by Stephen King
For a little while she’s able to forget her worries in the round of year-end holiday visiting and the jostle of Christmas shopping. Scott has never been much of a shopper even when things are slow and the stores are empty, but this season he throws himself into it with hectic good cheer. He’s out with her every smucking day, doing battle at either the Auburn Mall or the Main Street shops in Castle Rock. He’s recognized often but cheerfully refuses the frequent autograph requests from people who smell the chance for a one-of-a-kind gift, telling them that if he doesn’t stick with his wife, he probably won’t see her again until Easter. He may have lost his sense of humor but she never sees him lose his temper, not even when some of the folks who want autographs get pushy, and so for awhile there he seems sort of all right, sort of himself in spite of the drinking, the canceled tour, and his slow progress on the new book.
Christmas itself is a happy day, with lots of presents exchanged and an energetic midday tumble in the sack. Christmas dinner is at Canty and Rich’s, and over dessert Rich asks Scott when he’s going to produce one of the movies made from his novels. “That’s where the big money is,” Rich says, seemingly ignorant of the fact that of four film adaptations so far, three have bombed. Only the movie version of Empty Devils (which Lisey has never seen) made money.
On the way home, Scott’s sense of humor swoops back in like a big old B-1 bomber and he does a killer imitation of Rich that has Lisey laughing until her belly cramps up. And when they arrive back at Sugar Top Hill, they proceed upstairs for a second tumble in the sack. In the afterglow Lisey finds herself thinking that if Scott is sick, maybe more people should catch what he has, the world would be a better place.
She wakes around two AM on Boxing Day, needing to use the bathroom, and—talk about déjà vu all over again—he’s not in bed. But this time not gone. She has come to know the difference without even letting herself know what she means when she thinks
(gone)
about that thing he sometimes does, that place he sometimes goes.
She urinates with her eyes shut, listening to the wind outside the house. It sounds cold, that wind, but she doesn’t know what cold is. Not yet. Let another couple of weeks pass and she will. Let another couple of weeks pass and she’ll know all sorts of things.
When she’s done with the toilet, she peeks out the bathroom window. This looks toward the barn and Scott’s study in the converted hayloft. If he was up there—and when he gets restless in the middle of the night, that is where he usually goes—she’d see the lights, perhaps even hear the happy carnival sounds of his rock-and-roll music, very faint. Tonight the barn is dark, and the only music she hears is the pitchpipe of the wind. This makes her a little uneasy; hatches thoughts in the back of her brain
(heart attack stroke)
that are too unpleasant to completely consider, yet a little too strong, given how…how off he’s been lately…to completely dismiss. So instead of sleepwalking back to the bedroom, she goes to the bathroom’s other door, the one that gives on the upstairs hall. She calls his name and gets no answer, but she sees a slim gold bar of light shining beneath the closed door at the far end. And now, very faint, she hears the sound of music coming from down there. Not rock and roll but country. It’s Hank Williams. Ole Hank is singing “Kaw-Liga.”
“Scott?” she calls again, and when there’s no answer she goes down there brushing the hair out of her eyes, bare feet whispering on a carpet that will later wind up in the attic, frightened for no reason she can articulate, except it has something to do with
(gone)
things that are either finished or should be. All done and buttoned up, Dad Debusher might have said; that was one old Dandy caught from the pool, the one where we all go down to drink, the one where we cast our nets.
“Scott?”
She stands before the guest-room door for a moment and a horrible premonition comes to her: he’s sitting dead in the rocking chair in front of the television, dead by his own hand, why has she not seen this coming, haven’t all the symptoms been on display for a month or more? He has held out until Christmas, held out for her sake, but now—
“Scott?”
She turns the knob and pushes the door open and he’s in the rocking chair just as she has imagined him, but very much alive, swaddled in his favorite Good Ma african, the yellow one. On the television, the sound turned low, is his favorite movie: The Last Picture Show. His eyes don’t move from it to her.
“Scott? Are you okay?”
His eyes don’t move, don’t blink. She begins to be very afraid then, and in the back of her mind one of Scott’s strange words
(gomer)
pops off a haunted assembly line, and she swats it back into her subconscious with a barely articulated
(Smuck it!)
curse. She steps into the room and speaks his name again. This time he does blink—thank God—and turns his head to look at her, and smiles. It’s the Scott Landon smile she fell in love with the first time she saw it. Mostly the way it makes his eyes turn up at the corners.
“Hey, Lisey,” he says. “What’re you doing up?”
“I could ask you the same question,” she says. She looks for booze—a can of beer, maybe a half-finished bottle of Beam—and doesn’t see any. That’s good. “It’s late, don’t you know, late.”
There is a long pause during which he seems to think this over very carefully. Then he says, “The wind woke me. It was rattling one of the gutters against the side of the house and I couldn’t go back to sleep.”
She starts to speak, then doesn’t. When you’ve been married a long time—she supposes how long varies from marriage to marriage, with them it took about fifteen years—a kind of telepathy sets in. Right now it’s telling her he has something more to say. So she stays quiet, waiting to see if she’s right. At first it seems she is. He opens his mouth. Then the wind gusts outside and she hears it—a low quick rattling like the chatter of metal teeth. He cocks his head toward it…smiles a little…not a nice smile…the smile of someone who has a secret…and closes his mouth again. Instead of saying whatever it was he meant to say, he looks back at the TV screen, where Jeff Bridges—a very young Jeff Bridges—and his best friend are now driving to Mexico. When they get back, Sam the Lion will be dead.
“Do you think you could go to sleep now?” she asks him, and when he doesn’t respond, she begins to feel afraid again. “Scott!” she says, a little more sharply than she intended, and when he returns his eyes to her (reluctantly, Lisey fancies, although he has seen this movie at least two dozen times), she repeats her question more quietly. “Do you think you could go back to sleep now?”
“Maybe,” he allows, and she sees something that is both terrible and sad: he is afraid. “If you sleep spoons with me.”
“As cold as it is tonight? Are you kidding? Come on, turn off the TV and come back to bed.”
He does, and she lies there listening to the wind and luxuriating in the man-driven warmth of him.
She begins to see her butterflies. This is what almost always happens to her when she begins to drift into sleep. She sees great red and black butterflies opening their wings in the dark. It has occurred to her that she will see them when her dying-time comes around. The thought scares her, but only a little.
“Lisey?” It’s Scott, from far away. He’s drifting, too. She senses that.
“Hmmmm?”
“It doesn’t like me to talk.”
“What doesn’t?”
“I don’t know.” Very faint and far. “Maybe it’s the wind. The cold north wind. The one that comes down from…”
The last word might be Canada, probably is, but there’s no way to tell for sure because by then she’s lost in the land of sleep and he is too, and when they go there they never go together, and she is afraid that is also a preview of death, a place where there may be dreams but never love, never home, never a hand to hold yours when squadrons of birds flock across the burnt-orange sun at the c
lose of the day.
3
There’s a period of time—two weeks, maybe—when she goes on trying to believe that things are getting better. Later she’ll ask herself how she could be so stupid, so willfully blind, how she could mistake his frantic struggle to hold onto the world (and her!) for any kind of improvement, but of course when straws are all you have, you grasp them.
There are some fat ones to grasp at. During the opening days of 1996 his drinking seems to stop entirely, except for a glass of wine with dinner on a couple of occasions, and he trundles out to his study every day. It will only be later—later, later, percolator, they used to chant when they were little kids building their first word-castles in the sand at the edge of the pool—that she’ll realize he hasn’t added a single page to the manuscript of his novel during those days, has done nothing but drink secret whiskey and eat Certs and write disjointed notes to himself. Tucked beneath the keyboard of the Mac he’s currently using, she’ll find one piece of paper—a sheet of stationery, actually, with FROM THE DESK OF SCOTT LANDON printed across the top—upon which he has scrawled Tractor-chain say youre too late Scoot you old scoot, even now. It’s only when that cold wind, the one all the way down from Yellowknife, is booming around the house, that she’ll finally see the deep crescent-moon cuts in the palms of his hands. Cuts he could only have made with his own fingernails as he struggled to hold onto his life and sanity like a mountain-climber trying to hold onto a smucking ledge in a sleet-storm. It’s only later that she’ll find his cache of empty Beam bottles, better than a dozen in all, and on that one at least she’s able to give herself a pass, because those empties were well-hidden.
4
The first couple of days of 1996 are unseasonably warm; it is what the oldtimers call the January Thaw. But as early as January third, the weather forecasters begin warning of a big change, an awesome cold wave rolling down from the white wastes of central Canada. Mainers are told to make sure their fuel-oil tanks are topped up, that their waterpipes are insulated, and that they have plenty of “warm space” for their animals. Temperatures are going to drop to twenty-five degrees below zero, but the temperatures are going to be the very least of it. They’re going to be accompanied by gale-force winds that will drive the chill-factor to sixty or seventy below.
Lisey is frightened enough to call their general contractor after failing to raise any real concern in Scott. Gary assures her that the Landons have got the tightest house in Castle View, tells her he’ll keep a close eye on Lisey’s kinfolk (especially on Amanda, it almost goes without saying), and reminds her that cold weather is just a part of living in Maine. A few three-dog nights and we’ll be on the way to spring, he says.
But when the subzero cold and screaming winds finally roll in on the fifth of January, it’s worse than anything Lisey can remember, even casting her mind back to childhood, when every thunderbuster she rode out gleefully as a child seemed magnified into a great tempest and every snow flurry was a blizzard. She keeps all the thermostats in the house turned up to seventy-five and the new furnace runs constantly, but between the sixth and ninth, the temperature inside never rises above sixty-two. The wind doesn’t just hoot around the eaves, it screams like a woman being gutted an inch at a time by a madman: one with a dull knife. The snow left on the ground by the January thaw is lifted by those forty-mile-an-hour winds (the gusts kick up to sixty-five, high enough to knock down half a dozen radio towers in central Maine and New Hampshire) and blown across the fields like dancing ghosts. When they hit the storm windows, the granular particles rattle like hail.
On the second night of this extravagant Canadian cold, Lisey wakes up at two in the morning and Scott is gone from their bed once more. She finds him in the guest room, again bundled up in Good Ma’s yellow african, once more watching The Last Picture Show. Hank Williams warbles “Kaw-Liga”; Sam the Lion is dead. She has difficulty rousing him, but at last Lisey manages. She asks him if he’s all right and Scott says yeah he is. He tells her to look out the window, tells her it’s beautiful but to be careful, not to look too long. “My Daddy said it would burn your eyes when it’s that bright,” he advises.
She gasps for the beauty of it. There are great drifting theater curtains in the sky, and they change color as she watches: green goes to purple, purple to vermilion, vermilion to a queer bloody shade of red she cannot name. Russet perhaps comes close, but that isn’t it, exactly; she thinks no one has ever named the shade she’s seeing. When Scott twitches the back of her nightgown and tells her that’s enough, she ought to stop, she’s stunned to look at the digital clock built into the VCR and discover that she’s been looking out the frost-framed window at the northern lights for ten minutes.
“Don’t look anymore,” he says, in the nagging, dragging tones of one who speaks in his sleep. “Come back to bed with me, little Lisey.”
She’s glad enough to go, glad enough to kill that somehow awful movie, to get him out of the rocker and the chilly back room. But as she leads him up the hall by the hand, he says something that makes her skin prickle. “The wind sounds like the tractor-chain and the tractor-chain sounds like my Daddy,” he says. “What if he’s not dead?”
“Scott, that’s bullshit,” she replies, but things like that don’t sound like bullshit in the middle of the night, do they? Especially when the wind screams and the sky is so full of colors it seems to be screaming back.
When she wakes up the following night the wind is still howling and this time when she goes down to the guest room the TV isn’t on but he’s in there watching it anyway. He’s in the rocking chair and bundled up in the african, Good Ma’s yellow african, but he won’t answer her, won’t even look at her. Scott is there, but Scott is also gone.
He’s gone gomer.
5
Lisey rolled over on her back in Scott’s study and looked up at the skylight directly overhead. Her breast throbbed. Without thinking about it, she pressed the yellow knitted square against it. At first the pain was even worse…but then there was a small measure of comfort. She looked into the skylight, panting. She could smell the sour brew of sweat, tears, and blood in which her skin was marinating. She moaned.
All the Landons are fast healers, we had to be. If it was true—and she had reason to believe it was—then she had never so much wanted to be a Landon as she did now. No more Lisa Debusher from Lisbon Falls, Mama and Daddy’s afterthought, Li’l Tag-Along.
You are who you are, Scott’s voice responded patiently. You’re Lisey Landon. My little Lisey. But it was hot and she hurt so much, now she was the one who wanted ice, and voice or no voice, Scott Landon had never seemed so smucking dead.
SOWISA, babyluv, he insisted, but that voice was far.
Far.
Even the phone on Dumbo’s Big Jumbo, from which she could theoretically summon help, seemed far. And what seemed close? A question. A simple one, actually. How could she have found her own sister like that and not have remembered finding her husband like that during the cold-wave of 1996?
I did remember, her mind whispered to her mind as she lay looking up at the skylight with the yellow knitted square turning red against her breast. I did. But to remember Scott in the rocker was to remember The Antlers; to remember The Antlers was to remember what happened when we went from under the yum-yum tree out into the snow; to remember that was to face the truth about his brother Paul; to face the true memory of Paul meant doubling back to that cold guest room with the northern lights filling the sky as the wind boomed down from Canada, from Manitoba, all the way from Yellowknife. Don’t you see, Lisey? It was all connected, it always has been, and once you allowed yourself to make the first connection, to push over the first domino—
“I would have gone crazy,” she whimpered. “Like them. Like the Landons and the Landreaus and whoever else knows about this. No wonder they went nuts, to know there’s a world right next door to this one…and the wall between is so thin…”
But not even that was the worst. The wor
st was the thing that had so haunted him, the mottled thing with the endless piebald side—
“No!” she shrieked at the empty study. She shrieked even though it hurt her all the way down. “Oh, no! Stop! Make it stop! Make these things STOP!”
But it was too late. And too true to deny any longer, no matter how great the risk of madness. There really was a place where food turned bad, sometimes outright poisonous, after dark and where that piebald thing, Scott’s long boy
(I’ll make how it sounds when it looks around)
might be real.
“Oh, it’s real, all right,” Lisey whispered. “I saw it.”
In the empty, haunted air of the dead man’s study, she began to weep. Even now she didn’t know for sure if this was true, and exactly when she had seen it if it was…but it felt true. The kind of hope-ending thing cancer patients glimpse in their bleary bedside waterglasses when all the medicine is taken and the morphine pump reads 0 and the hour is none and the pain is still in there, eating its steady way deeper into your wakeful bones. And alive. Alive, malevolent, and hungry. The kind of thing she was sure her husband had tried, and failed, to drink away. And laugh away. And write away. The thing she had almost seen in his empty eyes as he sat in the chilly guest room with the TV this time blank and silent. He sat in
6
He sits in the rocking chair, wrapped to his staring eyes in Good Ma’s hellaciously cheery yellow african. He looks both at her and through her. He doesn’t respond to her increasingly frantic repetitions of his name and she doesn’t know what to do.
Call someone, she thinks, that’s what, and hurries back down the hall to their bedroom. Canty and Rich are in Florida and will be until the middle of February, but Darla and Matt are just down the road and it’s Darla’s number she intends to dial, she’s far past worrying about waking them up in the middle of the night, she needs to talk to someone, she needs help.
