David's hair. The very self-consciousness of the gesture made it oddly charming. "Stories have been my Achilles' heel practically since I ditched the stroller. I have to tell you, though, this is one I'd like to hear end with 'And they lived happily ever after.' "

  "Wouldn't we all," Cynthia said.

  "I think the guy I met told me everything," David said, "but there are still some parts I don't know. Parts that are blurry, or just plain black. Maybe because I couldn't understand, or because I didn't want to."

  "Do the best you can," Ralph said. "That'll be good enough."

  David looked up into the shadows, thinking--summoning, Cynthia thought--and then began.

  3

  "Billingsley told the legend, and like most legends, I guess, most of it was wrong. It wasn't a cave-in that closed the China Shaft, that's the first thing. The mine was brought down on purpose. And it didn't happen in 1858, although that was when the first Chinese miners were brought in, but in September of 1859. Not forty Chinese down there when it happened but fifty-seven, not two white men but four. Sixty-one people in all. And the drift wasn't a hundred and fifty feet deep, like Billingsley said, but nearly two hundred. Can you imagine? Two hundred feet deep in hornfels that could have fallen in on them at any moment."

  The boy closed his eyes. He looked incredibly fragile, like a child who has just begun to recover from some terrible illness and may relapse at any moment. Some of that look might have been caused by the thin green sheen of soap still on his skin, but Cynthia didn't think that was all of it. Nor did she doubt David's power, or have a problem with the idea that he might have been touched by God. She had been raised in a parsonage, and she had seen this look before ... although never so strongly.

  "At ten minutes past one on the afternoon of September twenty-first, the guys at the face broke through into what they at first thought was a cave. Inside the opening was a pile of those stone things. Thousands of them. Statues of certain animals, low animals, the timoh sen cah. Wolves, coyotes, snakes, spiders, rats, bats. The miners were amazed by these, and did the most natural thing in the world: bent over and picked them up."

  "Bad idea," Cynthia murmured.

  David nodded. "Some went crazy at once, turning on their friends--heck, turning on their relatives--and trying to rip their throats out. Others, not just the ones farther back in the shaft who didn't actually handle the can tahs, but some who were close and actually did handle them, seemed all right, at least for awhile. Two of these were brothers from Tsingtao--Ch'an Lushan and Shih Lushan. Both saw through the break in the face and into the cave, which was really a kind of underground chamber. It was round, like the bottom of a well. The walls were made of faces, these stone animal faces. The faces of can taks, I think, although I'm not sure about that. There was a small kind of building to one side, the pirin moh-I don't know what that means, I'm sorry--and in the middle, a round hole twelve feet across. Like a giant eye, or another well. A well in a well. Like the carvings, which are mostly animals with other animals in their mouths for tongues. Can tak in can tah, can tah in can tak. "

  "Or camera in camera," Marinville said. He spoke with an eyebrow raised, his sign that he was making fun, but David took him seriously. He nodded and began to shiver.

  "That's Tak's place," he said. "The ini, well of the worlds."

  "I don't understand you," Steve said gently.

  David ignored him; it was still Marinville he seemed to be mostly talking to. "The force of evil from the ini filled the can tahs the same way the minerals fill the ground itself--blown into every particle of it, like smoke. And it filled the chamber I'm talking about the same way. It's not smoke, but smoke is the best way to think about it, maybe. It affected the miners at different rates, like a disease germ. The ones who went nuts right away turned on the others. Some, their bodies started to change the way Audrey's did at the end. Those were the ones who had touched the can tahs, sometimes picked up whole handfuls at once and then put them down so they could... you know ... go at the others.

  "Some of them were widening the hole between the shaft and the chamber. Others were, wriggling through. Some acted drunk. Others acted as if they were having convulsions. Some ran across to the pit and threw themselves into it, laughing. The Lushan brothers saw a man and a woman fucking each other--I have to use that word, it was the furthest thing in the world from making love--with one of the statues held between them. In their teeth."

  Cynthia exchanged a startled look with Steve.

  "In the shaft itself, the miners were bashing each other with rocks or pulling each other out of the way, trying to get in through the hole first." He looked around at them somberly. "I saw that part. In a way it was funny, like a Three Stooges show. And that made it worse. That it was funny. Do you get it?"

  "Yes," Marinville said. "I get it very well, David. Go on."

  "The brothers felt it all around them, the stuff that was coming out of the chamber, but not as anything that was inside them, not then. One of the can tahs h
ad fallen at Ch'an's feet. He bent to pick it up, and Shih pulled him away. By then they were about the only ones left who seemed sane. Most of the others who weren't affected right away had been killed, and there was a thing--like a snake made of smoke--coming out of the hole. It made a squealing sound, and the brothers ran from it. One of the white men was coming down the crosscut about sixty feet up, and he had his gun out. 'What's all the commotion about, chinkies?' he asked."

  Cynthia felt her skin chill. She reached out for Steve, and was relieved when his fingers folded over hers. The boy hadn't just imitated a gruff bossman's tone; he seemed actually to be speaking in the voice of someone else.

  "'Come on now, fellows, gettee-backee-workee, if you don't want a bullet in the guts.'

  "But he was the one who got shot. Ch'an grabbed him around the neck and Shih took away his gun. He put the barrel here"--David poked his forefinger up under the shelf of his jaw--"and blew the guy's head off."

  "David, do you know what they were thinking when they did that?" Marinville asked. "Was your dream-friend able to take you in that far?"

  "Mostly I just saw."

  "Those can tah things must've gotten to them after all," Ralph said. "They wouldn't have shot a white man, otherwise. No matter what was going on or how bad they wanted to get away."

  "Maybe so," David said. "But God was in them too, I think, the way he's in us now. God could move them to his work, no matter if they were mi en tak or not, because--mi him en tow--our God is strong. Do you understand?"

  "I think I do," Cynthia said. "What happened then, David?"

  "The brothers ran up the shaft, pointing the foreman's pistol at anyone who tried to hold them back or slow them down. There weren't many; even the other white guys hardly gave them a glance when they ran by. They all wanted to see what was going on, what the miners had found. It drew them, you see. You do see, don't you?"

  The others nodded.

  "About sixty feet in from the adit, the Lushan brothers stopped and went to work on the hanging wall. They didn't talk about it; they saw picks and shovels and just went to work."

  "What's a hanging wall?" Steve asked.

  "The roof of a mineshaft and the earth above it," Marinville said.

  "They worked like madmen," David went on. "The stuff was so loose that it started falling out of the ceiling right away, but the ceiling didn't give way. The screams and howls and laughter coming up from below ... I know the words for the sounds I heard, but I can't describe how horrible they were. Some of them were changing from human to something else. There was a movie I saw one time, about this doctor on a tropical island who was changing animals into men--"

  Marinville nodded. "The Island of Dr. Moreau."

  David said, "The sounds I heard from the bottom of the mine--the ones I heard with the Lushan brothers' ears--were like that movie, only in reverse. As if the men were turning into animals. I guess they were. I guess that's sort of what the can tahs do. What they're for.

  "The brothers ... I see them, two Chinese men who look almost enough alike to be twins, with pigtails hanging down their sweaty bare backs, standing there and looking up and chopping away at the hanging wall that should have come down after about six licks but didn't, looking back along the shaft every two or three strokes to see who was coming. To see what was coming. Pieces of the ceiling fell in front of them in big chunks. Sometimes pieces of it fell on them, too, and pretty soon their shoulders were bleeding, and their heads--blood was streaming down their faces and necks and chests, as well. By then there were other sounds from below. Things roaring. Things squelching. And still the roof wouldn't come down. Then they started seeing lights farther down--maybe candles, maybe the 'seners the crew-bosses wore."

  "What--" Ralph began.

  "Keroseners. They were like these little lighted boxes of oil you put on your forehead with a strip of rawhide. You'd fold a piece of cloth underneath to keep your skin from getting too hot. And then someone came running out of the darkness, someone they knew. It was Yuan Ti. He was a funny guy, I guess--he made animals out of pieces of cloth and then put on shows with them for the kids. Yuan Ti had gone crazy, but that wasn't all. He was bigger. so big he had to bend almost double in order to run up the shaft. He was throwing rocks at them, calling them names in Mandarin, condemning their ancestors, commanding them to stop what they were doing. Shih shot him with the foreman's gun. He had to shoot him a lot before Yuan Ti would lie down and be dead. But the others were coming, screaming for their blood. Tak knew what they were doing, you see."

  David looked at them, seemed to consider them. His eyes were dreamy, half in a trance, but Cynthia had no sense that the boy had ceased to see them. In a way, that was the most terrible part of what was happening here. David saw them very well ... and so did the force inside him, the one she could sometimes hear stepping forward to clarify parts of the story David might not have fully understood.

  "Shih and Ch'an went back to work on the hanging wall, digging into it with their picks like madmen--which they'd be before it was over for them. By then the part of the ceiling they were working on was like a dome over their heads"--David made curving gestures with his hands, and Cynthia saw that his fingers were trembling--"and they couldn't reach it very well with their picks anymore. So Shih, the older, got on his younger brother's shoulders and dug into it that way. The stuff fell out in showers, there was a pile almost as high as Ch'an Lushan's knees in front of them, and still the ceiling wouldn't come down."

  "Were they possessed of God, David?" Marinville asked. There was no sarcasm in his voice now. "Possessed by God? What do you think?"

  "I don't think so," David said. "I don't think God has to possess, that's what makes him God. I think they wanted what God wanted--to keep Tak in the earth. To bring the ceiling down between them and it, if they could.

  "Anyway, they saw 'seners coming up from the mine. Heard people yelling. A whole mob of them. Shih left off on the hangwall and went to work on one of the crossbar supports instead, hitting it with the butt of his pick. The miners coming up from below threw rocks at them, and quite a few hit Ch'an, but he stood firm with his brother on his shoulders. When the crossbar finally came down, the ceiling came down with it. Ch'an was buried up to his knees, but Shih was thrown clear. He pulled his brother out. Ch'an was badly bruised, but nothing was broken. And they were on the right side of the rockfall--that must have seemed like the important thing. They could hear the miners--their friends, cousins, and in the case of Ch'an Lushan, his intended wife--screaming to be let out. Ch'an actually started to pull some of the rocks away before Shih yanked him back and reasoned with him.

  "They still could reason then, you see.

  "Then, as if the people trapped on Tak's side of the fall knew this had happened, the screams for help changed to yelling and howling. The sounds of ... well, of people who weren't really people at all anymore. Ch'an and Shih ran. They met folks--some white, some Chinese--coming in as they ran out. No questions were asked except for the most obvious one, what happened, and since the answer was just as obvious, they had no trouble. There'd been a cave-in, men were trapped, and the last thing anyone cared about just then were a couple of scared China-boys who happened to get out in the nick of time."

  David drank the last of his soda and set the empty bottle aside.

  "Everything Mr. Billingsley told us is like that," he said. "Truth and mistakes and outright lies all mixed up."

  "The technical term for it is 'legend-making,' " Marinville said with a thin, strained smile.

  "The miners and the folks from town could hear the Chinese screaming behind the fallen hanging wall, but they didn't just stand around; they did try to dig them out, and they did try to shore up the first sixty feet or so. But then there was another fall, a smaller one, and another couple of crossbars snapped. So they pulled back and waited for the experts to show up from Reno. There was no picnic outside the adit--that's a flat lie. Right around the time the mining engineers were getting off th
e stage in Desperation, there were two cave-ins-real cave-ins, big ones--at the mine. The first was on the adit side of the hanging wall the Lushan brothers had pulled down. It sealed off the last sixty feet of the drift like a cork in a bottle. And the thump it made coming down--tons and tons of skarn and homfels--set off another one, deeper in. That ended the screams, at least the ones close enough to the surface for people to hear. It was all over before the mining engineers got up from town in an ore-wagon. They looked, they sank some core rods, they listened to the story, and when they heard about the second cave-in, which people said shook the ground like an earthquake and made the horses rear up, they shook their heads and said there was probably nobody left alive to rescue. And even if there was, they'd be risking more lives than they could hope to save if they tried to go back in."

  "And they were only Chinese," Steve said.

  "That's right, little chink-chink China-boys. Mr. Billingsley was right about that. And while all this was going on, the two China-boys who had escaped were out in the desert near Rose Rock, going mad. It got to them in the end, you see. It caught up with them. It was almost two weeks before they came back to Desperation, not three days. It was the Lady Day they walked into--you see how he got the truth all mixed up with the lies?--but they didn't kill anyone there. Shih flashed the foreman's gun, which was empty, and that was all it took. They were brought down by a whole pack of miners and cowboys. They were naked except for loincloths. They were covered with blood. The men in the Lady Day felt like that blood must have been from all the folks they had murdered, but it wasn't. They'd been out in the desert, calling animals to them ... just like Tak called the cougar that you shot, Mr. Marinville. Only the Lushan brothers didn't want them for anything like that. They only wanted to eat. They ate whatever came--bats, buzzards, spiders, rattlesnakes."

  David raised an unsteady hand to his face and wiped first his left eye and then his right.